Class or Nation: Communists, Imperialism, and Two World Wars

Class or Nation? Communists, Imperialism and Two World Wars

Neil Redfern

Tauris Academic Studies

ABBREVIATIONS

CLASS OR NATION

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CLASS OR NATION

ABBREVIATIONS

CLASS OR NATION Communists, Imperialism and Two World Wars NEIL REDFERN

Tauris Academic Studies LONDON • NEW YORK

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Published in 2005 by Tauris Academic Studies, an imprint of I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Copyright © Neil Redfern, 2005 The right of Neil Redfern to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Libray of Political Studies 2 ISBN 1 85043 723 8 EAN 978 1 85043 723 9 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author

ABBREVIATIONS

For Jenny, Pat and Ross – “It is time to cast off the soiled shirt and don clean linen.”

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ABBREVIATIONS

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Contents Abbreviations

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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1. The Inheritance: European and British Marxism 1884–1917

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2. Breaking with the Past? The Birth of British Bolshevism 1917–1922

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3. The Second International Revisited 1935–1941

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4. The decay of British Bolshevism: From Barbarossa to Teheran June 1941–November 1943

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5. The Death of British Bolshevism: Teheran to the CP’s Eighteenth Congress November 1943–November 1945

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations AEU ARP BEF BL BSP CC CCP CI Comintern CP CPGB CPI CPSU CPUSA DC DPC ECCI ETU EWO FOSR FOSU ILP INC JPC KPD LAI LP LRC MFGB MMM NEC NLWM NMM

Amalgamated Engineering Union Air Raid Precautions British Expeditionary Force British Library British Socialist Party Central Committee Chinese Communist Party Communist International Communist International Communist Party of Great Britain Communist Party of Great Britain Communist Party of India Communist Party of the Soviet Union Communist Party of the United States of America District Committee (of the AEU) District Party Committee (of the CPGB) Executive Committee of the Communist International Electrical Trades Union Essential Work Order Friends of Soviet Russia Friends of the Soviet Union Independent Labour Party Indian National Congress Joint Production Committee Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands League Against Imperialism Labour Party Labour Representation Committee Miners’ Federation of Great Britain Miners’ Minority Movement National Executive Committee (of the LP) National Left Wing (Committee) Movement National Minority Movement

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x NUM NUWM OMI PB PCF PCI PHM PRO SDF SLP SPD SSWCM SWMF TGWU TUC USA USSR WCML WEB WFS WIR WFTU WTM YCL

CLASS OR NATION National Union of Mineworkers National Unemployed Workers’ Movement Department of International Information (of CPSU) Political Bureau (of the CPGB) Parti Communiste Francais Partito Communista Italiano People’s History Museum Public Record Office Social Democratic Federation Socialist Labour Party Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands Shop Stewards’ and Workers’ Committee Movement South Wales Miners’ Federation Transport and General Workers’ Union Trades Union Congress United States of America Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Working Class Museum Library West European Bureau Workers’ Film Society Workers’ International Relief World Federation of Trade Unions Workers’ Theatre Movement Young Communist League

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Acknowledgements

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lthough the opinions expressed here are of course my own responsibility, I would like to thank several people who made invaluable contributions to the production of this work. Thanks are due to Ross, whose remarks many years ago on the intellectual origins of the Popular Front provoked the intellectual journey which has culminated in this work, and to Jenny, Pat and many others with whom I debated the issues involved, also for many years. Thanks are due also to Tony Adams, the supervisor of my PhD thesis on the CP in the Second World War, on which this work is in part based. I am indebted to Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, David Howell, Neville Kirk, Stuart Macintyre, Kevin Morgan, Mathew Worley, and others for invaluable comments, reading early drafts and making pertinent criticisms. Thanks are due too to Stephen Bird and Andrew Glynn of the Peoples’ History Museum, Manchester, who were always ready with advice and showed me the way around the Communist Party Archive and other sources. The librarians and archivists of the Working Class Movement and Central Libraries in Manchester, the Public Record Office, British Library and Marx Memorial Library in London and the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex were unfailingly helpful. Without the help and encouragement of all these people, this work could never have been written.

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INTRODUCTION

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Introduction

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his is a study of British communists during the two world wars of the Twentieth century.1 Both periods have been the object of study, but the links between them remain largely unexplored. The intellectual origins of the present work lie in an attempt to explain why the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP or CPGB) enthusiastically supported the British war effort in the Second World War, given that most of its leaders had been militant opponents of the First World War. For most, this is not problematic, for were not the two wars quite different in character? For those for whom both wars were imperialist wars, Stalin is the usual culprit for communist policy in the Second of the World Wars. He certainly played a major role, but it will be argued here that other major factors were the ideological and political foundations of European and British socialism (the Third International had more in common with the Second International than partisans of either organisation would readily admit) and the particular circumstances of the CP’s foundation in 1920. The genesis of this work and the fact that the early years of the CP have been much more studied than the later years account for the greater attention paid here to British communists in the Second World War than in the First. The CP was founded in 1920 as a section of the Third or Communist International (Comintern). It was formed by those Marxists, mainly from the British Socialist Party (BSP) and Socialist Labour Party (SLP), who had opposed the First World War and who had enthusiastically welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The foundation of the Comintern in 1919 had institutionalised a split in socialism into Social-Democratic and Communist wings. For the Communists, the Social Democrats were incorrigible opportunists. Their ‘social patriotism’ – the patriotic stance adopted by them in the ‘imperialist war’ of 1914–18 – and their reformist political strategy had shown them to be not a legitimate part of the working class movement but the principal social props of the bourgeoisie. In 1920, to establish strict lines of demarcation with the Social Democrats, the Communists adopted the Comintern’s Theses on the Conditions for Admission to the Communist International, a political programme which committed them, inter alia, to actively prepare, through legal and illegal means, for the

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insurrectionary overthrow of capital, to smash the existing state machine and to replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat, to resolutely oppose all manifestations of ‘social patriotism’, to vigorously expose and oppose the Social Democrats and to build a Bolshevik-style vanguard party.2 The foundation of the Comintern was in part predicated on a belief that capitalism was in its death-throes and that conditions were ripe for general proletarian revolution in Europe and perhaps elsewhere. As we know, these expectations were not fulfilled. By the mid 1920s it was clear that capitalism had become stabilised. In the colonies of the European powers there were growing anti-colonial movements, but these were in their infancy. The widespread post-war social unrest and the imposition of fascist and semifascist regimes in several European countries, notably Italy, had shown that the expectations of Communists were greatly exaggerated, rather than mere millenarian fantasies. Even so, the prospects for revolution in Europe were not great. Whilst paying some attention to Asia, China in particular, Communists nevertheless continued to pin their hopes on Europe. In the late 1920s it was proclaimed that capitalism had entered a final crisis, the ‘general crisis of capitalism’ and that the prospects for revolution in Europe were bright. What became known as the ‘third period’, a period in which Communists practised the sectarian politics of ‘class against class’, effectively ended with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933. It was not until 1935 though, at its Seventh Congress, that the Comintern finally interred the politics of the ‘third period’. The debacle in Germany was the catalyst for a fundamental reappraisal of the Comintern’s strategy. Although Comintern strategists had been wrong in their assessment of the European situation, and in their belief that capitalism had entered a final and irreversible ‘general crisis’, their prognostications were to some extent vindicated by the great depression of the 1930s and by the great-power rivalries which led to the Second World War. But from 1935, Comintern strategists could see only great dangers rather than revolutionary possibilities. A two-stage strategy was adopted in which Communists proposed first to defend the institutions of liberal democracy against fascism, held to be a great danger in all capitalist countries, and then to resume the revolutionary struggle. By 1939 this strategy had been transformed from one which proposed to defend liberal democracy against a perceived internal threat of fascism to one of advocating defence of the democratic states against the external menace of the fascist powers. To justify this breach with the founding principles of the Comintern, it was argued that two new factors meant that the precedent of 1914–18 could not be applied to the international situation of the 1930s.

INTRODUCTION

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Firstly, the existence of the Soviet Union had radically transformed world politics. If the democracies were to ally with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, then their war effort should be supported, for willy-nilly, irrespective of their motives, they would be helping to defend the socialist Soviet Union and hence the general interest of the working class. Secondly, the working class of the imperialist countries had acquired a stake in the nation which it was legitimate to defend against fascist aggression. During the Second World War, the Comintern’s new approach became transformed into a reformist, gradualist strategy which assumed that socialism could more or less peacefully emerge from advanced capitalism. By the end of the war Communists were advocating that war-time national unity should continue into the peace. All ‘democratic’ forces could co-operate in national and international co-operation and reconstruction. Keynesian demand management of the international economy and bodies such as the World Bank and the United Nations Organisation could prevent a return to prewar conditions of slump, great-power rivalry and war. An intrinsic element of the strategy adopted in 1935 was a transformed attitude to the SocialDemocratic parties. These were now seen as essential allies in the fight against fascism. Doctrinal disputes were set aside in the interests of unity. Eventually, the Social Democrats came to be seen as a legitimate wing of the working-class movement. Though Communists among them might dissent, historians generally agree that in the decade after 1935 the CP ceased to be a revolutionary party. A comparison of the Party’s Congresses of 1935 and 1945 is most instructive in this respect. The outlook of the Party in 1935 is suggested by the title of the Congress resolution adopted then, For Soviet Britain. There is in the resolution a pink vein of Social-Democratic thought, but overall its outlook is red. The resolution declared the Party’s opposition to imperialist war, its belief that revolution was the only road to the emancipation of the working class and that the future form of workers’ state must be the dictatorship of the proletariat. By the outbreak of war in 1939 the Party’s adherence to this bedrock of Leninism had, after nearly five years of the politics of the Popular Front, become nominal only. By 1945 the vast majority of the Party no longer spoke the language of Leninism. The report and resolutions adopted by the Congress of that year contain scarcely a vestige of the revolutionary orientation of 1935.3 This work seeks to advance our understanding of how this transformation took place. If the Comintern’s new strategy was essentially a rationalisation of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, it was not merely that. The foreign policy requirements of the Soviet Union dovetailed neatly with ideological

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baggage which the Communist parties of the imperialist world had inherited from the Second International from which they had sprung. As Marx said of quite different circumstances, ‘the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ In the 1920s and early ‘30s the influence of the Comintern was such as to keep this baggage in check. But, it will be shown, Comintern policy after 1935 allowed it to flourish. It will be shown that the CP essentially reverted to the ideology and politics of the Second International, in particular to the Euro-centric nationalism that led the parties of that International to support the war effort of their respective governments in the First World War. It will not be claimed that the CP was a mere retread of its predecessors, for there were important differences. The Party remained, for instance, much more involved in mass movements than had the BSP which had provided most of the early membership. It is stressed that while what is offered here is a political history of the CP, it is based on a view that the fundamental reason for this transformation was socio-economic. Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and its consequences for politics in the imperialist countries remains fundamentally convincing, despite the inconsistencies and factual errors which several writers4 have pointed out. His tendency to explain the support offered by most workers for the war effort of their respective countries in terms of the ‘treachery’ of the leaders of the socialist parties is though not at all convincing: much more satisfying is the use of Lenin’s basic theoretical framework to argue that the great majority of people in the imperialist countries have benefited and continue to benefit from imperialism.5 Though attention is paid to the activities of the Party’s rank-and-file, the main foci of attention in this history are the Party’s leaders, their attempts to come to grips with the world in which they lived and their interactions with the Comintern, the Soviet Party and its changing line. As Ben Fowkes has argued, a ‘top down’ approach is particularly appropriate to the history of the highly centralised Communist movement.6 The Communist Party archive shows that while the Party rank-and-file were far from unreflective helots, it was the Comintern and the central leadership of the CP which were fundamentally responsible for the changes in orientation and line which we are seeking to explain. Some important aspects of CP politics are not discussed. It was decided that a consideration of the activities of CP members in the armed forces would take this study beyond what could reasonably be accomplished in a contemporary monograph.7 As the Party seems moreover to have made little attempt to guide these members, it is not clear how much additional light a

INTRODUCTION

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study of their activities would throw on the central concerns of this work. A further notable omission is that the role of women in the CP is not considered. It was decided that here too a substantial discussion could not be developed.8 What is more important, the ‘woman question’ is not directly relevant to the central concerns of this study. It figured little in the Party’s strategy for the conquest of power and its understanding of the matter changed little in our period. The well-worked themes of anti-fascism and People’s War are not discussed at any length.9 Though a chronological rather than thematic structure has been deemed the most appropriate, there are three themes which predominate. Firstly, the CP’s line on imperialism, nation and war; secondly, its reformist stance on the state; and thirdly its view of Social-Democracy. Since the Party’s foundation it had been these matters which above all else had defined what it was to be a communist. And it is on these matters that the Party’s departure from its early revolutionary orientation is most marked. Some questions which on first consideration might not seem directly relevant are discussed within the context of these principal themes. The CP’s industrial policy is briefly considered in the light of its war-time fight for national unity. Industrial policy and the Party’s changing view of the nature of a Communist Party are analysed as crucial elements of the Party’s developing reformist strategy towards the British state. An important aspect of this last element of the CP’s new view of the world – what James Hinton has called its policy of ‘constructive opposition’, its vision of a radical post-war participatory democracy,10 – is though not discussed at any length. This, and the other major elements of the Party’s policy for the post-war world – its positions on welfarism, nationalisation, etc. – are analysed in order to demonstrate the Party’s revisionism, rather than explored in their own right. One aspect of party history that has been keenly debated, as we shall see in Chapter One, is the question of whether the Comintern’s new strategy arose mainly from the Soviet Union’s security needs or from attempts by the parties of the Comintern to respond to the new situation created by the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. This is an important debate, won, in the opinion of the present writer, by those who see the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy as the primary factor.11 It will be shown here that throughout the war, even after the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, the CP continued to follow closely the contours indicated by Soviet foreign policy. But if the foreign policy of the Soviet Union was the agent of change in the CP, it is the Party’s internal dynamics, it will be argued, that explain how it changed. These preliminary remarks should have begun to make clear the conceptual model employed here. It is hoped that it will be further clarified

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in the brief analysis of some of the secondary literature on the CPGB which follows. To the present writer, the most striking feature of the existing literature on the CP is how little the question of imperialism – using this term in the Leninist sense of monopoly capitalism – is addressed. It was the crisis of imperialism of 1914–18 that created the conditions for the Party’s formation and the subsequent crisis of the 1930s and ‘40s which was crucial in its transformation from a revolutionary to a reformist party. Stuart Macintryre’s A Proletarian Science is an outstanding exception in a body of work on the early CP which has little to say on imperialism.12 To a degree of course this neglect reflects the Party’s own priorities which were firmly centred on the class struggle in Britain. In the work of James Hinton and Richard Hyman and Michael Woodhouse and Brian Pearce, sympathetic to the early CP, the question of imperialism is scarcely discussed.13 These preoccupations have been continued by Mathew Worley and Andrew Thorpe in more recent work on the CP in the inter-war years.14 Most literature on the CPGB views then the Party from the narrow confines of British society, a perspective from which the Party’s ambitions make little sense. The Party’s relationship with the Comintern is usually discussed and sometimes its dealings with another Party, the French, the US or the Indian perhaps. Even so, the conceptual framework deployed is usually one in which the Party is a discrete entity whose task was the achievement of socialism in Britain. But the parties of the Comintern were not autonomous: they were contingents of an international movement. This organisational structure reflected the movement’s view of itself as a body dedicated to leading the fight of labour against capital in an international arena. It was regarded as the duty of each party to consider how best to advance the interests of the movement as a whole, rather than of their particular contingent alone. In this respect, Nina Fishman’s work on the CP and the trade unions would have benefited from a consideration of the effects on the Party of its move in the 1930s towards the mainstream of the British trade union movement. Given the dominant ideology of this movement, this shift in the centre of gravity of the Party’s practice must surely have strengthened reformist and social-chauvinist sentiments in it and made it less likely, for instance, that it would continue to render internationalist support to anticolonial movements in the British Empire. Some historians have studied the British labour movement, including the CP, in the context of imperialism. Stuart Macintyre’s pamphlet has set a model which will be hard to follow.15 James Klugman made more effort than most to consider the CP in an international context, but his work suffered

INTRODUCTION

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from being written from within a suffocating Party context.16 Kevin Morgan is one of the few historians of the CP to treat the matter of imperialism in other than the most cursory manner17. But he, like most labour historians, tends to regard imperialism as being synonymous with colonialism, rather than as the very nature of advanced capitalist societies, something which profoundly affected the lives and consciousness of the members of those societies. P. S. Gupta has shown how even the founders of ‘scientific socialism’ were not immune from the imperialist prejudices of the societies in which they lived, 18 whilst Steven Howe and A.J. MacKensie have produced illuminating studies of the labour movement and the colonial question.19 But these are exceptions to the general tendency of British labour historians. Kevin Morgan has endorsed Perry Anderson’s ‘three basic requirements ‘for an adequate historical reconstruction’ of a Communist Party’. These are, first, an account of its ‘membership, organisation, leadership, tendencies and policies’; second, placing the Party in question in the context of the ‘national balance of class forces’; and, third, a discussion of its relationship with the Comintern. It is unlikely that this current work will meet these demanding requirements in all respects.20 It is suggested however that there should be another requirement similar to, but not the same as, Anderson’s third: that the activities of the party in question should be set fully in an international context. To propose this as a requirement of Communist Party history is not to demand that all historians should have an internationalist perspective: it is to suggest that Communist parties are best understood in the context of that proletarian internationalism to which they were, at least nominally, committed. Most labour historians would endorse Henry Pelling’s verdict on the CP, that ‘all the absurdities of the history of the Party spring from this one fact, that it has been a revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary situation’.21 But, as James Hinton and Richard Hyman have argued,22 it is possible to practice revolutionary politics in a non-revolutionary situation. In any event, tragic, rather then ‘absurd’ seems to the present writer a better epithet to apply to the CP. Granted, the Party had, with the possible though doubtful exception of the few years immediately following the First World War, been confronted with a non-revolutionary situation in Britain. But what Pelling called the ‘absurdities’ of the Party’s history surely stemmed not so much from being a revolutionary party in a ‘non-revolutionary situation’ but from being part of a movement with a mistaken assessment of the balance of national and international class forces. It will be argued that a crucial part of the Comintern’s ideological and political outlook was a great overestimation of the revolutionary inclinations of the working class of the

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imperialist countries and a corresponding underestimation of that of the people of the periphery of Europe and of what is now called the ‘third world’. It will be shown that the practical consequence of this, when combined with the other elements of the Party’s Euro-centric outlook, was to adopt a political practice in which the Party exhibited a general indifference to the colonial question and insisted that the people of the colonies should subordinate their anti-colonial struggle to the needs of the anti-fascist struggle in Europe. Most Trotskyist work on the CPGB does set the party in a context wider than Britain. But this context is usually the workers’ struggle in the imperialist countries, rather than the international situation as a whole. The movement in the colonies is usually either ignored or treated as a side-show. This is not particularly surprising, given that Trotskyism was even more Euro-centric than Stalinism. In most of these accounts the principal factor in the failure of the proletariat of the imperialist countries to rise up in revolution is the ‘betrayal’ of the Stalinists. Woodhouse and Pearce, for instance, present the CP’s drift into reformism after 1935 as a more-or-less deliberate plot to sabotage revolution. They, like R. Black, Ian Birchall and Hugo Dewar, portray the leaders of the CP as virtual puppets of Stalin, singing and dancing to whatever tune he played in his alleged attempts to sell-out the revolutionary strivings of the British workers.23 This is hardly a sufficient explanation for the course of the class struggle in the imperialist countries. As Kevin Morgan has noted, most of the members of the Trotskyist school offer a monocausal analysis which provides little more than a critique of political line and ‘usually a poor one’.24 Even Raymond Challinor, whose work is scholarly rather than polemical, attributes to the Communist movement, in his collection of essays on the Second World War, almost superhuman powers to thwart the proletariat. Even if they existed, plots and intrigues in the Kremlin and in the King St. headquarters of the CP are an unsatisfactory explanation for the essential moderation of the British working class in our period.25 Not one of this Trotskyist school discusses the impact of imperialism on Britain: in particular none of them recognises that there existed a substantial material basis for reformism. That this, rather than conscious betrayal, might account at least in part for the chauvinist and reformist politics adopted by the CP after 1935 is not a possibility considered by them. A recent example of this school – albeit one much more nuanced than is usually found in Trotskyist accounts – is James Eaden’s and David Renton’s general history of the Party. Here, the Party’s decay is attributed mainly to Stalinist degeneration in the Comintern.26

INTRODUCTION

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There is a substantial body of literature on the CP written by historians from within the contemporary Communist Party tradition and by those sympathetic to it. Some of this work, for instance the work by James Hinton cited above and Eric Hobsbawn’s illuminating work on the Comintern during the Popular Front, is first-rate.27 But, first-rate or otherwise, we find in this literature virtually no discussion of imperialism as monopoly capitalism. We do find, sometimes, accounts of the Party’s anti-colonial work, but rarely anything on other aspects of imperialism. In the two volumes of Party history written by Noreen Branson, the Second World War is treated as essentially a battle between aggressive, fascist powers and defensive, democratic powers. The question of why one camp was aggressive and the other defensive is not addressed. In the Second of these volumes Branson offers some criticism of the British government’s colonial policy but does not relate this policy to the political economy of imperialism.28 Communist Party historiography is also marked by a tendency, as Kevin Morgan has noted,29 to attribute to the Comintern and the Soviet Party responsibility for those episodes in the Party’s history of which they disapprove and to claim for the British Party credit for those of which they approve. This tendency is particularly marked in the latest volume of Branson’s official history. There is no hint, for instance, in her discussion of the Party’s programme for post-war reform, that the main elements of this programme were not independently developed by the Party, but were largely cribbed from the Atlantic Charter and the Teheran Declaration, the latter sanctioned by the Kremlin. Nor is there any discussion of the Party’s vacillations on the question, conditioned by defeats and victories on the eastern front.30 For most CP historians, the Second World War saw the Party’s finest hour, a time of unparalleled growth and influence. It is of course generally regarded as Britain’s finest hour too, an attitude manifested in the celebrations of D-Day and VE-Day and in the ugly nationalism paraded by football hooligans, most of the British Press and by Euro-sceptics at Conservative Party Conferences. A radical version of this narrative is the received wisdom in the labour movement and among left and liberal academics. In this version, the British working class and people stood up to defend against fascist tyranny cherished rights and liberties, won through hundreds of years of struggle, and, through that struggle, in alliance with other ‘progressive’ forces, won new victories in the shape of the post-war settlement. Is this not a rather one-sided view of history? Were the British working class and people really fighting in defence of democratic liberties? If we look

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at Britain in isolation, perhaps. But on a world scale? The vast majority of the people of the British Empire had no democratic rights whatsoever. Not surprisingly then, vast numbers of people were involved in the civil disobedience campaigns led by the Congress Party of India and a significant number of Indian people unwisely fought in or supported Subhas Chandra Bose’s India National Army, formed to fight with the Japanese against the British.31 What then was really going on in The Second World War? What were the British people really fighting for? A fundamental part of the conceptual framework deployed here is that whatever the British people thought, the principal content of The Second World War was a battle between two rival imperialist blocs for world hegemony. The members of the CPGB though quite clearly believed that they were fighting during the war in the best interests of the working class and people. In the chapters that follow it will be argued that they did so because they shared in no small measure the ideology and values of the British bourgeoisie. Before proceeding further, the claim of one historian that the CP is ‘interesting, but irrelevant’ requires an answer.32 Certainly most historians regard the CP as hardly worthy of attention, even when writing on the Labour Party.33 There are obvious objections to such attitudes to the CP, the main one being that the Party exerted an influence on the British labour movement, indeed on British society as a whole, quite disproportionate to its size. The history of the Labour Party, for instance, would have been quite different had it not been for its alter ego, the Communist Party. In addition to such standard objections, it should also be pointed out that the CP was part of an international communist movement, arguably the movement which more than any other shaped the twentieth century. Yes, the British Party was small, its influence on British society, if not insignificant, not that great. But, once the German Party had suffered its bloody defeat in 1933, the British Party was one of the most important parties in Comintern calculations. Britain was, after all, one of the three or four biggest imperialist powers and one of the key players in the nexus of international relations in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, as the greatest colonial power, Britain possessed vast natural and geo-political resources which would be crucial in the world war which Soviet and Comintern strategists considered inevitable. Though the Comintern after 1935 no longer attempted to ‘conduct revolution by telegram,’ as Mao complained it had with respect to the Chinese Party, it continued to pay close attention to the British Party until its dissolution, as did the Soviet Party afterwards. As we shall see, these bodies on several occasions directly intervened in the affairs of the British Party. The result of this interaction was to produce a

INTRODUCTION

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Party which more than most illuminates the development of the international communist movement in the most crucial period of its history. Though caution should be used in generalising the experience of the British Party, as the occasional comparisons with the French and US Parties made here show, the British CP was in many ways a microcosm of the communist movement during the Second World War. The five chapters that follow correspond to more or less clearly demarcated periods. Chapter One considers the ideological inheritance of the CP from the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Chapter Two examines the period of the CP’s formation and Chapter Three its line and practice in the period 1935–41, from the Seventh Congress of the Comintern to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Chapter Four discusses the Party’s work from the invasion to the Teheran Conference of late 1943. In this period the Party’s single-minded aim was the opening of a Second Front in Europe, though some tentative consideration was given to the postwar order. For the sake of clarity, discussions of the Party’s anti-colonial work, its industrial work and its overhaul of its organisational structure are extended to 1945. In Chapter Five we look at the Party’s activities in 1943– 45, a time when it became increasingly confident of eventual Allied victory and adopted a reformist strategy for the post-war period.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Inheritance: European and British Marxism 1884–1917

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n early Twentieth century western Europe, mass socialist parties seemed poised to take power and to transform capitalist Europe into a socialist Europe. Nominally Marxist, these parties were in practice more concerned to achieve reforms than to make revolution. Nominally internationalist, the test of war in 1914 showed that most wished to defend the nation. Theoretically committed to colonial freedom, they demonstrated little support for or confidence in anti-colonial movements. British socialists shared these characteristics and demonstrated some peculiarities. Most prominent of these was that very few of them were Marxist. The Marxist sects, the largest of which was the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), made no active preparations for revolution, believing that socialism would be the result of capitalist economic collapse and the indoctrination of the working class. As tensions between Britain and Germany grew, chauvinist trends in the SDF (renamed the British Socialist Party in 1912) grew rapidly, culminating in its support for the British war effort in 1914. An internationalist minority in the BSP grew stronger and won control of the Party in 1916. The BSP thereafter grew closer to the Socialist Labour Party, the other main Marxist organisation, which had split from the SDF in 1903 in opposition to that Party’s reluctance to support trade unions. The SLP had opposed the war virtually from the outset and was now joined by an internationalist BSP. But both Parties tended to oppose the war from a pacifist perspective. The Bolshevik revolution challenged British revolutionaries ideologically and politically. From 1917 they began to try to emulate Bolshevism’s revolutionary internationalism.

The Growth of Reformism and Chauvinism in European Socialism Socialism as a doctrine and movement emerged in Europe in the Nineteenth century: though it had many elements of general relevance (which is why it

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was taken up with enthusiasm by such diverse people as Mao Tsetung and Jawarhalal Nehru), it was, like any other doctrine and movement, a product of its time and place. In particular, and unsurprisingly, it was very Eurocentric. Its attention was focused on the workers’ movement in Europe, where, it was assumed, the transition to socialism would begin. Socialism, most socialists believed, was only possible in such advanced industrial economies as those of western Europe. It was thus always likely that the peoples of those places which Europeans had colonised would have little place in the strategy of European socialists. The development of imperialism, monopoly capitalism, in the course of the century exacerbated these perspectives by promoting pronounced reformist and chauvinist tendencies.1 The outbreak of war in 1914 revealed that for the vast majority of socialists Marx’s slogan ‘workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains’ was merely that, a slogan. Like the mass of workers, socialists rallied to their respective flags with varying degrees of enthusiasm or reluctance. Reformism and chauvinism were particularly marked in Britain, the mightiest and most prosperous of the great powers. Here, there was no significant Marxist party, only small sects. The largest of these sects, the quasiMarxist SDF, was distinguished by the jingoism and Germanophobia of its founder and leader, H.M. Hyndman. As did all socialist parties, the SDF contained both revolutionary and reformist wings. But whereas many other parties split in 1914, the revolutionary wing of the SDF rated unity more important than principle. The reasons for this were rooted deep in the past. The defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 marked the end of mass revolutionary politics in Europe, the end of a period in which the ideals of the French Revolution and of anarchism had been as influential as Marxism. Apart from the exceptional case of Russia in 1905, mass revolutionary politics revived only in 1917. In the interregnum of nearly a half-century Marxism had become much more influential on the left: in some countries, notably Germany, it was dominant. Whereas the First International had witnessed a battle for influence between Marxism and anarchism,2 Marxism was indisputably the creed of the Second International. Whether Marx himself would have found the International congenial is another matter. Its Parties had begun to become incorporated into the structures of their respective societies and their supporters to make gains, and thus revolution began to seem less attractive than reform. These processes also fostered patriotism and chauvinism, as the support given in 1914 by the great majority of socialists to the war effort of their respective countries was to demonstrate. The late Nineteenth century saw a great expansion of colonialism and of accompanying paternalism and racism, from which socialists were not immune.

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The Second International was founded (on the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille) in Paris in 1889. In the 1880s European capitalism rested on much firmer foundations than when Marx and Engels had published their Communist Manifesto. In just a few decades, capitalism in western Europe had passed from the era of the guild and the workshop to the era of the trade union and the factory, from an era of anarchist conspiracies to an era of mass politics. It was this which made Marxist socialist parties viable. The time was one of unprecedented prosperity, even if large sections of the working class still lived in wretched poverty. Capitalism had passed from a period of raw, primitive accumulation to one of conciliation and concession. Living standards and conditions for most were notably better than they had been in 1848. Factory reform had compelled capitalists to regard their workers less as machines and more as humans. Trade Unions were largely accepted as legitimate vehicles for working class aspirations. The working class was making inroads into a political system from which they had been ferociously excluded for fear that they would use political power to enact a social revolution. In sum, these conditions encouraged the formation of parties which while Marxist in orientation sought in practice a gradual accretion, rather than a revolutionary seizure, of power. But this is not to say that the working class and their parties did not challenge the existing order. Mass trade unions, unemployment protests in the 1880s and the pre-First World War ‘syndicalist revolt’ all alarmed European elites. Such late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century reforms as unemployment insurance were in part attempts to head off the socialist challenge to capitalism. But for concessions to be made and improvements to be gained there must be reserves. In the early years of the Twentieth century Marxist intellectuals pondering the question of why mature capitalism showed no sign of collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, began to consider that imperialism might provide at least part of the answer. Kautsky, Hilferding, Bukharin, Luxemburg and Lenin all published work.3 But the question of imperialism, in particular the question of the connection between imperialism and reformism, scarcely impacted upon the practice of socialists prior to 1917. For Lenin, the events of 1914 burst an abscess in socialism which had been a long time festering. A landmark in the growth of this abscess was the decision in 1899 by the French socialist Alexandre Millerand to join the French cabinet. Hitherto, it had been axiomatic for the great majority of socialists that they should not join bourgeois governments. Power would be achieved through revolution, not through government. But, Millerand

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argued, capitalism could be replaced by socialism gradually, by reforms enacted by progressive governments. Millerand’s decision to join the cabinet sparked off a fevered debate among evolutionary and revolutionary socialists. In Germany, where the revolutionary wing was strongest, orthodox Marxism had been entrenched in the Erfurt Programme of 1891. Germany was where Marxism had been turned into a mass doctrine. The rapidly growing socialist party there provided a template for other European Marxists. Prior to 1917 it was to Germany, not Russia, that they looked to for inspiration. But the tensions which in France had led to the Millerand Affair of 1899 were present too in Germany. That year’s Hanover Conference saw a debate between the two wings which raised more fundamental matters than participation in government. The issue was Eduard Bernstein’s ‘revisionism’, what was seen as his attempts to cut out the revolutionary heart of Marxism and replace it with reformism. In a series of writings in the 1890s Bernstein attempted to provide, by showing that capitalism had not developed as Marx had predicted, a rationale for the activities of the evolutionary wing of socialism. 4 In particular, Bernstein argued, capitalism showed no sign of exhausting its capacity to develop the forces of production, the proletariat was not experiencing progressive immiseration and society had not become increasingly polarised between two hostile classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.5 In general, contemporary capitalism was ameliorating, not exacerbating, class conflict. Socialists should therefore work for evolutionary change within capitalism rather than prepare for crisis and revolution.6 At Hanover, discussion of the Millerand Affair was avoided, orthodox Marxism reaffirmed and Bernstein indicted.7 But the revolutionary left’s criticism of Bernstein tended to be ideological and tactical, rather than theoretical. But this is hardly surprising The phenomena raised by Bernstein arose from the transition to imperialism, monopoly capitalism. Marxist discussion of this development was in its infancy as was modern imperialism itself. What was particularly lacking was an appreciation of the connection between imperialism and reformism. 1914 made a study of this connection seem urgent to such revolutionary socialists as Lenin. Prior to then reformism had grown rapidly. Some significant steps were taken at the 1900 Paris Congress of the International. Anticipating the argument of the Communist International (Comintern) of the 1930s, Emile Vandervelde declared at the Paris Congress that a ‘coalition is legitimate where liberty is threatened as in Italy’ (where a conservative government had responded to recent social unrest by imprisoning socialist deputies).’ The Congress decided that socialists could join a

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bourgeois government in ‘exceptional circumstances’. 8 No doubt the delegates (which included some from Britain’s SDF) were swayed by ‘circumstances’ in Paris, where the republican government was seriously threatened by an alliance of conservatives, royalists and clerics forged by the Dreyfus Affair. The issues raised by the debates in Paris were to surface again and again over the next few decades. Traces of them can be found in the arguments in the 1930s over the Popular Front. Karl Kautsky, the chief representative of orthodox Marxism, drafted a resolution which he hoped would establish a line of demarcation with the conspiracies, bomb-throwing and other elitist methods of the anarchists. But it gave theoretical weight to the gradualists by arguing that socialism would be the result of ‘a prolonged and complex task of political and economic organisation on the part of the workers . . . and the gradual increase in the seats held by the party in local councils and central parliaments.’9 Whatever the intentions of its revolutionary wing, gradualism dominated the practice of European socialism in the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. No western European party contemplated an insurrectionary attempt at seizing power. Prior to 1914, Lenin had regarded Karl Kautsky as the chief guardian of Marxist orthodoxy. But, as John H. Kautsky (no relation) has convincingly argued, when Lenin and Kautsky thought of ‘revolution’ they had very different things in mind. Like the late Engels, Kautsky had in mind not the barricades and street battles of revolutionary France, but the coming to power of the Social Democrats, an event for which German capitalism was rapidly creating the conditions.10 The SPD’s Erfurt programme of 1891 provided a recipe for gradualism by appending a minimum programme of reforms to be achieved under capitalism to a maximum programme affirming Marxist theory. No serious preparations were made for revolution while everyday work was a routine of propaganda and agitation, demonstrations, trade unions, elections, petitions, cycling clubs, and so on. The greatly increased economic militancy of the European working class in the period 1900–1914, manifested in an unprecedented wave of strikes, in any event suggested that the working class was politically maturing, that power could not be far off. The ideological and practical paralysis produced by this practice was demonstrated in Germany during the revolutionary crisis of 1917–19, when even the revolutionary wing of German socialism proved incapable of mounting a sustained bid for power.11 Even more than creeping gradualism, the outbreak of war in 1914 revealed how reformist the socialist parties had become. Marx’s dictum that

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the workers had ‘no country’ was perhaps the acme of Marxism. It summed up the view that the proletariat and bourgeoisie of a given country were locked in a mutually antagonistic embrace. The fundamental interest of the workers lay not in defending this or that national territory but in uniting with the workers of other countries to put an end to the capitalist system. War makes fundamental loyalty – class or nation – clear. But by 1914 the categories of class and nation had become conflated. Whilst a deputy of the German SPD announced that Germans had much to lose ‘from a victory for Russian despotism’, the Secretary of the French section of the International declared that if ‘notre France republicaine et pacifique’ were attacked French socialists would defend it.12 What to do in the event of the general European war which in the early years of the Twentieth century seemed increasingly likely was the subject of earnest and urgent debate among the socialists of Europe. All were agreed that such a war would be a catastrophe for the workers and could not be supported. Yet when war came nearly all did support it. The reasons why were more complex than the ‘treachery’ ascribed to the ‘social patriots’ by Lenin. Some, like Britain’s Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, were chauvinists. Many were patriots who found stronger ties to nation than to class. But in the crisis of 1914 most, while not wanting war, were paralysed first by the seemingly inexorable and exceedingly swift march to war once the final crisis erupted and then by manifestations of popular support for war. In theoretical terms, the International was still locked into the Nineteenth century. At its founding Congress a resolution against standing armies and for national defence by means of ‘the people in arms’ had been passed unanimously, The delegates believed that ‘it was standing armies that were liable to provoke war, whilst some form of national militia would inevitably prevent it.’ 13 This was a stance which owed more to liberalism than to Marxism. It may have been appropriate to the early decades of the Nineteenth century, but was of doubtful value in a period of militarism, imperialism and general reaction. But though the Congress of 1891 adopted a Marxist resolution which declared that war was the inevitable outcome of capitalism, certain assumptions underlying the earlier resolution were never examined. Firstly, it was assumed that defensive wars could be supported. In part this assumption was based on a sectionalism which wished to advance the cause of labour in the respective countries of the socialists, rather than on a world scale. Secondly, it was assumed that the workers would oppose war. In general, Marxist thought was ill-equipped to deal with imperialist worldwar.

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During the Franco-Prussian War German socialists had supported Germany during the initial French offensive whilst French socialists had supported France during the later phase of German aggression, in both cases with the endorsement of the General Council of the First International. But this distinction between defensive and offensive wars could of course be a rationale for ‘my country, right or wrong,’ a point made by a Dutch delegate at the Congress of 1893 who maintained ‘that this kind of thinking inevitably betrayed the spirit of international working-class solidarity’.14 The delegate had perhaps in mind one of the leaders of German socialism, August Bebel, who in 1891 had been adamant that ‘The soil of Germany . . . belongs to us the masses as much and more than to the others. If Russia, the champion of terror and barbarism, went to attack Germany . . . we are as much concerned as those who stand at the head of Germany’.15 In the 1890s such arguments were of a largely theoretical nature, but within a few years had acquired a practical significance. Indicating that socialists were not immune to the growing nationalism, chauvinism and war-fever of the time, only a tiny minority of delegates to the 1907 Congress of the German socialists rejected outright any possibility of supporting their country in war. That same year, at the Stuttgart Congress of the International, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg urged that in the event of war socialists should ‘exploit with all their might the economic and political crisis caused by the war to arouse the population and to hasten the overthrow of capitalist rule.’16 That the German socialists rather than Lenin and Luxemburg had been in tune with the sentiments of the movement was demonstrated in 1914 when nearly all socialist parties found reason to assert that their country was fighting a defensive war. It was an illusion that the mass of workers would oppose war. The illusion was based on the International’s deterministic view that socialism would inevitably supersede capitalism. The growth of large-scale capitalist production was held to be automatically creating the material conditions for socialism and also an associated class consciousness in the working class, a view that seemed to be vindicated by the enormous growth of trade unions and mass socialist parties. But August 1914 showed that nationalism was a more potent mass force than socialism. Yet the illusion was not utterly without foundation – hundreds of thousands demonstrated against war in Britain, France and Germany in the crucial July days. But by the 4th. August British, German and French socialist parliamentarians had voted for war credits. German socialists justified themselves by the threat of ‘Russian despotism’ and the French by the threat to national independence by Germany. The empiricist British, mostly untroubled by continental

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theorising, simply assumed that they must support their country.17 No doubt too they were all influenced by an upsurge of nationalist sentiments, which began to drown out internationalist and pacifist sentiments. What would have happened if they had attempted to rally and lead the anti-war minority we can only speculate. Probably they would have been imprisoned. Perhaps they would have been shot. But only a minority of socialists in Europe opposed the war. The majority of those who did adopted a pacifist standpoint. The Bolsheviks were the only significant Party who saw in the crisis the possibility of revolution. This was to have the most profound consequences for European and indeed world socialism. Contention between the great powers for colonies was central to the tensions which led to the First World War. The ‘scramble’ for Africa and other parts of the world led the socialist parties to begin to pay serious attention to the colonial question. The London Congress of 1896 declared its support for ‘the right of all nations to complete sovereignty.’18 But whilst socialists did in general uphold this principle – in Britain, for instance, most socialists opposed the Boer War – the Second International regarded the colonial question as a peripheral matter. This was, perhaps, only to be expected. Capitalism and a modern proletariat scarcely existed in the colonies. Thus, socialists believed, it was in the advanced capitalist countries that the decisive revolutionary battles were to be fought, after which the colonies would be given their freedom. Only after the formation of the Communist International did a section of the left, the communists, argue that the colonial question was central to the struggle for socialism. And from 1928, as the Comintern entered its ‘Third Period’, even they reverted to the Eurocentrism characteristic of the Second International. The socialist parties’ opposition to colonialism was not without a tinge of that ‘white mans’ burden’ paternalism which some used to justify colonialism. Indeed, some such outlook can be discerned in Marx and in Engels. Whilst Marx was in general (and certainly in his later years) sympathetic to colonial risings, he did tend to see European colonialism as having a progressive role: British rule in India had been highly destructive, but it was nevertheless breaking down feudalism and was thus ‘the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia’.19 Engels argued that ‘the countries inhabited by a native population . . . must be taken over for the time being and led as rapidly as possible towards independence.’ 20 Similarly, the International’s Amsterdam Congress of 1904 approved a resolution which fell short of supporting unconditionally the right of self-determination, but rather called for that ‘degree of freedom and independence appropriate to their stage of development.’ The Stuttgart Congress of 1907 did take a more

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clear-cut stance against colonialism, but with no recognition that the colonial peoples could free themselves: rather they pledged ‘to do everything possible to educate [the colonial peoples] for independence’.21 It was at this Congress that one of the first discussions of the connection between imperialism and reformism and chauvinism took place. Prompted by the discussion, Lenin argued that profits from colonies provided the ‘material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism’22. But contrary, chauvinist trends in the International were growing. Bernstein argued at the Congress that a ‘positive socialist colonial policy’ should be pursued. Socialists should ‘get away from the utopian idea that aims simply at leaving the colonies. The final consequence of that view would be to return the United States to the Red Indians.’ Though Bernstein’s remarks caused a disturbance in the hall, his views were only narrowly rejected, as was a less extreme resolution which argued that the ‘benefits and necessity of the colonies are grossly exaggerated, especially for the working class. However, the Congress does not, in principle and for all times, reject all colonial policy, which, under a socialist regime, may have a civilising effect.’23

The Peculiarities of Socialism in Britain Such was the general European background to our study. British Marxists in the mass did not differ greatly from their counterparts in continental Europe, but the reformist and chauvinist tendencies which were generally present in European socialism were more pronounced in Britain, the richest country in the world, a society with a long parliamentary tradition in which doctrines of class struggle seemed alien to most. Few of the British delegates present at the Founding Congress of the International were Marxist. It is striking that, unlike France and Germany, none of them was there as a representative of a mass Marxist Party. Keir Hardie, then the leader of the Scottish Labour Party and later to be the first leader of the Labour Party attended. But Hardie never claimed to be a Marxist. William Morris too, the founder of the Socialist League, was there. But in his nostalgia for an idealised pre-capitalist past he had perhaps, as has frequently been pointed out, more in common with Carlyle and Ruskin than with Marx. Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Marx’s youngest daughter was probably the only orthodox Marxist in the delegation. A notable absentee was Hyndman, who had capriciously chosen to attend a rival congress held in Paris at the same time by the reformist socialists. In a well-known and influential article Ross McGibbon asked why was there no Marxism in Britain?24 Various probable factors are suggested by

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McGibbon, but not the matter of imperialism. Britain was the hegemonic power of the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, the possessor of a huge colonial empire. It was the richest country in the world and its workers were well-off in comparison both to their continental brothers and sisters and to their parents and grandparents. Little wonder, then, that there was no mass Marxist party in Britain. Those workers in Britain who were organised were mainly skilled workers organised in trade unions. In 1889 Engels remarked that “the most repulsive thing here [in England] is the ‘bourgeois respectability’ which has grown deep into the bones of the workers . . . Even Tom Mann, whom I regard as the best of the lot, is fond of mentioning that he will be lunching with the Lord Mayor.’25 The record of the trade union movement in our period suggests that Engels’s opinion was not unduly jaundiced. Leaders of the TUC dined with the jingo newspaper proprietor Horatio Bottomley during their congress of 1902.26 Socialists were not immune from deference. In a famous incident, the executive of the Social Democratic Federation sent a loyal address to King Edward VII on the occasion of his coronation declaring ‘That you are very popular, Sir, there can be no doubt whatever’.27 Throughout the period of increasing antagonism between Britain and Germany there was always a significant number of Labour MPs prepared to back military preparations. Though most members of the labour movement were probably not jingoists, most believed that if there was to be war they would have to fight for the national interest. As Douglas Newton suggests, the prevailing mood was probably well expressed by Oldham Trades Council at the outset of the First World War: the war was: a war which every sensible person regrets . . . We do not believe in war, and whilst we are working for the victory of our forces and allies it is only because we believe that any other result would be disastrous to our nation, to our love of liberty, and to everything we hold dear. The question of the causes of war may be left for the present.28 Even though most trade unionists were not members of working class political parties, their views could not but affect those of these parties. The working class parties which had the most influence in Britain were the Labour Party (LP) and the Independent Labour Party (ILP), neither of which was Marxist. Both parties had moderate objectives and were committed to constitutional means of achieving them. There was a considerable overlap of members between unions and parties and the parties sought to win over and

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influence unions. Some indication of the pressure exerted on socialists by the trade unions can be gained by the advice given by the ILP to delegates prior to the Memorial Hall Conference which established the LP. Most ILP leaders believed that it would be prejudicial to unity with the trade unions to try to get the LP formed on a socialist basis and thus ILP delegates were advised that they should ‘have no desire nor intention to press the Conference to affirm its adhesion to abstract principles in the form of a programme.’29 The Labour Party, founded in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), was essentially the creation of the Trade Unions, which were anxious to secure representation in parliament.30 The founding conference of 1900 heard calls from delegates from the SDF that the party be founded upon ‘a recognition of the class war.’31 This call was rejected and indeed there nothing distinctively socialist in its objectives, which were to secure legislation favourable to trade unionists on such matters as the right to strike, liability, and so on. The other major influence on Labour were the Fabians, who argued for social reform on the grounds of ‘national efficiency’. They decided early in the Twentieth century that the Labour Party was the best vehicle to achieve this objective. Labour’s policy is sometimes described as ‘labourism’, but a better epithet is social-imperialism, a steadfast defence of the British national interest combined with a programme of social reform helpful to its largely working-class constituency.32 The centre of gravity of British working class politics, which exerted a gravitational pull on all working class parties, was then well to the right of Marxism. The ILP, founded in 1893, mainly by young Northern militant trade unionists, was a socialist party, but its socialism was ethical and moral rather than Marxist. It looked not to historical materialism and revolution but to a gradual maturing of mass socialist consciousness. As Chris Wrigley argued, ‘for many in the ILP the continental comrade’s Utopia was the wrong one. It was Marxist. The way to it was proclaimed in the rhetoric of class war, not in the language of either a puritanical, ethical socialism or an economic labourism.’33 On the other hand, the ILP and SDF rivalled each other for the adherence of young socialists in a way that Labourism never could. Thus we find at key junctures attempts at SDF/ILP unity. As in Europe generally, in the first few years of the Twentieth century British socialists became increasingly concerned by the threat of war. From time to time, the International had discussed the general strike as a means of preventing war, though this possible tactic had tended to become conflated with debates as to whether or not such means could be used to achieve working class power. British socialists, no doubt influenced by the serious industrial unrest of 1910–1914, seem to have been keener than most

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on this tactic and in 1912 the ILP succeeded in committing the Labour Party to consider if and how the labour movement might organise strikes to oppose war. The Party’s annual conference of that year expressed ‘its approval of the proposal to investigate and report on whether and how far a stoppage of work . . . would be effective in preventing an outbreak of hostilities’34 British socialists were still discussing the general strike option when the impetuous and heady race to war began in late July 1914. The majority capitulated to war-fever whilst the anti-war minority proved incapable of mobilising significant numbers of workers against war. On the 2nd. August a large anti-war demonstration was held in London and smaller ones in several provincial cities. Though Hardie argued that the war could be stopped by ‘the international anti-war strike’35, no such strike took place. By the 4th., LP and ILP leaders had to decide their attitude to an actual war. British socialists had always assumed that a defensive war could be supported – in 1910 the ILP had declared that ‘no sane politician would dream of opposing expenditure necessary for national defence’36 – and, as in the rest of Europe, most of them decided that their country’s war was a just, defensive war. A majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) voted to support the war,37 a decision which, however regretfully, a majority of members of the labour movement supported. MacDonald, by now the Labour leader, resigned in order to lead a pacifist opposition to the war by the ILP. That Labour were more in tune than the ILP with working class, or least trade union, sentiment is demonstrated by the sharp fall in strikes in the last quarter of 1914, this before emergency legislation curtailing the right to strike was introduced. As we noted earlier, contention for colonies was central to the antagonisms between the great powers; but as we also saw earlier, whilst there was among European socialists general, if qualified, support for self-determination for the colonial peoples, the colonial question was seen as a peripheral matter. Doubtless, this was to a degree a matter of historical development, in that anti-colonial movements were in general not very advanced prior to 1914. It is not that the colonial question was believed to be unimportant, but that it never seemed to be quite connected with the workers’ struggle in Britain itself. In the official labour movement, there may have been concern not to be seen as unpatriotic by working class supporters. Bernard Porter has pointed out that ‘On none of the ‘burning issues’ of Empire . . . did any Labour MP say a word in parliament between 1895 and October 1899 . . . Similarly, only once was Africa ever mentioned at the Trades Union Congress’. Even the annual conferences of the ILP, ‘while maintaining a certain interest in such issues as conscription and war, made virtually no

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effort to discuss the colonies.’38 The trade unions were hardly interested in the colonial question. In 1911 the future Communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala was a member of an ILP committee. which petitioned to no avail ‘a number of trade union leaders with the aim of giving ‘an opportunity for the expression of national concern for our fell (sic) workers in India’39 In 1913 the BSP asked the TUC to urge unions to ask their members to withdraw their children from school on Empire Day as a protest against imperialism. The parliamentary Committee of the TUC refused to even consider the idea.40 Various imperialist ventures – such as ‘Chinese’ Gordon’s Sudan expedition – were ignored by official Labour, yet the Boer War evoked a storm of protest. Virtually all Labour M.Ps. vociferously opposed the war. A probable reason for this is that in South Africa, as in other settler colonies, but in contrast to traditional colonies such as India, there existed a significant working class and trade union movement with which European socialists could identify. Porter argues that Labour discerned in the Boer War a specifically capitalist element absent from earlier imperial adventures. Perhaps so, but it is clear that racism played a significant part. Porter himself provides many examples of the anti-Semitic tinge to attacks on financiers.41 The ILP claimed that those papers supporting the Boer War were owned by people whose names ‘have curiously foreign terminations and whose features seem to indicate that they are of the circumcision.’42 More generally, Blatchford claimed that: In whatever walk of life the Jew adopts he generally becomes preeminent, and the stock exchange Jew is no exception to this rule. He is the incarnation of the money idea, and it is no exaggeration to say that the Jew financier controls the policy of Europe.43 But paternalism rather than such crude racism was more typical of the attitudes of liberals and socialists. J.A. Hobson, the keenly anti-imperialist liberal whose writings were very influential among socialists, opposed enfranchising black Africans on the grounds that they were ‘still steeped in the darkness of savagery’.44 E.D. Morel, who, when Labour MP for Dundee, was much admired for his exposures of colonial outrages in Africa, called for ‘humane and practical policy in the government of Africa by white men’.45 At the 1904 Amsterdam Congress of the International, a resolution on India from British delegates, whilst opposing the existing form of colonial rule in India, nevertheless affirmed that the International recognised ‘the right of the inhabitants of civilised countries to settle in lands where the population

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is at a lower stage of development.’ 46 In any event, the pro-imperialist elements of the Fabians were probably a greater influence on the Labour Party than the resolutions of the International.47 A majority of Fabians saw in imperialism a means of achieving ‘national efficiency’. George Bernard Shaw argued that ‘a Fabian is necessarily an Imperialist’ whilst Sydney Webb declared his support for the Liberal imperialist Lord Rosebery on the grounds that he was the most likely among the liberal leadership to create a ‘’virile’ collectivist, imperialist opposition party’.48 Whilst most socialists did oppose imperialism, the Fabians were not alone in supporting it. The most significant of these social-imperialists, in terms of mass influence, was the highly influential Blatchford, whose Clarion sold 80,000 (and doubtless influenced far more) copies at the end of the 1890s.49 As Bernard Semmel has noted, in any other European country but Britain Blatchford would probably not have been regarded as a man of the left.50 Blatchford supported Britain in the Boer War, declaring that ‘When England is at war, I’m English. I have no politics and no party. I am English.’51 In 1908, when Anglo-German contention over colonies was becoming acute, Blatchford argued that ‘Britain must defend her Empire or lose it . . . The world is welcome to my share of the Empire . . . But I recognise that to lose the Empire, to be attacked and defeated, would be a bloody, a ruinous and horrible business’.52

The Marxist Sects in Britain This then was the milieu in which British Marxism took root. The main Marxist organisations in our period were the SDF, the main forerunner of the BSP, in turn the main founding organisation of the Communist Party of Great Britain, William Morris’s Socialist League, the SLP and the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB). Here, we will concentrate on the SLP and especially the SDF.53 It is easy to be critical of the SDF: indeed there is much to criticise. Its sectarianism, for instance, has often been censured. But on the other hand, as Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, it was hard, in late Nineteenth century Britain, for a Marxist organisation not to be a sect: and the organisation did foster Marxism, survive, and help to produce such future proletarian leaders of the Communist Party as ‘[Arthur] Horner, [Harry] Pollitt, [J.R.] Campbell [and Willie] Gallacher.’ 54 The Federation was founded in 1884. It had a pre-existence as the radical Democratic Federation, founded by Hyndman in 1881. Unlike most of the British left, the Federation did take a principled stand on the colonial question. In 1882 it managed to mobilise

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between 30,000 and 80,000 on a demonstration in London against the government’s Coercion Bill55, a response to the Phoenix Park murders56. Justice, the organisation’s paper, urged its readers ‘’not to confine themselves to the boundaries of a narrow municipalism’ but to read and learn about foreign politics, and to do all they could to try and influence them.’ The paper helped its readers to achieve this ambition by regularly commenting on events in the Empire.57 Like their continental comrades, from the late Nineteenth century some British socialists did begin to develop a theory of imperialism. The liberal Hobson was the most influential theorist of imperialism in Britain. Like Hobson, British socialists tended to see imperialism as a policy, synonymous with colonialism. British socialists’ views on imperialism were then tinged with liberalism58, as was their ideology and theory in general.59 For Lenin, imperialism was not a policy that the bourgeoisie could pick up or set down, as they pleased, but a new stage in the development of capitalism, monopoly capitalism. But as late as 1919, Hyndman was demanding as that the ‘policy of imperialism’ be abandoned.60 Belfort Bax, when editor of the SDF’s Justice, promoted a similar view. Bax did though see the effect of imperialism on the consciousness of the working class: It is high time that the socialist working classes became thoroughly alive to the fact that . . . every new market opened up is an obstacle in the way of their emancipation . . . it is a thing of vital importance to the early realisation of Socialism to stem the tide of annexation and colonial expansion without delay.61 But Bax and other British socialists did not consider whether the ‘bourgeois respectability’ which Engels had referred to had penetrated their own ranks. What Stuart Macintyre has described as ‘the extremely mechanical version of the materialist conception of history’62 to which most British Marxists subscribed had a strong streak of positivism in it. The science of Marxism led them to assume that those initiated into this science could, uncontaminated by ideology, dispassionately probe society and elucidate all problems. Furthermore, the bitter doctrinal disputes among continental socialists were not common in Britain. Despite their differences, most British socialists assumed that they were all undertaking the same voyage. This melange of positivism and liberalism meant that British Marxists were ill-equipped to withstand the ideological and political pressures arising from attempting to fight for revolutionary politics in such a stable and prosperous society as Britain.

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Hobsbawm has claimed that the SDF’s strategy ‘was not so much revolutionary as intransigent: militant, firmly based on the class struggle, but quite unable to envisage . . . the problems of revolt or the taking of power, for which there was no precedent within living memory in Britain.’63 But were the SDF’s politics ‘firmly based on the class struggle’? Though it professed to uphold Marx’s doctrine of historical materialism, class struggle was not at the heart of the Party’s strategy. It would teach the workers the doctrines of socialism, but it attached little value to independent working class activity. At its foundation the Party was sceptical of the trade union struggle. It taught the so-called ‘iron law’ of wages, falsely attributed to Marx64, and adhered to the determinist view that socialism would be the ineluctable result of economic collapse – capitalism was supposed to be ‘heading for Niagara’ 65 – and the necessary working class socialist consciousness. However, as Henry Collins has pointed out, the SDF’s disdain for trade unions owed something to trade unionism being then the preserve of ‘a small minority of better-paid workers in skilled trades.’66 Its attitude was thus modified to some extent by experience, particularly by the upsurge of class struggle by previously unorganised unskilled workers which led to the ‘New Unionism’ of the 1890s. SDF members were involved in the great London dock strikes of this period. But as late as 1912 the Party still had a rather sniffy attitude to strikes. After the great strikes of that year a Party leader remarked that ‘if the workers had used their political power as they ought to have used it [i.e. by voting for socialist candidates in elections], all these recent strikes would have been wholly unnecessary’.67 Though the SDF did engage in more extra-parliamentary activities than conventional political parties (it played a major role, for instance, in the unemployed workers’ struggle, culminating in ‘Bloody Sunday’, the attack by police on demonstrators in Trafalgar Square in November 1887.68) its view of politics was nevertheless essentially conventional. Though G. Johnson has warned against viewing the SDF ‘through the prism of the split of 1917’69, it is clear that the SDF did not advocate insurrection. Socialism would come when, in the final convulsion of capitalism, a majority of working class parliamentarians declared for socialism. Like Germany’s SPD, the SDF had a minimum programme of reforms which provided a rationale for concentrating on electoral activity prior to the conquest of power. Most of these – such demands as free meals for children and free compulsory education – had been included in the SDF’s original statement of principles Socialism Made Plain.70 Later, such demands as universal adult suffrage and payment for MPs were added in order that socialists could take control of parliament.71

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The SDF’s work undoubtedly brought Marxism to thousands of workers. Such prominent working class leaders as Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, Will Thorne and John Burns were, at various times, members. Probably tens of thousands of workers passed through its ranks in the twenty or so years after its foundation. But it failed to make a significant breakthrough into the ranks of the working class. The SDF itself could hardly be unaware of its failure to make a breakthrough, and this may well have played a part in its decision to affiliate to the new LRC in 1900. But a year later it withdrew on the doctrinal grounds that the LRC did not recognise the class struggle. Most labour historians, including Martin Crick, who argues that the decision was ‘a fundamental error’, believe the SDF was misguided to withdraw.72 But was it? Those who refused to submerge themselves inside the Labour Party might have condemned themselves to isolation from the mainstream of the British labour movement, but by doing so they ensured that there was a focus of opposition to Labour reformism and chauvinism. But of course the SDF itself was hardly free of these vices and thus internal doctrinal wrangling led to near-splits and splits. An early row was caused by anti-Semitic tendencies which surfaced during the Boer War. The Party went against the popular tide (though Richard Price has convincingly argued that the war was not very popular among the working class73) and mounted a spirited attack on the British war effort. But immediately prior to the war, at a rally in Trafalgar Square, Hyndman had slyly referred to ‘the good old British names of Eckstein, Beit, Solomon, Rothschild and Joel’ of those involved in commercial and financial activities in South Africa. Later, he argued that the War was an ‘abominable war on behalf of German-Jewish mineowners and other international interlopers’.74 In the later stages of the War the SDF called off its anti-war agitation. C. Tsuzuki accepted Hyndman’s explanation that he believed a British victory would be a better outcome for the African native people than a Boer victory. 75 But one wonders, given German support for the Boers, if this was not a rationalisation, an outcome of Hyndman’s increasingly splenetic Germanophobia. Theodore Rothstein, later to become influential in the forming of the Communist Party, and Bax both disassociated themselves from Hyndman. Rothstein who had earlier protested against ‘the unsavoury tendencies . . . of anti-Semitism’ in the SDF, openly criticised Hyndman.76 In 1900 the Party’s annual conference passed a resolution condemning the anti-Semitic trend.77 But anti-Semitism was but one aspect of a wider nationalism, jingoism even, which began to flourish as Anglo-German antagonism increased. Hyndman, anxious at Germany’s growing power, wrote to the Conservative paper the Morning Post ‘urging the Conservative Government

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to take the necessary steps ‘to promote cordial relations between the most civilised nations of Europe’’.78 Most of the SDF left, including Rothstein, chose to stay inside the Party and fight the increasingly chauvinistic stance adopted by the Hyndmanite right. But a minority split in 1903 to form the Socialist Labour Party. The split left the right in firm control. Chauvinist tendencies in the Party flourished. It increasingly found itself in the same jingo camp as the National Service League, the Primrose League, and other organisations devoted to preparing Britain to fight for its imperial interest. In 1908 the famous ‘naval scare’ erupted. It was alleged that Germany was secretly increasing its production of battleships. Hyndman and Blatchford joined in the resultant demands that Britain accelerate its production of Dreadnoughts. In Justice Hyndman argued that Germany was preparing to attack Britain and that Britain must have ‘a sufficient fleet’ for its defence. Blatchford wrote a series of articles for the staunchly imperialist Daily Mail and also visited Germany on behalf of the Mail to report on war preparations there. Though the SDF subsequently repudiated Blatchford, his sin seems to have been not so much his opinions but writing for the conservative Mail, for no action was taken against Hyndman.79 In 1910 Hyndman and another leading member, Harry Quelch, announced that they supported further naval spending to maintain British superiority over Germany. Anticipating the ‘gallant little Belgium’ arguments of August 1914, Hyndman announced that such spending was necessary to defend the small nations of Europe.80 Despite protests by internationalists in the Party, it continued to steer a chauvinist course. One tack taken was to blame German socialists and the backwardness of British workers for their own opportunism. Hyndman argued that German socialists ‘could not hope to check a war’, whilst Quelch, no doubt pondering the resolution of the Stuttgart Congress of the International, reminded the Party of the experience of the Boer War and argued that it was useless to call on British workers to oppose war once it had started.81 But the Agadir incident of 1911 (in which Anglo-German antagonisms were stoked by the arrival of a German cruiser off the Moroccan coast) provoked a public row in the Party. Justice took a pro-British stance, infuriating the internationalists. ‘German imperialism is neither worse nor better than French imperialism . . . why should Germany . . . be everlastingly singled out for attack in an English socialist paper?’, wrote one correspondent to Justice.82 The Agadir incident could have been the spark for a split, but the differences in the SDF (which had become the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1907) were for a time papered over by the formation of a new party.

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Seventy SDP branches, thirty-six ILP branches, thirty Clarion Groups and sundry other bodies united to form the BSP, formally constituted in 1912.83 The SDF left had hoped that in the new Party the Hyndmanites would be isolated. But they were not. Despite occasional victories – in 1912 Zelda Kahan persuaded the SDF executive to pass a resolution opposing increased naval expenditure84 and the 1913 conference passed a resolution committing the Party to emulating the campaigns against militarism of the French and German socialists85 – the chauvinist wing remained in control, demonstrated by the BSP’s decision to support the British war effort in 1914. The final split between chauvinists and internationalists did not occur until 1916, two years after the commencement of the war. Though Walter Kendall argued that a split in the SDF between the chauvinists and the internationalists in 1911 would have been premature86, the decision of the SDF left to join the new Party rather than split meant that their voice was scarcely heard in 1914. It is at least possible that a split in 1911–12 (incidentally, the year in which the final Bolshevik-Menshevik split took place in Russia) would have permitted a spirited opposition to the war, particularly if a united opposition with the SLP had been mounted. It is true that the two bodies would have had major doctrinal differences to overcome, but war imposes its own logic. This of course is mere speculation: but the present writer is convinced that the prospects for communism in Britain would have been brighter if there had been a split in 1911–12. Another problem with the merger – at least from the point of view of the Marxism which the SDF/SDP professed to uphold – is that it blurred the distinction between Marxism and ethical socialism. The split of 1903 had left those who favoured unity and co-operation with non-Marxist Parties in firm control (those who had left to found the SLP had been mainly responsible for the decision to withdraw from the LRC). After the split, the Hyndmanites had once again begun to argue for closer links with the Labour Party. Quelch opposed Hyndman, arguing that the Labour Party was a ‘compromise in which the socialists lost heavily’87, and thwarted Hyndman’s move to reaffiliate.88 But in several areas SDF members co-operated with Labour and the ILP in elections and helped to form locals LRCs. In 1906 Will Thorne, the SDF’s most prominent trade unionist, was elected, with Labour’s approval, as the Labour MP for West Ham South.89 The dangers of this co-operation with Labour were illustrated by Thorne’s opportunism in parliament, where in 1907 he, like all other Labour MPs, failed to protest against the shooting of strikers in Belfast and in 1914 when he failed to oppose legislation for war credits.90 Quelch would appear to have been right in opposing closer unity with Labour. After the merger which produced the

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BSP, Quelch was almost a lone voice in opposing new moves to affiliate to Labour promoted by the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) of the International. After Quelch’s death a majority of the BSP voted in favour of an application to affiliate. The application to affiliate was accepted in 1916.91 However, the ‘impossibilists’ (a term coined at the SDF’s Conference of 1901, when major differences first emerged) of the SLP were implacably opposed to parliamentary politics in general and to the Labour Party in particular. According to Raymond Challinor, ‘British Revolutionary Socialism was born in Paris on 27 September 1900.’ Challinor’s grounds for this assertion are that, alone of the SDF delegation in Paris, George S. Yates, who was instrumental in the split which led to the formation of the SLP in 1903, opposed the compromise resolution on the vexed question of whether or not socialists could participate in bourgeois governments. ‘When Congress passed the resolution, the left exploded with anger. They taunted the supporters of Millerand with shouts of ‘Vive la Commune [the government included General Gallifet, who had bloodily suppressed the Paris Commune of 1871] and ‘Go to Chalons’ – a reference to the place where French soldiers had recently killed strikers.’92 But how revolutionary was the SLP? The disaffection of the ‘impossibilists’ within the SDF was rather unfocused and stemmed from a general dissatisfaction with rightist trends within the Party rather than from a coherent critique. As the rebels were mostly young and working class93, it probably reflected also the impatience of youth with the older generation and of working class rank-and-file members with middle class leaders. The Irish extraction of many of its leaders94 may have fostered an alienation from the mainstream of British Marxism. In addition to the Millerand Affair and other associated signs of ‘revisionism’, the SDF’s loyal address to the King and the termination of the anti-Boer War campaign also promoted dissension. But probably the chief issue was the SDF’s attitude to the industrial struggle. We have seen that the SDF was at best lukewarm and at worst hostile to trade unionism. The ‘impossibilists’ in contrast were increasingly attracted to the quasi-syndicalist doctrines of the American Daniel De Leon. Unlike orthodox syndicalists, De Leon argued that political as well as industrial methods were necessary: after the working class had defeated its capitalist enemy on the industrial terrain victory would be sealed by sending a majority of working class delegates to parliament. The gradualists of the SDF/BSP and the ‘impossibilists’ of the SLP were then ideologically united by a failure to put the question of state power at the centre of their strategy. The one increasingly sought reforms through parliament and co-operation

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with non-Marxist organisations, whilst the other pursued the chimera of industrial unionism and gaining a majority of working-class MPs. Contacts between SDF members and De Leon’s Socialist Labour Party were made in 1898–1901. These members began to sell the Weekly People, the journal of the American SLP and to factionalise against the SDF leadership.95 It is unsurprising that younger, working-class members of the SDF found De Leonite ideas attractive in the early years of the Twentieth century. The SDF was making little progress at a time when working class industrial militancy was rising. Militants knew of the convulsions which had led to the ‘new unionism’ of the 1890s. Tom Mann, a veteran of those struggles, was still active at a time when new militant industrial leaders like James Connolly and James Larkin were emerging. Between 1900 and 1914 trade union membership more than doubled: in 1910–1914 over 70 million working days were given over to strikes. Divisions between the orthodox majority and the impossibilists grew sharper and more strained after 1900. At the 1901 Party Conference a motion clearly aimed to stop the minority selling the Weekly People gained a big majority.96 A motion at the 1902 conference calling for the establishment of separate Marxist trade unions (the DeLeonists were opposed to working in the existing trade unions as well as to co-operation with other working class parties) was heavily defeated.97 A row in 1902 led to the expulsion of the Finsbury Branch which then provided funds for the publication of the De Leonite The Socialist. At the 1903 Conference Yates was expelled for attacking the Executive in The Socialist and no member of the minority was elected to the Committee. Soon afterwards the Socialist Labour Party was founded with The Socialist as its paper. 98 Yet if the impossibilists now had their own organisation, they were as remote from power as were the SDF. If the majority of the working class were disinclined to use the ballot-box to achieve socialism, why would they use trade unions for the same purpose? Faced with this reality, the practice of the SLP was not that different from the SDF’s. Both saw education and propaganda as the key tasks. Education was taken particularly seriously by the SLP: its mainly auto-didact members studied seriously and a wide selection of Marxist literature was offered for sale. As Kendall remarked, ‘There can have been scarcely a single person involved in the foundation of the Communist Party of Great Britain who was not, at some time, influenced by the SLP and its literature.’99 Neither Party seriously prepared for revolution, believing that the day would come when the majority of the working class was intellectually convinced of the case for socialism. Neither did the SLP achieve a great deal in the industrial field. Its sectarianism

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served to isolate the Party from the mass of workers. It did gain influence among industrial militants, through which it achieved some success on the ‘Red Clyde’ during the First World War. The SLP’s syndicalism led it to concentrate its attentions on the struggle of the working class in industry. Its members were far from the ‘tribunes of the people’ which Lenin believed Marxists should be. Suspicious of conventional politics, it lectured the German SDP for its increasing electoral success: ‘Their mere mass of constantly increasing support at the polls is the most dangerous ground that a revolutionary party can accept: the lumping of opinion and diversity of interest is, to our mind, the beginning of the undoing of German socialism.’100 Yet it was not electoral activity per se that signified German ‘revisionism’, but reliance on this and the other paraphernalia of gradualism. Other Parties, the Russians for instance, used elections as part of an overall revolutionary strategy. Another aspect of the SLP’s insular concentration on the workers’ struggle was The Socialist’s nearsilence on colonial matters. Kendall then exaggerates when he claims that the SLP ‘cleared the way for Bolshevism for more than a decade before the [Bolshevik] Revolution took place.’101 But the Party did hew closer to the Marxist seam than the SDF, particularly on the matter of ‘revisionism’. Its implacable opposition, after a period of some confusion, to the First World War did put it in the vanguard of those who eventually formed the Communist Party. It provided many of the first cohort of leaders.

The Impact of the War on British Marxists As we have seen, the majority of European socialists, some with enthusiasm, but perhaps more with resignation, supported their respective countries in what came to be known as the Great War. It is not surprising that the Labour Party took this course, nor is it surprising that the ILP’s opposition should be from a pacifist perspective. Even the BSP’s support is explicable, given the increasing chauvinism and Germanophobia of its most influential member. The consequence of the refusal of the internationalist wing of the BSP to split with the chauvinists is that until 1916, when they gained control of the Party, they spent most of their energies on internecine struggles rather than joining the SLP and a few others in fighting the patriotic tide of 1914. Within days of the outbreak of war Hyndman echoed the official justification by blaming German treaty violations and its attack on ‘plucky’ Belgium. ‘Everybody’, therefore, ‘must eagerly desire the defeat of Germany.’ Doubtless and correctly anticipating opposition, the majority asserted that

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the duty of members was ‘to put aside all internal differences . . . and unite in a common endeavour’ to preserve Party unity ‘ready to resume our work in the class struggle when peace shall be proclaimed.’102 The BSP’s internationalists were clearly outraged when in September a manifesto called on the membership to participate in army recruiting campaigns. Fifteen out of eighteen London branches called for it to be withdrawn whilst in Scotland John Maclean argued that ‘Our first business is to hate the British capitalist system . . . It is mere cant to talk of German militarism when Britain has led the world in the navy business.’103 Maclean quickly convinced most of the Glasgow membership to oppose the pro-war line. Thereafter Maclean’s circle was indefatigable in taking their anti-war message to the people of the Clyde. But not until 1916 did he convince a majority in the rest of Scotland.104 Much of the BSP in Scotland, on the Clyde in particular, had been at odds with the majority for some years. In contrast to the Hyndmanites, Maclean had early been convinced of the importance of participating in trade union struggles. A schoolmaster, he had frequently used his Summer holidays to conduct socialist propaganda among workers. In the course of his industrial work he had come into contact with James Connolly (who was turning to Irish revolutionary nationalism). He forged a close friendship with the Russian exile Petroff, who had participated in the failed 1905 revolution. As a result of these experiences and his own cogitation he clearly visualised, probably more than any other British Marxist, the revolutionary party as the result of what Lenin had termed ‘uniting the working class movement and scientific socialism.’105 It was probably most unfortunate for the early British Communist Party that Maclean tried to found a separate Scottish communist party rather join the CP. Though the SLP fairly quickly adopted a staunchly anti-war stance, there was some early equivocation, which Challinor, perhaps over-eager to demonstrate the party’s revolutionary credentials, ignores.106 John Muir, the editor The Socialist asked in December’s issue ‘Shall I fight’ and answered in the affirmative, arguing that the war was not ‘a test of conscience’’. Like the BSP, Muir had decided that recruitment must be supported for ‘the safety of Britain’.107 Other members, with magnificent insouciance, declared that the war was an ‘event of academic interest’.108 How the SLP came to adopt an anti-war line is not known, but many years later Tom Bell claimed that he and Arthur MacManus, both to become founding members of the CP, were responsible. MacManus took over from Muir as the editor of The Socialist,109 which thereafter took a consistently anti-war line. Challinor rather consistently exaggerates the consistency and revolutionary consciousness of the SLP. He claims that the Party wanted ‘to turn

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a capitalist war into a socialist revolution’, illustrating this contention with a call from the SLP to workers ‘to enrol themselves [in the army] Remember the war of 1870 gave birth to the Paris Commune; who knows what the future holds in its womb.’110 Here, Challinor (unusually) fails to draw our attention to the similarity of SLP views with those of the Bolsheviks, though few would need reminding of Lenin’s famous call to ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war’. But the SLP’s position was frequently more equivocal than Challinor suggests. At its April 1915 Conference, for instance, the Party pledged ‘to do our utmost to bring [the war] to a speedy termination by all means in our power’. This could certainly be interpreted as a declaration of ‘revolutionary defeatism’, but the conference also indicated its support for a the peace proposals of Karl Liebnecht.111 SLP members courageously denounced the war at public meetings and demonstrations, but they seem to have been hesitant to do so in the factories, despite an upsurge of radicalism on the Clyde. James Hinton has convincingly argued that on the Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC), formed by shop stewards to oppose ‘dilution’ (the introduction of semi and unskilled workers to replace skilled men away at the war), SLP members ‘appear to have pushed a line of neutrality. They were neither for nor against the war: they were concerned only to defend the workers against the threats to their organisation brought about by the war’. To John Maclean ‘such ‘neutrality’ was hypocritical and a betrayal of socialism.’112 Challinor is very informative on the SLP in war-time, but produces no evidence to suggest that it attempted to raise internationalist sentiments in the factories.113 Such ‘economism’, prompted by a desire to win working class support on what the CP was later to call ‘bread and butter’ issues, rather than more fundamental matters, was hardly unique to those influenced by syndicalism, but they were particularly prone to it. Kendall offers many examples. 114 No doubt repression (Maclean, Gallacher and others were imprisoned, MacManus and others deported from Glasgow) was also a deterrent. Anti-war sentiments in the BSP increased as the war progressed. But few were prepared to work for the split which would have burst the abscess. The Zimmerwald Manifesto could have provided the rationale for a split, but did not. At the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915, socialists from both sets of combatant countries declared that they stood ‘not on the grounds of national solidarity with the exploiting classes but on the grounds of the international solidarity of the proletariat and of class struggle’. They had ‘assembled to retie the torn threads of international relations and to call upon the working class to recover itself and fight for peace.’115

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Though the Manifesto was palpably a reproach to such chauvinists as Hyndman, it was also an attempt to unite the thorough internationalists in international socialism, such elements as the Bolsheviks and people like Maclean, with what Lenin had called the ‘confused and vacillating’ elements116, against the open chauvinists. At Zimmerwald Lenin was reproved for working for a split, for wanting a new international. A French delegate spoke against Lenin for the majority: ‘We want a manifesto which will demand action for peace: we do not wish to stress what divides us, but what unites us.’117 Motivated probably by a desire to avoid a split, the BSP’s Executive failed to endorse the Manifesto, preferring merely to welcome it as a manifestation of international solidarity. But the evasion reflected more than an unwillingness to split, it manifested also an evasion of principle. As Kendall argues, ‘the BSP hesitated between the two extremes, unable to support the war for total victory, unwilling to oppose the war at risk of final defeat.’118 The Manifesto itself was an evasion, an attempt to find a compromise between the ‘revolutionary defeatist’ opponents of the war and those who sought merely peace. After the final split in the BSP the Manifesto provided for the international majority the means to avoid ‘revolutionary defeatism’. The split came within months, helped along by The Vanguard, published by Maclean’s Glasgow branch. In its first issue, in an open challenge to the Hyndmanites, it averred that ‘This monstrous war shows the day of social pottering or reform has passed . . . The only war worth waging is class war’.119 In November, Petroff came close to calling for a split: ‘We must . . . purify our parties, and immediately proceed to gather our forces, participate in all the chance encounters between the workers and the capitalists, sharpen the class struggle and make ourselves ready for drastic revolutionary action’120 In response, Justice asked ‘Who and what is Peter Petroff’, pointed out Petroff’s foreign origins and effectively incited the authorities to deport him.121 He was arrested shortly afterwards, as part of the general repressions on the Clyde. By late 1915 Justice clearly did not represent the views of the majority of the BSP. Deprived of an independent voice, and clearly inspired by The Vanguard, the internationalists in London began publication of The Call in February 1916. This paper helped to cement the unity of the internationalists, and on its foundation four years later (renamed The Communist) became the first official paper of the Communist Party, At its April conference, the BSP finally split into an internationalist majority and a chauvinist minority. The Hyndmanites left the conference and later founded the unfortunately named National Socialist Party.122 Kendall argues that the

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difficult decision to remain inside the Party . . . at the Conference of 1911 was now amply rewarded. Where earlier secessions had led to isolation and defeat, continued opposition had finally brought success. In overthrowing the Hyndman regime, the BSP showed signs of, at last, achieving maturity.123 This, of course, is a matter of historical judgement. The present writer argued earlier that a split in 1911–12 could have led to clearer appreciation of the nature of the war and how to oppose it. On the other hand, by remaining in the Party the internationalists gained a majority. Yet as it was, even in 1916 the BSP still hovered uncertainly in the space between the chauvinists and the outright internationalists. In January, E.C. Fairchild, the editor of The Call, had argued in Justice that action ‘calculated to endanger national defence’ had to be ‘rigorously avoided’.124 In a conflation of the categories of class and nation, which was to surface again in the 1930s, The Call argued that ‘if a love of country is a just definition of patriotism, then all socialists are patriots, since they desire and strive to acquire their country and its resources for social use.’125 The Call itself preached a militant form of pacifism rather than revolutionary defeatism. Its first issue called on socialists to ‘urge upon the working class the wisdom and claims of peace.’ Its failure to take seriously the matter of organising for revolution was demonstrated by its demand that the effectively defunct ISB ‘act immediately and with the utmost vigour in reconciling the workers now in conflict’. 126 At the April Conference, delegates had various ideas as to how the war might be brought to an end, but the predominant notion was that the international socialist movement should pressurise the belligerent powers to end the war: ‘The one hope . . . [was] . . . the united demand of the international working class for the immediate conclusion of a peace’.127 Eighteen months later the Bolsheviks demonstrated how the war might be brought to an end, but such methods were not contemplated by the BSP. It still regarded education and propaganda as the key.

British Socialism and the Easter Rising in Ireland In 1916 the UK had of course an insurrection of its own. But the Easter Rising in Ireland neither inspired the vast majority of British socialists nor gained their support. Of course, the sanguinary measures taken by the British government against its leaders, most of whom were executed, may have deterred any British socialists who were contemplating emulating Irish

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nationalists. But there is no evidence that any were. The reaction of the generality of British socialists to the Rising is illustrative of that general indifference to the colonial question discussed earlier (although Ireland was part of the UK, it was effectively a colony). As is well-known, after first considering that Irish freedom would come as the result of the workers’ struggle in Britain, Marx later changed his mind and argued that ‘The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.’ On these grounds he advised the General Council of the First International, after Fenian ‘terrorist’ activities in Manchester and London in 1866 and 1867, that the national struggle in Ireland must be supported by British workers in Britain.128 Hyndman, who, until his Germanophobia took hold, was very sympathetic to the struggle of small nations, argued forty years later that Russia’s defeat by Japan in the war of 1904–05 had inspired Indian nationalists: ‘They mean to try force in one form or another. and they will win . . . We are on the eve of some such desperate struggle . . . The collapse of Britain’s rule in India would mean revolution at home to a certainty.’129 But whilst many British socialists were sympathetic to Irish aspirations for independence, virtually none supported the Easter Rising. Acting on the dictum that ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’, at Easter 1916 the revolutionary wing of Irish nationalism occupied strategic points in Dublin and issued a proclamation of independence. Few on the British left were prepared to support the Rising. Partly, this was the result of theoretical confusion. Socialists tended to reject all nationalism. It was not until the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920 that a clear distinction was made between the nationalism of the great powers and that of small nations struggling for independence. Lenin had consistently argued that such a distinction should be made and was thus was one of the few leaders (albeit a minor leader at this time) of European socialism to support the Rising. Trotsky was undoubtedly more representative of the mainstream of socialist opinion when, in the wake of its bloody suppression, he argued that ‘An all-Ireland movement such as the nationalist dreamers had expected simply failed to materialise . . . The basis for national revolution has disappeared even in backward Ireland’.130 But it was probably chauvinism rather than a lack of theoretical clarity which prompted most British socialists to ignore or to disassociate themselves from the Irish revolution. It was hardly to be expected that official Labour, by now in the War Cabinet, would support a colonial revolt at the height of the war with Germany. Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation (WSF), which was to form for a while a part of the early CP, was the only organisation of

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the British left to give unqualified support to the rebellion in Ireland. Far more typical was the response of the ILP, which announced that ‘In no degree do we approve of the Sinn Fein rebellion. We do not approve of armed rebellion at all, any more than any other form of militarism or war.’131 But most of the Marxist organisations were equivocal. The BSP, now in the hands of the internationalists, had nothing to say for several weeks and then disdainfully remarked that ‘In every demand made by the Sinn Fein movement there is the spirit of nationalism . . . to rise, as the men in Dublin rose . . . was foolish’, but they could ‘understand this effort of the Irish people to throw off the alien yoke.’132 Thereafter the BSP had little to say on Irish matters. John Maclean, who was sympathetic to Irish nationalism, was in prison and unable to influence matters. It was not until after the formation of the CP that British Marxists began to pay serious attention to the Irish question. Given the links the SLP had made with James Connolly and Jim Larkin in their campaigns for industrial unionism (the Party clandestinely printed the IRSP’s paper Irish Worker after its suppression in 1915133), it might be expected that it would have supported the Easter Rising, but it was evasive, leaving ‘the merits or demerits of the revolt aside’. According to Harry MacShane some elements of the SLP disliked the rising on the dogmatic grounds that ‘it wasn’t based on industry the way they liked things to be.’134 Though Helen Vernon asserted that after its initial suspicion of the Rising the SLP became more sympathetic to Irish nationalism135, there is little trace of this in the historical record. Of course, the Rising presented particular difficulties for the SLP in sectarian Glasgow. The skilled workers who dominated the CWC were overwhelmingly Protestant.136 If the SLP was reluctant to raise the politics of the war on the CWC it was hardly likely to prejudice unity by speaking out in favour of what was seen by Protestants as a Fenian rising.

A Turn to Revolution? The Easter Rising was but one manifestation of unrest that the war was sparking in all the combatant countries. Though the events in Ireland failed to stir sympathy in Britain, the first Russian Revolution of 1917 evoked tremendous enthusiasm, and not just on the revolutionary left. Hyndman, for instance, assumed that the end of Tsardom would aid the Russian and thus the allied war effort. 137 Lloyd George hailed the revolution as a ‘triumph’ for ‘human freedom.’138 A great wave of strikes, which helped to fuel expectations that even Britain might be convulsed by revolution, erupted in Britain.

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At the April Conference which had adopted a centrist position on the war the BSP firmly aligned itself with the Russian Revolution, but on this matter centrism too was clearly in evidence: The conference pledges itself and the Party to act in the spirit of the Russian revolution by endeavouring to arouse the British working class to a sense of the despotism and militarism which are growing in this country, and by redoubling its energy in an agitation for the restoration of the International, and for the speedy termination of the war on terms involving no annexations, and no humiliations to any country.139 Here, in the utopian notion that there could be a peace which did not involve annexations and humiliations, we see the continuing influence of Nineteenth century radicalism, a view that the roots of war and unjust peace lay not in political economy, but in malice, failed diplomacy, secret treaties and general human failings. Such ideas were to resurface in the CP in the period of the Popular Front. We see also, in the emphasis on ‘a speedy termination of the war’ that even after the split of 1916 the BSP was still in the camp of the ‘confused and vacillating’ elements. There is though evidence that the experience of the war was beginning to undermine some illusions. Not long after the split the long-cherished notion of a citizens’ army was questioned: it had to be considered ‘how far it is possible to establish and preserve a democratic military force with capitalism still in control.’140 It is not surprising that the first Russian revolution did little to spur the Party in a revolutionary direction. The revolution, the result of a palace coup and spontaneous revolt, may have suggested to the BSP, at a time of mass unrest in Britain, that the knell of revolution was sounding in Britain too. But if so, the BSP saw no role for themselves in making that revolution: their role was that of John the Baptist, not Christ. As Kendall remarks: ‘In the words and actions of its leaders one finds no concept of insurrection as the outcome of actions consciously planned and directed by a socialist party of the working class.’141 It was the Bolshevik Revolution which brought to the fore the role of revolutionaries in preparing rather than simply awaiting a revolution. But there was a deeper problem. Many in the BSP still adhered to the oldstyle paternalism of the SDF and saw little value in the independent activity of the working class. The Party was wary of the growing social unrest in Britain. The Party chairman told the April conference that ‘We want no

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hunger revolts which will lead to the transformation of our towns and cities into bloody shambles. We want no ill-directed demonstrations of the workers which will enable the ruling class still more firmly to implant the iron heel upon our neck.’142 Little wonder then that the Party made no effort to unite its struggle for socialism with the rapidly growing strike movement in Britain, despite having by now a fair number of trade union militants in its ranks. Needless to say, the SLP was euphoric when news came of the March Revolution. Like the BSP, it saw in the democratic revolution which had just been accomplished the germ of socialist revolution. For the BSP, ‘It may well be that we are only in the initial stages of the revolution.’143 For the SLP, the revolution was ‘The first tremendous breach in the walls of the enemy . . . a glorious step in social evolution . . . but across the triumph of Russian capitalism there looms the spectre of International Socialism.’ Challinor argues that unlike the BSP, the SLP saw in the March Revolution implications for the activities of socialists in Britain, and produces some evidence for his claim.144 Kendall though produces ample evidence to suggest that Challinor exaggerated the SLP’s revolutionary rectitude. He shows that syndicalist beliefs persisted even after the Bolshevik-led Revolution of October 1917. It was not understood until much later that the Bolshevik Party rather than the Soviets had been the ideological inspiration and the political leader of the Revolution. As James Hinton argued, probably few of those who joined the CP in 1920–21 ‘had grasped the Bolshevik idea of the party or would have approved of it had they done so.’145 The SLP, as Kendall argued, saw in the Revolution ‘a triumphant vindication of the whole SLP system of ideas.’ 146 Arthur MacManus declared to the electors of Halifax, where he stood as SLP candidate in the General Election 1918, that the working class ‘must build up their industrial organisation to obtain control over the means of production . . . and destroy the state institutions of the master class . . . The first aim demands the creation of Workers’ Industrial Councils, the latter demands the attack upon the political institutions through the ballot box.’147 Indicative of the BSP’s continued attachment to conventional politics, it continued to work with the ILP on the United Socialist Council, established by the two organisations in 1916 to co-ordinate the work of the anti-war left. The two organisations, together with The Daily Herald, mounted one of the most peculiar events in British history, the Leeds Soviet Convention of June 1917. The SLP and WSF attended too.148 For L.J. Macfarlane, the Convention was ‘amazingly successful’.149 If judged by numbers attending it was,

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but the Convention achieved nothing. It does, however, indicate that the BSP still regarded the parliamentary, not the insurrectionary road, as the route to power., and that it had a gross overestimation of the level of socialist consciousness among workers. After the Convention, the BSP argued that ‘if the local Workers and Soldiers Councils achieve complete local solidarity, then the next parliamentary Election should witness the return to the House of Commons of an overwhelming majority of direct representatives of the working class.’150 Regarded with some apprehension by the government of the day and sometimes interpreted as manifesting a growing revolutionary tide151, the Convention was in fact dominated by trade unionists and the constitutional socialists of the ILP. Those present who urged the delegates to ‘follow Russia’ were calling for ‘the settlement of the war by an honourable peace’, not for revolution.152 Chaired by the respectable trade unionist Bob Smillie and attended by such stalwarts of the official labour movement as Ramsay MacDonald,153 the Convention’s leaders ‘saw the conference as an end in itself’ and ‘indulged themselves in much wild talk about the imminence of revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat’.154 But faced with obstruction and harassment from the authorities (symptomatic of the legalism which was to continue to hobble the revolutionary movement, The Call helpfully provided details of forthcoming meetings of the Council Movement155) the campaign faded away. It was always likely to. At the Convention, the ILP MP W.C. Anderson had been emphatic that the Convention movement was ‘not intended to be subversive, not unconstitutional’.156 It says a great deal about the BSP’s outlook in 1917 that it thought it could work with the ILP for the creation of a Soviet Britain. But the ILP quickly melted away. It may be, as Macfarlane suggests, that the failure of the Convention made the BSP ‘all the more responsive to the later Bolshevik appeal to build a new disciplined revolutionary Marxist party as the indispensable prerequisite for a successful revolution.’157 Not long after the failed Leeds convention the term Soviet was to be given a new meaning by the October Revolution. One of the most significant consequences of the revolution was that it formalised the existing split of the socialist movement into internationalist and chauvinist wings. A majority of the internationalists and many of the centrists (and indeed some calculating chauvinists) formed communist parties. It is to the efforts of the BSP, SLP, WSF and others to form a united communist party that we now turn.

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CHAPTER TWO

Breaking with the Past? The Birth of British Bolshevism 1917–1922

B

olshevism grew out of the Second International. It was marked by a sharp rupture with much of the praxis of the International, in particular the questions of war and revolution. But the Second International left its mark on the Third. Though the Comintern for several years energetically attempted to promote revolution in what is now called the Third World, it was not free of that Euro-centrism which had been so marked in its predecessor. What mattered for the British Party was that workers were in power in Russia. Doctrinal matters such as how to win power and the attitude to be taken towards anti-colonial movements were not discussed at its founding convention. Though British Marxists were keen to do in Britain what had been done in Russia, it was not until after the foundation of the Comintern in March 1919 that the task of founding a Communist Party acquired any urgency. Unity might well have foundered on the questions of parliament and the Labour Party, but a settlement was brokered by the Comintern. In many respects, the British Communist Party was a mark II BSP, shorn of its rightwing and bolstered by the less sectarian and dogmatic elements of the SLP. The post-war revolutionary wave was ebbing when the CP was founded, and the prospects for revolution in Britain had not been bright even at the height of that tide. Though the Comintern resisted recognising it, the locus of revolution was shifting eastwards, to Asia. But the CP gamely attempted, though not in a very Bolshevik fashion, to build a mass Party and to foster revolution in Britain. Chivvied by the Comintern, the Party did begin to support movements for colonial freedom. But anti-colonial work, which could have formed a vital part of a revolutionary practice more in keeping with British conditions, was always peripheral in the CP’s practice.

Towards a Communist Party The Bolshevik revolution radically altered the perspectives of British revolutionaries. It could hardly have failed to do so: through the Soviets, the

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working class had seized power in a major European state. Bolshevik leaders appealed to the working class internationally to emulate the Russian working class and seize power in the other citadels of capitalist power. For a while, an intoxicating while, it seemed that this might happen. Capitalist might in Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria seemed about to topple. Even in Britain, troops mutinied, police went on strike and large-scale industrial unrest erupted to the extent that a gunboat was despatched to the Mersey. But the Bolsheviks did far more than appeal to the international working class: they energetically intervened in the affairs of other socialist parties to divert them onto the Bolshevik path. In their different ways, Challinor and Kendall both asserted that the intervention of the Bolsheviks into the affairs of British revolutionaries had overwhelmingly negative consequences. For Challinor, the intervention thwarted the development of a native revolutionary tradition based on the SLP. Kendall’s argument was similar, except that he saw those elements of the BSP left grouped around John Maclean as the germ of the future British revolutionary movement. Like Andrew Thorpe,1 the present writer does not find these contentions persuasive. In sharp contrast, it will here be argued that Russian intervention was mainly positive or at least potentially positive: it stiffened the backbone of the British far left and injected into it a degree of ideological and theoretical flintiness. As James Hinton argued, Russian intervention ‘probably saved the revolutionary movement from a fragmentation far more sterile than anything . . . the Communist Party itself’ managed to achieve.2 Challinor argued that Lenin’s insistence that the new CP affiliate to the Labour Party stymied a revolutionary regrouping around the SLP: this ‘alienated the overwhelming majority of potential members. The SLP, in the forefront of the organisations wanting regroupment, immediately withdrew from negotiations.’3 Challinor was probably right in his assertion that Lenin’s belief that Communists should seek affiliation to Labour was misjudged. But affiliation was not the crux of Lenin’s argument: the issue was that most class-conscious (not the most class-conscious) British workers were gravitating to Labour. His advice to British revolutionaries (or at least to those who did not wish to be ‘mere windbags’) was that to ‘help the majority of the working class to convince themselves by their own experience’ that the Labour Party was an obstacle to socialism, Communists should call on workers to vote for Labour. In a well-known metaphor, Lenin described this tactic as supporting Labour ‘in the same way that a rope supports a hanged man’.4 According to Challinor, the SLP’s refusal to compromise on policy towards the Labour Party is evidence of a healthy distrust of Labour. But, as

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James Klugman argued, it is likely, just as its members were forbidden to take union posts for fear of being corrupted, that the SLP preferred to remain a sect rather risk contamination by association with Labour5 (and with the BSP). Consequently, they refused, firstly, to accept what still seems judicious advice from Lenin and, secondly, to participate in what was the best chance to build a viable Communist Party in Britain. Kendall saw the CP as ‘an almost wholly artificial creation which wrenched the whole course of the movement’s left wing out of one direction and set if off on another,’6 and claims that the ‘foundation of the Comintern forced socialists in Britain to make an organisational choice between the Second and Third Internationals.’ But, as was argued in the previous chapter, a split between the internationalists and the chauvinists, the revolutionaries and the reformists, had been delayed beyond the point when anything was to be gained by delay. It was necessary for British revolutionaries to choose between the Comintern and the Second International. It is true that Bolshevik conviction that the revolutionary wing of socialism must be rapidly shaped into disciplined parties on the Russian model, ready to lead the working class in a seizure of power, was based on unrealistic expectations of a general European revolution, but the voice of revolution and internationalism would have been drowned in a sea of reformism and chauvinism if the split had not been made. In the 1920s the Communists were the only force on the British left who had broken with the chauvinists who had supported the war of 1914–1918 and who even attempted to support anti-colonial struggles. This would not have happened if some British revolutionaries had not learnt to ‘speak Russian’ (as the BSP urged the revolutionary left to do not long after the October Revolution7). Bolshevism was not, as alleged by the Labour Party, an ‘alien creed’, but rather an attempt at a synthesis of the experience of European socialism over the previous half century. Though the synthesis was incomplete and applied mechanically by both Russian and British communists, the potential existed for a substantial ‘wrench’ in a revolutionary direction. But British Communists, due to the circumstances in which the revolutionaries split from the reformists and to the continuing strength of old ideas, were only partially wrenched out of the groove travelled since the 1880s. The attempt to merge Bolshevism with the native socialist tradition went through three distinct phases. In 1917–1919 the influence of Bolshevism was exerted mainly indirectly. British revolutionaries looked on from afar and attempted to discern what lessons they could while the Bolsheviks struggled to hold onto power. From 1919 to 1920 onwards a more direct

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influence was exerted via the Comintern. After 1920, its influence became mainly direct as those elements of the revolutionary left unprepared to accept Comintern direction fell by the wayside while those prepared to accept it formed the British section of the Third International, the Communist Party of Great Britain. It is important at this point to stress that Comintern direction was accepted voluntarily. Communists were not chess pieces moved hither and thither in pursuit of Comintern strategy. Communist discipline made sense to British Communists because they accepted its objectives and (to a degree) its doctrines. As Andrew Thorpe has argued, the Comintern, could not force the Communist Party ‘over sustained periods, to do what it did not itself wish to do.’8 The British Party developed partly by the external factor of the Comintern and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but mainly by its internal dynamics. It is not intended to discuss here in detail the tortuous developments and negotiations which led to the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. What will be discussed in some detail are the ideological and political differences which led some to enter the CP and others to stay outside. A major difference of opinion was on the October Revolution itself and its consequences. There was never of course the remotest chance that the deeply chauvinist and reformist Labour Party or even significant elements of it would embrace Bolshevism. Maxim Litvinov, the Bolshevik’s representative in Britain, spoke at Labour’s January 1918 Conference. But it was then only just becoming apparent that the Bolshevik government was a very different beast indeed from the Provisional government which it had recently overthrown. Early decrees gave the land to peasants and confiscated many large enterprises. But it was the Bolshevik’s refusal to continue the war that enraged Labour (which had hoped that the First Russian Revolution would result in a more efficient and energetic prosecution of the war). At Labour’s June Conference Kerensky, the deposed Prime Minister of the Provisional government, spoke, signalling the Party’s profound disagreements with Bolshevism. The organisations which were most likely to form a communist party were the BSP, the SLP, the WSF and (perhaps) the ILP. All these organisations warmly welcomed the second Russian Revolution. But it was the Revolution itself, that the democratic revolution had been succeeded by a socialist revolution, that they welcomed. Though articles by Lenin had appeared in The Call and The Socialist between the two revolutions, Bolshevism itself was not well understood in Britain. When understanding began to dawn, many of the British left who had welcomed the October Revolution were as dismayed by its adamantine insistence that the knell for

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general European revolution was sounding as Lenin’s fellow Bolsheviks had been on hearing at the Finland Station his April Theses. Though the BSP’s Executive Committee declared its full support for the Second Revolution at its meeting of January 1918,9 and issued its demand that British revolutionaries should learn to ‘speak Russian’ shortly afterwards, the majority of the BSP, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, was still in the centrist camp in 1917. Though a few, notably John Maclean (though by this time he had virtually built a separate organisation) were already speaking Russian, many declined to learn, whilst the majority underwent intensive tuition. That in 1918 they were still in need of tuition became evident at that year’s conference. In 1917, clearly influenced by Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’, the Party had demanded ‘the complete democratisation of all political institutions, the conduct of diplomacy in the light of day, and the popular control of foreign affairs.’10 At the 1918 Conference, attendance at a forthcoming international socialist conference was debated. Though some delegates expressed reservations, a resolution endorsing the conference ‘as the only means by which a really democratic and lasting peace can be established’ was unanimously passed.11 Little changed in the remaining months of 1918 to shift this tendency to prefer resolution to revolution, but the winter of 1918/19 saw revolutionary upheaval in Germany and the formation of the Comintern, after which the intensive tuition began. In Scotland, those elements of the BSP grouped around Maclean and, notwithstanding their sectarianism, the SLP were much closer to the temper of Bolshevism than most members of the BSP. We saw in the previous chapter that on the central question of internationalism and war, the SLP was much closer than the BSP to the Bolsheviks. But they were not so close as they thought on the matter of revolution, of fighting for power. In 1918 the SLP boasted that: The SLP is the only party in this country which has compelled the ILP and BSP to realise that socialist tactics do not mean how to juggle men into parliament. Socialist tactics mean the education of the proletariat and the organisation of the political weapon to destroy capitalism, backed by the industrial unions taking over the means of production.12 It is hard to be sure what exactly the SLP meant here, but the continuing influence of De Leonite syndicalism was certainly present in the almost equal importance attached to political and industrial organisation. It is probably

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the case too, that the importance attached by the SLP to industrial unionism reflected a view that the majority of workers could be won for such unions and hence for socialism. There is little sense here of the Bolshevik view that a determined revolutionary party which had gained the support of the most class-conscious workers could seize power in the name of the majority of workers. It was on such matters that a major difference of opinion between the SLP and Maclean emerged in the Summer of 1918. By this time Maclean appears to have thought that the conditions for revolution in Britain were rapidly maturing. He had declared at the BSP’s conference that year that Britain was ‘in the rapids of revolution.’13 In the Summer the SLP campaigned for the release of the now-imprisoned Maclean, but made clear its differences with him: ‘We too advocate the establishment of a Soviet republic. But there is this difference between us and Maclean, that we do not advocate action until the conditions are ripe for such action.’14 It is difficult to know what the SLP meant by ‘ripe’ conditions (after all, Lenin argued against precipitate action in the ‘July Days’ of 1917), but given all that we know of the SLP it is probably the case that the Party thought (without doubt correctly) that conditions in the Summer of 1918 were not ripe for revolution and (here parting company with Bolshevism) that a majority of the working class could and should be won for revolution before attempting it. Though the SLP claimed at the end of the year ‘Let it be known: We are the British Bolsheviks!’,15 its subsequent direct involvement with Bolsheviks via the Comintern’s attempts to forge a united communist party in Britain makes it clear that the SLP’s boast was hubristic. We saw in Chapter One that there had been several moves towards socialist unity. The formation of the United Socialist Council by the BSP and the ILP had been the most notable of these moves. It was not however likely that the ILP would participate in an avowedly Marxist organisation, which the BSP and, especially, the SLP began after the October Revolution to regard as essential. The principal obstacle to unity between the BSP and the SLP was the continuing distrust of the latter for the former, arising from the split earlier in the century. But the mutual opposition to the war by the SLP and elements of the BSP had helped to allay antipathy. The SLP had earlier advised its members to ‘work with every anti-militarist regardless of his party affiliation.’16 Early in the war MacManus had spoken at a BSP meeting.17 The suspicions of the SLP were no doubt also assuaged by a resolution of the BSP’s 1918 Conference committing it to a ‘complete recognition of the class struggle’ and ‘to advocate industrial unionism as a class-conscious weapon for the workers to fight the capitalist class’18 After its Conference, the BSP sent invitations to the ILP and the SLP to a joint conference to

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discuss unity, to which both responded positively. But the formation of the Comintern in March 1919 thwarted what little prospect there was of the ILP participating in the Communist project.

An Internationalist International? In November 1918 the hoped-for spread of revolution from Russia to the rest of Europe had begun. In Germany, the democratic revolution which overthrew the Kaiser’s regime seemed, to the Communists, certain to be followed by a socialist revolution. In January, the Communist Party of Germany was founded. Now it seemed appropriate and necessary to formalise the ideological and political split which had been revealed in 1914 by the formation of a Third, Communist International. A dozen or so communists then present in Moscow from various countries sent out an invitation to an inaugural meeting. It had been hoped to hold this in Berlin, but continuing revolutionary upheavals there, notably the murder of Karl Liebnicht and Rosa Luxemburg, made that inadvisable. The Congress was eventually held in Moscow in March. Fifty-one delegates representing thirty-five organisations from twenty-one countries19 braved the capitalist world’s blockade of Russia to attend the Congress. One of the ironies of the Comintern’s history is that whilst it arose out of the outrage felt by a minority of socialists at the ‘treachery’ of the majority in 1914, its very success in seizing power in Russia served to concentrate the attention of the movement on the questions of Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was assumed that by a determined assault the whole of Europe would soon be Soviet. At the Comintern’s First Congress, Gregory Zinoviev, its first leader, announced that ‘Europe is hurrying toward the proletarian revolution at breakneck speed’, whilst Lenin asserted that the delegates assembled there would ‘all see the founding of the World Federative Republic of Soviets.’20 Matters of imperialism, war, and the colonial question were thus to a considerable degree sidelined. The Comintern’s priorities in the millenarian climate of 1919 are explicable, but they reflected also the ideological priorities of Comintern functionaries, many of whom transferred their allegiance from the Second to the Third International.21 Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, the Comintern’s initial concentration on the question of Soviet power was based on an assumption that Europe was ripe for revolution. In the traditional Marxist sense of economic development, it was: but subjectively, it was not. The crisis of 1917–1921 showed that the great majority of European workers were not in a

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revolutionary mood. Lenin’s attempts to deal with this in terms of a ‘labour aristocracy’ failed to recognise the benefit all sections of European society obtained from imperialism and the consequent deepening penetration of bourgeois ideology into the working class and into the socialist movement. Secondly, despite paying much more attention to the colonial question than had the Second International, the Comintern still had strong Euro-centrist tendencies. Thirdly, the ideological roots of the eruption of ‘socialpatriotism’ in 1914 were not fully dug up. The view that defensive wars in capitalist countries could be just, a view which failed to deal theoretically with the new phenomena of a general imperialist war, survived in the Comintern and prevailed after 1933. This matter will be discussed in the next chapter. From Britain, individual delegates from the BSP, the SLP and the shop stewards movement attended the Congress. As the invitations were being drawn up a new wave of industrial turbulence swept Britain. On the Clyde, tens of thousands went on strike. It is not surprising, given that they were meeting at a time when there was street fighting in Berlin and serious industrial unrest in Britain, that the minds of the communists meeting in Moscow were concentrated on the questions of Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. There was an apocalyptic air to many of the contributions. The prominent Bolshevik Nickolai Bukharin declared that it was utopian ‘to think that it is possible to rehabilitate the capitalist system at all. The capitalist system is cracking at all its seams.’22 The reality though, which those in Moscow could not have been expected to realise, was that the revolutionary movement in Europe was at its zenith and would shortly start a swift retreat, while the movement in the colonial and semi-colonial countries which was then in its infancy – the African National Congress had been founded only in 1912 – would before very long become the main theatre of revolutionary advance. Only weeks after the Comintern’s Congress the May Fourth uprising in China would signal the start of a revolutionary movement which would culminate in the founding of the People’s Republic in China in 1949. If the delegates in Moscow could not be expected to anticipate the seismic changes in the world which were to take place over the next decades, they nevertheless showed little appreciation of the first stirrings, such as the prewar boycott of British goods by the Congress Party of India. This and other movements had in 1913 prompted Lenin to remark of Asia that ‘hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light and freedom. What delight this world movement is arousing in the hearts of all class-conscious workers’.23 After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks worked to establish

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links with liberation movements in the colonies. At a rally in Petrograd, for instance, a speaker from India said he spoke in the ‘name of the 330,000,000 Indian people oppressed by British Imperialism.’24 But there were very few references to the question of oppressed nations and colonies at the Congress. Although in one of the concluding appreciations of the proceedings Bukharin declared that the ‘movement in the colonies . . . has joined the broad stream of the great liberation struggle that is shaking up the entire immense structure of world capitalism’25, there is little evidence that this appreciation informed the deliberations of the Congress. Zinoviev, in his report on the situation in Russia said nothing of national movements in the former Tsarist empire, despite the crucial role played by the national question in the Russian Revolution.26 This was almost certainly no mere oversight. Under his leadership, the journal Communist International paid very little attention to colonial matters. Late in 1919, in an article on The Russian Revolution and the International Proletariat, he failed even to mention the emerging proletariat of the colonies and semi-colonies.27 Issues of the journal in 1920 and 1921 scarcely mentioned colonial matters. At the Congress, very few delegates raised colonial affairs. Even Lenin, in speaking of the spread of revolution, singled out Germany and Britain and failed to mention tumult in such places as India and China.28 The French delegate ignored the French Empire, save to refer to the authorities’ readiness to use ‘special armed forces made up of coloured and black troops, of Senegalese and Indochinese, in all industrial centres, poised to strike at the working masses,’29 (that the delegate though it necessary to refer to the ethnic origin of the troops suggests that, like some other communists of the time, there was a racist component to his objection to the use of colonial troops in Europe: of this, more later). Joseph Fineberg of the BSP was likewise not greatly concerned with colonial matters. He did have something to say on Ireland and demonstrated that the aloofness towards nationalist movements manifest in 1916 was still present among British socialists. While he argued that the movement in Ireland would ‘contribute to revolutionising the working masses in Britain,’, it was the Irish labour movement rather than the national movement which according to Fineberg had this potential. Sinn Fein he dismissed as ‘purely nationalist or revolutionary nationalist’. The labour movement ‘on the other hand’ had shown a ‘revolutionary and internationalist side.’ Completely at odds with the facts of the matter, Fineberg claimed that Connolly’s Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union had been ‘behind the Dublin uprising of 1916.’30 The Congress Manifesto did show that those drafting it had given some consideration to colonial matters. The recent world war was said to have

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been fought ‘not least . . . over colonies’. In declaring that ‘never has the problem of colonial slavery been posed more sharply than it is today.’ the delegates clearly thought the colonial question far more important than had the Second International. But the proceedings and documents of the Congress make it clear that few of those attending shared Bukharin’s views. Most of them probably saw the struggle for colonial freedom as a peripheral matter, an adjunct to the workers’ struggle in Europe. Very few references to the matter were made: when they were, it is evident that it was considered an external matter, not part of the warp and weft of the revolutionary struggle. Thus the Manifesto’s section on the colonial question ended in a paternalistic tone that would not have been out of place in a Manifesto of the Second International: ‘Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia: the hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will also be the hour of your liberation!’31 This rather patronising attitude to colonial movements was never eradicated – in 1925, much to the annoyance of the prominent Indian Communist, M.N. Roy, the British Party was to assert that the CPGB should control the activities of Communists in Britain’s colonies32 – and vigorously resurfaced in the last years of the Second World War. But in 1919 most eyes were on Europe: the British delegates left Moscow bent on revolution in Britain.

Forming the Communist Party After the founding of the Comintern, emissaries from Moscow and émigré Russians played a major role in the unity process in Britain, a matter which Klugman, doubtless because the role played by Moscow was still sensitive in the late 1960s, downplayed. According to Tom Bell, British revolutionaries after hearing of the foundation of the Comintern ‘set out to establish contact with our Russian comrades . . . from them came the suggestion of the unity of all the socialists . . . in Great Britain favourable to the Russian Revolution into a single party’.33 Probably the most significant of the Russians was Theodore Rothstein, who was instrumental in promoting the Comintern within the BSP and in the unity negotiations. Shortly after the conclusion of the Comintern Congress and just prior to the BSP’s 1919 Conference Rothstein challenged the Party to decide which International it wished to follow. Was it prepared to ‘call on the working class to rise, and help it do so’ or would it merely continue ‘preaching the Social Revolution, in common with the anti-revolutionary patriotic opportunist and pacifist socialists of all hues and descriptions?’34 Rothstein was probably the Comintern’s representative in Britain after the Bolshevik representative, Litvinov, was deported for illicit activities in

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September 1918.35 Challinor and Kendall36 both saw Rothstein as a sinister Svengali-like character who importuned the native revolutionary left with Russian money and prestige. But, as Crick argues, ‘the Marxists of the BSP came to accept the Bolshevik viewpoint not because it was imposed upon them but because they accepted its validity.’37 (Or, as is argued here, what they thought Bolshevism’s viewpoint was). One of Challinor’s charges is that prior to the Russian Revolution Rothstein had been much closer to the Mensheviks than to the Bolsheviks.38 But that was true of many, including Challinor’s hero, Trotsky. Despite his earlier Menshevism, Rothstein was quick to learn to ‘speak Russian’. The reaction to his challenge shows that he was not alone. Despite opposition from Fairchild and others, the BSP Conference committed itself to a world revolution which would ‘in all countries . . . overthrow the rule of the capitalist and landlord classes parading in the shoddy cloak of parliamentarianism and sham democracy, establish the direct rule of the workers and peasants by means of Soviets, and wind up the capitalist order of society.’39 In October, The Call reported that 98 branches had voted in favour of affiliation to the Comintern and only four against. Fairchild and another leader then resigned from the Party.40 The first session of the unity talks took place as the first congress of the Comintern was ending. It quickly showed that the ILP would not join a Marxist Party. According to Tom Bell, the conference ‘turned into a dialectical skirmish between MacManus and Philip Snowden [of the ILP] on industrial unionism versus trade unionism; Soviet versus parliamentary democracy; and the role of violence in the social revolution.’41 The ILP took no further part in the unity negotiations. At its Easter Conference of 1920 a motion to disaffiliate from the Second International was carried but one to affiliate to the Comintern was lost.42 Andrew Thorpe argues that the failure of the ILP to adhere to the CP ‘was one of the earliest and, perhaps, biggest setbacks for British Communism’,43 but James Klugman’s view that the talks ‘revealed the fundamentally reformist position of the I.L.P., and that there was no place for it . . . in a unified revolutionary party meant . . . a distinct step forward’44 seems nearer the mark. It would have been much harder for the infant CP to maintain a revolutionary orientation if there had been an large influx of ILP members. Unity negotiations then foundered on the issue of parliament and the Labour Party. We have seen that the SLP was opposed to affiliating to Labour and to calling on the working class to vote Labour. The WSF and the SWSS were even more purist, opposed on principle to standing for parliament. Despite their agreement with the BSP on the far more fundamental questions of Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the SLP,

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WSF and SWSS were not prepared to compromise on their differences. No doubt they feared that their voice would be drowned by that of the BSP in a unified organisation, but their refusal to compromise at a time when they believed the revolutionary hour was approaching does suggest a high level of sectarianism and dogmatism. In August the BSP revealed that at a recent meeting ‘Russians’ had been ‘exceedingly anxious to witness unity between the revolutionary left wing organisations in Britain.’45 Even so, unity seemed as elusive as ever. What follows is an extremely condensed account of the unity proceedings.46 An attempt was made to resolve differences by balloting the memberships, but the SLP’s leadership took a course of action which they must have calculated would wreck the prospect of unity. The members were asked two questions: firstly, were they were in favour of merging with the BSP; secondly, were they were in favour of affiliation to the Labour Party. Predictably, there was a majority in favour of unity and a majority against affiliation. The leadership took these votes as a mandate to refuse to unite. MacManus, Bell and William Paul of the SLP then formed a pro-unity Communist Unity Group (CUG). They and others were subsequently expelled, an action approved by twenty-five out of forty-eight of the SLP’s branches. The SLP now took no further part in the unity movement. Further negotiations still did not resolve the issues of parliamentary action and affiliation, but after an intervention from the Comintern, which urged settling outstanding differences at a post-unity convention, the BSP and the CUG founded the CPGB at a Unity Convention held on July 31st. and August 1st. 1920. Prior to this, the WSF had in June unilaterally founded the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International (CP(BSTI)). At a second unity convention in 1921 the CPGB mopped up the CP(BSTI) and the Communist Labour Party (CLP), founded in Scotland in October 1920 by Gallacher and other elements opposed to the CPGB.47 These Parties were persuaded that they should unite with the CPGB by, respectively, Pankhurst and Gallacher, who had been convinced in gruelling sessions in Moscow during the Second Congress of the Comintern that this was necessary.48 If the strains caused by the question of parliament and affiliation seem today out of all proportion to the importance of the issue, it is as well to remember that to many revolutionary inclined men and women of the time they had an ideological as well as an immediately practical significance. Parliament and the Labour Party stood for a discredited reformist and corrupt path in contrast to the pristine road to workers’ power which industrial militancy seemed to offer. But those who refused to compromise on this issue may well have been motivated more by sectarianism than principle. The

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SLP’s view that the Comintern’s insistence that Red Unions should be under Party control was ‘contrary to the principles laid down by De Leon.’ 49 demonstrates the sectarianism and dogmatism of those who refused to join the CP. As for the BSP, whose members dominated the new CP, the Party’s decision by only 100 votes to 85 to seek affiliation to the Labour Party strongly suggests that Macfarlane was right to argue that ‘many of the more moderate BSP members must have resigned in the months preceding the foundation Congress’,50 for the old BSP would have been strongly in favour. Probably then, those of the SLP committed to sectarianism and those of the BSP who could not embrace a new revolutionary orientation were winnowed out by the process of unity. Far from having the negative effect discerned by Challinor and Kendall, it is the present writer’s view that Comintern intervention ensured that the best elements of the revolutionary left joined the CP. This is not to say that with the formation of the CPGB there now existed a British version of Bolshevism. Far from it. It was not to be expected that British conditions would replicate the Bolsheviks. From the perspectives of the early twenty-first century it is abundantly clear that Britain was not in a revolutionary situation in 1920, nor was it at any time during the crisis of 1917–1921. It could be argued that the crisis could have developed in a revolutionary direction if there had existed a communist party. Then a young communist militant, Harry Pollitt argued many years later that this was a period of ‘golden opportunities’, that the revolutionaries’ failure ‘to provide the workers with real leadership’ was ‘one of the blackest and most tragic’ periods in recent history.51 For Pollitt then the problem was leadership, not objective conditions. But was it? That no European communist party, not even the German, came close to seizing and holding onto power, is pretty conclusive evidence that the problem lay in material conditions, not failures of leadership. It is not just hindsight that allows us to grasp this. There was evidence enough to come to this conclusion in 1920. The general election of 1918, in which Labour gained a mere twenty per cent of the vote of a greatly increased electorate, showed that most British workers’ horizons were still limited to the existing system. Even on the Red Clyde, far more workers voted for the ILP than for John Maclean.52 After 1918, when more and more workers began to vote on class lines, it was to Labour and parliament, not the CP and revolution, that they turned. The first Labour government took office in 1924, but the CP remained a small, if significant, minority party. By 1924, the Party’s membership was only 3,000 or so, compared with more than 5,000 at the time of its foundation (though this was something of a recovery

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from around 2,000 a year after foundation).53 Why a majority of the working class in the imperialist countries stayed wed, in the main, to constitutional politics and reform was the subject of debate at the Second Congress of the Comintern, held in July 1920, shortly before the British CP was founded.

A Break with Euro-Centrism? Compared with its First, the Comintern’s Second Congress saw a qualitative leap in its theoretical appreciation of the colonial question, but, as Fernando Claudin remarked, it was not to be ‘reflected in any sustained effort by the Comintern either on the plane of theoretical and political thinking or that of practical activity. The ‘Euro-centrist’ viewpoint continued to predominate in the leadership of the Comintern and in the Communist parties of the metropolitan countries.’54 This is perhaps unsurprising, given that nearly all the cadres of the movement were Europeans based in Moscow, with perspectives that were rather dismissive of the prospects for revolution in the colonies. Lenin though became increasingly convinced that movements in the colonies were a crucial part of a world-wide revolutionary struggle. Late in 1919 he had argued: The socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country . . . the civil war of the working people against the imperialists and exploiters in all the advanced countries is beginning to be combined with national wars against international imperialism.55 The Second Congress adopted theses on the national and colonial questions which were clearly influenced by Lenin’s developing ideas. The Theses were based on those submitted by Lenin.56 They declared, inter alia, that a division of the world between a handful of oppressor, imperialist countries and a great number of oppressed countries was ‘characteristic of the era of finance capital and imperialism’ and that the Comintern’s policy on the national and colonial question had to be based ‘mainly on the union of the workers and toiling masses of all nations and countries in the common revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the landlords and the bourgeoisie.’57 In Lenin’s report on the work of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions he made much more explicit a point that was present only in embryo in the Theses, namely that Communists must support the ‘national-revolutionary-democratic movement in backward countries’58 This was an important advance in Marxist understanding of the national question.

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Hitherto, Marxists had frequently made little or no distinction between the nationalism of the great powers and that of the nations and countries oppressed by them (some, notably Trotsky and his followers, continued to make no distinction). We saw in the previous chapter that Lenin in particular had begun to argue that ‘superprofits’ from imperialism were responsible for reformism in Europe. At the Second Congress, M.N. Roy, later to be a prominent leader of the Indian Party, went much further than Lenin. In supplementary theses59 to the Theses on the national and colonial question Roy argued that ‘superprofits made in the colonies form one of the main sources of the resources of contemporary capitalism. The European working class will only succeed in overthrowing the capitalist order once this source has finally been stopped up.’60 This formulation was too extreme for Lenin, who argued that Roy had ‘gone too far’: ‘Though India has five million proletarians and thirty-seven million landless peasants, the Indian Communists still haven’t succeeded in forming a Communist Party in that country, a fact which by itself cuts much of the ground from under Comrade Roy’s opinions’61 This exchange has prompted Michael Weiner to claim that while ‘Lenin accepted that colonial liberation might accompany or come about as a consequence of revolutionary upheaval in the metropolitan states, he was not prepared to contemplate the reverse.’62 But towards the end of his life Lenin suggested that in the ‘final analysis’ the outcome of the Communist movement’s struggle for world revolution would be ‘be determined by the fact that Russia, China, India, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority which has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity.’63 This insight suggests a possible way out from the Communist movement’s impasse of the early 1920s. But, despite the considerable attention paid by the Comintern to the revolutionary movement in the East, its preoccupation throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s was with Europe, the more so as the years rolled on. The history of the Twentieth century would seem to demonstrate that Roy, not Lenin, was correct on the question of ‘superprofits’, but of course those present in Moscow did not have the benefit of hindsight. Despite rejecting Roy’s views they adopted a compromise thesis which argued that ‘Extra profit gained in the colonies is the mainstay of modern capitalism, and so long as the latter is not deprived of this source of extra profit it will not be easy for the European working class to overthrow the capitalist order.’64 But even this limited appreciation of the role of superprofits was not readily translated into the practice of the Comintern.

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In contrast to Roy, most leaders of the Comintern in 1920 (and this was not simply a delusion, given the conditions of that year) thought that capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries was doomed. Karl Radek, a Russian leading member of the Comintern, argued that ‘Communists must instil into the minds of the masses the consciousness that a systematic reconstruction of the public economy on the basis of a capitalist order . . . is now totally impossible.’65

The CP and the Colonial Question Such was the outlook of the CP on its foundation. British capitalism was doomed. The workers were going to make revolution. It would be presumptuous at this distance to suggest precisely what, rather than attempt to win the mass of workers for communism, the CP should have done, but one thing that would have vastly helped it to attain its stated objectives would have been a recognition, once the post-war crisis came to an end, that it was in the periphery of Europe and in the colonies and semi-colonies, not in the capitalist heartlands, that revolutionary opportunities were arising. But we have seen that few European communists shared Lenin’s appreciation of the importance of the revolutionary movement in the East. Even the more limited perspectives on the national and colonial questions taking shape in Moscow in 1920 were absent at the CP’s foundation. As recently as that January, the BSP had argued that ‘however much we sympathise [with the Irish people] rightly struggling to be free, we are forced to recognise that nationalism, wherever it exists, is essentially reactionary in spirit and motive.’66 Unsurprisingly then, no organisation represented at the CP’s Unity Convention, no delegate present, nor the Provisional Committee which convened the Convention, seems to have thought it necessary that the colonial question should be discussed. Whilst the Convention was in session British troops were engaged in bloody suppression of colonial risings in (to mention just a few places where such activities were public knowledge) India, Ireland and Iraq. Only the previous April, in the infamous ‘Amritsar Massacre’ in India, 379 people had been killed and around 1,200 wounded at a peaceful pro-independence gathering. On this question, the miners’ union showed itself to be far in advance of the communists by denouncing the ‘Amritsar Massacre’ and calling for the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to hold a special session to discuss British military operations in Ireland.67 The communists did however deem it important that prohibition be discussed (a resolution calling for prohibition was referred to the Provisional EC).68 These priorities show that the general indifference to the colonial question

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exhibited by Fineberg at the Comintern’s First Congress was shared at this stage by the CP as a whole. The British delegates to the Second Congress did not arrive home in time to participate in the Unity Convention. If they had they would have been able to relay some home truths heard in Moscow. According to Radek, Tom Quelch had, in an oft-quoted remark during discussions on the Colonial Commission, justified British inactivity on the colonial question on the grounds that ‘the ordinary British worker would regard it as treachery if he was to help the dependent peoples to rebel against English domination.’ (Maclaine, another British delegate, later claimed that Quelch had not meant that British communists should ‘therefore give up our revolutionary activity’). The riposte of an Irish delegate to Quelch was ‘the faster English workers learn to commit such treason against the bourgeois state the better it will be for the revolutionary movement.’ Radek argued that the Comintern would judge British communists not for the number of articles written denouncing British colonial outrages ‘but by the number of communists who are thrown into gaol for agitating in the colonial countries.’ He demanded that British communists had the duty ‘to agitate among the British troops . . . to block the policy that the British transport and railway unions are at present pursuing of permitting troop transports to be shipped to Ireland . . . We have a right to demand this difficult work of the British comrades.’69 Since January 1919, when Sinn Fein, who had decisively won the general election of 1918, had constituted themselves as the Dail Eireann (the Irish parliament) and declared Irish independence, Britain had been involved in guerrilla warfare with the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Especially given that British trade unions ignored appeals from Irish unionists to impede British military operations, Ireland was then a good but ‘difficult’ early test for British communists. In a ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign, first the BSP and then the CP sought with some success to rouse British trade unions to prevent the passage of troops and arms to Russia, where the British were but one of several countries intervening to try, as Winston Churchill demanded, to ‘strangle Bolshevism at birth.’ It was their failure to attempt to do the same with respect to Ireland that raised Radek’s criticism.70 In April, the BSP had urged British workers to continue to take practical measures to aid Russia: but with respect to Ireland, limited their support to demonstrations and meetings. Gallacher and MacManus had spoken at one such demonstration.71 The lower priority attached to solidarity with Ireland was justified by the CP on the grounds that the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign had ‘superior

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urgency’.72 Much of politics consists of setting priorities, but throughout its history the CP found colonial work a low priority. In this particular case, it is at least arguable, given Britain’s status as the greatest colonial power, that the wrong choice was made. Practical support for Irish nationalists, which would necessarily have involved challenging the deep-seated anti-Irish prejudice widespread among British workers, might well have made a greater contribution to communist objectives than the solidarity with Russia campaign did. After the Unity Convention, the CP did begin to edge towards a more positive stance towards the struggle in Ireland. This was probably the work of the delegates who had returned from the Second Congress of the Comintern. There, McAllen had remarked that ‘All the oppressed people are exploited by the parasitic capitalism of Britain . . . Every national revolutionary movement that fights for liberation from Great Britain contributes to the development of the world revolution, since it fights against imperialist reaction. All such movements must be supported.’73 But these sentiments remained more an aspiration than practical politics. A much more positive appreciation of the national struggle began to appear in the Party’s press, but practical work appears to have remained limited to occasional demonstrations. It is significant that in his memoirs Harry MacShane described intense communist activity on unemployment and housing, but despite referring to the ‘very important’ status of the Irish question in Glasgow74 seems not to have been active on the matter after he joined the CP in 1922 (though this may be due to the national struggle there entering a quieter phase after the ending of the Civil War in April 1923). The influence of the Comintern’s theses on the national and colonial question can be clearly discerned in a new theoretical appreciation of the importance of the national question. In October 1920 a long article in The Communist referred to ‘the belief in some quarters [clearly in the CP itself] that the national idea is being overemphasised’. It was right to reject ‘Rule Britannia and all that rubbish [but there was] a vast difference between the nationalism of a dominant nation and that of an oppressed nationality.’75 In 1921, the CP published the Comintern’s theses and argued that anti-colonial struggles must be supported ‘irrespective of whether . . . Communist in outlook or not’.76 Shortly beforehand, the Party’s Executive Committee (EC) had issued a statement deploring the failure of British workers to support the national struggle: ‘we have betrayed them, and, in so doing we are betraying the whole working-class movement . . . For us, if we were to connive at these things, to claim for our motto ‘Workers of the World Unite’

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would be to merely add hypocrisy to treachery.’77 Strong stuff indeed, but the author has found no evidence of a sustained attempt by the Party to match its words with deeds.78 It may be, of course, that the sensitivity of the matter meant that the Party chose to carry out unpublicised activities, but MacManus made no mention of public or secret solidarity work in his report to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) in December 1922.79 Given the CP’s eagerness to impress the ECCI, we can be confident that he would have mentioned any such work. This breach between theory and practice may have reflected differences of opinion on the colonial question. Not long after the Party’s foundation, its new theoretical paper, Communist Review, stated that the ‘obstacle’ to socialism in Britain was the British Empire which was ‘the knot which socialism in this country will have to unravel if it is to succeed.’80 Yet this assertion sat oddly with the coverage of party publications, in which colonial matters were raised not at all frequently. In 1921 the Party leadership set up several committees to direct the Party’s practical activities,81 but a colonial committee was not established until 1924. In 1922, in its report to the Party’s annual conference, the EC had nothing to say on imperial matters, nor did any branch submit a resolution on such matters.82 Similarly, though the Sixth Congress of the Party in 1924 passed a lengthy resolution on the colonial question, of greater significance was that in his opening speech the chairman, Gallacher, had virtually nothing to say on the matter. 83 It is particularly significant, given the reputation of the emerging Party leader Rajani Palme Dutt as one particularly interested in colonial issues, that they were rarely mentioned in Dutt’s Party correspondence in the 1920s. Such evidence suggests that conference resolutions were pious and ritualistic and had little practical significance. It would seem likely that some members of the Party had learnt to ‘speak Russian’ on the colonial question, but most had not. It is possible that racism played a part in the CP’s aloof attitude to the colonial question.84 In general, the British left did oppose racial discrimination – the BSP, for instance, opposed the South African Labour Party’s white only membership policy, arguing that ‘no party can be called truly a Labour Party which includes only whites.’85 But at times racial attitudes in society were pandered to. At other times white men’s atavistic sexual anxieties about white women and black men surfaced. The Labour MP E.D. Morel in 1920 notoriously attacked on racist grounds the use of black troops by the French in Germany after the First World War. Morel claimed that white women were being raped by black troops: moreover, ‘for well-known physiological reasons, the raping of a

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white woman by a negro is nearly always accompanied by serious injury and not infrequently has fatal results.’86 The far left had expressed similar fears. The Call denounced the plans of the British and French governments to use colonial troops, the ‘poor simple blacks – the children of the planet’87 More offensively, a year later it referred to the colonial men the British government proposed to bring to Britain to relieve labour shortages as (though we should be aware that such language did not necessarily have then the racist connotations it has today) ‘Fifty thousand jolly coons, looking picturesque in ill-fitting European clothes with scarlet bandannas round their heads, boyishly larking as they toil’ The BSP believed there would be a serious moral problem if these plans were persisted with. With the men away at the front, ‘the sex appetites of the women are being starved . . . to dump thousands of negroes into the country under such conditions . . . is asking for trouble.’ Soldiers would naturally resent their women ‘being delivered into the arms of the vigorous Othellos of Africa while they are in the trenches.’ The same issue referred approvingly to the ‘white Australia’ policy: the workers insisted upon this ‘because they know a little of the blighting effects of ‘coloured’ labour. The menace of the cheap Negro is here’.88 Such attitudes survived in the CP. As late as 1922, The Communist printed without comment a denunciation from Germany of the ‘awful disgrace which is being done to our white women on the Rhine by the eager lust of African savages’.89 The same year, in a discussion of colonial matters, while declaring that there that were no fundamental differences of interest between British workers and the peoples of the Empire, the Party leadership complained in a paper for a policy conference that year, that the ‘British working class can never be free whilst the capitalist class can use cheap coloured labour to break the attempts of the white workers to raise their standards of living and can recruit vast uneducated and ignorant populations for its armies, etc.’90 To be sure, these are exceptional statements, such as did not appear after 1922. We must assume that internal criticism began to eradicate such overt racism. But more than racism, it was probably communists’ conviction that capitalism in Europe was doomed that determined their half-hearted attitude to anti-colonial work.

A Revolution in Britain? The BSP had declared shortly before the CP’s foundation that ‘it is becoming plain to the dullest that however much capitalism would like to stabilise itself, it simply cannot. The machinery of revolution has been started. There

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can be no reversing or stopping.’91 Fuelled by such millenarian prospects, the CP attempted to build a mass communist party. But some communists were sceptical of these apocalyptic visions. Shortly before the formation of the CP, the BSP wrote to the Amsterdam sub-bureau of the Comintern to claim that the bureau overestimated the revolutionary mood in Britain.92 Interestingly, given his reputation for subservience to the Comintern, Dutt expressed very grave reservations about the prospects for revolution in Britain. In contrast to Russia, Dutt argued, there were ‘strong non-revolutionary working class institutions in the Labour Party and the trade unions’. There was also ‘a large middle class of undoubted white sympathies and . . . a large parasitic or loyalist proletariat which would form a considerable reservoir for dependable soldiers and White armies.’93 In the first issue of The Communist, (effectively a renamed The Call) published a week after the Unity Convention, MacManus implicitly argued that the mass of workers were not in a revolutionary mood. The CP had the tasks of ‘the education of the masses to Communism, the shattering of their faith in the institutions of capitalism, the encouragement of a belief in their own powers of social construction, of self-reliance . . . and the stimulation of an aggressive revolutionary fervour amongst the working class.’94 But Dutt and MacManus either reserved their opinions or were persuaded of error by others. After the defeat of the miners on ‘Black Friday’ of 1921 (when railway and transport workers had failed to uphold a pledge to support miners striking against a wage cut) the CP argued that ‘The capitalist system has broken down. It can no longer contain the instinctive revolutionary urge of the workers’. The ‘doom’ of the capitalists was ‘very near.’95 Dutt now argued that workers were not joining the CP because the Party was lagging behind them: ‘Events are moving with great rapidity; the consciousness of the workers is moving with great rapidity. The present time is a time when we should be gaining on all fronts.’96 MacManus, as Chairman of the new party, was part of the leadership core of a party that attempted to persuade the working class that it could and should seize power. Party agitation and propaganda were centred around the questions of Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, in a manner which suggested that these could soon become practical questions rather than distant aspirations. In 1922 the Party underwent a ‘Bolshevisation’ campaign. This campaign, inspired by Moscow, aimed to transform what in many ways was still the old propagandist BSP into a fighting, centralised organisation ready to lead the working class in a bid for power. The Party’s task, the leadership argued, was ‘not to create some ‘propagandist’ society or revolutionary club, but to create an efficient machine of the class struggle, capable of organising the entire

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working-class movement for the struggle of confronting and battling with the complicated and centralised apparatus of the state’.97 Yet old habits died hard. Party members, including leading members, did not behave as though they believed revolution was imminent or even visible on the horizon. Much Party correspondence reads as though it was between members of a gentlemen’s club. Not long after the Party’s foundation, for instance, Dutt and other members sent by post details of ‘an informal conference . . . to discuss Communism in relation to present conditions’. The meeting was to be held at The Old Rectory, Guildford. The cost was to be ‘25/- for the whole weekend exclusive of railway fare.’98 Party affairs were conducted in full view of the state. Conveniently for any Special Branch or MI5 functionary who wanted to know, the names and addresses of the Provisional Executive Committee were printed in the report of the Unity Convention. Just as helpfully, the first issue of The Communist provided a full list of the names and addresses of branch secretaries.99 Even after police raids on the Party headquarters in May 1921, in which a full list of subscribers to The Communist had been seized, legalistic attitudes persisted. Albert Inkpin, the Party’s first secretary, sent to branch secretaries by post a letter asking them to ‘send all cash’ to Party headquarters.100 British Communists were not behaving as they were required to by the Comintern’s ‘twenty-one conditions’, which committed them to construct an apparatus for underground work. Willy Thompson, citing Ralph Milliband’s point that the conditions made sense only on the presumption that the Comintern was ‘an international army preparing itself for the decisive assault’, seems to believe that it is then axiomatic that it was inappropriate for the CP to attempt to work in such a manner.101 But whether or not the British Party was ready for power, it was a section of an international movement – which Milliband and Thompson do not take into account – and many (most by the late 1920s) communist parties – the Indian, Polish, Chinese and Italian, for instance – were illegal. British communists frequently had contacts with members of illegal Parties – the Indian in particular – which were ill protected by the lackadaisical attitudes of most British communists. The persistent reluctance of British communists to work clandestinely no doubt arose from experience. British Marxists had hitherto not presented a serious challenge to the British state which had thus treated them tolerantly. But the British elite were extremely apprehensive about the Bolshevik contagion and communists began to experience surveillance, harassment, arrest and imprisonment. Inkpin was arrested during the May 1921 raid and eventually sentenced to six months hard labour102 (the bloody repression of

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Irish nationalists after the rising of 1916 showed what could be expected should communists ever present a serious threat). But even during the ‘Bolshevisation’ campaign Party leaders seemed indifferent to security considerations: Inkpin sent by post a questionnaire to branch secretaries requesting information which would ‘be collated and transmitted to Moscow.’103 Steps to stop such practices were taken, including the establishment of a special department to deal with clandestine work, but the Party remained extremely lax on such issues. 104 The state had no difficulty in locating and imprisoning most of the Party’s leaders before the General Strike of 1926. James Hinton pointed out, and this writer agrees, that the early CP would have been well advised not to have attempted to build a mass communist party and to lead mass struggles but to attempt to build a cadre party and to build influence and credibility among the most class conscious workers.105 The CP’s efforts to lead mass struggles were doomed to fail: it did attract significant numbers of workers, but most quickly left, disillusioned when no reward for their efforts materialised. A practice based on attempting to build a solid, stable core of revolutionaries with an eye more for the horizon than for the next strike would have been appropriate to the CP’s situation. But enormous efforts and resources were spent in trying to win over the mass of workers, to build a mass Party. An assumption that this was possible underlay the publication from 1922 of the Workers’ Weekly, which replaced The Communist. From 1930 Herculean efforts were expended in producing and distributing the Daily Worker.106 The Comintern was instrumental in determining the nature of the Party press. In 1921 Zinoviev wrote to all CPs regarding ‘the character of our newspapers’. Communist newspapers, complained Zinoviev, were very much like the old Social- Democratic newspapers, but it was imperative to produce ‘a new type of communist organ’ which would ‘grow parallel with the growth of the mass labour movement.’ Parties were urged to learn from Pravda, a ‘classic example of a proletarian newspaper’, which had ‘devoted more than half of its space to letters from working men and women from the factories.’107 J.T Murphy, a veteran of the shop stewards movement and one of the SLP cohort of Party leaders, circulated a paper on the Party press which was evidently modelled on Zinoviev’s prescription. A communist paper, Murphy argued, ‘must be bold, inspiring, simple in its appearance and expression . . . to arrest the attention of the masses, it must boldly interpret the leading issues of the day and relate them to the experience of the workers.’108 Dutt also wanted a paper out of the Pravda mould. Advance publicity for Workers’ Weekly proclaimed that it would be a paper ‘written by WORKERS FOR THE

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WORKERS . . . we want to build up a great newspaper of the working class. Whatever the workers are thinking or doing will be our concern.’109 Clearly, Zinoviev, Murphy and Dutt wanted a paper that appealed to the average worker, not the most class-conscious workers. The problem for the CP was that what such workers were ‘thinking and doing’ had little in common with communism and so the circulation of communist papers remained disappointingly low: indeed the Party’s activities as a whole were kept afloat only by regular subventions from Moscow.110 We have seen that if few workers were turning to communism, significant numbers of them began to turn to Labour in the post-war years. Basing themselves on Lenin’s advice, the CP fought several campaigns to affiliate to Labour. Though some rank-and-file members of Labour were in favour of Communist affiliation, the leadership was adamantly opposed. The arguments used to oppose affiliation – that communists were unpatriotic, wished to use violence to destroy parliamentary democracy, etc. – showed clearly enough that Labour was firmly in the reformist camp. Labour’s 1922 Edinburgh Conference rejected the CP’s first application for affiliation and, ominously for the CP, voted that Labour members could not be a member of an organisation ‘with the object of returning candidates to parliament or local authorities, unless endorsed or approved by the Labour Party’, effectively a ban on individual communist membership.111 Labour’s hostility to Communists was not reciprocated for several years, indicating considerable ideological affinity. For most of its existence the CP regarded Labour not as Lenin’s ‘bourgeois workers’ party’ but as another working class party, a party with aims the CP could endorse, even if its methods were reformist. In any event, to many communists, doctrinal differences had always mattered much less than co-operation in their communities, trades councils, trade unions and constituency Labour Parties. A member of the Brighton branch remembered that in the 1920s ‘members of both parties used to meet frequently, they weren’t that hostile to one another’. It was customary in some areas for local Labour and Communist Parties to agree on a common candidate for elections.112 Such attitudes prompted the Soviet representative on the ECCI later to claim that the British Party was ‘too friendly to the British left’, that it was a ‘society of friends, not a Bolshevik Party’113 After the election of 1922, branch secretaries reported with enthusiasm examples of co-operation with Labour. In Leeds ‘the Labour Party’s election agent said his committee rooms had been turned into a Communist Party headquarters’ while in Rochdale, ‘the Party speaker was admitted to the platform of the Labour candidate.’114 No doubt it was such attitudes which

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prompted the German Communist Ruth Fischer to comment that ‘every English comrade has two party tickets in his pocket, the Labour Party ticket in his right pocket, the Communist Party in his left; they were members of the Labour Party on weekdays and communists in a mild way on Sundays for recreation’115 and the Comintern to intervene several times in the 1920s to criticise the British Party for ‘adopting too friendly an attitude to the Labour Party’.116 Communists campaigned for Labour during the General Election of 1922, called when the Conservatives withdrew from the coalition government. Any desire which communists had to be ‘friendly’ to Labour was doubtless fuelled by the proceedings of the Comintern’s Third Congress, held the previous summer. It had been decided that the revolutionary offensive started in 1917 had stalled, that capital had had some success in a counter-offensive and that communists should seek to become mass parties as a precondition for further revolutionary advance. ‘The most important task’ for the British CP the Comintern asserted was ‘to become a mass Party’, taking as its ‘starting point the mass movement which already exists’.117 In December 1921 the ECCI had argued for an even more defensive position through a united front with other working-class parties.118 The election took place during the proceedings of the Comintern’s Fourth Congress (which approved the ECCI’s united front stance). Lenin was so convinced of the importance of the British General Election that he prevailed upon the organising committee to reorder its proceedings to allow British delegates to return home in time to campaign in the election.119 As it had since its foundation then the Comintern continued to overestimate the revolutionary potential of the European working class. The great majority of European workers continued to support conservative and social democratic Parties. The notion that the British Communist Party could become a mass party was a fantasy. The CP’s decision to support Labour in the election was based on an assumption that workers would turn to communism en masse once Labour was exposed as a thoroughly reformist Party. The reality though was that the more Labour was seen as a credible vehicle for reform the more workers were prepared to vote for it. Communist Party membership though remained stubbornly low throughout the twenties and early thirties. It reached a peak of 12,000 in the extraordinary circumstances following the general strike of 1926, before falling to a trough of 2,350 in 1930 at the height of the difficult ‘class against class’ policy of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Only from 1935, when the CP too began to turn to reformism, did its membership begin to steadily increase. Between 1935 and 1939 it rose from 6,500 to 17,756.120

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There had been little enough in Labour’s record in the 1918–1922 parliament to suggest any good reason for class-conscious workers to vote Labour. The right-wing leadership’s outlook was barely distinguishable from liberalism. They had given only the most lukewarm support to miners and engineers in major strikes. They and the TUC had refused to work with the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), formed to combat the mean and punitive treatment of the unemployed,121 on the grounds that it was Communist-controlled (as it was). Nor did they promise anything qualitatively different for the new parliament. On India, for instance, Labour was opposed to independence, favouring only gradual development to selfgovernment within the Empire. But even so, a newly resurgent Conservative Party was seen by the CP as a serious threat to the labour movement whilst a serious split in the Liberal Party was seen to offer opportunities for Labour advance. A case could have been put for voting Labour as a defensive measure, a lesser evil, but the CP chose to present both itself and Labour as workers’ parties. It would stand in some constituencies, but would not oppose Labour candidates: ‘To demonstrate our strength and unity we must stand together. We must present a united front of the working class. No worker must stand against a worker to the advantage of the capitalists.’122 Labour and the CP did well in the 1922 election. Labour emerged as the main opposition party, while the six communist candidates received on average thirty-three per cent of the vote. Two communists were elected as MPs. J Walton Newbold won Motherwell, standing as a communist, while S. Saklatvala won Battersea North as a Labour candidate.123 But Dutt, a few months later to become part of the Party’s leading body, the Political Bureau (PB), argued, as he would for decades to come, that many Party members had forgotten the vital doctrinal differences between the CP and Labour. He admonished them that calling for the return of Labour candidates did not mean support for Labour policy, but, taking up a theme from the recent Comintern Congress, attempting to unite all workers ‘on the most elmentary demands of the immediate struggle’.124 But cosiness towards Labour persisted, prompting the first Comintern rebuke for adopting too friendly an attitude to Labour.125 Though the CP had not flourished since its foundation two years previously, it had established itself as a militant force on the left. It had united all those who had been capable of being united into one organisation. Though it faced a significant rival in the ILP, it continued to attract significant numbers of class-conscious workers. Though it had signed up to the ‘twenty-one conditions’, it is doubtful if these had deeply entered the consciousness of most members. Their continued friendliness towards the

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Labour Party is but one reason to doubt this, as is the Party’s reluctance to take up anti-colonial work. Though within a few years the Party was to enter a far more militant ‘third period’, the fact that this was rapidly succeeded by an anti-fascist period in which the ‘twenty-one conditions’ were effectively filed away suggests that Bolshevism had never really entered the soul of most British communists. In the next chapter we will summarise the theory and practice of the CP in the period 1922–1935 and consider the rapid decay of British Bolshevism after 1935’s Seventh Congress of the Comintern.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Second International Revisited 1935–1941

I

n the previous two chapters we saw the emergence of the Communist Party from a native British left. The Party’s adherence to the Comintern’s ‘Twenty-One’ conditions, notably its stark insistence that only revolution could improve the lot of British workers, seemed to sharply differentiate the CP from other organisations of the British left. And indeed it did: from 1922 to 1935 the CP continued to attempt to lead the working class in revolution, which is why the Party suffered increasing harassment from the British state, notably the arrest and imprisonment of most of its leading core as the state prepared for the General Strike of 1926. The Party’s role in the strike, its leadership of the NUWM, its attempts to win over the left wing of the rest of the labour movement through the Minority Movement and the National Left-Wing Movement, the purges of communists from the Labour Party and the trade unions in the mid-20s and its practice during the ‘Third Period’ of c. 1928–1932 were perhaps the most notable episodes in this period1: they seemed only to emphasise its revolutionary isolation. Yet the party retained organic links with the rest of the British left and it also, we noted in the previous chapter, had much in common with it: as Eric Hobsbawm remarked, the British CP was ‘both entirely loyal to Moscow . . . and an unquestioned chip off the native working class block.’2 We saw in the previous chapter that on such fundamental questions as imperialism, reformism, war and the state, much of the outlook of the British left lingered on in the CP. After the Comintern’s Seventh Congress, this ideological and political baggage gained the ascendancy over the Bolshevism with which it had uneasily co-existed since 1920. It will be argued here that whilst the movement retained for some time after 1935 its revolutionary internationalist rhetoric and perspectives, these concealed an emerging socialchauvinist and reformist strategy. Having failed to take capitalism by storm in the tumultuous years since 1917 the communist movement now adopted a defensive strategy in which it attempted to defend liberal democracy

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against the perceived threat from fascism and to defend its one gain of the revolutionary upsurge of 1917–1921, the Soviet Union, against attack from Nazi Germany. The key question addressed in this chapter is the Comintern’s and the CPGB’s stance on the international imperialist rivalries which erupted into world war in 1939. In laying the ground, after 1935, for its support for defence of the liberal democratic powers against the Axis, the leaders of the Comintern were of course well aware of the precedent of the First World War. They were preparing to ‘defend the fatherland’, or at least a particular set of fatherlands, a course of action hitherto regarded as the acme of opportunism. This problem was primarily tackled by arguing that the existence of the socialist Soviet Union had introduced a new factor into international affairs, that the necessity of defending the Soviet Union meant that the movement should not look for guidance to the experience of 1914–18, and by revising Marxist theory on the national question in the imperialist countries. It was in its attitude to the threat of war that the CP’s reformism became most manifest. Like the BSP, the Party no longer regarded war as the inevitable outcome of the contradictions of imperialism, but as something which could be prevented by the right policies. The Soviet Union’s diplomatic and military policy of ‘collective security’ was applied to domestic politics, with the result that Communists waged vigorous campaigns to pressurise their respective governments to use the League of Nations as a weapon against the expansionist policies of Germany, Japan and Italy. The movement’s struggle for Popular Front governments was primarily an attempt to bring to power governments sympathetic to the Soviet Union’s foreign policy and to gain popular support for this policy. The British Party enjoyed nothing like the success of its counterparts in France, Spain and Chile, but it grew considerably and gained prestige as it espoused antifascist, patriotic and reformist sentiments congenial to a significant section of the population. The Popular Front was also seen by Communists as a means of ending the historic split of the labour movement into Communist and SocialDemocratic wings. At the grass-roots level the British Party, by dint of ideological and political trimming, enjoyed some success in this endeavour. It won considerable influence in the labour movement, where the Party’s influence could be seen in innumerable trade union and constituency Labour Party resolutions, but its attempts to heal the breach at the top proved futile.

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The Seventh Congress of the Comintern: its Origins and Consequences Though the origins of the transformation of Comintern politics wrought by its Seventh Congress remain controversial, Kevin MacDermott has convincingly argued that the origins of the Popular Front ‘should be sought in the ‘triple interaction’ of ‘national factors, internal dynamics in the Comintern leadership and the shifting requirements of Soviet diplomacy’.3 The present writer would argue that in this interaction it was Soviet foreign policy which was the principal factor. Initial attempts by the British and French Parties at instituting united front politics4 were tentative and hesitant.5 Only after the leaders of the CPSU were convinced that the new policy was correct was it possible for it to be pursued with vigour and confidence. Recently released documents from the Moscow archives demonstrate this beyond all reasonable doubt.6 It is not claimed, as do John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, that the leaders and members of the Parties of the Comintern were little more than puppets dancing to Moscow’s tune.7 A better metaphor would be that of an orchestra, in which the players voluntarily follow the conductor’s baton. A political party, no less than any other organism, develops primarily by its internal dynamic. Members of Communist Parties were loyal to Moscow because they wished to be. Though significant numbers of foreign communists perished in the purges of the 1930s,8 dissident members were free to leave. And, as Andrew Thorpe has pointed out,9 enthusiasts for change, such as Harry Pollitt, by now the CP’s Secretary, and Thorez, the leader of the French Party, played a significant role in the transition to the Popular Front. But if the leaders of the Parties of the Comintern were largely left to decide for themselves how to implement the line of the Seventh Congress they did so within a predetermined set of parameters. It is, moreover, important to grasp that by 1935 all Parties were led by Moscow loyalists and that the ECCI, of which virtually no meetings were convened after 1935, was effectively controlled by Stalin and his circle.10 If the Comintern’s new strategy was essentially a rationalisation of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, it was not merely that. Most Communists firmly believed that their overarching task was to defend the Soviet Union, the perceived bastion of world revolution. Moreover, Communists in Stalin’s time saw no contradiction between defending the Soviet Union and the general interest of the revolutionary movement. Communists assumed that compromises made by the Soviet Union with imperialist states required

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similar compromises by Communists in those states. In 1926, addressing the ECCI, Stalin had claimed that: the interests of building socialism in the Soviet Union wholly and completely merge with the interests of the revolutionary movement of all countries into the one general interest of the victory of the socialist revolution in all countries . . . to counterpose the ‘national’ tasks of the proletariat of a particular country to the international tasks is to commit a profound political error.11 Two years later, it was resolved at the Comintern’s Sixth Congress that the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ in the USSR should ‘exercise leadership . . . over the whole world revolutionary movement’.12 In other words, the CPSU, not the Comintern, should lead the International Communist movement. In practice, this meant that Stalin and his close comrades dictated the Comintern’s policy. The CPSU’s view that everything must be subordinated to the defence of the Soviet Union was a specific and extreme manifestation of Euro-centrist tendencies which, as we saw in chapter two, had been present in the Comintern since its foundation. The new strategy found a ready response in European Communist Parties. They, the British Party especially so, had been conspicuously unsuccessful in building mass parties and leading revolution. If Europe was the main theatre of revolutionary advance, yet no advance was there made, there must have seemed a certain sense to giving the utmost priority to defending the one place where socialism had triumphed. A different new strategy had, in principle, been possible. We have seen that Lenin, and even more so Roy, had argued at the Comintern’s Second Congress that the key to advancing world revolution lay in the East. Events since then had vindicated their views. Despite such episodes as the British General Strike of 1926 and the advances the KPD had made before 1933, such countries as China and India were clearly far more promising for revolution than Britain and Germany. But the development of a new approach based on a recognition of these realities was an impossibility, given the movement’s Euro-centrism. The reversal in Germany in fact intensified the Comintern’s Eurocentrism, theoretically as well as politically. The imposition of fascism there, following its triumph in Italy, was seen as a manifestation of an inexorable economic decline of the great powers which would inevitably lead to the victory of socialism. We saw in chapter two that Comintern leaders argued in the early 1920s that capitalism was doomed. Despite its partial recovery from the post-war crisis, the Wall St. crash of 1929 led Comintern theorists

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to codify in the theory of the general crisis of capitalism their early doommongering. This theory was given its first exposition in Stalin’s speech in 1930 to the Sixteenth Congress of the CPSU.13 The theory was given its most comprehensive exposition by Dutt (by now the CP’s chief ideologue) in 1934, shortly after the Nazis won power in Germany. Dutt argued that the general crisis of capitalism was ‘not to be confused with the old cyclical crises of capitalism which, although demonstrating the inherent contradictions of capitalist relations, nevertheless constituted an integral part and direct factor in the ascent of capitalism.’ But now, capitalism had entered its imperialist phase, a phase of inexorable decline and permanent crisis. There could be no possibility of recovery from this crisis and capitalism could avert proletarian revolution by an immiserated proletariat only by the imposition of fascism. Fascism was not a peculiarity of such countries as Italy and Germany but the overall response of the bourgeoisie to the general crisis of capitalism.14 One of the chief components of ‘general crisis’ theory was the argument that there was no longer any significant basis for reformism among the working class of the imperialist countries. In his World Politics Dutt argued, quite at variance with the evidence of increasing post-war support for SocialDemocratic parties, that ‘the decline of capitalism has continuously undermined the old aristocracy of labour; and the experiences of 1914 to 1936 have dealt heavy blows to old illusions of progress within imperialism’.15 Pollitt made the absurd claim in 1933 that the situation of the British working class in the 1930s was ‘worse than it was in 1844 . . . when we take into account the great technical developments and scientific conquests’.16 Communist discourse in this period was dominated by a crude determinism which assumed an almost automatic correlation between being and consciousness. Thus proletarians were seen as resolute fighters for socialism whilst intellectuals were regarded with suspicion, as the possible bearers of all sorts of ideological contamination. The Italian Party leader ‘Ercoli’ (Togliatti) argued thus at the Sixth Congress: The intellectuals are not the same as the workers. They are easily influenced by the petit-bourgeois and bourgeois milieus from which they come. For this reason they waver easily, especially when difficult decisions must be made. In our movement the intellectuals cannot be allowed to oppose the workers and their leaders.17 The imperialist milieu in which the workers of the west lived was evidently of no consequence. In fact, in the writings of the leaders of the British Party, most of whom came from the stratum of skilled, male industrial workers, we

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find an idealisation of such workers. In Wal Hannington’s account of the NUWM there is an account of a march-past at the Cenotaph of unemployed ex-servicemen who laid a wreath with the inscription ‘From the living victims – the unemployed – to our dead comrades, who died in vain’.18 Hannington made no criticism of the obvious assumption of the men that they had somehow been betrayed, that their participation in an imperialist war would have been validated if the ‘broken promises’ of the war had not been broken. In Pollitt’s autobiography we do find a reference to the ‘craft outlook’ of skilled workers, but no reference at all to the imperialist prejudices common among workers in the imperialist countries. Pollitt refers to a speech he had made from the dock in 1925 in which he claimed that the British working class had ‘abandoned imperialist illusions’.19 Pollitt’s speech had been made at a time when the CP was claiming that the Empire harmed the living standards of British workers. Capitalism found higher returns on investment in the colonies and thus ‘the working man at home in Britain must suffer because any redistribution of capitalist production throughout the Empire cannot fail to begin with a crushing down of their wage demands’ and to lead to a ‘permanent and progressive increase in the number of the unemployed.’20 This idealisation of the British working class and its revolutionary potential doubtless stemmed in part from the CP’s understanding of imperialism. We saw in chapter one that the British left’s chief mentor on the question had been the liberal Hobson, who regarded imperialism as being synonymous with colonialism. In one of several interventions on the question of imperialism in the 1920s, the Comintern in 1925 instructed the CP to strengthen its theoretical appreciation of imperialism and to treat imperialism as a world phenomena [monopoly capitalism, in other words], ‘rather than as another way of discussing the British Empire’. 21 But Comintern interventions did little to shake the CP’s understanding of imperialism. It continued to downplay or ignore the role of Empire in permitting rising living standards in Britain. Thus the Party argued that the General Strike of 1926 signalled a new phase of class struggle, which would force the working class ‘to realise that the only way to complete victory is the destruction of the capitalist state and its replacement by a workers’ state based on the mass organisation of the workers.’22 The Comintern itself promoted such views after the adoption of ‘Class against Class’ in 1928.23 At its Sixth Congress it was asserted that only a tiny minority of the working class benefited from imperialism: the labour aristocracy was defined as ‘the leading cadres of the social-democratic parties’.24

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The persistent failure of the working class to embrace revolution was thus explained in terms of treacherous leadership and lack of education, rather than ideological and social corruption. A particularly striking example of the application of this model is to be found in a discussion in Labour Monthly in 1934 by the prominent Party intellectual Robin Page Arnot of the question of why there had been so much popular enthusiasm for war at the outbreak of the First World War. According to Arnot, it was simply because the leaders of the working class had not prepared for war. So little effort had been put into warning the workers of the danger of war ‘that it is safe to say that the organised working class of Britain, let alone the proletariat as a whole, did not know the war danger, far less was roused to the need of combating it’. With respect to the looming threat of a new war, Page Arnot contrasted the situation in 1934 with that of 1914. The crucial difference was that there was now a Communist Party which was alerting the working class and thus the workers would take a different stance from 1914 in the event of war.25 Though ‘general crisis’ theory had been a product of the ‘third period,’ its Euro-centric conceptual framework was incorporated into the Comintern’s Popular Front strategy. The movement’s preoccupation with Europe became even greater, and it continued to insist that the working class of the imperialist countries was in a revolutionary mood and that fascism was therefore a real danger in all these countries, even Britain and the USA. But, clearly shaped by the rapidly deteriorating international situation (the delegates to the Seventh Congress met in a year in which Germany had restored conscription and repudiated the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty), the political outlook of the Comintern had changed radically since ‘general crisis’ theory had first been developed. At the Seventh Congress, Dmitrov, the General Secretary of the Comintern, claimed that the ‘mass of working people’ were ‘becoming revolutionised’ and yet, paradoxically, a purely defensive strategy was adumbrated. Communist strategy was now to be based on the ‘defence of the working class against fascism’ which was to ‘form the starting point and main content of the united front in all capitalist countries.’ The paradox becomes less of a paradox if we recall that the Soviet Union was then attempting to construct diplomatic and military alliances with Britain and France against Germany. It was made very clear by the Congress resolutions that the Parties of these and other countries should do nothing which would jeopardise these attempts and should henceforth regard themselves primarily as auxiliaries of the Soviet Union’s diplomacy: the main task of the Comintern Parties was defined as ‘the struggle for peace and the defence of the USSR’.26

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The formulation on the nature of fascism advanced by Dmitrov at the Congress was significantly different from Dutt’s. Dutt had defined fascism as a necessary consequence of the innate contradictions of capitalism: it was ‘the most complete expression of the whole tendency of modern capitalism in decay . . . the final attempt to defeat the working class revolution and organise society on the basis of decay’. The only solution offered by Dutt was proletarian revolution.27 Dmitrov defined fascism not as an ineluctable process but as a policy of the ‘most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital’ and offered an alternative to socialist revolution as a means of averting fascism – an alliance of all democratic forces. If fascism was the policy of the ‘most reactionary’ elements of finance capital, then clearly there existed less reactionary or even progressive sections of finance capital. Dmitrov did not elaborate this point, save to refer to the importance of being prepared to ‘take advantage of contradictions among the bourgeoisie itself’.28 But this differential analysis of the bourgeoisie is crucial to an understanding of the new Comintern strategy. Many delegates to the Congress were doubtless not aware of it, but the foundations were being laid for a strategy which would attempt to include sections of the bourgeoisie and indeed whole countries in the fight to defend the Soviet Union. To do this would require a fundamental overhaul of the Comintern’s attitude to nationalism in the imperialist countries. It had been axiomatic for the Comintern that there could be no question of Communists supporting their ‘own’ bourgeoisie in another imperialist war: indeed precisely this point was reiterated by Dmitrov at the Congress. But what sort of war the ECCI considered to be an imperialist war was not made very clear, probably deliberately so, given the crab-like way in which the ECCI was proceeding with its demolition of Leninism. But Dmitrov’s overall meaning was clear enough: the working class should prepare to defend the democratic states against the fascist states. Dmitrov began a lengthy process of undermining Leninist orthodoxy by inventing the bogey of ‘national nihilism’. Communists were, he asserted, ‘irreconcilable opponents, on principle, of bourgeois nationalism . . . but we are not supporters of national nihilism, and should never act as such’. Communists should persist in educating the working class in the ‘spirit of proletarian internationalism,’ but this should not mean that they should ‘sneer at all the national sentiments of the wide masses of working people’. Communists in those imperialist states interested in maintaining peace should defend ‘to the very end the national freedom of [their] own country’. Lenin’s The National Pride of the Great Russians, written in 1914 as a rather

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unprincipled sop to the outburst of jingoism of that time, was invoked in support of Dmitrov’s strictures on ‘national nihilism’.29 Subsequent to the Congress, the ECCI began to undermine the Comintern’s previously predominantly internationalist outlook and to call for an alliance of the working class and the democratic imperialist states against the fascist states. Its May Day 1936 Statement, issued only weeks after Germany remilitarised the Rhineland, made it clear, by baldly stating that ‘today the situation is not what it was in 1914’, that the Communist movement should not look to the precedent of 1914–18 for guidance in the threatened new war. Now, ‘a number of capitalist states’ were ‘concerned to maintain peace, hence the possibility of creating a broad front of the working class, of all working people against the danger of imperialist war.’30 The leaders of the Comintern were well aware that the course they were taking was quite at variance with the dictum of Marx and Engels that the workers had ‘no country’. Of course, underlying the Popular Front strategy was the view that the workers did have a country, the Soviet Union. But the question of the relationship between the working class and their official homelands had to be tackled. A few weeks after the Munich Agreement, the ECCI decided that this issue must be confronted. Once, it argued, the idea that ‘the proletarian has no country was a profound and bitter conviction’. But things had changed. Through the class struggle the working class had ‘gradually won a place in the nation for themselves’ and ‘began to revise its relationship with the nation’. True enough, of course. In the previous sixty years or so the working class in the imperialist countries had extended the franchise, elected parliamentary representatives and enjoyed increasing material prosperity. But what of the international working class? The working class and the people generally in the colonial countries had had rather a different experience. This was a matter of seeming indifference to the Comintern theorists, who, now that the working class of the imperialist countries had won a place in the nation, urged them to defend it: In its struggle against fascist imperialism and its reactionary accomplices the working class and the Communist Party are the only consistent defenders of national independence . . . The reactionary bourgeoisie is betraying the national interests . . . It is the working class and its Communist Party which takes over the legacies of the bourgeois revolution, maintains them against the traitors and develops them to a richer and fuller life.31 How such nations as Britain and France could be defended without, willy-

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nilly, defending their Empires was a matter not addressed. The Comintern’s commitment to supporting revolutionary movements in the colonies and semi-colonies of the imperialist powers presented a tricky problem to Comintern strategists, given that most of these colonies belonged to Britain or France, the Soviet Union’s principal putative allies against Germany. There was in Dmitrov’s report to the Seventh Congress a statement that the Communists of the imperialist countries should wage a ‘resolute struggle against the oppressor policy’ of their ‘own’ bourgeoisie,32 but this was virtually the only reference to the colonial question in a report devoted almost entirely to the question of fascism in the imperialist countries. In conformity with the Comintern’s new priorities, its work in the colonial and semi-colonial countries was swiftly curtailed. Noreen Branson contends that it is a ‘myth’ that after the Seventh Congress the Comintern ‘aimed to dampen down colonial liberation struggles so as not to put pressure on governments who might be won for the popular front policy.’ Branson points to the speech of Thorez, the leader of the PCF, who claimed that the French Party was ‘fighting with great energy for the independence of the colonial peoples of Northern Africa and Indo-China’. Our attention is drawn also to the contribution of Pollitt who ‘spoke of the need to assist the Indian, African and Irish peoples in their ‘revolutionary struggle for complete liberation from British imperialism’.33 But Branson is, to say the least, disingenuous on this matter. Given the overriding priority attached to defending the Soviet Union, how could the attitude of the Comintern towards the colonial question not be profoundly affected by Soviet foreign policy? At the Seventh Congress the Italian Party leader Togliatti had argued that: For us it is absolutely indisputable that there is complete identity of aim between the peace policy of the Soviet Union and the policy of the working class and the Communist Parties of the capitalist countries. There is not, and cannot be, any doubt in our ranks on this score. We not only defend the Soviet Union in general. We defend concretely its whole policy and each of its acts.34 Though Togliatti had also insisted that there need not be ‘complete coincidence in all acts and on all questions’35 between the Soviet and the other parties, there could not have been ‘complete identity of aim’ without a radical adjustment of policy towards the anti-colonial struggle. Revolutionary activities on the colonial question would have jeopardised the Soviet Union’s diplomacy. Thus even before the Congress, the French Party,

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despite Thorez’s boasts, had ceased public support for the anti-colonial struggle in North Africa after the signing of the Franco-Soviet Pact of May 1935. And according to George Padmore, then a Comintern functionary, a plan for revolutionary work in the French colonies was dropped around this time. Padmore and others turned in disgust to Pan-Africanism.36 It is true that the British Party, unlike the French, maintained its support for anti-colonial movements. But the nature of that support changed profoundly. The Popular Front was applied to anti-colonial work, with the result that Communists stressed a liberal programme of democratic reform rather than revolution. As A. J. Mackensie noted, the CP’s line now allowed it to ‘work with the liberal humanitarians and with those in the peace movement sympathetic to the alleviation of most injustices of colonial rule’.37 No doubt the members of the British Party were sincere in their work to promote democratic reform in the British Empire, but it is not hard to discern that their activities were in fact promoting more the foreign policy requirements of the Soviet Union than those of the anticolonial struggle. Their reformist programme posed no threat to the Soviet Union’s diplomacy and, to the degree that it was successful, would placate middle-class elements in the colonies and render them more likely to support the British against its rivals. The Soviet leadership were well aware of the enormous resources of the empires of the British and their allies. Which is doubtless why in 1937 the ECCI urged the working class of the democratic powers to demand that their governments defend their colonial empires in the east: ‘the peoples of Asia and the countries of the Pacific Ocean are menaced by Japanese imperialism . . . Demand of the bourgeois democratic countries that they carry on a resolute struggle against the fascist aggressors’.38 The British Party, small as it was, had a key role, working as it did in the heartland of the greatest imperial power, in fighting for this and other the aspects of the new Comintern’s new reformist strategy. Though the CP continued to participate in class struggles, in strikes for instance, it was extremely anxious that such activities should not militate against its antifascist priorities. The NUWM, which swiftly reoriented itself from ‘mass action to token protest’39 was an early victim of the new priorities. The fundamental task now was to unite all who could be united against the threat of fascism, in particular against the threat to the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. This unity was not however to be built on a revolutionary basis: rather the CP proposed to mobilise mass support for the Soviet Union’s foreign policy of ‘collective security’ against the threat from fascism and to fight to replace the National government with an anti-fascist government.

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In practice, the CP found it extremely hard to build mass movements to attain these objectives.

Fighting for a Popular Front in Britain The Comintern’s new strategy of defending bourgeois democracy against fascism was essentially a reversion to the gradualist strategy of the Second International. We saw in Chapter One that the delegates to the 1900 Paris Congress of that International decided that socialists could join bourgeois governments in ‘exceptional circumstances’ Now, just as republican governments had been threatened by monarchists, liberal democratic governments were perceived to be under serious threat from fascists. In contrast to the Bolshevik view which saw revolutionary opportunities in the crisis precipitated by the First World War, Communists saw in the new international crisis only a threat to positions already won. Even in the 1920s, as Stuart Macintyre has pointed out, ‘British Marxists . . . always stipulated that they were not interested in fomenting an insurrection and that they were considering the military issue only in the context of a capitalist recourse to armed force.’40 Such attitudes can be traced back to the BSP and SLP, both of which had expected socialists to take power in the ruins of a capitalist collapse, rather than to have to use insurrectionary methods. The CP’s disavowal may of course have been made for tactical reasons, to avoid the attentions of the state, but since its foundation the CP had taken virtually no steps to prepare for revolution. The Comintern’s new commitment to the defence of bourgeois democracy would therefore have made perfect sense to most Communists. At the Seventh Congress Dmitrov argued that Communists should be prepared to support and even participate in a united front government formed by electoral means. Though he also argued that such a government should be regarded by Communists as a transitional government, and that Communists, even while working for the election of a united front government, should also be preparing for the ‘socialist revolution’ which alone could bring ‘salvation’,41 the subsequent record of the Communist movement suggests that these remarks were made out of habit rather than any serious intent. We might note, for instance, the response of the PCF to the wave of strikes which followed the election of a Popular Front government in France in 1936. Far from seeking to use these strikes to stir up revolutionary sentiments, the Party saw them as a threat to the Popular Front and worked to bring them to an end.42 The British Party of course was never faced with such a test of its proclaimed revolutionary intent, but its practice suggests a Party with no

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intention of preparing to lead the working class in seizing state power. No doubt veteran members of the Party saw the Popular Front as a necessary detour, after which it would be business as usual. But these members were soon swamped by those who were attracted to the Party because of its uncompromising anti-fascism and radical patriotism. Business never did return to usual. In conformity with the prescription issued by Dmitrov at the Seventh Congress, the CP’s initial objective was to fight for labour movement unity and to campaign for the return of a Labour-led United Front government committed to militant anti-fascist policies. But Labour lost the General Election of late 1935 and, as we shall see, the CP’s wooing of Labour came to naught. Though the Party continued to regard labour movement unity as the key-stone of its anti-fascist strategy, it began to cast its net wider and wider in its search for allies to implement the policy of collective security, the more so as the international crisis deepened. United Front politics were replaced by a call for a Popular Front of all parties and classes. The Comintern’s new strategy involved a volte-face in its attitude to the Social Democrats. Since its foundation the Comintern had insisted that there could be no principled unity with these people, who had been regarded as bogus socialists, purveyors of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois ideology in the workers’ movement. But at the Seventh Congress Dmitrov argued that in the interests of the fight against fascism, unity between the Social Democrats and the Communists was imperative: so imperative that he offered to dissolve the Communist Parties in favour of a ‘single political mass party of the working class’.43 Eric Hobsbawm has suggested that, given the conditions set out by Dmitrov (that the Social Democrats embrace the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, for instance) , this offer was not very seriously meant.44 But for the British Communists it was the conditions that were not taken very seriously. For the CP, the principal consideration after 1935 was the formation of a Labour-led anti-fascist government which would support the Soviet Union’s peace policy: programmatic matters were quite subordinate. The CP moved swiftly to try to convince the labour movement that old attitudes had been abandoned. Tom Thomas, the founder of the typically Third Period Workers Theatre Movement, recalled that he had been very surprised ‘when it was put to me . . . that as the organiser of the [movement] and as the organiser of so many lampoons upon the Labour Party my continued leadership might be considered in some quarters as a minor obstacle to the development of the Popular Front’. Thomas accordingly resigned.45 Mollifying measures such as this failed to impress the labour

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movement hierarchy, who remained resolutely anti-Communist. In the four years before the outbreak of war the CP did build up some measure of rankand-file unity with Labour people, notably in a large-scale defection of ILP members shortly after the Seventh Congress.46 But its attempts to win unity at the top failed completely. The most important of these attempts, the campaign to affiliate to the Labour Party, was decisively rejected by Labour’s annual conference. In an early attempt to foster labour movement unity, all but two of the CP’s candidates for the November 1935 General Election were withdrawn in favour of Labour. In January 1936 the Party mounted a campaign for affiliation to the Labour Party. The Party’s request for affiliation was, not surprisingly, promptly rejected by Labour’s NEC. In turn, the CP launched a mass campaign for affiliation. A circular from King St, dramatically entitled The Fate of the Working Class Is In Our Hands, called on Party members to initiate ‘mass activities’ with local Labour Parties, with a view to creating sentiments in favour of affiliation among the Labour rank-andfile.47 The CP’s efforts were however unavailing: at the Labour Party Annual Conference in October only one quarter of the votes cast were in favour of affiliation.48 In its endeavours to win unity with Labour people, the CP made concession after concession on matters of principle. In the Autumn of 1936 tripartite unity negotiations began between the CP, the Socialist League49 and the ILP. Pollitt and Dutt asked the representatives of the Socialist League why all reference to the colonies, including a demand for independence for India, had been dropped from their draft of the proposed Unity Manifesto. Aneurin Bevan replied that, in their opinion, labour movement publications paid too much attention to international matters and that ‘people wanted to know about unemployment and things that concerned them’. As for the colonies, well ‘Jennie Lee . . . didn’t think that if the working class got power in this country we should give freedom to the Indian people because if we withdrew it leaves India in a difficult position.’ Dutt and Pollitt appear not to have pressed the matter any further. In the discussions on the state of the negotiations not one PB member even mentioned the colonial question.50 As a result of these negotiations, a Unity Campaign with a Popular Front programme was launched in January 1937 but lasted only until Labour disaffiliated the Socialist League in the Spring.51 These failures to win unity on the left caused the CP to look further and further to the right for possible partners in a Popular Front. In early 1938 the Party warmly endorsed the call by the editor of the liberal Reynolds News for a United Peace Alliance of all those opposed to the National govern-

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ment’s policy.52 Shortly after Austria’s forcible incorporation into the German Reich, a Liberal who supported the Alliance was adopted to stand in the Aylesbury election to be held in May. To the CP’s chagrin, the Labour Party adopted a leftist candidate, Reg Groves, who was opposed to the Peace Alliance. The CP endorsed the Liberal candidate and denounced Groves as a ‘friend of Chamberlain’ and an ‘agent of Franco’.53 Dutt argued that the issue at stake was not socialism: ‘the fact that this candidate bears the Liberal label is secondary in the present critical issue to the fact that he stands for the unity of the democratic forces for peace against Chamberlain and Fascism’.54 After the Munich crisis, the Party began to consider the bellicose, archimperialist anti-appeasers within the Conservative Party as possible recruits to the Popular Front. In December 1938 the Conservative MP the Duchess of Atholl resigned her seat in Perth in order to fight the government on an anti-appeasement platform. The Duchess made no bones about her imperialist sentiments but this presented little problem for the CP who argued that she should be supported by ‘all those who are against the government’s foreign policy’.55 Early in the new year the formation of the New Progressive Group, ostensibly led by Duncan Sandys, but widely believed at the time to have been formed on Churchill’s initiative, was announced. Though it was later withdrawn, the Group won the endorsement of the CP who argued that it might ‘prove to be a new, broad democratic movement, based primarily on the youth of the country’.56 In January 1939 the Party launched its ‘Crusade for the Defence of the People.’ This crusade was the apotheosis of a tendency which had become increasingly dominant in the Party’s propaganda, a tendency to treat fascism as a threat to democracy, rather than as a response to the revolutionary strivings of the working class. Increasingly the Party presented itself as the champion of democratic liberties rather than as the leader of the fight for socialism, a trend which had been symbolised in 1938 by the removal of the Hammer and Sickle from the masthead of the Daily Worker. The Crusade was essentially a campaign to mobilise the widest possible number of people against the National government’s foreign policy. The basis of the CP’s opposition to the government was defined in terms which even Conservatives could support: ‘All the millions spent on arms will not save us’, argued the Party, ‘if the value of the guns, airplanes and ships is destroyed by the policy of giving away the vital interests of British defence to fascism.’57 The Crusade was officially launched by Pollitt at a rally in Bethnal Green which took place shortly after the defeat of the Republican forces in Barcelona. Pollitt spoke with great feeling about the threat to democratic liberties in Europe and urged all democrats to join the Party’s crusade.58

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Later that month the Communist parties of Europe issued a Manifesto which called upon ‘Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, democrats, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Believers and Non-Believers, lovers of peace, to save today the children of Catalonia, tomorrow your children.’59 But despite their energetic campaigns, no Communist Party had the popular support necessary to build a stable Popular Front. By the Summer of 1939 war was virtually inevitable.

The CP’s Road to War Until 1935 it had been the CPGB’s firm stance that under no circumstances would it support its ‘own’ government in war. It held that any war in which an imperialist Britain participated would be an imperialist war. After the Seventh Congress the Party made a differentiation between the nation and the government. The bourgeoisie were no longer prepared to defend the nation so the working class must take up this task. But there could be no question of supporting the British government’s defence preparations. This was a reactionary government which would only use armaments for reactionary purposes. It was a pro-fascist government which was far more likely to use its military capabilities to impose fascism at home or to engage in anti-Soviet adventures abroad. The precondition for support for national defence was therefore the coming to power of a progressive government. This policy was maintained until after the Munich agreement of 1938 when, prodded by the Comintern, the CP began to adopt a policy of national defence. Given the movement’s origins in the opposition to the ‘social patriots’ of 1914, it is striking that there was so little concern within the communist parties about the post-Seventh Congress orientation. But there was of course the crucial difference from 1914 that central to the new strategy was the defence of the Soviet Union. The fact that in the heady days of the Comintern’s formation there had been no excavation of the ideological and political roots of the outburst of ‘social patriotism’ in 1914 must also have militated against questioning of the new strategy. At the CP’s founding Unity Convention there had been no discussion of why the BSP had supported the British war effort. Another opportune moment for selfcriticism would have been the mass Comintern campaign against war on the 10th. anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. The CP made a courageous appeal to soldiers not to allow themselves to be used against fellow workers,60 but there is no evidence that the Party ever considered the roots of 1914. It is perhaps unsurprising then that so few communists

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protested that the Comintern’s arguments for defending liberal democracy against the Axis differed little in essentials from those offered by the ‘social patriots’ of 1914. The Party leadership had not though embarked on the new course lightly. After the entry of the Soviet Union into the League of Nations in 1934, the CP-front organisation the Friends of the Soviet Union had argued that the Soviet Union’s membership of the League of Nations should cause the CP to re-evaluate Lenin’s teachings on imperialist war. It might now be ‘in the interests of the USSR, i.e., of the world revolution, for us to support our own capitalist government in a war with Germany, against Nazi aggressors’. The leadership responded with a sharp circular denouncing such suggestions as ‘utterly false’. It was virtually inconceivable that Britain would ally with the Soviet Union, but if it did ‘it would be doing so not to support the Soviet Union but for its own imperialist aims – crushing a rival, seizing markets, enslaving whole peoples etc., and this is bound to be the case so long as the capitalist class continues to control Britain (whatever the Party in office)’.61 But Dmitrov’s invention of national nihilism found a ready response in the audience at the Seventh Congress. Pollitt’s remarks on this matter are worth quoting at some length, illustrative as they are of the new view of the CPGB on class and nation. Communists, he argued: must destroy the slanderous canard that the Communists are friends of every country but their own. There is now more need than ever to popularise the history of our country and recall the great traditions that have been associated in the past for a fight for progress and the fight for democratic rights. We must prove that we love our country so well that our lives are dedicated to removing all the black spots on its name, to removing poverty, unemployment and the bloody oppression of colonial peoples. We must show that the working class alone is the true custodian of the honour and rights of the British people.62 The ‘canard’ arose because those prejudiced against it understand internationalism only in terms of loving ‘every country but their own.’ Once, Pollitt, or at least Dutt,63 would have tackled this distortion of the orthodox Communist position head on and argued that the allegiance of Communists was not to this or that country but to the cause of the international working class, that, far from ‘loving every country but their own’, they loved no country (or at least no capitalist country). But after 1935 patriotic sentiments burgeoned in the Party.

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A thorough discussion on the implications of the Comintern’s new line took place on the PB in October 1935. Whilst no PB member opposed the new line, those who spoke took their leadership responsibilities seriously. Dutt, as might be expected, sought to provide theoretical justification for the Comintern’s change of direction. Anticipating that scriptural objections might be made, that Lenin had argued that the national question had been resolved in the imperialist world, Dutt characteristically claimed that ‘the important thing is not the question of texts. The important thing is what are the realities of the present world situation and what are we going to do about it.’ The crucial factor in world affairs was the existence of the Soviet Union. The situation was not to be compared with 1914. Since then ‘the battle of capitalism and socialism’ had moved ‘to an entirely new form’. In 1914 ‘it did not matter to us which imperialist power won’, but now ‘the issue of imperialist war and the issue of capitalism and socialism’ were ‘intertwined’. And thus it could be appropriate for the working class of a capitalist country allied with the Soviet Union to support its government in a war with another capitalist country.64 It was not argued that the British working class might find itself in such a position. Later that month Pollitt addressed the London District Party Committee (DPC) and drew the members’ attention to a recent article in the Comintern publication Inprecorr which had declared that ‘in a war for national liberation the Communist Parties will support in that war their own ruling class.’ But, he added, the countries the Comintern ‘had in mind’ were such countries as Poland and Czechoslovakia. 65 Even if Pollitt privately thought that Britain was such a country, he did not say so. In 1935 this would have been a big and bitter pill for not a few members to swallow. Kevin Morgan has rightly argued that the Party’s policy in this period was ‘far more complex than is generally made out and cannot be reduced to support for Britain as a democratic power against Germany as a fascist power.’66 We can point to Dutt’s continued insistence, to the very eve of war, that Britain was the biggest reactionary power, the power mainly responsible for the threat of fascism and war, and to Pollitt’s dogged opposition to conscription. Nevertheless, the tension in the Party’s line between its opposition to the British ruling class and its desire to defend the British nation became more and more acute and the latter pole of this contradiction became increasingly dominant. Each successive crisis of the latter half of the 1930s served to erode what remained of the Party’s lingering attachment to proletarian internationalism. The huge influx of new members into the Party who were, presumably, attracted by its radical patriotism and anti-fascism, must also have served to undermine the Party’s opposition to British imperialism. According

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to Eddie Frow, quite a few members of the Party had been initially troubled by the Party’s new line on war and peace, but had eventually accepted that it would be appropriate to defend Britain if an alliance with the Soviet Union was concluded. New members, on the other hand, were not troubled by the new line and many joined precisely because of it.67 As war loomed, the question of which powers were the aggressors became a major theme in communist analysis and discourse. At a CC meeting held in March 1936, shortly after the German reoccupation of the Rhineland, Pollitt remarked that ‘one of the important differences between 1936 and 1914 is this, that in 1914 you could not say which is the aggressor. In 1936 it stands out for all to see.’68 In November 1936 Communist International published an article by Dmitrov which laid great stress on the threat posed to democracy in ‘France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia . . . and England’ by Nazi Germany. The fact that Britain, France and the USA were defensive powers partly because they were the main imperialist powers was not addressed by Pollitt and Dmitrov, and thus the undoubted fact that the fascist powers were the aggressive powers was divorced from the political economy of imperialism.69 In urging the working class and the people generally to take up the task of defending the nation, the CP began to claim that Britain was not really the land of Palmerston, Cecil Rhodes and Earl Haig but of Wat Tyler, Tom Paine and Percy Shelley. Publicity material for a ‘March of English History’, on which the portraits of ‘progressive’ stalwarts such as these were carried aloft, evoked a Baldwinesque rural England: ‘ENGLAND! A word of power. A name deeply engraved on the minds of men, whether murmured with love, whispered in fear, shouted with hatred. Bringing a picture of green fields and hedges to the soldier stationed beneath burning desert skies.’70 Such a soldier could only have been serving in one of Britain’s many colonial possessions, but the author of this material was evidently not troubled by such considerations. This, admittedly, is an extreme case, but the fact that such material could be produced by Party members and that they could carry both the Union Jack and the Red Flag on demonstrations71 shows how quickly the CP’s internationalism was evaporating in the heat of the radical patriotism being promoted by the leadership. In contrast to Pollitt, Dutt continued to stress Britain’s role as the principal instigator of fascism, war and anti-Sovietism. Such an analysis clearly informed a Party pamphlet attacking the decision of the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) to support rearmament. According to the CP, this decision gave the National government ‘a free hand to go forward with its policies which are preparing the way for a new world war’.72 Dutt

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continued to hold the line against national defencism even after the Munich crisis of the late Summer of 1938, which according to him had caused nearpanic among the rest of the leadership.73 In October Dutt stressed that the government’s pro-fascist policy was not simply a matter of appeasing the fascist powers: it ‘must now be definitely characterised as steering towards the realisation of a fascist regime in Britain.’74 But at the first CC after the Munich agreement, J.R. Campbell, the Party’s representative on the ECCI, and thus presumably privy to the latest thinking in Moscow, began to question the Party’s version of the Popular Front. Opening the discussion in Pollitt’s absence, Campbell argued that the Party ‘had to consider whether we cannot present our line on defence in a more positive light . . . In the first place we have got to make it much more clear . . . that we are for the defence of this country and the defence of the democratic institutions.’ The Party had hitherto only committed itself to national defence if an anti-fascist government were in power, but now, Campbell insisted, ‘our line should be a positive line, not waiting for the next Labour government’.75 Though no definite decision was taken in response to Campbell’s views, no dissent was expressed and a perceptibly harder tone on the question of defence did creep into the columns of the Worker. A few months later Campbell intervened again, this time to criticise the Party’s line on the government’s introduction of conscription. His intervention precipitated a crisis in the leadership which culminated in an attempt by Pollitt to resign the Secretaryship. The Party was initially strongly opposed to conscription. But Campbell’s’ intervention led the Party to call off a planned mass campaign against conscription, whilst continuing to offer some fairly strong criticism of the government’s specific plans. The continuing stridency of CP comment on the matter caused Kevin Morgan to miss what is surely the key point – that the Party abandoned its campaign against conscription.76 This matter is worth exploring in some detail, illustrative as it is of tension and confusion among the Party leadership. The government’s conscription proposals had been vehemently denounced by the Party. Conscription was said to be ‘not a way of fighting Hitler. It is on the contrary, a way of fighting the British working classes while the British ruling classes make a deal with Hitler’.77 After the conscription bill had been introduced into parliament, the PB had issued a statement urging the Labour Party to ‘call emergency demonstrations and meetings against conscription’ and ‘all Labour, Democratic and peace organisations [to] come together to organise a united campaign’. 78 For the next month the Worker

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contained news of resolutions, meetings, demonstrations and even the odd strike against conscription.79 But if the Party was opposed to conscription, it was not opposed to voluntary defence preparations. John Gollan, the Secretary of the Young Communist League, lyrically expressed these sentiments in May: ‘Give us the ideals to serve, give us a policy worth serving, give us the means to fitness, and we will show what latent strength there is in our democracy, and how unitedly we can shoulder our responsibilities to defend it.’80 The PB was then understandably incensed by an article in L’Humanite, the French Party’s paper, lending support to conscription in Britain. It resolved to send a protest to the paper and minuted that it regarded the article as ‘an unwarranted statement and very harmful, when any other action than the one we are adopting would at the present moment alienate us from the general mass labour movement’. But in the middle of May a letter from Campbell, then in Moscow, evidently shocked the PB. They requested that Campbell return from Moscow and devoted four whole days to discussing the contents of Campbell’s letter. 81 Campbell addressed a meeting of the CC on the 21st May at which he made it quite plain that the central question was the threat from Nazi Germany. The policy of the National government was another matter: Today over a large part of Europe, the danger to a number of states from fascism, arises not so much in the growth of the fascist mass movement within their own country, as in the danger of intervention from without by Nazi Germany, or by Fascist Italy and so on . . . the possibility now was not that the Munich plan meant a free hand in the East, but in the West. Campbell drew the attention of the members of the CC to Stalin’s speech at the 18th Congress of the CPSU where ‘there had been a reference to the historic strategy of Britain. What is that strategy? It is to get into alliance with other European powers in order to ensure that no one power shall dominate the continent of Europe’. The implication would have been obvious to all those present: it was not in the interests of the Soviet Union that the CPGB oppose the British government’s preparations for war with Germany. This was not said and Campbell assured his audience that their opinion that the Chamberlain government would only use the British Army for reactionary purposes was ‘one 100% correct’. But then he got to the crux of the matter. A People’s Government would have to impose conscription: therefore the best policy with respect to the National government’s plans

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would be not to actively oppose them but to ‘advise the youth to go to the army’ and learn how to fight. Most of those who spoke at the meeting seem not to have noticed Campbell’s distinction between the policy of a People’s Government and that of the National government and simply welcomed his proposals. The Party intellectual Maurice Cornforth claimed that ‘far from there being any really rooted opposition’ among the people ‘against building up armaments and having conscription, there is really big support for it’. After a heated discussion the meeting voted 13 to 5 in favour of Campbell’s proposals 82 and decided to withdraw Pollitt’s recent anti-conscription pamphlet.83 The Party’s new line on conscription was made clear by a CC statement on the 24th May. It attacked the Labour Party for encouraging the ‘futile path of individual resistance’ and called upon ‘the young workers who are called up, sons of the working class and the people [to] remember at all times that the ostensible reason for their being conscripted was to defend the people against fascism, and during their period of military training to equip themselves accordingly.’84 The Party’s attempts to build a mass labour movement campaign against conscription were abandoned. It did though continue to expose what it saw as the reactionary purposes of the government in imposing conscription and the tone of this opposition led Campbell to urge a ‘more responsible treatment’ of the matter. Shortly afterwards Campbell was appointed editor of the Worker, doubtless to ensure such a ‘treatment’.85 At the CC Dutt had voted in favour of the change and Pollitt against. Pollitt obviously found his position intolerable. At a meeting of the PB a few days later he attempted to resign. He was rebuffed, but the meeting resolved that Campbell should not return to Moscow.86 Dutt’s support for Campbell may surprise those who know his reputation as a hard-liner. But for Dutt the over-riding consideration was always the defence of the Soviet Union. Campbell was clearly conveying the views of the CPSU and for Dutt that was probably the end of the matter. Pollitt’s motives in opposing Campbell are more difficult to fathom, particularly in view of his resolute opposition to the Comintern’s imposition of an anti-war line only a few months later. Pollitt did have more than a streak of the sturdy patriot in him, and thus might be expected to have supported Campbell’s proposals. He also had a visceral hatred of fascism and this too might have led him to support Campbell. But Pollitt’s anti-fascism was not the intellectual anti-German fascism so common in the 1930s. Pollitt’s hatred of fascism was class-based and mixed with a hatred of Toryism and militarism. If we take account of these elements of his intellectual and emotional make-up, his opposition to

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Campbell is not so hard to understand, nor is the ready support of many of the rank-and-file for the anti-war line adopted six months later. One by one then the ambiguities in the Party’s attitude to the looming war were being resolved in favour of supporting the government in a war against Nazi Germany. The Party’s early insistence that British imperialism was the biggest reactionary power and that the coming to power of a progressive anti-fascist government was the necessary pre-condition for supporting a British war effort had become steadily attenuated. A pamphlet issued in Pollitt’s name in the Summer of 1939 suggested that whatever happened in the protracted diplomacy of that Summer, British Communists would not be found wanting by the nation if it came to war: Our country and our people will never fall victims to fascism. The people of Britain will fight if necessary better than any other people in the world. They stand now unafraid in a land led by capitulators . . . people who are afraid to stand on their own feet, people who will whine about the ‘horrors of war,’ blind to the fact that a real policy of defence means the only sure shield for preventing war. And if it fails, the people of Britain will fight as never before.87

Not Counting the Colonies It was noted earlier that defence of such countries as Britain and France necessarily involved a defence of their colonial empires. This problem was never discussed by the CP, but then, as we saw in Chapter Two, most members of the CP were indifferent to colonial questions. Whilst Comintern interventions – in 1924, for instance, it had protested that the Party had never ‘demanded clearly and unequivocally the secession of the Colonies from the British Empire.’88 – did stir the Party into action, it is striking that after 1935 the CP worked more vigorously to help defend the British Empire against its imperial rivals than it ever had to support anti-colonial movements in the Empire. At the Party’s Seventh Congress of 1925 Harry Pollitt, by now the Party Chairman, had argued that ‘the struggle of the anti-colonial peoples all over the world against British imperialism is our struggle, and we shall help the colonial people to the very best of our ability and power.’89 What such declarations meant in practice was another matter. Perhaps taking Radek’s strictures at the Comintern’s Second Congress too literally, the CP probably worked harder to subvert colonial rule in the colonies than it did to promote anti-colonial sentiments among the British working class. Certainly, these

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had been the priorities of those attending the first meeting of the Party’s Colonial Committee.90 It might seem churlish to question the motives that lay behind these priorities, given that in 1929 Ben Bradley and others were arrested and imprisoned in India on charges of conspiracy,91 but paternalism probably played a role. We saw in Chapter One how strong such sentiments had been in British socialism and in Chapter Two that the Comintern gave the British Party responsibility for overseeing the work of Indian Communists.92 Indian Communists subsequently complained of the ‘’bossing’ and ‘big brotherly’ attitude of the British Party towards its Indian counterpart.’93 In contrast to its work in India, the CP seems to have made only spasmodic attempts – one such, probably in response to Bradley’s arrest, was ‘Down with Empire’ demonstrations on Empire Day 1930 – to raise anti-colonial matters among British workers.94 Of course, part of the problem facing the CP was that the great majority of British workers was not very interested in such places as China and India. Andrew Thorpe has commented on the Party’s difficulties in this respect as it attempted to carry on solidarity with the Chinese revolution in 1926–27. 95 Such difficulties could have lead to a reconsideration of the policy of attempting to build a mass party: instead they resulted in half-hearted anti-colonial work. Jean Jones has taken issue with those who have questioned the commitment of the CPGB to anti-colonial politics. Jones argues that ‘the frequency with which colonial issues came before the CC . . . testifies to the seriousness with which this work was conducted.’96 Perhaps, at least until 1935: but it is more significant that anti-colonial matters appeared much less frequently in leadership letters and circulars to the DPCs and with even less frequency in DPC reports to the centre. This strongly suggests that anti-colonial activities had more of an ornamental than a revolutionary significance. Like the present writer, Jones found ample evidence of CP activities in the fields of propaganda, meetings, conferences and so on, but little evidence of rankand-file anti-colonial work. And after 1935, as we have seen, the character of the Party’s anti-colonial work profoundly changed. The Party rank-and-file, taking its cue from the leadership, seem to have been largely indifferent to anti-colonial struggles in the British Empire. A typical CC circular of 1936, several pages in length, contained only an evident afterthought on ‘the anti-imperialist struggle’, in which the membership was urged to pay ‘greater attention to the colonial question so that we can make a quicker response to support movements against British imperialism’ and to organise meetings on the anniversary of the Easter Rising ‘to explain and help the efforts of the Irish people for complete

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independence from Britain’.97 Such rare references to anti-colonial work as were made in the reports of DPCs to the Party Centre were almost invariably set in the context of the anti-fascist struggle. In 1937 the London DPC reported that it was to hold a ‘Save China, Save Peace’ meeting (the CP was by now leading a vigorous campaign in support of China against Japanese aggression) whilst Manchester and Salford mentioned only the work of the China Campaign Committee.98 Teresa Hunt, then a rank-and-file member in Manchester, recalls lively discussions of the means test, Abyssinia, the Spanish Civil War, anti-fascism and the Soviet Union among Party members, but has no recollection of discussions of the British Empire.99 The Party’s post-Seventh Congress attitude to the colonial question caused Pat Devine, a CC member from Manchester, to exclaim at a CC discussing the Party’s overall work that it was ‘nothing short of alarming that we can sit here and have a discussion without the question of the whole colonial struggle coming into the discussion’.100 Comments like this were made from time and time, but with little effect. The minutes of the PB and CC reveal that the colonial question was hardly ever discussed. The few occasions where it was show that the old chauvinist traditions of the British labour movement were quickly gaining the upper hand. At a CC meeting in 1936, for instance, Pollitt expressed alarm that a leader of the Irish Party had invoked the old Irish nationalist dictum that ‘England’s [difficulty] is Ireland’s opportunity’ and warned that the British Party had to ‘give more help to the comrades in Ireland, where the Party has the duty of beginning a simple explanation of the falsity of this point of view’.101 Pollitt’s desire to ‘help’ his Irish comrades was an expression of the CP’s post-Seventh Congress view that the most important anti-colonial work was that directed against Britain’s imperial rivals. Soon after the Italian invasion of Abysinnia, in October 1935, Emile Burns made this point quite clear: ‘The attack on Abysinnia is not merely an imperialist attack, but also a fascist attack. It is obvious that any victory for Italian aggression would be a tremendous encouragement to German fascism, already threatening the world with war.’102 By far the biggest campaign waged by the Party after 1935 was that to support the Spanish Republic. But it did also mount a major campaign to support China against Japanese imperialism. The Party responded to Japan’s renewed aggression against China, in August 1937, with industrial action and demands that the League of Nations and the British government enforce sanctions against Japan. Led by Communists, dockers in Southampton, Middlesbrough and London ‘blacked’ cargoes bound to and from Japan. The question of China was given the greatest prominence in issue after issue of the Party’s Colonial Information Bulletin.

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The China Campaign Committee held public meetings and demonstrations in solidarity with China and tried to organise boycotts of Japanese goods. The intention of the campaign seems to have been to stoke up nationalist antipathy to Japan. Soviet interests might also have played a part, given that Japanese successes in China threatened the Soviet Union. Certainly, proletarian internationalist sentiments were not noticeable in the campaign’s literature. A leaflet on the silk trade, sensationally headed ‘Innocent Purchasers Finance Raids of Death’, called for a boycott of Japanese silk and argued that ‘just as the aggressor in Europe plans to dominate the western world, so Japan aims to rule over the East, completely excluding Britain.’103 From 1935 the CP had consistently subordinated anti-colonial work to anti-fascist work: in practice, and to some degree in intent, this meant subordinating anti-colonial work to the British national interest. But Marika Sherwood grossly exaggerates in claiming that the ‘British CP, with the exception of very few members is shown to have been as imbued with racial prejudice and indifference to the colonies as was the rest of the population.’104 Until 1935 the CP had attempted to support the revolutionary anti-colonial struggle. And even after 1935 the Party continued to combat racial prejudice in its publications and to support the Congress Party of India’s demand for national independence, not a stance which would have found favour with most of ‘the rest of the population.’ By the late summer of 1939 the CP’s industrial105 and anti-fascist work had gained it a significant following among industrial militants and the middleclass intelligentsia. The Party was well positioned to attempt to lead a radical, anti-fascist pro-war movement. But there were severe shocks in store for it. The first of these shocks was the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which made war between Britain and Germany virtually inevitable. If the leadership of the CP had any inkling of the contortions in Communist politics to come, no trace has been left. The pact was hailed as a ‘master stroke of Soviet peace policy . . . a genuine stand against aggression’.106

1939–1941: ‘Imperialist War’? In this period of the Second World War the CP’s line twice changed. For a short period it supported the British war effort, though it also called for the replacement of the Chamberlain government by a reliably anti-fascist government. Within a matter of weeks, at the instigation of the Comintern, this policy was reversed and the war was denounced as an imperialist war. The Party then strove to mobilise public opinion against the war but it did not attempt, as was once argued, to emulate the Bolshevik’s policy of

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‘revolutionary defeatism’ in the First World War. A further, though less dramatic, shift came after the defeat of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in the Spring and early Summer of 1940. Thereafter, encouraged perhaps by a Comintern disinclined to see Germany triumphant in Europe, defencist sentiments grew steadily in the Party. By the summer of 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, these sentiments had grown to such an extent that the Party had little difficulty in