History: Britain’s communist party
In our society, where the
fields of information and education are as much dominated by the
monopoly-capitalist ruling class and its state as are culture and what passes
for politics, tackling questions of working-class history – and, even more, the
history of the British communist movement – is not generally encouraged. Quite
the contrary.
What follows, then, will not be found on the BBC,
on ITV or on channels 4, 5 or 197. Nor will any light be shed on any of this in
the glossy, liberal Sunday supplements – and still less in The Sun or
the Daily Mirror. Nor is there much factual information to be found on
the internet.
We’re clearly taking a conscious step out of the bourgeois
mainstream when we tackle aspects of communist history, but stepping out of the
mainstream is what Marxist Leninists are all about.1
It’s not ‘mainstream’ to analyse our society from
the class perspective of the exploited and oppressed. And it’s not ‘mainstream’
to argue for, and act towards, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and
the establishment of a socialist state run by the majority of our population,
the working people, in our own interests rather than those of a parasitic
minority.
Founding conference
So here we are in 2011, dealing with British
communist history. But we want you to close your eyes for a moment (either
literally or metaphorically) and imagine that you don’t have credit cards in
your purse or wallet, that you don’t have a mobile phone, and that when you go
home from work – possibly by tram rather than bus – and write your next letter,
it will be by hand or on a manual typewriter rather than on a computer.
And there’ll be no telly to greet you and attempt
to lull you into apathetic indifference to the global exploitation of man by
man. No Big Brother and no EastEnders, not even the BBC news.
You might have a radio, though, because you’re now
in 1920 – and you’re at a posh hotel near St Paul’s cathedral in London. It was there, on the last day of July, that Marxists of various shades and from
various traditions came together, after many months of difficult negotiations,
in a Unity Convention aimed at establishing the British communist party.
This was an important attempt at unity, but unity
around what?
Unity around support for the new Soviet republic,
which had resulted from the seizure of state power by the workers and peasants
of Russia less than three years before – and which, in the words of American
communist journalist John Reed had “shaken the world” by
ousting the capitalists and landowners, putting the working class in the
driving seat and pointing the way forward for the exploited and oppressed of
the whole world.2
The Great October Socialist Revolution was, and remains,
the single most important event in the entire history of humanity since it
first split into classes thousands of years ago.
And unity in seeking to establish a single British
communist party, fully embracing Marxism Leninism and based on the political
and organisational principle of democratic centralism. This was to be a ‘party
of a new type’, which would be affiliated to the newly established Communist –
or Third – International, set up just the previous year at a historic meeting
in Moscow.
Remember, it’s still 31 July 1920, in the City of London. We want you to imagine that, in this hotel meeting room we’re sitting in, some of
you are delegates from the British Socialist Party (BSP). Others came
from the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) – not Arthur Scargill and his
shrinking coterie of fans, it has to be said. There was an Arthur
involved in the leadership, a certain comrade MacManus, but the key figure in
the organisation had been the revolutionary socialist, Irish patriot and martyr
to British imperialism, James Connolly.3
And maybe the rest of our readers could imagine
that you’re here to represent either Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist
Federation (WSF), the South Wales Socialist Society (SWSS) or the Shop
Stewards’ and Workers’ Committee (SSWC).
Or perhaps you’re a left-winger within the
Independent Labour Party (ILP), or a member of the Guild Socialists (GS).
This latter group, as the reference to ‘guilds’
implies, comprised artisans – small, independent craftsmen – who had thrown in
their lot with the proletariat. There’s a precedent for this in William Morris,
considered to be one of the fathers of British socialism but better known
outside political circles for his furniture and his wallpaper designs.
You, our readers (still living in 1920), are about
to become foundation members of the brand new Communist Party of Great Britain.
In so doing, you’re going to arm the working class
of this country as never before in its historic battle for the end of wage
slavery and the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism and then
communism.
Rejection of social democracy
Having established that, let’s return to 2011.
Let’s cast a retrospective eye on where these various organisations came from
and what they represented at the time of the Unity Convention.
Then we’re going to outline some of the key
elements of the Communist Party’s work in the first two and a half decades of
its existence.
First, though, a word about the Labour Party, which
genuine communists are always banging on about – and with good reason.
On demonstrations, we sometimes hear slogans such
as: ‘ConDem/Labour, both the same! They all play the bosses’ game!’
Alternatively, we are occasionally treated to the more concise ‘Labour, Tory –
same old story!’
Both are true and, almost alone among political
journals, Lalkar and Proletarian characterise the Labour party as
every bit as pro-capitalist, pro-war and anti-worker as its Tory and Liberal
Democrat bedfellows.
Four years before the foundation of the British
communist party, back in 1916, there were seven Labour ministers in the
Tory/Liberal coalition, who not only supported the great imperialist war of
1914-18 but actually helped prosecute it.
And, more recently, it doesn’t take much research
to show that it wasn’t the Tories who took uniformed, working-class lads into
Korea (1950) or into the northeast of Ireland (1969) to kill other workers in
those countries. Nor was it the Tories who were responsible for the genocidal
attack on Iraq in 2003. To deny that Labour is a capitalist, imperialist party
– no different from the other two – is to turn your head away when history
doesn’t personally suit you.
Back to the first two decades of the 20th century,
though. Let’s resume our investigation into the origins and development of the
Communist Party of Great Britain.
The first world war
In 1914, on the eve of the first world war, which
was to sweep millions of British workers into the armed forces to kill or be
killed by their fellow workers of other lands, there was a profound contradiction
within the British labour movement.
On the one hand there were great mass organisations
– the trade unions and the TUC, the cooperative movement with all its manifold
societies, the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party, together
embracing millions, but without a socialist outlook, led by men who preached
and practised reformism and class collaboration: mass organisations without
socialism.
On the other hand, there were a number of socialist
organisations, accepting scientific socialism, the ideas and approaches of
Marxism, courageous but small, isolated, sometimes sectarian: socialism
without the masses.
With the war, all the oft-voted and oft-applauded
resolutions against war of the Second International were quickly forgotten. The
official trade-union movement, as Beatrice and Sydney Webb put it, became “part
of the social machinery of state”. (Quoted in ‘The foundation of the
Communist Party of Great Britain’ by James Klugmann, Marxism Today,
January 1960)
Trade-union and Labour Party leaders recruited
workers for the trenches to fight against workers recruited by German
trade-union and social-democratic leaders who had also tried to transform their
organisations into a “part of the social machinery of state”.
There were, of course, very many workers in Britain who resisted participation in the war. Many (in the ILP, for instance), lacking
revolutionary clarity, and finding no organisation or leadership to guide them
in the struggle, expressed their opposition in individual resistance, pacifism,
conscientious objection – courageous but ineffective.
The BSP and the SLP were both divided at the
beginning of the war, and it was not until the 1916 conference that the
anti-war and internationalist section of the BSP defeated the pro-war
leadership.
Meanwhile John Maclean, on the Clydeside, gave a
stirring example of how to lead masses of workers into political resistance
against imperialist war. As the war continued, and with all the suffering that
war entails, new organisations arose from the militant rank and file, mainly
led by Marxists and revolutionaries – organisations in the factories, shipyards
and pits.
And, with the end of the war in 1918, workers
inspired by the Great October Socialist Revolution joined together to oppose
the armed intervention by 14 capitalist powers – among them Britain – against the young Soviet republic. The highlight of this ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign was the refusal by dockers to load the ship Jolly George with military
supplies bound for the interventionist forces in Murmansk.
These two trends were among the forces that
subsequently came together to form a Leninist ‘party of a new type’ in Britain.
Communist unity convention
Against the backdrop of a deep post-war depression,
with first a million and then two million workers on the dole, the
organisations outlined above – principal among them the BSP – began unity
negotiations that can be characterised as falling into three main stages:
1. From the end of the war until March 1919,
there were a number of discussions between the BSP, the ILP and the SLP,
calling for “the cooperation of all active socialist forces with a view to
formulating a common working basis”.
2. From March 1919 to May 1920, there were a
series of discussions between BSP, the SLP, the WSF and the SWSS. All the
comrades involved stood for “revolutionary struggle, the overthrow of
capitalism, the winning of political power by the working class [and] the
establishment of the dictatorship of the working class”.4
Tactical differences remained, however, on two
fronts. Should the new Communist Party engage in parliamentary activity? And
should it be affiliated to the Labour Party?
3. Discussions followed, on and off,
throughout the period May 1919-May 1920, and the decision was finally taken to
convene a Unity Convention. But the bulk of the SLP – except its ‘Communist
Unity Group’ (CUG) – had already withdrawn from the negotiations, as had the
WSF (which, under Sylvia Pankhurst, went on to work for an organisation of a
strictly anti-parliamentarian character).
The actual Unity Convention, as we have said,
opened in London on the last day of July in 1920, in the rather unusual
atmosphere of the Cannon Street Hotel, more accustomed to City dignitaries than
to representatives of the revolutionary proletariat. It subsequently adjourned
to the more familiar surroundings of the International Socialist Club in the
East End of London.
Some 160 delegates attended with 211 mandates, of
which 96 represented BSP branches, 25 branches of the CUG and 36 miscellaneous
groups including ILP branches, Shop Stewards’ organisations, Guild Communists
and local socialist societies.
Fraternal messages were read, including one from
Tom Mann (from the left of the ILP) and another from veteran German socialist
Clara Zetkin (forever to be associated with the establishment of International
Working Women’s Day).
Lenin
on parliamentary elections and the Labour Party
But the greatest enthusiasm of the delegates was
reserved for the personal message from V I Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks and
chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Soviet Russia.
Lenin said that he considered the WSF and Sylvia
Pankhurst wrong not to have attended the convention. He went on to argue in
favour of participation in Parliament and of “adhesion to the Labour Party
on condition of free and independent communist activity”.
The two ‘communist’ parties which, in our own day,
emerged from what had become a thoroughly revisionist CPGB – the New Communist
Party (1977) and the Communist Party of Britain (1988) – still call on workers
to vote Labour on the basis of Lenin’s intervention back in 1920.
For this reason alone, three things must be
stressed:
1. Lenin’s advice was never more than
tactical – an immediate, short-term response to an immediate, short-term
problem.
2. Lenin’s insistence on full freedom of
communist activity within the Labour Party was never met.
3. In his subsequent work, Left-Wing
Communism: an Infantile Disorder, Lenin went on to call for supporting
Labour “as a rope supports a hanging man”, that is, in order to
thoroughly expose its bourgeois nature. Hardly praise for social democracy!5
In the event, back in July and August 1920,
delegates to the Unity Convention voted (by 186 to 19) to embrace parliamentary
activity, and the decision to seek affiliation to the Labour Party was made by
a vote of 100 to 85.
Most importantly, a historic step had been taken: Britain now had its own Communist Party, a party which was affiliated to the
Communist International.
It should be pointed out that the WSF briefly
joined the new party, but Pankhurst and her followers were expelled after she
refused to hand editorial control of her newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought,
over to the central committee, as required under one of the Communist
International’s 21 rules for affiliation.6
Initially, seeking to implement the Unity
Convention’s affiliation decision, the CPGB attempted to work within the Labour
Party, which at this time operated mainly as a federation of ‘socialist
societies’, only having allowed individual membership since 1918.
However, despite the support of ILP leader James Maxton, the Labour Party decided against accepting the affiliation of the Communist Party.
Election of first communist MPs
While pursuing affiliation, the CPGB had promoted
its own candidates at parliamentary and local authority elections. Now it
encouraged its members to join the Labour Party individually and to seek
Labour’s endorsement of its own – Communist but officially ‘Labour’ –
candidates.
It was in this way, in the 1922 general election,
that CPGB members Shapurji Saklatvala (Battersea North, London) and Walton
Newbold (Motherwell, Scotland) both became members of parliament. Newbold, very
significantly, had openly stood as a ‘Labour and Communist’ candidate.
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) having
been established, and having taken very loudly to the public stage, the ruling
monopoly-capitalist class was bound to sit up and take notice.
In 1924, the first Labour government – led by the
class traitor James Ramsay MacDonald – was forced out of office by the affair
of the forged Zinoviev letter. Intended to suggest that the CPGB was engaged in
subversive activities among the armed forces and elsewhere, the forgery’s
successful aim was to promote the electoral chances of the Tories.
It was actually the work of MI6 and White Russian
counter-revolutionaries but, of course, the CPGB had been agitating
among the ‘workers in uniform’ – and everywhere else that the proletariat,
organised or unorganised, was to be found.
British General Strike
In 1926, on the eve of Britain’s first and only
general strike, much of the CPGB’s leadership was arrested (a pre-emptive
strike by the bourgeois state) and imprisoned for ‘seditious conspiracy’, their
having – in the words of the Attorney General – “published the works of Mr
Lenin”. Five were jailed for a year, and seven for six months.
During the general strike itself – led by miners,
engineers, rail and other transport workers – and during the separate miners’
strike which followed, members of the CPGB were to the fore in defending the
workers and their industrial action.
In response to the establishment of the
‘Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies’ (OMS), a government-funded
strike-breaking militia to which the top two fascist leaders of the day were
affiliated, the CPGB said that this was “the most definite step towards
organised fascism yet made in this country … [A]n examination of its
leading personnel and its proclaimed purpose can only stamp it as an
organisation for the defence of property against the lives of the masses of
labouring people.
“The Communist Party,” continued the
statement, “does not regard this development as unique. It simply indicates
the inevitable lines in the development of capitalism already traversed in
other countries, and confirms the communist analysis of the class war. It will
develop the class war here and convince the workers of the correctness of our
policy and our demand for the organisation of workers’ defence corps.”7
Then, upon the betrayal of the strike by the Labour
Party and the TUC, British communists had this to say: “The working class is
bigger than any leader. If the old leaders turn traitor or coward, the workers
are capable of taking charge themselves … There will be talk of loyalty and
discipline.
“The Communist Party declares that the greatest
loyalty is loyalty to the working class; the finest discipline is one that
helps the workers to beat the bosses, not the bosses to smash the workers.”
Class against class
In 1929, the Communist International declared a
‘third period’, one of renewed revolutionary advance. The result of this new
analysis in Britain was the shift to a policy of Class Against Class, as
reflected in the CPGB’s electoral manifesto of the same name.
Henceforth, social-democratic and Labourite parties
were to be seen as equally as much a threat to the proletarian movement as
openly fascist parties. The Labour Party was denounced as ‘social-fascist’ –
socialist in word; fascist by nature.
This ‘third period’ also meant that the CPGB sought
to develop revolutionary trade unions, under the umbrella of the Red
International of Trade Unions [Profintern], in opposition to the docile
and reformist unions organised in the TUC.
In practice, a handful of red trade unions were
formed, amongst them a miners’ union in Scotland and a tailoring union in East London.
To his discredit, Arthur Horner, the communist
leader of the Welsh miners, broke with CPGB discipline and fought off attempts
to set up a revolutionary trade union on his patch.
We can justifiably view the ‘class against class’
period as one of the heroic episodes of British communism. In particular, the
National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) – which emerged around this time –
is worthy of note. This was led by CPGB cadre Wal Hannington, who is also
responsible for a very useful book on how, as chair, to run a political
meeting.
Increasing unemployment had led to a substantial
increase in Communist Party membership, particularly among jobless engineers.
These new members helped boost the numbers taking part in a series of
nationwide marches on the unemployment question (the most famous being a Jarrow
to London trek). The NUWM survived the change in the international communist
line worked out at the Seventh World Congress in 1935, only being dissolved in
1941.
Popular front
In 1935, at the aforementioned congress of the
Third International, Georgi Dimitrov announced a new policy – that
of the Popular Front against fascism.8 Shortly thereafter, Willie
Gallacher was elected as the Communist MP for the coal-mining region of West
Fife (in Scotland).
Then, beginning in 1936, the CPGB started
recruiting internationalist volunteers in defence of the Spanish republic
against Franco’s fascist coup. Without the leadership of the British
communists, there would have been no contribution from this country to the
world-renowned International Brigades.9
At about the same time, the party played a leading
role in opposing – both politically and physically – the British Union of
Fascists, led by former Labour cabinet minister Sir Oswald Moseley. This
campaign reached its peak with the famous Battle of Cable Street, in London’s East End.10
Second world war
With the outbreak of the second world war in
September 1939, British communists initially declared their support for what
they saw as an anti-fascist battle against Nazi Germany. Less than a month
later, the Communist International having characterised the war as ‘imperialist
on both sides’, the CPGB was forced to change its position, with Harry Pollitt
having to step down as General Secretary.11
Now, as an opponent of the war, the CPGB found its
newspaper, the Daily Worker, banned (by Labour home secretary
Herbert Morrisson, grandfather of the beloved Peter Mandelson) and its work in
the factories closely monitored, given the wartime ban on strikes and other
industrial action.
This situation was reversed when, early in 1942,
the Daily Worker ban was lifted, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union the previous year having transformed the character of the war. Now we were
talking about a war against fascism, about an imperialist attack on the
spiritual homeland of the international, revolutionary proletariat.
The dissolution of the Communist International in
1943 seems like a good place to end this brief survey of the CPGB’s foundation
and early work, but we leave you with the oft-neglected story of British
communists’ leadership of the struggle – during the London blitz of 1940-41 –
to gain access for working-class people to the London Underground by way of
shelter.
Suburban Londoners, even before the outbreak of
war, had been given Anderson shelters to install in their back gardens. No such
luck, though, if you were a worker living in a Victorian terraced house in the East End – with no garden in sight.
It was the CPGB that successfully spearheaded the
campaign to turn Tube stations into mass shelters for ordinary, working people.
In other words, the most iconic image of the second
world war, that of Londoners sheltering on Tube platforms, is primarily down to
the CPGB. How much more in tune with the immediate – as well as longer-term –
interests of the proletariat can a communist party be?
NOTES
1.
This article is based on two parallel talks given by Steve Cook, at a London day school organised by the CPGB-ML in January 2011, and at a February meeting of
the Stalin Society in Glasgow.
2.
See Reed’s first-hand account of the October Revolution, Ten Days That Shook
the World, with its introduction by V I Lenin (Penguin,
Harmondsworth 1986).
3. See
James Connolly: Selected Writings (ed P Berresford Ellis,
Pelican, Harmondsworth 1973).
4. James Klugmann, Marxism Today, January 1960.
5.
For a full treatment of this question, consult Harpal Brar’s excellent Social
Democracy: the Enemy Within (1995).
6.
Some of Sylvia Pankhurst’s writings remain worth reading. The best anthology
available is A Sylvia Pankhurst Reader (ed Kathryn Dodd, Manchester
University Press 1993).
7.
Quoted in The 1926 British General Strike (CPGB-ML, 2009).
8.
Dimitrov, who had turned the tables on Göring during the Reichstag Fire trial
of 1933, was general secretary of the Communist International and went on to
become the first prime minister of socialist Bulgaria.
9. A
memorial to those who served in the International Brigades is to be found on London’s south bank, between County Hall and the London Eye. It’s definitely worth a
visit. Meanwhile, readers are directed to Bill Alexander’s British
Volunteers for Liberty (Lawrence and Wishart, London 1982).
10.
See the pamphlet The Battle of Cable Street (Cable Street Group, London
1996).
11. A
conference was held by the – already revisionist and moribund – CPGB on this
subject in 1979. The verbatim transcripts are available in book form as 1939:
The Communist Party and the War (eds John Attfield and Stephen Williams,
Lawrence and Wishart, London 1984)