[November, 1998]
To write the history of a political party, it is really necessary to face up to a whole series of problems [...]. Obviously it will be necessary to take account of the social group of which the given party is the expression and the most advanced part [...]. But this group is not isolated; it has friends, allies, opponents and enemies. Only from the complex picture of social and State life (often even with international ramifications) will emerge the history of a certain party. It can therefore be said that to write the history of a party is to write the general history of a country from a monographic point of view [...].
Antonio Gramsci [1]
That lot run a revolution? They couldn’t run a whelk stall.
George Lansbury [2]
One could ask: why study the history of the Communist Party at all? The mushrooming of the Labour History industry over the last decades has left this particular furrow a very well worked—if not over-worked—one indeed; the potential bibliography for a survey of this type is a quite formidable one. [3] And in addition, of course, the very party itself not so long ago slipped ignominiously away from history, along with the last lingering manifestations of the October Russian Revolution that gave it reason to live and which catalysed its birth. Surely now is the time to post the ‘closed’ notice over the over-mined seam of ‘problems of Communist history’, file away our considerations and questions into that cupboard reserved for the peculiar and uncategorisable material that we no longer have need for nor know what to do with, and, with a mumbled apology of embarrassment, allow ourselves to move on to more pressing and relevant problems; just as, indeed, the very human experiences of the period under consideration themselves finally begin to pass out of the arena of living memory and into the terrain of ‘history’ proper.
Such an approach, I would argue, would be very much mistaken: much of the mountain of historiography that this area of study has produced—if much of it admittedly of real value—remains, through its inability to reflect the multiple and subtle complexities at the root of the vicissitudes of the early Communist Party, in the end inadequate. Perry Anderson, reflecting on the general problems faced by the study of European Communist history, has identified five broad categories of historical literature: ‘personal memoirs’, ‘official histories’, ‘independent left histories’, ‘works of liberal scholarship’ and ‘cold war monographs’. [4] Allowing for the fact that none of these genres are entirely without interest or value, I would argue that on the basis of these categories the most valuable literature from the point of view of developing an interpretative historical viewpoint is that which falls within the crossover between works of independent left and liberal scholarship, since it is this field that is capable of combining the necessary degree of critical dispassion with a genuinely sympathetic approach to the real dilemmas and problems faced by its subjects. Now, much of this literature is—and necessarily so, for therein lies much of its value—openly judgmental, and often highly critically so. In short, it tends to be characterised by a quest to uncover the reasons behind the various failings—and at first sight they appear legion—of the Communist Party during this period.
But there is a curious pattern that emerges across the scope of literature on offer: the bulk of it lays stress on the weight of negative external—which is to say Russian—influences on the party, rather than on domestic, endogamous weaknesses, even when some acknowledgement is indeed made of the latter. [5] The approach has its attractions: it allows for a certain degree of simplification of the picture to occur, as well as, through providing a rather convenient ‘alibi’, engendering a more positive view of the quality and practice of the ‘British Bolsheviks’. It is, however, in my view profoundly misleading. Perceptively, at the start of his 1969 review of Klugmann’s ‘official’ history, Eric Hobsbawm noted that ‘each Communist Party was the child of a marriage of two ill-assorted partners, a national left and the October Revolution.’ [6] Perry Anderson reinforces the point: while it is salient and important to be aware of the ‘massive interventions by the Soviet bloc in the early life of [...] [the European Communist] parties’, increasingly an ‘embarrassing memory’ for the more mature European Communist parties as they tried to develop their own, distinctive ‘national’ roads to socialism, ‘it is also necessary not to bend the stick too far in the other direction, that of the characteristic Cold War histories, which tend to present each national communist party as if it were just a puppet whose limbs were manipulated mechanically by strings pulled in Moscow. That was never the case.’ Anderson quite correctly, therefore, stresses the necessity of a sensitivity to the ‘complex dialectic between the national and international determinants of party policies.’ [7]
But I want to go further than this: the central thrust of much of what follows here is founded on the belief that weaknesses of British Communism over the course of our period almost wholly arise as a consequence of the weakness of the British revolutionary tradition: from congenital defects, and the inability to overcome congenital defects. If there is a criticism to be levelled at the Communist International with regard to the operation of the British party in the 1920s it is not that of misleadership, but that it was unable to correct the already existing weaknesses of ‘British Marxism’. [8] This need to address manifest weaknesses in the existing historiography is a powerful reason to re-engage the study of the Communist Party.
There is also another, which flows logically from the point just developed above: simply because the British Communist Party no longer exists in the form that it did does not mean that the problem of would-be revolutionaries trying to build their organisations in a ‘non-revolutionary situation’ has. Far from it. The experience of the Communist Party over the course of the 1920s, I would argue, is marked by an inability to definitively overcome the various political defects it inherited at its birth. Yet the modus operandi of 1920s British Communism is many respects a kind of template for the operation of the would-be revolutionary—ostensible ‘Trotskyist’—left today. If one looks, for example, at the largest revolutionary grouping in Britain today, the Socialist Workers’ Party—the self-proclaimed ‘smallest mass party in the world’—then one is indeed struck by the similarities between its practice and that of the early Communist Party: the inability to marry ‘economic’ and ‘political’ struggles, the combination of paying detailed attention to practical day-to-day tasks on the one hand and propagandistic proclamations of a future socialist nirvana on the other, the inability to get to grips with the fact that the working class, when disillusioned with its existing institutions and leaders seek, in the first instance, not to discard them outright but to reform them from within—all these are phenomena that resonate powerfully across the decades between the two organisations. The revolutionary left in the 1920s failed to learn the same political lessons that the revolutionary left of the 1990s appears to be equally blind to. For today’s would-be revolutionary left, therefore, there are again compelling reasons to engage in the study of Communist history.
It is undoubtedly the case that without the fact of the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Communist International in 1919 the Communist Party of Great Britain would not have come into existence as such. Yet it was not until 1921 that the Comintern was able to persuade the bulk of the revolutionary movement into a single, unified party—and even then the unification was not ‘total’: Sylvia Pankhurst, who had played a significant role in the actual process of unification over 1920-21, was not to remain long in the new party, and John MacLean, a large part of the Scottish SLP, and the SPGB, never entered the party in the first place. Nevertheless, the formation of the Communist Party did mark a qualitative step forward for the British revolutionary movement.
Yet we have to guarded when making judgements as to the degree of political clarity that the new party embodied. Its principal political inheritance was revolutionary syndicalism: directly so in the case of the De Leonite SLP and the shop stewards’ movement, by default in the case of the BSP. [9] This was a no mere contingent fact, but a real and forceful reality in the new party. A significant layer of the leadership of the new party had a background as authentic mass working-class leaders, and were not superficially under the sway of some transient political ‘fashion’ arising out of the shop stewards’ movement, but rather were genuinely political individuals who had a history of theorising and arguing the politics of revolutionary syndicalism. Thus the currents and parties that came together to forge the new Communist Party did not do so on the basis of a conscious and organic break with the politics of syndicalism but because of their revolutionary identification—despite their syndicalist outlook—with the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks.
This is not, however, to argue, that the role of the Comintern in the birth of the new party was in any sense malign; as does Walter Kendall, for example, whose work is founded on the belief ‘that the CPGB was an almost wholly artificial creation which wrenched the whole course of the [British] movement’s left-wing out of one direction and set it off on another. [...] The ferocity of [...] [the Communist Party’s] criticism and challenge as an alternative party antagonised the workers to revolutionary theory and strengthened the hands of the reactionary and conservative elements within the labour movement.’ For Kendall, therefore, the objective effect of the formation of the Communist Party was ‘to destroy a previous socialist tradition which [...] showed every sign of developing towards more realistic and effective forms [...].’ [10]
Against this view, I would argue that the formation of the Communist Party was a necessary precondition for the political development of the revolutionary movement, a process that necessarily focused around two key political questions: first, an assessment of the weaknesses of syndicalism itself; and second, the need to take account of the place of the Labour Party within both the working class movement and the Communist Party’s own strategy.
Now, syndicalism as a political strategy can be both a logical and a successful one, but only under certain conditions. In periods when an expanding capitalism is able to offer concessions to well-organised sections of the working class, syndicalism presents itself as a militant and attractive form of trade union struggle, and it was indeed these very conditions from which the syndicalist movement itself arose in the decade previous to the formation of the Communist Party. In periods of slump and depression, however, pure trade union activity—whether conceived of in the syndicalist fashion as the steady encroachment on the economic power of the capitalist class or not—loses its effectiveness. The Communist Party itself, of course, was formed at just such a period of oncoming slump. As unemployment shot up (especially in the engineering industry), between 1921 and 1923 the trade unions lost more than two million members, more than the increase since 1918; and, as the government and the employers moved onto the political offensive, in 1921 the Triple Alliance collapsed. The need for the party to slough off its syndicalist prejudices and begin to address the directly political questions of building a leadership sensitive to the aspirations and under the control of the rank and file of the movement was urgent. Yet in practice progress towards this end was slow: the party’s work in the trade unions tended to be subsumed within the shop stewards’ and workers’ committees movements, with the party’s political profile limited to a purely propaganda role. Typical of the experience was the heavily Communist Party-influenced Miners’ Reform Movement, which itself remained for all practical purposes a mere propaganda body during the course of the 1921 lock-out. It was not until the formation of the National Minority Movement that the party began to adequately address the tasks facing the left in the trade union movement, centred on the need to make the Minority Movements adequate vehicles for asserting rank-and-file control over the official union leaderships and the General Council.
Over this period, however, the leaders of the Comintern were both aware of and sought to address the weaknesses of the British party. As E. H. Carr notes, at the third congress of the International in 1921, both the ‘British and American parties were warned that it was a “matter of life and death not to remain a sect.” The British Party, in particular, was reproved for its ineffectiveness during the miners’ strike, and pointedly told that being a small party was nothing to be proud of.’ [11] And, at the same congress, Radek declared that:
In many places the party appears on the scene under the cloak of the ‘Workers’ Committees’ and any success that is achieved by the propaganda does not bring the masses nearer to the CP. [...] We consider it our duty to say the following, even to the smallest CPs: you will never have any large mass parties if you limit yourselves to the mere propaganda of the Communist theory. [12]
Thus the weaknesses of the British party lay in its syndicalist-derived inability to develop a political relationship with the working class movement; and the role of the Comintern in this period was to try to warn the party and assist it in overcoming these difficulties. Progress—where it occurred—was slow. But there is little evidence the British party would have fared better if left to its own devices; quite the contrary, in fact.
The syndicalist prejudices of the British party also found their expression in its inability to understand the position of the Labour Party within the working class movement. In 1920 the Labour Party had over 2,000 local organisations (compared to around 150 in 1914): by 1921, therefore, as the Communist Party emerged out of the process of unification, the salient fact was that it was not the new party, but the Labour Party, that was the established party of the British working class. The Communist Party was, at this point, unable to grasp that it was not possible either to ignore or simply circumnavigate the Labour Party. Simple propaganda against Labour’s practice and programme was inadequate: concrete tactics to engage in joint work with the many militants who looked to the Labour Party were necessary in order to win them closer to the Communist Party. Again the leadership of the Comintern had to wage a persistent struggle against the Communist Party’s syndicalist-derived hostility to the Labour Party. At the first unity conference in 1920 a vote was taken on the question of Communist affiliation to Labour: after a heated debate, in which most of the speakers opposed the move, it was passed—narrowly—by 100 votes to 85. The application (the first of many) was couched in terms so as to invite rejection. When the inevitable occurred, the party’s journal The Communist was unequivocal: ‘So be it,’ it declared. ‘It is their funeral, not ours.’ [13] Slowly, however, under pressure from both the leadership of the Comintern and the exigencies of the domestic situation, the Communist Party moderated its position. The party’s 1922 conference approved the united front positions adopted by the International; in 1925, the Sunday Worker—aimed at the Labour Party left wing, the ILP, the Co-op and the Labour Colleges—was launched, with a circulation that peaked at 85,000, three times that of the Weekly Worker, and in the December of that same year, partly in response to the recent Labour Party conference decision to exclude Communists from individual membership of the Labour Party, a National Left-Wing Conference was held under the aegis of prominent figures from the Labour left, the ILP and the Communist Party.
However, even though the pressure of the Comintern had brought the party into line (although not often without a struggle) whenever syndicalist strategy diverted from the Comintern’s line—with a manifestly positive effect on the party’s performance and influence in this period—it is difficult to assess how thoroughly the party assimilated the political method behind the International’s admonitions; the conversion looks, as one commentator notes, ‘too much like Paul on the Road to Damascus to be true.’ [14] The prestige of the Russian leaders counted for more than did a genuine political convergence, a point that Lenin himself appeared to be aware of at the fourth congress of the International, when he reflected on the resolution of the structure of Communist parties that was passed at the third:
The foreign comrades must learn to understand what we have written [...], which they have signed without reading and understanding. [...] It is quite unintelligible to foreigners, and they cannot be content with hanging it in the corner like an icon and praying to it. [...] We Russians must also find ways and means of explaining the principles of the resolution to the foreigners. [15]
Lenin’s concerns were well-founded: the authors of the commission established by the party in 1922 to report on the task of re-organisation felt able to declare that ‘the greatest hindrance to the growth of our party is not the lack of political training, it is the number of practical difficulties our members are meeting with.’ [16] Clearly, re-organisation was being perceived not as a political but rather as an administrative task: exactly to the contrary of the meaning intended by the original Comintern resolution. The absence of a political conception of organisation posed the dangers of bureacratism and centralisation: grim portents for the future. On the consequences of the re-organisation, J. T. Murphy could write in the Communist Review of January 1924: ‘If I were asked what are the principal defects of the party today, I would answer unhesitatingly, formalism, organisational fetishism, and the lack of political training.’ [17] Looking back subsequently, the same author commented: ‘We were of course far from having put into operation all that was required by the CI resolution [...]. We had made our political declaration of adherence to its principles, but it is one thing to accept a principle and another to apply it to life.’ [18]
Thus I would argue that Kendall’s case that the very founding of the Communist Party itself on Russian insistence lies at the root of the malaise of the British revolutionary left is unconvincing: the weaknesses exhibited by the British Communist Party were the product of those inherited from its birth—despite and not because of the best efforts of the Comintern. But Kendall’s is not the only argument casting the corrupting influence of the Comintern misleading the British party: a variation on this line of analysis is to be found in the classic ‘Trotskyist’ account of Michael Woodhouse and Brian Pearce, in which stress is laid on the influence not of non-British ‘Bolshevism’ but on post-Leninist ‘Stalinism’, and in particular on the effects of this influence on the role of the party in the 1926 General Strike. In this account, ‘what is of vital importance is to understand the process whereby the CPGB became ‘Stalinised’ by the mid-1920s and a willing tool of Stalin’s rapprochement with imperialism in this period, from which flowed the failure to prepare for revolutionary struggle in the General Strike.’ [19] Specifically, ‘across the period between 1924 and the General Strike the international implications of the policy of Socialism in One Country served in the British context to confuse and neutralise the important steps which the CPGB was taking in the mid-1920s towards a full understanding of Bolshevik methods of party work.’ [20]
This thesis is itself also unconvincing. [21] To subscribe to it would mean subscribing to a number of rather questionable assumptions: first, that the General Strike represented in any meaningful sense a ‘revolutionary situation’; second, that the reason that this situation did not develop into a full-blown revolution was a result of the Communist Party’s ‘opportunist’ line to the left trade union leaders; and third, that the reason for this opportunist position lies with misleadership from Moscow.
Now, perhaps the most remarkable feature of the General Strike itself is not that it occurred at all, nor the undisputed heroism displayed by its participants (including not least members of the Communist Party), but the fact that the trade union leaders should have had such remarkably little difficulty in actually calling it off when they did; there was—heroism aside—no practical alternative leadership in place. As James Hinton and Richard Hyman argue, the two key issues suggested by the General Strike were, first, that to defend the miners it was necessary to overthrow the government, and that, second, practically none of the trade union leaders—at every level—had the slightest wish to overthrow the government through trade union action. [22] Given this state of affairs, therefore, it is difficult to conceive of how the Communist Party, small as it was and given its uneven geographical and sectional implantation, could have seized the initiative from the official leadership at the decisive moment whatever political line it had at the outset of the strike. It is, however, a moot point as to what effect the delayed formation of the party and the protracted difficulties it experienced developing a political relationship with the mass organisations of the working class had on the party’s position by 1926, although we should note that—as we have seen—the role of the Comintern in this respect was as a help and not as a hindrance. Nevertheless, this is where it found itself, and perhaps J. T. Murphy was only being sanguine when he noted in the Weekly Worker on the eve of the strike:
Our party does not hold the leading positions in the trade unions. It can only advise and place its press and forces at the service of the workers—led by others. And let it be remembered that those who are leading have no revolutionary perspective before them. Any revolutionary perspective they may perceive will send the majority of them hot on the track of a retreat. [...] To entertain any exaggerated views as to the revolutionary possibilities of this crisis and visions of new leadership ‘arising spontaneously in the struggle’, etc. is fantastic. [23]
This was, however, not the position of the Comintern. It did indeed perceive a slide to the right on the part of the British party’s line; and not, it must be said, without some justification. In October 1924, for example, J. R. Campbell, in a representative exposition of the party’s then current line, noted that ‘it would be a suicidal policy [...] for the Communist Party and the Minority Movement to place too much reliance on what we have called the official left-wing.’ [24] But by late the following year, Dutt could offer the following eulogy to the very ‘same’ lefts:
The left trade union leaders occupy at present the position, not only of the workers in the immediate crisis, but also of the spokesmen of the working-class elements in the Communist Party—it might be said, an alternative political leadership—in the present stage the language of the left trade union leaders is the closest indication of the advent of the British working class to revolution. [25]
Now, the root of this shift is worthy of speculation, and may in fact be more complex than it first appears; could it not be the case, argue Hinton and Hyman, ‘that an inability to construct independent rank-and-file organisation, due to objective difficulties, could itself explain the party’s over-dependence on the trade union bureaucracy?’ [26] Of course, if this were the case, then we have further evidence that the situation facing the party in 1926 was decidedly not a revolutionary one. But whatever the merits of this particular argument, what is manifest is that the shift in line was not undertaken at the behest of the Comintern. Just at the outset of the strike itself, the Executive Committee of the International declared:
A strike by the miners would imply a general strike, and a general strike cannot remain an industrial struggle. [...] The British bourgeoisie [...] will mobilise the entire power of the State, because the basic question of capitalist society will be raised the question of private property. [...] The fight for wages and conditions will raise before the working class the question of power. [27]
And, in drawing a balance sheet of the whole affair, the Executive noted: ‘The ‘left’ leaders, who had a majority in the General Council, put up no resistance whatever to the deliberate traitors [...] but marched all the time under the right wing orders.’ [28] Whatever the merits of the line of the Comintern, it is clear that it was certainly not pulling the British party to the right; indeed, in this period—and unusually—the British party itself found itself on the right of the International. [29]
The consequences of the defeat of the strike were to have a significant effect on the fortunes or the party, for it triggered a reflex within it that was eventually to surface as the ‘new line’. Now, it is commonly held that the left turn of 1928-9 was foisted on an unwilling Communist Party by the International; but this view is at best only partially true. Although there was opposition to the turn by a majority of the leadership, it is also the case that there was substantial support for a shift to the left within the British party, not only by figures such as Pollitt, Dutt and Arnot, but also amongst the rank and file, and especially amongst the younger members; indeed, the Young Communist League was to play a critical role in the whole process. A. L. Morton, at the time a young and new member of the party, subsequently recalled the political atmosphere: the change in line, he recollected,
was welcomed, and even demanded, by the membership of the Party. We all felt [...] that it meant a more militant, positive, and one may say more political role for our Party [...]. The ignominious failure of the TUC Left in the General Strike had prepared us to accept the idea that left and right might be equally unreliable. [30]
MacFarlane substantiates the case: ‘It is clear that the initiative for driving the policy of the British Communist Party still further to the left came, not from the Communist International, but from a powerful minority within the leadership of the British party, with the support of important sections of the rank and file.’ [31] Of course, it is evident that the esteem in which the British party held the leadership of the International meant that once the latter threw their political weight behind the change then its adoption by the Communist Party was more or less a foregone conclusion. This is not to argue that in the absence of Comintern support the turn would not have taken place, as MacFarlane does, [32] for it was in that direction that the party was already heading; at the very most we can say that the International accelerated the change, and also that the change would only not have occurred in due course if the International had thrown its full weight and prestige against it, as it had—as we have seen—on numerous other occasions in the previous decade.
This time, however, the International did not resist the Communist Party’s leftward reflexes; and the consequences were serious. In the 1929 election the party’s Manifesto—’Class against Class’—declared that in the absence of Communist candidate, and ‘where the Labour candidate refuses to pledge himself to a programme of fighting working-class demands, the Communist Party advises the workers not to cast a vote for any of the capitalist candidates, Tory, Liberal or Labour.’ [33] The Labour vote, however, rose by some three million. Without undue ceremony, the party withdrew from the National Left-Wing Movement, and closed down the Sunday Worker, while the Minority Movement was left to wither on the vine. By the end of the decade, the party found itself more isolated than ever. In August 1930, The Communist Review could only comment sadly that ‘although we have stood on the line of the Comintern [...] the membership continues to fall and the party is still largely isolated from the masses.’ [34] Yet, even allowing for the desperately unfavourable conditions in which the party was operating—its withdrawal from the structures of the labour movement was far from one-sided, Noreen Branson characterising the anti-Communist hostility of the official structures under the rubric of ‘The Great Purge’ [35]—deliberate self-isolation was the worst possible policy for the party. As Willie Thompson argues:
It is hard to escape the conclusion that in the period of the new line the CP abandoned a position which it could never subsequently recover. The organic connection which it had managed to establish with working class culture and its institutions was peripheral certainly [...] but it had up to 1928 shown a great endurance under the most compromising of circumstances. To indulge in counterfactual reasoning for a moment: if from 1928 to 1931 the party had been seeking unity instead of division on the left, upon the shameful collapse of the MacDonald government in the August of that year and the co-option of the Labour leaders by the Conservatives, the CP’s warnings and jeremiads would have sounded in retrospect immensely convincing and made it more difficult for its opponents to keep up the barriers designed to exclude it [...] from the movement. [36]
By November 1930 the membership of the Communist Party—according to figures given by its journal Communist Review—stood at around two-and-a-half thousand: half of what it was in 1922, a mere year after its foundation, and a quarter of what it was during the peak following the General Strike of 1926. [37] The party, it would appear, had proved itself unable to capitalise on the wave of militancy of the early 1920s, and of 1926, to establish itself in British working class politics as a serious and securely implanted revolutionary pole to the left of Labour. ‘British Marxism’ was subsequently to prove incapable of overcoming its marginal position, and in this respect—as in so many others—the British experience stands as a contrast to that of much of the rest of continental Europe. For James Hinton and Richard Hyman, the roots of the party’s failure to carve out for itself a successful political project lie in the very attempt—at the behest of the Communist International—to forge a ‘Bolshevik’ party in non-Bolshevik terrain and circumstances:
In the objective circumstances of Britain in the 1920s it was a mistake to attempt to construct a mass revolutionary party. On the criteria set out by the Communist International itself the situation could hardly have been less favourable for such an enterprise. In attempting to build a mass party, when it should have been consolidation a small cadre, the party sacrificed revolutionary clarity in its theory and in its propaganda to an illusory pursuit of growth at any cost. [38]
The entire project itself would appear to have been doomed from the outset. Yet this judgement is premature. The key to the problem with Hinton and Hyman’s position lies with the word ‘mass’ in the formulation ‘mass revolutionary party’; does it here stand as a synonym of ‘big’, or is it a description of a type of party, deduced from nature of its modus operandi? Neither definition strikes me as useful: the first is clearly far too relative to be of any utility, while the second, as a description of ‘style’, is of little weight as to questions of political influence (although admittedly of relevance to judgements of errors—or otherwise—in political practice).
A third—and more plausible—definition of ‘mass’ would refer to the question of political influence relative to other currents within the working class movement. Here we could designate a ‘mass’ (revolutionary) party in this context as one that has won itself a social base of at least qualitative equivalence to Labourism’s; that is, one that has qualitatively and successfully challenged the position of Labourism position as the predominant socialist politics of the British working class. From this perspective we can quite uninhibitedly come to the judgement that the party ‘failed’; yet, within the limits imposed by our definition, we could still at the end of the 1920s be talking about a relatively large minority revolutionary party of ten, twenty or even forty thousand members, as compared to the relatively paltry organisation of two-and-a-half thousand that did in fact obtain. This is still manifestly a matter of some consequence, worthy of historical examination.
My line of argument here is premised on the view that the operation of a revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary conjuncture is not such an exceptional state of affairs as some would have us believe. Since revolutions in particular, and revolutionary crises in general, are—by definition—rare events, then a non-revolutionary situation is the normal set of conditions faced by would-be revolutionaries. The question posed in this respect is: what, therefore, should they do? Classically, this has always been a matter determined by the relative strengths of the various political currents to which sections of the working class subscribe their allegiance, as well as by the features of the particular national and international political situation that obtain at any given point. ‘Success’ or ‘failure’ in this respect is a function of the judgement we can make as to the progress or otherwise that the revolutionary current is able to make towards the displacement of non-revolutionary working class ideologies within the constraints that are inevitably imposed by factors beyond its control.
Yet, as we have seen, there were significant obstacles to progress along these lines, obstacles that arose not out of external Russian misleadership but out of the very weakness of the revolutionary tradition in Britain, and the hostile political environment that helped to create that weakness. In a perceptive summary of the congenital defects of British Communism, Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson offer us the following analysis:
Almost from its birth British Marxism failed to carry on a meaningful political dialogue with the mass working-class organisations. It remained a sterile dogma, the self-justification for more or less religious sects, rather than an instrument of critical self-awareness. Its understanding of the wider institutions of the class was limited to a more or less moral denunciation of their leaders, or sermonising over the futility of reforms.
This utopianism of the early British Marxists was really the spiritual reflection of their slim material base. They accepted a pre-packed Marxism on faith, free not only of contradictions but also of life, which came to them lock, stock and barrel from Moscow, as they had once accepted it lock, stock and barrel from Marx himself (or rather from German Social Democracy). [...]
It was not that they were lacking in judgement, or courage, or sincerity, or even in involvement in the labour movement as such. The list of the founding members of the Communist Party reads like a gazetteer of the most capable contemporary and future trade union militants. But the strategic political task, their orientation to the Labour Party and to the political plane in general, found them sadly lacking. [...]
All [...] [the Communist party’s] vices were present at birth, in its tenuous understanding of the movement of the class, its false and one-sided counterposition of trade union militancy and political action, its penchant for replacing politics with intrigue, and in the sectarianism that expressed itself in the vilification of those closest to it. [39]
In summary, then, my central thesis is as follows. I share the Bornstein-Richardson view that at root what characterised the operation of the young party was ‘its tenuous understanding of the movement of the class [...] [and] its false and one-sided counterposition of trade union militancy and political action’. The construction of a ‘mass’ party along the lines outlined above was clearly not on the cards; yet the degree to which the Communist Party fell short of what was possible was, in my view, considerable. At the root of the party’s problems, its inability ‘to carry on a meaningful political dialogue with the mass working-class organisations’, was its inability to break out of the syndicalist reduction of ‘class’ politics to ‘trade union’, ‘workplace’ politics that it inherited from its forerunner organisations; including, paradoxically, the BSP, whose conception of the Labour Party as the organised expression of working class militancy tout court was but a mirror-image of the syndicalist inability to see the need to break out of the dichotomy of the practical separation ‘trade unionism’ and ‘politics’ in the first place. Overdetermining these weaknesses was the practical inability of the Russian party—despite its best intentions, at least up until 1927-28—to assist the British ‘Bolsheviks’ to overcome them, either through the effects of the 1922 reorganisation, the inability to convince the British party of the centrality of the Labour Party question in its political conceptions, or finally—for our period—to the impact of the practicalities of ‘Third Period’ conceptions on a British party that was always up to that point inclined to veer to the left.
Although I have noted that the Communist Party had proved itself unable to capitalise on successive waves of militancy and to establish itself in British working class politics as a securely implanted revolutionary current to the left of the Labour Party, if the judgement of this state of affairs really is ‘failure’, then it is a failure of a relative and not a definitive character. From the standpoint of, say, 1930—discarding the tool of hindsight for a moment—one could also add to the above sentence the following clarifying caveat: ‘thus far’. I do not share the view—expressed by, among others, Hinton and Hyman—that the project of building a stable and influential revolutionary current to the left of Labourism as in any predetermined sense ‘doomed’; neither in 1920, nor in 1930, nor—for that matter—now.
In this light, then, I noted at the start of this review that one pressing reason to study Communist history in this period arises from the fact that the problems faced by revolutionaries in Britain are, so to speak, perennial. It is thus very revealing that a current leading member of today’s British Socialist Workers’ Party could declare, with more than a favourable nod to the politics of ‘class against class’, that:
The defeat of 1926 had enormously strengthened the right in the Labour Party against the CP. The level of industrial struggle plummeted in the next few years. The notion that a revolutionary left could be sustained in the Labour Party in these unfavourable conditions was absurd. [...]
What should have been done? In conditions of profound downturn after 1926, it is necessary to recognise that since revolutionary work in the Labour Party was excluded [...] the solution was to pull out of everything that could be pulled out of and concentrate on building the CP directly [...]. [40]
Those who do not learn from history, it would appear, really are doomed to repeat it.
[1] ‘The Modern Prince: Essays on the Science of Politics in the Modern Age’, in Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York, 1970), 148-9.
[2] Raymond Postgate, The Life of George Lansbury (London, 1951), 238.
[3] See, for example, the useful fifteen pages of works offered by Alan J. Mackenzie, ‘Essay in Bibliography’, Society for the Study of Labour History Bulletin, 44 (Spring 1982), pp 23-41, itself, in the words of its author, only ‘a partial and intermediate substitute’ of what is necessary; and now, of course, in need of substantial updating.
[4] Perry Anderson, ‘Communist Party History’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981), 145-46.
[5] An examination of the relative influence of endogamous and exogamous factors of course poses a more general problematic with regard to the evolution of post-1917 Marxism. In an essay on the phenomenon in Britain, Raphael Samuel argued that ‘far from being immune to exogamous influences, Marxism may rather be seen [...] as a palimpsest on which they are inscribed.’ (’British Marxist Historians 1880-1980: Part One’, New Left Review 120 (March-April 1980), 24).
[6] E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Problems of Communist Party History’, in E. J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (London, 1977), 3.
[7] For Anderson (’Communist Party History’), the two keynote examples of indigenous national pressure effecting Comintern policy are the opening of the ‘Third Period’ outlook (which we shall return to below), and the development of the mid-1930s conception of the Popular Front.
[8] Although it needs to be stressed at this point that this analysis holds good only up until the late 1920s. The ‘Third Period’ strategy (which was, however, by no means imposed on an unwilling British party, as we shall see) was a malign influence; and with the development of the Popular Front line in the 1930s the problems of Communist Party history begin to take on something of a different character, as the complete ‘Stalinisation’ of the CPSU and the International leads to a qualitative breakdown of class politics and genuine internationalism for the CPGB. I raise these points here not for the sake of being contentious nor because they are points that I wish to address in the essay—they are not—but as a methodological justification for introducing the practical limits that I do to the period under consideration. The problems of Communist Party history posed by the experiences of the latter half of the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s and beyond are of considerable interest; they are, however, I would argue, of a rather different character to those outlined above, but are beyond the scope of this survey.
[9] ‘The BSP had no definite concept of organised work in the trade unions. The farthest it got in defining the relationship of party members to the unions was to advocate that all BSP union members should “carry on a vigorous campaign on behalf of socialist principles and also in favour of the ultimate amalgamation of all unions on the basis of class and not craft.” This was a purely abstract and propagandist concept. In practice it left the BSP members free to adapt to the leftward tendencies of the trade union bureaucracies, or to syndicalist currents among the rank-and-file. In fact, where the latter tendency asserted itself, the BSP became submerged in purely syndicalist forms of struggle, as it did in its work to create the unofficial reform movement amongst the Scottish miners in the later part of the war.’ Michael Woodhouse, ‘Syndicalism, Communism and the Trade Unions in Britain, 1910-1926’, Marxist 4.3 (1966), 47.
[10] Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain: The Origins of British Communism (London, 1969), xii, 301. As Perry Anderson points out (’Communist Party History’, 152), in the other case of an industrialised country in which the Communist Party did not arise out of a mass breakaway from a party of the Second International—the United States—there has also arisen a literature casting the corrupting influence of an alien Bolshevism cutting short an otherwise healthy and growing indigenous socialism; see, as an example, the work of James Weinstein: Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York, 1975), 26-36, and The Decline of Socialism in America 1912-1925 (New Brunswick and New Jersey, 1984), 234-257, 334-6.
[11] E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, (Harmondsworth, 1977), vol. 3, 387.
[12] Cited in Michael Woodhouse, ‘Syndicalism, Communism and the Trade Unions’, 53.
[13] Brian Pearce, ‘Early Years of the Communist Party of Great Britain’, in Michael Woodhouse and Brian Pearce, Essays on the History of Communism in Britain (London, 1975), 153.
[14] Mike Holbrook-Jones, ‘Lessons of the General Strike’, International 3.2 (Winter 1976), 18.
[15] Cited in Jane Degras (ed.) The Communist International 1919-1943: Documents (London), vol. 1, 257.
[16] Cited in Holbrook-Jones, ‘Lessons of the General Strike’, 19.
[17] Cited in Michael Woodhouse, ‘Marxism and Stalinism in Britain’, in Woodhouse and Pearce, Communism in Britain, 71
[18] Ibid., 70.
[19] Woodhouse, ‘Marxism and Stalinism in Britain’, 4.
[20] Ibid., 83.
[21] Although this is not to say that the work of Woodhouse and Pearce is without merit: far from it. The collection Essays on the History of Communism in Britain is quite literally indispensable on its subject, and—although flawed by an over-playing of the role of Stalinism in this period—thus far remains the definitive work on the early Communist Party, overshadowing even MacFarlane’s excellent study.
[22] James Hinton and Richard Hyman, Trade Unions and Revolution: The Industrial Politics of the Early British Communist Party (London, 1975), 43.
[23] Cited in Hugo Dewar, Communist Politics in Britain: The CPGB from its Origins to the Second World War (London, 1976), 61.
[24] Cited in Woodhouse, ‘Marxism and Stalinism in Britain’, 82.
[25] Cited in Woodhouse, ‘Syndicalism, Communism and the Trade Unions’, 57.
[26] Hinton and Hyman, Trade Unions and Revolution, 39-40.
[27] Degras, The Communist International, 299
[28] Cited in Duncan Hallas, ‘The Communist Party and the General Strike’, International Socialism 88 (May 1976), 23.
[29] Thus while we can agree with the thesis offered by Hinton and Hyman in this respect, it is not the case that their position is unproblematic; indeed their view that the central problem regarding the difficulties faced by the British Communist Party in the 1920s lies with the misguided project—urged by the International—of ‘attempting to build a mass party, when it should have been consolidation a small cadre’, is also, in my view, unsustainable, and I will return to it shortly.
[30] A. L. Morton, review of Noreen Branson, The History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927-41, Our History Journal 10 (November 1985), 2.
[31] L. J. MacFarlane, The British Communist Party: Its Origin and Development Until 1929 (London, 1966), 215.
[32] ‘Ordinarily such a move would have had no chance of success, but the momentum of the “new line” moved the Comintern steadily to the left’ (ibid., 215).
[33] Cited in Monty Johnston, ‘The Communist Party in the 1920s’, New Left Review 41 (January-February 1967), 58.
[34] Cited in ibid., 59.
[35] Noreen Branson, The History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927-41 (London, 1985), 1-16.
[36] Willie Thompson, The Good Old Cause: British Communism 1920-1991 (London, 1992), 49-50. And would, I would add, place it in a qualitatively more favourable position to wage a ‘unity offensive’ towards the ILP.
[37] Figures cited by Hugo Dewar, Communist Politics in Britain, ibid., 93. Unsurprisingly, estimates of party membership varies across the literature, but the general trends are clear. For a useful summary of the data, see Stuart Macintyre, A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain 1917-1933 (Cambridge, 1980).
[38] Hinton and Hyman, Trade Unions and Revolution, 9.
[39] Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, Two Steps Back: Communists and the Wider Labour Movement, 1935-1945: A Study in the Relations between ‘Vanguard’ and Class (Ilford, [1982?]), iii-v.
[40] Duncan Hallas, ‘Revolutionaries and the Labour Party, International Socialism 16 (Spring 1982), 11.