Class or Nation: Communists, Imperialism and Two World Wars 9780755623532, 9781780760285

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ABBREVIATIONS

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

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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 the 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.

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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

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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 Three, 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

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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

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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 local 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 internationalist 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, Bolshevism s 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 Polish 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 won the great majoity of Irish seats in 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 dë ifficultí 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 average 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 reverting to full support for the war. When war came the Party’s leaders were spoiling for a fight. During the Commons debate on the British ultimatum to Germany, Gallacher called for an immediate declaration of war. Pollitt met Harry McShane, a leading member of the Party in Scotland, in the bar of the Euston Tavern and declared ‘I have been sitting in the gallery of the House of Commons and that old bastard Chamberlain refuses to declare war’.107 Anticipating the declaration of war on September 3rd, beneath the banner headline ‘Nazis plunge World into War’, the Worker of the 2nd denounced the ‘The mad dogs of Europe – Hitler and his Nazi government’ who had ‘set out on their last bloody adventure’. The CC’s Manifesto declared that the Party was ‘in support of all necessary measures to secure the victory of democracy over fascism’ but added that ‘fascism will not be defeated by the Chamberlain government’. The CC therefore called for a ‘war on two fronts,’ one front against German fascism and a second front ‘against Chamberlain and the enemies of democracy in this country’.108 There can now be no reasonable doubt that the subsequent and abrupt change of line was the work of the Comintern, rather than, as Dutt continued to maintain to the end of his life, internal party critics. The change was initiated by Stalin, who summoned Dmitrov to inform him that the war was an imperialist war. Dmitrov in turn convened a meeting of the ECCI which passed an appropriate resolution. Instructions were sent to the member parties of the Comintern. Pollitt received a telegram on the 13th September, but sat on it until Dave Springhall, the Party’s representative on the ECCI returned from Moscow during a CC meeting. The meeting was adjourned for a week. At a stormy meeting held on 2 – 3 October, Dutt and William Rust eventually won a not very convinced majority for the Comintern line.109 Pollitt and Campbell, who had obstinately clung to the old line, were removed from their posts and Dutt and William Rust were installed as a duumvirate, Rust taking over the editorship of the Daily Worker.110 Pollitt’s obstinate support for the old line, given his record over the previous few years, is not hard to understand. But one aspect of his stance perhaps requires some elucidation: was his support for the war consistent with his passionate

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opposition to the introduction of conscription a few months previously? Probably it was. Actual, as opposed to possible, war concentrates the mind. At the end of the first session of the CC meeting convened to discuss the emerging new line of the Comintern, Pollitt made the heartfelt remark ‘I am a Communist. I hate the ruling class of this country, but I hate the German fascists more.’111 Hating the British ruling class but hating the German fascists more was probably the predominant sentiment among British Communists at this time and it explains a great deal about their conduct. Should Dutt’s claim that it was a ‘fable of anti-Communist historians’112 that the Comintern initiated the new line be dismissed out of hand? Some rank-and-file members opposed the pro-war line from the beginning. Dave Priscott of the Portsmouth branch converted his branch to an anti-war line, on the grounds that the Chamberlain government could not possibly prosecute a just war, before any hint of the new line emerged.113 Ernie Trory opposed the line also.114 Eddie Frow recalled that in Manchester ‘a man called Frank Bright was advocating that it was an imperialist war’.115 And writing in the Worker, prior to the change of line, Rust made the tantalising, though unelaborated, statement that some members of the Party had ‘put forward opposing points of view in the course of the discussion on policy and tactics’. 116 Dutt undoubtedly overestimated the importance of this opposition (of those Party members interviewed by the author only Eddie Frow had known Party opponents of the war), but it gives some credence to his view that the initiative for change came from the British Party. The first public statements of the ECCI after the outbreak of war denounced the ‘imperialist’ war, calling upon the working class ‘to put an end to the war after its own fashion, in its own interests, in the interest of the whole of labouring mankind and thereby to destroy once and for all the fundamental causes giving rise to imperialist wars’.117 These seemingly unequivocal statements of revolutionary intent, and their dutiful echo in the publications of the British Party led to the assumption in early studies of the CP that following the change of line it followed the policy of ‘revolutionary defeatism’. 118 Work by James Jupp and, especially, Kevin Morgan has comprehensively shown this to be a myth. But Jupp has argued that in this period the CP ‘used the Marxist analysis applied to the First World War’, whilst Morgan has claimed that the Party developed a ‘quasi-Leninist analysis of the war’.119 But was the CP’s analysis in any sense Marxist? The CP’s new line, like its previous line, was not based on an analysis of the political economy of imperialism: it was a purely political policy centred around the British and French governments’ refusal to support the Soviet Union’s policy of

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‘collective security’. Dutt made this quite clear at the CC which endorsed the Comintern’s ‘imperialist war’ line. Had a war developed on the basis of the peace front it would have been a just war. Why? Not because the imperialists of Britain and France would not have had their imperialist aims, but because, as we have said, the antagonism of imperialism and the Soviet Union is the basic world issue and that would have outweighed the imperialist aims of Britain and France, would have been a fundamental character of the war, making it a just war.120 It was, of course, implicit in Dutt’s argument that the nature of the war could change very quickly, that if a government committed to fighting the fascist powers in alliance with the Soviet Union was to come to power, then the war would become a just war. This was to be the justification for the further switch in line in June–July 1941. Much ill-feeling was generated by the CC meetings of SeptemberOctober: maintaining comradely relations must have been very difficult. Nevertheless, attempts at reconciliation were made. On the 16th October the Secretariat wrote identical letters to Pollitt and Campbell to confirm that they were to fulfil ‘existing speaking arrangements’. But, noting the ‘abnormal position . . . in which a leading member of the Party is publicly known to be in disagreement with the main line of the Party and at the same time carry on public propaganda on its behalf’, they indicated that they hoped that ‘the present difference of line might soon be overcome’, a clear indication that recantations were expected.121 It was not until mid-November that satisfactory recantations were produced. Pollitt’s continued opposition to the new line is manifest in correspondence in the Party archive,122 but on the 18th he produced a statement in which he referred to his previous ‘doubts about the policy of revolutionary defeatism in an imperialist war’ in which one of the powers was ‘German fascism’, his ‘hatred of fascism’, which had led him not to see in time ‘the true role of British imperialism’, and ‘his strong personal feelings’ arising from what he ‘had witnessed in Spain.’ But now ‘after the most serious consideration of the whole situation’, Pollitt ‘unreservedly’ accepted ‘the policy of the Communist Party and the Communist International’, and pledged his ‘fullest support in explaining, popularising and helping to carry it forward to victory.’ Pollitt’s statement was accepted by the Secretariat. But the published version was different in one highly significant respect: a phrase referring to his doubts about the policy of ‘revolution-

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ary defeatism’, was amended to read ‘doubts about our traditional policy in an imperialist war.’123 This version was published in the Worker on the 23rd November. The change made by the Secretariat to Pollitt’s statement shows that it was anxious that it should not be thought that the Party was committed to ‘revolutionary defeatism’, even if in private they were at that stage resigned to it. A public commitment to such a policy might well have been used by the government as a pretext for taking action against the Party. The members of the new secretariat were also far too canny, far too schooled in the ways of Comintern to do so without being completely sure that this was what was wanted in Moscow. In any event, by the time a majority for the new line had been gained, the Soviet and German governments had signed a Treaty of Friendship and called for the British and French governments to make peace with Germany now that the Soviet and German governments had settled their territorial disputes.124 There was little that was Leninist or even ‘quasi’ Leninist about the CP’s policy in 1939–1941. In the period of the ‘phoney war’ its policy was reminiscent of the BSP’s post-1916 policy in that they called on the belligerent powers to make peace. Though references to revolutionary objectives were occasionally made by Party leaders during the ‘imperialist war’, the Party’s strategic objective was not the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism but peace and the establishment, by some unspecified means, of a new government. A pamphlet by Dutt argued, in the clearest possible expression of Second International gradualism, that an ‘immediate peace’ would ‘make possible extending disarmament, and prepare the way for the most rapid advance to world socialism.’125 The CC adopted an extremely cautious Manifesto on the 7th October. Though the war was denounced as a ‘fight between imperialist powers over profits, colonies and world domination’, there were no calls to the working class to prepare for revolutionary battles. Rather the Party demanded that ‘a peace conference of the powers be called immediately’. Whilst the Manifesto was unequivocal in stating that the war was an imperialist war, its analysis concentrated on the policy of the British ruling class. They had, for instance, shown that ‘they do not stand for democracy against Fascism. If they did they would have stood by democracy in Spain and Czechoslovakia’. Questions of political economy – which would have made a further change of line much more difficult to justify – were ignored.126 Initial guidance to the membership was extremely cautious. After discussing ‘mistakes’ made at the start of the war, the members were warned that ‘for the purposes of carrying out our line and for public propaganda, it is

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necessary to express a warning against abstract formulas or sectarian errors.’ Experienced members would have recognised this as a warning not to practice ‘revolutionary defeatism.’ The circular made very clear what was expected. The first task was ‘the fight for peace . . . we demand the ending of the war and the starting of immediate peace negotiations.’ The second task was ‘the fight on immediate mass issues – the most important are in industry.’127 Kevin Morgan has shown that these were the two tasks on which the Party concentrated its energies and that its practice was thus ‘characterised by economism – [a] failure to relate immediate struggles to the question of ending the war – and pacifism – [a] failure to relate the question of ending the war to the question of ending capitalism.’128 Nina Fishman’s work on the activities of Communists in the engineering industry has provided no reason to question Morgan’s verdict. She, and Richard Croucher, have shown that whilst Communists did take part in strikes, they did not attempt to foment political unrest in the factories.129 Government surveillance reports tend to confirm Morgan’s verdict. Pollitt was alleged to have referred at a public meeting to the Party’s ‘revolutionary drive’ and to have stated that ‘Russia’s revolution of the last war must be repeated’. But much more typical is an account of another meeting at which a Party speaker ‘did not mention Communism or Russia, but dwelt on the difficulties confronting housewives, due to price increases’.130 If the Party had practised ‘revolutionary defeatism’, it would presumably have incurred considerable hostility. But the Party’s low-key opposition to the war chimed, particularly in the ‘phoney war’ period, with the not inconsiderable undercurrents of discontent arising from rationing, dilution in industry and so on. The Party was able to capitalise on these undercurrents and, after an initial loss of membership, enjoy an increase in membership and support and a substantial increase in the sales of Party publications.131 One possible tack for the Party to take had it wished seriously to practice ‘revolutionary defeatism’ was to give a high priority to work in solidarity with the peoples of the Empire, many of whom – the Congress Party in India, for instance – adapted the dictum of Irish Republicans that ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’. But though Dutt made the doubtful claim in the Spring of 1940 that ‘failure to understand the imperialist character of the war is above all failure to understand the Colonial question’,132 the Party’s practice was marked by the same general indifference to the colonial question as had been exhibited for several years. Dutt himself may well have genuinely wished to give a high priority to the matter, but the Party’s Euro-centric ideology and its insistence that ‘day-to-day’ issues had to be the main content of its mass work presented great difficulties for

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those (few) Party members who wished to take up such work. Some did: Ben Bradley, for instance, who was still clearly committed to the fight for Indian independence, was imprisoned for three weeks after making seditious remarks at an Empire Day meeting.133 It was presumably Dutt who instigated the decision to close the Party’s Colonial Information Bulletin, which had promoted a pro-war line even in its October issue. November’s issue contained a notice that in future it would be published from King St., but no further editions appeared. The new year saw a new publication, Inside the Empire. In contrast to the duplicated and turgid Bulletin, Inside the Empire was a glossy, hard-hitting publication which made no bones about the imperialist nature of the war. Dutt led the first issue, proclaiming ‘as in 1914 the war that has broken out is a war over the new division of the world, over the bodies of the colonial peoples’.134 But Inside the Empire closed at the end of 1940, for reasons which are not at all clear. According to Noreen Branson, it was the result of disruption caused by the ‘blitz’.135 Publication resumed in 1943. It is perhaps sentiments such as those contained in Inside the Empire which led Kevin McKensie to argue that in the 1939–41 period of the war the CP adopted a ‘more clear-cut anti-imperialist position’ with regard to the colonies.136 But despite the more militant tone struck by the Party, its basic line did not change. It continued to advance the type of democratic, rather than revolutionary demands, which it had propagated since the Seventh Congress. And, after the defeat of the BEF in France, those demands began to take on a defencist tinge. Even Inside the Empire began to express a rather ambiguous tone on the question of the Empire. It argued that the fate of the colonial people depended ‘upon the experience and organisation which has been acquired in the past twenty-five years by the popular and revolutionary colonial movements’, which could certainly be interpreted as a rather cautious endorsement of ‘revolutionary defeatism’. Yet the same issue declared that ‘the Indian people are determined to carry on the struggle for, and to defend a free India’.137 The colonial question featured little in the Daily Worker, whilst Dutt’s Notes of the Month in Labour Monthly were generally given over to an analysis of the contradictions between the various imperialist powers. Dutt’s general argument was that in Nazi Germany British and French imperialism had created a Frankenstein’s monster, an anti-Soviet fascist regime which had turned on its creator: ‘Hitler is the product of British and French imperialism. If Hitler applied the match to the gunpowder, it was the British and French ruling class that laid the trail of gunpowder and placed the match in his hand.’138 During the ‘phoney war’, Dutt constantly warned his readers

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that the ‘Munichites’, those who had conspired to turn German imperialism to the East, to an attack on the Soviet Union, were still very influential in the Cabinet and in ruling circles generally. The British government’s antiSoviet response to the ‘Winter War’ between Finland and the Soviet Union was seen by the Party as a vindication of this analysis.139 In May 1940, the German invasion of Norway and the despatching there of a British Expeditionary Force ended the ‘phoney war’. The Party’s response to these events was to blame the British rather than the Germans for the escalation of the war. John Strachey and Victor Gollancz both voiced the suspicion that the Party had adopted a pro-German line. Their suspicion was not though a manifestation of a Blimpish attitude that those who opposed the war must be agents of the enemy. Strachey pointed out that both the German and British Parties were treating the German regime with much less hostility than the British. He had read an article by Walter Ulbricht, the German Communist leader, and had been ‘disturbed by the contrast between its great moderation, to put it no higher, in its opposition to the Nazi regime’ and its attitude to the British government.140 Strachey had more than a point. The British Party’s treatment of the Nazi regime at times bordered on the surreal. An article in the Worker at this time lauded the favourable treatment afforded the Communist Party by the German occupation forces in Norway.141 This ‘pro-German’ stance was swept away by the British military reversals of that Spring. As a result of the British debacle in Norway Churchill became Prime Minister on the 9th May. The following day German troops invaded Belgium and Holland. The Party’s initial response to these events was to intensify the Leninist rhetoric it had to some extent deployed since the previous October. The CC’s Manifesto contained the call ‘let our aim be the victory of working-class power and of socialism’. If Labour was to enter a coalition, as seemed imminent, the ‘very existence of the working class movement, of trade union rights’ would be threatened. The statement ended with the call ‘Workers of All Countries, Unite’, a slogan hardly used by the Party for years.142 But this almost reflex reversion to Leninist language disappeared as quickly as the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France was defeated. The response of the CP to this defeat demonstrates how shallow was its ‘imperialist war’ line. Though Dutt deplored the ‘wave of national defencist feeling’ sweeping the country, no expressions of ‘revolutionary defeatist’ sentiments came from King Street.143 On the contrary, the Worker was emphatic that ‘everyone is thankful that the bulk of the BEF has been saved’ and joined in the hunt for scapegoats: ‘It is now admitted that a major strategic blunder was made by not ordering a

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strategic retreat to Amiens . . . Who made these blunders?’144 The fall of Paris caused intense anxiety in King St: ‘Paris was not defeated, the French people have been betrayed’.145 On June 22, the day the Franco-German armistice was concluded, a CC manifesto lamented the ‘appalling catastrophe that has befallen the French people’. If the British people didn’t learn the lessons of the French defeat, they too would ‘go under’. And what was this lesson? That ‘the same kind of leaders who brought defeat to France are in high places in Britain’. Accordingly, a People’s Government was required, one that was ‘really representative of the working people, a government in which there shall be no representatives of imperialism or friend of fascism, which shall be capable of organising the defence of the people and . . . find the way to a peace that is not a peace of subjection’.146 As Nina Fishman has argued, in effect, if not in its formal line, the Party had reverted to the ‘war on two fronts’ line of September 1939.147 This was certainly the view of the Foreign Office, which noted that ‘instead of denouncing the imperialist war’, the Party had taken to denouncing ‘the men of Munich on the grounds that they were contemplating a negotiated peace.’148 Though, as Kevin Morgan argues, the Party ‘did not repudiate its earlier analysis’ of the war,149 few claims that the war was imperialist in nature were now made by the Party. Occasional such statements were made, this was only to be expected, given that the ‘imperialist war’ line had not been explicitly repudiated. But the Party’s line and practice were fundamentally changed by the defeat of the BEF: its whole thrust and tenor was to prepare for the defence of the nation. Morgan argues that the Party’s insistence in June 1940 that the war should still be characterised as an ‘imperialist war’ unless a People’s Government were to come to power constitutes a ‘key difference’ with the line of September 1939, when unconditional support was given for the war effort.150 But is this really a ‘key’ difference? From the Leninist perspective which the Party claimed to be upholding, the distinction was entirely specious; with or without a People’s Government, Britain remained an imperialist society. Even if we lay aside such theoretical quibbling, it is clear that after June 1940 the Party’s propaganda and practice were just a hair’s breadth away from the line of September 1939. This was the view of quite a few Communists at the time. Douglas Garman complained of a ‘tendency in our present propaganda to obscure the imperialist character of the war, and to suggest that if only we could get rid of the Men of Munich it would be a straight anti-fascist struggle’, whilst the leadership of the Young Communist League (YCL) wrote to criticise ‘certain formulations which are absolutely contrary to the original Comintern line’.151

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How do we account for the CP’s abrupt change in attitude to the war? It is clear that the CPSU and the Comintern were extremely alarmed by France’s swift capitulation to Germany. Monty Johnstone has argued that a Comintern intervention was the agent of change, marked by the CC Manifesto of June 22nd . Certainly, the Comintern indicated to the British and French Parties that some softening of the ‘imperialist war’ line was in order. On the 19th June the ECCI issued a statement in the name of the PCF, declaring that the French Party would ‘fight decisively and fiercely against the enslavement of our nation by foreign imperialists’.152 This statement was wired by the Comintern to the British Party the next day.153 But this interpretation does not give sufficient weight to the CP’s shocked response in early June to the military reversals in France. This stance, taken before the Comintern’s views (so far as we know) were known, suggests that the new defencist154 stance was primarily caused by the leadership’s nominal commitment to ‘revolutionary defeatism’ being unable to withstand the severe shock of the defeat of the BEF in France. The Manifesto of June 22nd certainly struck a robust note of national defence not heard since the previous September, but this was merely the highest point of a wave of defencist sentiments which had begun to grow with the first news of the military reversals in France. These sentiments may have been strengthened by the formation of the Coalition government. On assuming the Premiership Churchill broadcast his famous ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech. The CP gave the new government no support, but Pollitt and others in the leadership would surely have appreciated this speech and seen in it, and the inclusion of Labour ministers in the government, a break with ‘appeasement’. With considerable justification, Johnstone and Andrew Thorpe have argued that after June 1940 there were in the CP two different lines, represented by Pollitt on the one hand and Dutt on the other. 155 The Manifesto of June 22nd was written in expectation of imminent invasion and was essentially a call to the British people to prepare to fight the invader. This was not a stance which Dutt would have warmed to. He certainly criticised such ideas, but his attempts to do so were not very effective. Defencist sentiments continued to be widespread in the Party. Dutt, moreover, was hamstrung in his attempts to fight them because he shared them to a considerable extent. As we have seen, he was not opposed to national defence per se, but to national defence of a Britain not Allied with the Soviet Union. In the absence of a firm directive from the Comintern, CP policy from the defeat of the BEF to the German invasion of the Soviet Union a year later

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rested on an uneasy compromise between Pollitt’s evident wish for a more open defencist stance and Dutt’s continued insistence that this could not be countenanced in an ‘imperialist war’. Defencist sentiments were criticised by Dutt in a circular to the membership on the 15th July. The circular contained elements of the line of the Manifesto of June 22nd and implicit criticisms of it. Probably it was the result of a compromise among the leadership. In a few not particularly prominent paragraphs Dutt discussed ‘the question of national defence’ and argued that: so long as monopoly capital continues to rule and own the country in the interests of a small minority, the main enemy of the people is the power of monopoly capital. The real defence of the people requires the breaking of the power of the monopolist ruling class. The experience of France has proved the truth of this and showed that the national defencist line of Social Democracy (unity with the financial oligarchy in the name of national defence) betrayed the real defence of the people. Dutt criticised ‘serious shortcomings’ in the campaign for a People’s Government. The campaign had been renewed yet again after the defeat of France. Dutt was particularly concerned by a tendency to present ‘the question of defence in general without emphasising the question of what class is in power’. But the patriotic, anti-fascist strain in the Party was, despite Dutt’s strictures on ‘national defencism’, now much more in evidence than anti-imperialist themes. However much Dutt wished to combat defencist sentiments in the Party, the logic of his arguments pointed in that very direction. His circular began by declaring that the ‘country’ faced a ‘disastrous and menacing situation’.156 His arguments against ‘national defencism’ were not expressions of internationalist sentiments, they rather condemned the British ruling class for betraying the national interest. In July’s Labour Monthly he claimed that ‘the bourgeoisie in its downfall drags down the nation and betrays the people, wherever the mass movement, led by the organised working class, is not ready and equipped in time to take over the power and forge its salvation. This has been the bitter experience of France.’157 The strains in the Party surfaced to some extent after the publication in the Summer of Ivor Montagu’s The Traitor Class, essentially an elaboration of the defencist themes raised by the Manifesto of June 22nd. Montagu claimed that a full mobilisation of resources ‘would infinitely fortify the defensive power, infinitely weaken the power for conquest of Hitler’.158 Montagu was teetering on the edge of open defencism, as Dutt wrote to

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complain to him.159 Montagu must surely have had the backing of someone high in the Party before undertaking this exercise: his close associate, Pollitt, perhaps? In Montagu’s papers there is a draft of a glowing but unpublished review in which Pollitt argued that Montagu’s book showed ‘what has to be done, if the fate of a proud people, who thought that their present fate could never come upon them, is also to be avoided by the people of Britain.’160 Dutt’s close ally Rust then attacked Montagu for a ‘mechanical transference of the lessons of France to the different situation prevailing in Britain’, claiming that as a power struggling for world domination Britain was unlikely to capitulate in the way the French imperialists had done. Britain was still therefore a major player in the imperialist war.161 Rust’s criticism did not appear until November, at the height of the Luftwaffe’s ‘blitz’ on London, the cause of much suffering and widely seen as the prelude to invasion. The response of the Party to the ‘blitz’ is further evidence of political paralysis in the leadership at this time. The ‘blitz’ could have been the occasion for a decisive shift towards either Dutt’s or Pollitt’s line. But the Worker studiously avoided a political analysis of the ‘blitz’ and concentrated on the lack of adequate air raid precautions. A pamphlet by Ted Bramley, the Secretary of the London DC, revived pre-war themes by blaming the ‘blitz’ on the government’s refusal before the war to pursue ‘a really effective collective security’ policy. 162 Party leaflets and posters attacked the government’s apparent indifference to the plight of the people and must have struck home when the authorities refused to allow the Underground to be used for shelter.163 But this response to the ‘blitz’, given the political climate, could only have worked in favour of a drift into a more open ‘national defencist’ position. Little now appeared in the Party press regarding the imperialist nature of the war. The government was still bitterly attacked, but implicit in much of its propaganda was the view that the real problem was not that the government had imperialist war aims, but that it was failing in its duty to defend the nation. Significantly, a ‘soldiers’ page’ featuring complaints about the conduct of the war began to appear in the Worker. A typical report complained that conditions in a training camp were so bad that they had caused the soldiers there to ‘lose sight of the purpose of the war’ and had had ‘a sobering effect upon our patriotic enthusiasm’.164 In another, soldiers wrote to complain that in the army they ‘had learnt little of how to defend our country’. A ‘People’s Army’ was needed, one that would truly ‘defend its own hearth and home’.165 Such themes were present in much of the propaganda in the winter of 1941–42 for the CP-led People’s Convention movement, the high point of

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the Party’s campaign for a People’s Government.166 Prominent in the Convention programme was a lengthy quotation from the Digger Gerrard Winstanley’s Appeal to All Englishmen: ‘This Commonwealth’s freedom will unite the hearts of Englishmen together, so that if a foreign enemy endeavours to come in, we shall all, with joint consent, rise up to defend our inheritance’.167 The implication of this was clear: with a People’s Government in power, Britain’s war would be just. This was the ‘war on two fronts’ line of September 1939 in all but name. The Convention met in January 1941 and was a great success, attracting over 2,000 delegates: it was the main cause of the ban imposed on the Daily Worker shortly afterwards. This drift into a pro-war position became more marked after further British military reversals in north Africa, Crete and the Balkans in the Spring of 1941, and was doubtless encouraged by Soviet coverage of the situation in the Balkans, which referred to the ‘just’ struggles of the Yugoslav and Greek peoples (according to Dmitrov, Stalin characterised ‘the war of the Greek and Yugoslav people’ against Germany as a ‘just war’.168) Warnings against ‘national defencist’ tendencies were by this time conspicuously absent from circulars to the membership and from Dutt’s Notes of the Month. It is unlikely that Dutt had changed his mind on this question. He may have been instructed to desist from warning against ‘national defencism’ by a leadership more inclined, in the Spring of 1941, to support Pollitt than him. Dutt himself must have noted the changed tone of Soviet war commentaries and might have decided that it would be prudent to sit on the fence for a while. His views on the nature of the British government were however unchanged and were reinforced by the flight of Rudolph Hess to Britain. This, he argued, showed that the dominant sections of the ruling class in both Britain and Germany were seeking ‘anew to find an alternative to the disastrous extension of the imperialist war on the basis of reactionary common interests against the rising class forces and against the Soviet Union’.169 The leadership as a whole were though clearly, if hesitantly, moving closer to a defencist position. The government’s Security Intelligence Committee (SIC), established in June 1940 to co-ordinate the activities of the various bodies involved in security and counter-espionage, noted that the Party leadership ‘seemed to lack a programme and the equivocal attitude of the USSR towards the Balkans was not helping them’. The British military withdrawal from Greece in April was said to have ‘aroused deep anxiety’.170 In May, the People’s Convention was recalled because the situation after the defeat in Crete demanded ‘a great mobilisation of men and women . . . in the urgent task of defending the British people’.171 The people were said to

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have insufficient food, therefore all ‘idle land’ and all ‘food combines’ should be taken over.172 The ‘output of coal’ had fallen disastrously’ and the government’s proposed use of an Essential Work Order to try to boost production could ‘only make the situation worse’.173 Under the impact of events in the war, and with some encouragement from the Comintern and the Soviet Union, the ‘imperialist war’ line, which had been reluctantly adopted in the Autumn of 1939, had effectively been abandoned by the Summer of 1941. The social-chauvinist ideology which had grown since the Seventh Congress of the Comintern had not been questioned after the change of line and increasingly asserted itself after the defeat of the BEF in 1940. The invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany in June 1941 precipitated the CP into openly social-chauvinist support of the British war effort.

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CHAPTER FOUR

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

W

e saw in the previous chapter that by the outbreak of war in September 1939 the CP had in the four years since the Seventh Congress of the Comintern moved from a position of adamant refusal to countenance any circumstances in which it might ally in war with its own ruling class, to fervent advocacy of such an alliance in the interest of defending the democratic states and the Soviet Union against the Axis powers. Not surprisingly then, the Party very quickly moved to pledge its full support for the Allied war effort after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on the 22nd June 1941. The Party’s initial response was to formalise the ‘war on two fronts’ line it had been inching towards ever since the defeat of the BEF in the early summer of 1940, but after prompting by the ECCI it pledged to the coalition government its full support Though patriotism was undoubtedly a major reason for the CP’s support for the British war effort in this period, its main motivation, certainly of the leadership, was to defend the socialist Soviet Union. Following the German invasion the USSR found itself in an increasingly desperate situation. In this phase of the war all other considerations were put to one side as the Party attempted to mobilise public opinion to force the government to launch a military offensive to render assistance to the Soviet Union. The Party fought fiercely for increased production of war materials and used its industrial militants to fight for industrial peace and to resolutely oppose strikes. It supported the ‘political truce’ struck between the parties of the coalition and sternly denounced such organisations as the ILP and Commonwealth when they broke the truce. 1 Those on the left who opposed the war were trenchantly denounced as agents of Hitler. Except for a brief period after the British victory at El Alamein in late 1942, which was closely, and not coincidentally, followed by publication of the Beveridge Report, schemes for post-war reconstruction and reform were roundly criticised as distractions from the job of defeating fascism.

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Internally though, the CP was appreciate of the coalition’s proposals for reform, which greatly informed its own new, reformist strategy. But it was not until the ‘Big Three’, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt, committed themselves at Teheran in November 1943 to radical post-war reconstruction that the CP considered that serious and sustained discussion of post-war reform was appropriate.

June–July 1941: the Line Changes Again The CP’s leadership was initially divided as to the most appropriate response to the turn in the war. Dutt headed a majority which effectively favoured a return to the ‘war on two fronts’ line adopted in September 1939. Pollitt argued for a policy of unconditional support for the British war effort. The latter policy prevailed after an intervention by the Comintern. Thereafter, though the Party’s support for the British war effort was greatly tested by the government’s refusal to meet its demand that a Second Front in Europe be opened, it did not waver in its fundamental support for the war. The rumours of an imminent attack by Germany on the Soviet Union circulating in Britain in the early summer of 1941 were dismissed by the CP the day before the invasion as yet another example of ‘the anti-Soviet dreams’ of the British imperialists, yet another manifestation of the desire of the British ruling class to turn Germany against the Soviet Union.2 A press statement issued on June 22nd, the day of the invasion, interpreted the German attack in this light, suggesting that it was ‘the sequel of the secret moves which have been taking place behind the curtain of the Hess mission. We warn the people against the upper class reactionaries . . . who will seek by every means to reach an understanding with Hitler.’ The Party had ‘no confidence in the present government, dominated by Tory friends of fascism and coalition Labour leaders’ and demanded ‘a people’s government, a people’s victory over fascism and a people’s peace’.3 According to Pollitt, at an emergency PB that day he had headed a minority calling for unconditional support for the Churchill government, but had been overruled by a Dutt-led majority.4 For Dutt the new situation suggested the possibility of revolutionary advance. Though the primary question was the defence of the Soviet Union, Dutt now envisaged a final, apocalyptic battle between capitalism and socialism. His intention was clearly that the Party should launch a new campaign for a People’s Government. A Manifesto for a campaign drafted for discussion at the next CC argued that the ‘present conflict opens up a new world situation. In the long range it opens up a new perspective of the world

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revolution, but at the present stage it is of the utmost importance to concentrate on the present concrete issue – the defence of the people against fascist enslavement’. 5 An initial circular to the membership warned, despite Churchill’s speech in the Commons pledging support for the Soviet Union, that collaboration between the two countries was ‘still limited. The British imperialists hope that both Germany and the Soviet Union will be weakened as a result of the war, and that it will be possible later to crush the Soviet Union and to establish British domination in Europe.’6 Not all the Party’s leaders were as confident as Dutt of what the new situation in the war required. After Churchill’s speech, Gallacher was asked by a Labour MP if the CP would now ‘join the labour movement in this country in throwing their whole energy into the efforts of the nation to win the war.’ Gallacher replied that he ‘must ask for notice of that question’.7 Shortly afterwards, one reporter claimed to have been speaking to CP leaders, but they had ‘all taken a vow of silence’. Investigation had ‘revealed a deplorable state of disorder. Only one command has been issued from the inner headquarters . . . hold everything’.8 But by the 26th the Comintern had effectively endorsed Pollitt’s stance. A telegram to King Street stated that the CP’s ‘attacks on Churchill . . . are not correct . . . To demand the replacement of the Churchill government by a Peoples’ government means to bring grist to the mill of pro-Hitler and anti-Soviet elements.’ 9 On the same day Gallacher and Pollitt were ostentatiously used to make a shift in line. Gallacher told a press conference that ‘when there is an attack against the vanguard of the working class the working classes in every country must unite.’ Pollitt addressed a rally of 8,000 people and pointedly did not call for a Peoples’ government.10 In a pamphlet issued that day he again failed to demand a People’s Government but did call for the dismissal of pro-fascist elements from the government.11 This was to be the tack followed by the CP in this phase of the war. The government was generally supported and sometimes criticised. Setbacks in the war and the government’s tardiness in supporting its Soviet ally was attributed to the baleful influence of the ‘Men of Munich’, such men as Halifax and Hoare. The CC met on the 4th July. It re-instated Pollitt as General Secretary and issued a manifesto which made it abundantly clear that the overriding issues for the CP were the defence of the Soviet Union and the British nation against Germany. ‘Today’, the Party declared, ‘the cause of freedom of all peoples against the Fascist aims of world conquest requires the victory of the British, American and Soviet peoples in unity with the peoples of all countries against German fascism’. As in the later days of the Popular Front,

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fascism was portrayed as the enemy of all that was decent, humane and progressive, no longer as a reaction of monopoly capital to the revolutionary strivings of the working class. Thus the Red Army was fighting not just to defend the Soviet Union but ‘for the freedom of all peoples, including the German people, against the foul creed of Fascism, which seeks to destroy everything that is democratic and progressive throughout the world.’ But this was to be no reprise of the Popular Front. The demands advanced were significantly different from those made on the 22nd June. The first demand in both manifestos was for solidarity with the Soviet Union, but the second manifesto no longer referred to the ‘socialist’ Soviet Union. The final two demands of the 22nd, for a ‘People’s Government’ and for ‘a People’s victory . . . and a People’s peace’, were dropped. The demands made on the 4th July were, in full: 1. Full co-operation with the Soviet Union through a pact of alliance on the basis of mutual aid. 2. Expose the friends of Fascism and clear them out of all government posts. 3. Organise production for victory, end waste and disorganisation; ensure equal distribution of food supplies; give adequate air raid protection. 4. Mobilise the entire people for victory through the fullest democratic activity and initiative.12 The absence of any demands for reform in the interests of the working class make it quite plain that the Party leadership was determined that class questions were to be firmly subordinated to a perceived common national interest. The Party’s general attitude throughout the war was that though the core of the national front against fascism had to be the organised labour movement, the fight against fascism was nevertheless a matter which transcended class interest, it was the common interest of all humanity. But of course there was not a common interest. The British government’s war aims were not the same as those of the CP. The government wished merely to defend the British national interest. The CP had wider aims. It wished to defend the British nation, but its definition of the national interest was not the same as the government’s. For the CP, the interests of the nation were inextricably linked up with allying with the progressive forces in the world, principally the Soviet Union, in defeating fascism and then building socialism. The CP also wanted there to be progress towards colonial freedom in the Empire, as an end itself and also as a means of winning the support of the

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colonial peoples for the British war effort. The fundamental incompatibility of government and CP aims had scarcely been discussed by the CP (perhaps because to do so would open the can of worms that was Comintern policy). The government was more canny: the question of war aims had become an issue around the time of Dunkirk, when the matter of post-war reform achieved some prominence. It was around then that the idea of ‘never again’, that this time, unlike after the First World War, the working class should get some palpable reward for supporting the British war effort began to be widely mooted.13 But until the turning point of the allied victories at El Alamein and Stalingrad, the Party refused to consider at all questions of post-war reform and criticised discussion of such matters as diversionary and as possible threats to national unity. In September, for instance, Dutt warned of ‘the gravity of a situation in which the Soviet Union is left to face alone the brunt of the entire military machine of the Nazis, while the statesmen and commanders in the West placidly discuss the future campaigns of 1942 and 1943 and their post-war aims’.14 The general tone for CP propaganda and practice was set by an article from Communist International reproduced in World News and Views: It is necessary, by destroying the Hitler despotism, to save democracy and the freedom of mankind. It is necessary to save human dignity, human civilisation, human culture from a stream of unexampled barbarism. Unless Hitlerism is rooted out, there is not, nor can there be any social, political or cultural progress at all for the people. Therefore the rooting out of Hitlerism is the pressing decisive task for all people, and everything is subordinated to this task.15 It would not be true to say that the CP became indifferent to the class question. Quite the contrary: at the tactical level the Party did, as we shall see, attempt to defend the working class against the government and against unscrupulous employers within limits set by its commitment to maintaining a national front of all classes. More fundamentally, winning the war was regarded by the Party as of immense strategic importance: the loss of the socialist Soviet Union would be a devastating blow to the international working class whilst a German victory over Britain would set the cause of the British working class immeasurably backwards. While noting the patriotic tone and fervour of much of CP discourse in this phase of the war, we should not assume that the Party had abandoned its socialist objectives: these surfaced very rapidly, albeit briefly and in a thoroughly reformist way, after El Alamein.

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Though Dutt endorsed the new line in World News and Views later that month,16 he was probably unconvinced, as we shall see later. Whatever his private reservations, Dutt bent his back to the task of proving that not only was the Communist Party right, it had always been right. In August’s Notes of the Month he answered the Party’s critics, who had been quick to denounce yet another abrupt change of line. Those opposed to the CP ‘would accuse the thermometer of being inconsistent because it registers hot in the summer and cool in winter’. The CP’s line’s had been marked, not by the ‘somersaults’ which the critics accused the Party of, but by appropriate responses to changing situations. In the 1939–41 period of the war ‘the dominant profascist imperialists in Britain and France who entered the war . . . still stood for the same basic reactionary aims which they had pursued through Munich.’ In the summer of 1940 the Churchill faction of the ruling class had gained the ascendancy, but while they opposed Hitler, their aims ‘were still the aims of imperialist war against a rival imperialism, and not of a people’s war against Fascism. They saw the war as a continuation of the war of 1914.’ But now this faction of the British imperialists were compelled to ally with the Soviet Union, they were unable to defeat Germany alone. Accordingly, the war had become a ‘just war for the liberation of the peoples against German fascism’.17 Dutt’s arguments should not be dismissed out of hand. Despite the sophistries frequently deployed, there had been an inner consistency to the CP’s line. Firstly, there had been the overriding imperative to defend the Soviet Union. Secondly, its defence of liberal democracy against fascism. Thirdly, its defence of the British nation. The abrupt changes of position had arisen when these different strands of its politics could not be reconciled, notably in the 1939–41 period of the war. After June 1941, or so it seemed to the CP, the party could harmoniously promote all three objectives. Moreover, progress in the war would enable the Party to begin to fight also for those socialist objectives which had been placed in abeyance since 1935. Though the Party had little to say about these objectives at this stage of the war, Dutt, and, no doubt, the rest of the leadership, had them very much in mind. For Dutt, the future, strategically, was red, even if the tactical difficulties were great: In the broadest historical sense the avenues of escape are narrowing for world imperialism . . . The forces on our side are growing in strength . . . But in terms of immediate power the balance is still overwhelmingly on the side of imperialism. Therefore the present period requires, more than ever before in the history of the working class

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movement, the utmost skill of leadership, tactical speed, elasticity, boldness of initiative and ability to manoeuvre . . . to secure at each point the most favourable combinations of forces at the given movement from the standpoint of the interests of the working class and the future of human liberation.18 The national front was then a necessary detour on the road to the ultimate objective, the seizure of power and the building of socialism. In this respect, the national front was a reprise of the Popular Front. But prior to 1941, however reformist and chauvinist its objectives, the Party remained committed to the rhetoric and practice of class struggle. An alliance between the proletariat and the ‘progressive’ sections of the bourgeoisie could only come about through sharp struggle between the classes. In the dialectic between unity and struggle, struggle was in the forefront; after 1941, unity. A People’s or Labour government was now no longer regarded as the prerequisite for supporting the defence of the nation. Certainly, the existing government should be criticised for any tardiness in fighting the war, any back-tracking in its commitment to alliance with the Soviet Union, but nothing should be allowed to undermine the basic class alliance of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The Party would fight all those, of whatever class or political hue, who opposed or undermined the united front. A fundamental problem for the CP now was that significant sections of the working class and the people in general were not prepared to subordinate their sectional interests to the degree that the CP thought necessary. The increasing propensity in the war years for workers to strike indicates that even if most workers supported the war, there was a definite limit to the sacrifices that some of them were prepared to make. Though Steven Fielding has argued that ‘most of industry remained essentially peaceful’,19 it could equally be argued that in the ideological and political climate of the time it was quite remarkable just how many strikes there were and that the absence of strikes does not necessarily indicate industrial peace. We shall see some examples of industrial unrest later in this chapter. Quite apart from industrial matters, contemporary accounts, notably Mass Observation, chronicled constant grumbling concerning such matters as Air Raid Precautions (ARP) and rationing.20 These currents of unrest presented an acute dilemma for the CP. In the 1930s it had built up not inconsiderable support among workers through its work in industry, in tenants associations and so forth. How was this following to be maintained in war-time conditions of class alliance? This is

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not to suggest that the Party’s basic pro-war stance was unpopular. Indeed its huge growth in membership during the war offers pretty incontrovertible evidence that the contrary was the case. But the Party had now to balance contending sentiments among the working class and formulate policies which would both motivate workers to fight for the war effort and at the same time not alienate them by indifference to the particular class interests of the workers. The Party’s eventual solution was to argue for limited reform and to articulate grievances, and sometimes to try to redress them, but to oppose all attempts to create mass movements out of popular opposition to the government’s domestic policies. But if the CP was now prepared to give full support to the war effort, the government remained highly suspicious of the Party. Its refusal, for over a year, to rescind the ban on the Daily Worker was the most obvious manifestation of the government’s wariness of the Party. Though the CP had endeavoured since the paper had been banned to gain the widest possible support for its campaign to end the ban by stressing its anti-democratic nature,21 it had also placed its campaign in the context of the struggle for socialism. Rust had been emphatic that ‘democracy . . . provides the best conditions for the advance and organisation of the working class in order to end capitalism’22 but after June 1941, little was heard of this theme. Immediately after Churchill’s Commons speech in support of the Soviet Union, J.B.S. Haldane, the chairman of the editorial board, sent a telegram to the Premier asking him ‘in view of [his] statement’ to ‘consider immediate withdrawal of [the] order suppressing’ the Worker. The telegram drew no response.23 But the Party’s fervent support for the war effort and the rapid emergence of pro-Soviet sentiments combined to promote support from some unlikely quarters. The management at Napier’s works ‘gave full support’ to a meeting called at the factory to discuss the ban. The former Labour Home Secretary, J.R. Clynes, who, as the CP dryly commented, had ‘certainly never at any time shown communist sympathies’, gave his support.24 But the Cabinet was unmoved. The support of Labour’s Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary and thus responsible for press regulation, was vital if the ban was to be lifted. Any hopes that Morrison would be swayed by popular calls for an end to the ban were quickly dashed. In early July Morrison responded to the request of a Conservative MP that the ban be lifted, in order that the Party be able to make its position clear, with the contemptuous remark that ‘the gratification of curiosity is not a sufficient reason for revoking the order suppressing the Daily Worker’.25 Rust reassured the government that ‘if the Daily Worker is allowed to reappear, it will

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vigorously campaign, above all in the factories, where its influence is greatest, for the greatest possible effort to be made and the widest possible unity to be achieved, in the fight to defeat and crush the Nazis’. Morrison proved impervious to this suggestion that the Party could deliver the support of large numbers of industrial militants for the war effort, and was not swayed at all by the presentation in August to parliament of a petition signed by one and a half million people.26 SIC minutes reveal its deep suspicion of the CP and an awareness of divisions. In July 1941 SIC’s opinion was that Pollitt was ‘genuinely anxious to assist in winning the war and for the time being to drop the war on capitalism’. Dutt on the other hand was said to be ‘afraid that Pollitt was becoming too co-operative and was likely to continue support for the doctrine of class hatred’. SIC believed that Dutt’s line was likely to win and this, presumably, was the government’s principal motive in refusing to lift the ban on the Worker.27 In November a SIC memorandum to Churchill argued that the ‘aim of the CPGB in trying to get the ban removed is also one ordered by the Komintern, [sic] namely, to write propaganda articles intended to persuade the British public that successful Russian resistance is only due to the fact that all Russians are perfect Communists’. In a marginal note Churchill argued that ‘these are very good reasons for keeping the ban on the Daily Worker’.28 It is hardly surprising, in the circumstances of 1941, that the government should be highly dubious of the Party’s sincerity. The Party might proclaim its support for the war, but the Cabinet was not convinced. By August 1942 the Party had demonstrated in practice its fervent support for the war and the ban was then lifted. What the CP’s fortunes would have been had Dutt’s case for a ‘war on two fronts’ line prevailed, it is impossible to say. But after the Comintern’s intervention the Party proceeded extremely cautiously. In this early stage of the Anglo-Soviet alliance the CP fought for national unity in an extremely inflexible fashion. The Party moved quickly to show its support for the ‘political truce’ by withdrawing the CP candidate for the forthcoming byelection at Greenock. This, the Party announced, was in ‘in order that the whole people of Greenock and the whole people of Britain shall be able to single-mindedly concentrate on doing everything in their power to achieve the joint victory of the peoples of Britain and the Soviet Union’.29 Within a month or so the Party made it plain that it would oppose strikes. We shall see that the CP’s policy of national unity came to be applied in a more flexible fashion as the war progressed, but on this basic policy of it made no compromises. It fought tenaciously for it in the Labour Movement, among industrial activists in particular.

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The Communist Party and the Labour Movement The CP’s initial stress on national unity was such that the question of labour movement unity, always regarded by the Party until then as essential to the success of its strategy, was not addressed at all. It may well have believed, after the government’s early statements of support for the Soviet Union and the conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance in July, that the Second Front in Europe would soon be opened. But it was not. In the Autumn the leadership decided that the Party needed to pay greater attention to the wider labour movement. Prompted by Labour Party moves against the Anglo-Soviet solidarity movement, the CP mounted a campaign against bans and proscriptions against Communists.30 Later, it mounted yet another campaign to affiliate to Labour. The leadership also became much concerned by oppositional currents in the labour movement. Trotskyists were particular causes for concern, as were mavericks who broke the ‘political truce’. These were venomously denounced. The Party also had to deal with some internal opponents of the new line, but these were few in number and easily defeated. A bigger, unanticipated and pleasant problem for the Party was a huge influx of new members. In November 1941, when the Wehrmacht seemed poised to capture Moscow, ‘this moment of acute peril to Britain and the Soviet Union’, the leadership wrote to labour movement organisations to urge them to fight for the lifting of ‘all present bans and proscriptions’ on Labour activists taking part in Anglo-Soviet Solidarity Committees’, arguing that ‘such action would cement the unity of the British and Soviet people. It would strengthen national unity behind the government, weaken the influence of the Men of Munich, and help remove social injustices and legitimate grievances that at present prevent an all-round increase in production and the effective use of all available man-power’.31 But this appeal over the heads of the leadership illustrates a fundamental dilemma for the Party. The right-wing leadership of the labour movement was hardly likely to respond to overtures from the Party. Yet the natural allies of the CP, the Labour left, could only be repelled by the slavishly progovernment policies of the Party, particularly its steadfast opposition to strikes and its vicious denunciations of those on the left who broke the ‘political truce’ A few examples give some flavour of the vituperation heaped by the CP on such people. The ILP candidate standing in the Conservative-held seat of Edinburgh Central in December 1941 was attacked in a handbill for associating with ‘Trotskyists who were publicly convicted of acting as

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Hitler’s agents in every country in the world’, a reference, presumably, to the verdicts of the Moscow trials of the late 1930s.32 At the Cardiff East byelection of April 1942 the ILP’s candidate was said to be standing ‘at a time when all energies should be devoted to the achievement of the greatest possible unity to defeat Hitler’. A YCL meeting held during the by-election was informed that ‘there are some elements . . . using the words of socialism for fascist reasons. That rat Laval and that rat Maxton’.33 ILP candidates in by-elections in 1941–2 routinely gained twenty to thirty per cent of the vote, a figure which, as Angus Calder has pointed out, suggests significant numbers of Labour Party supporters voting for the ILP in protest at the ‘political truce’, rather than large-scale support for the ILP’s pacifist stance on the war. 34 The CP’s attitude to ILP candidates was not one calculated to attract this constituency. Tribune probably articulated the disgust of most labour movement activists towards CP propaganda during by-elections: ‘we remember a time when every socialist who was not a member of the Communist Party was ‘Social Fascist’ . . . are they now really going to brand every Labour critic of Churchill a ‘Fifth Columnist?’35 The question of labour movement unity was the subject of CP-inspired resolutions at the Labour Party Annual Conference in London on 25th–28th May 1942. It was presumably not a coincidence that the CP’s National Conference (no Congress was held that year) was also in London on the 23rd– 24th May. Much lobbying must have gone on in the bars and boarding houses where delegates met. But to no avail. Though some delegates to Labour’s Conference expressed support for the CP’s call for unity (one remarked that in view of Atlee’s co-operation with Churchill he could not understand why there was ‘still no co-operation with the [Communist] Party’) rather more stated their hostility. One such noted that though he did ‘not like to associate with the Tories . . . Harry Pollitt does’. The resolution on unity was lost and a resolution on maintaining the ‘political truce’ scraped through by only 66,000 votes. The Conference did however vote by a large margin that the ban on the Daily Worker be rescinded.36 The CP’s campaign to end the ban on the paper had attracted considerable support from the labour movement. Given the vote on unity at Labour’s Conference, it is probable that this support was mainly given on liberal democratic grounds, rather than out of any great sympathy for the CP. Certainly that was the general tone of correspondence in Tribune, which published dozens of letter on the matter, including an open letter from the Labour MP George Strauss to Herbert Morrison.37 Most of these correspondents expressed distrust and even contempt for the CP. An

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opponent of lifting the ban noted that ‘being free of that dirty, crooked paper for a while makes me see what a pest it would be to have it back again’.38 Morrison was still opposed to ending the ban. He wrote to the Labour Party Secretary shortly after Labour’s Conference to argue that it was ‘not unreasonable for the government to be cautious in considering permission to publish the ‘Daily Worker’ in view of the variations and uncertainties of the [CP’s] attitude’.39 But the CP was greatly heartened by the vote at the Conference and began to organise to ensure that a similar resolution be passed at the TUC’s forthcoming conference. Opinion within the government was in any case changing. In August, shortly before the TUC Conference, a memorandum from Morrison to the War Cabinet noted that since July 1941 ‘the new policy has been consistently followed . . . There is no doubt that the present policy of the Party is to do all they can to stimulate and advance the war effort’. Though he also noted that the Party had ‘not in any way abandoned its revolutionary aims’, Morrison now recommended that the ban on the Worker be lifted.40 Shortly afterwards it was. To what extent Morrison was swayed by the CP’s campaign it is hard to say. It seems more likely that once convinced of the Party’s sincerity the government decided that the Worker could be a useful weapon in the war effort. Though the available evidence suggests that most members of the CP had few qualms in supporting the leadership, it is clear from several circulars issued in the first few weeks after June 1941 that a minority of members shared Dutt’s reservations regarding the concrete application of the policy of national unity and that some were opposed to the policy. But the fact that the leadership was able to reassure doubters and quell opponents without an open struggle suggests that these were few in number. This is not particularly surprising, given that the vast majority of the membership had been recruited since the Seventh Congress of the Comintern and had been weaned on the Party’s pre-war anti-fascist and patriotic rhetoric. But members with memories longer than the latest line no doubt recalled that the Party had consistently labelled the government a pro-fascist government. According to Ernie Trory, then a Party organiser in Sussex, it ‘had difficulties with some of its members regarding support for the Churchill government’.41 It was presumably such members that the leadership had in mind when early in July it complained that ‘doubts are still being voiced that can give the impression that there is disappointment that the Churchill government has not lined up with Hitler against the Soviet Union in order to prove some theoretical point about the only line of British imperialism being to effect a switch of the war against the Soviet Union.’ Clearly, some members doubted whether the leopard could change his spots and were pointing to the long

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reactionary record of British governments. ‘What does it matter’, the leadership asked the rank-and-file, ‘that twelve Communists were in prison in 1926, while Churchill was editing the British Gazette. These are insignificant things that have no place in the titanic events of the present time.’42 Shortly afterwards, a further circular noted that there was ‘still a large measure of hesitancy in the Party in regard to supporting the Churchill government’ and complained that not enough was being done by the branches to fight for national unity.43 When interviewed by the author, no Party veterans recalled encountering oppositional elements. Len Hanley had heard of some ‘in London’, but could remember none in Manchester. 44 But there is some evidence in the voluminous files on Trotskyism in the Party archive that there was opposition in quite a few parts of the country. A report to the Party centre in 1942 noted that the line of the Trotskyists was ‘almost indistinguishable’ from that of ‘leftists’ in the Party, ‘particularly of the leftists who have been associated with the Party for some considerable time’. Another report informed the leadership of ‘a number of cases of toleration of Trotskyists due to a certain leftist sympathy with them’. A list of 8 members expelled in London was appended. As late as 1943 a report recommended that ‘a much sharper attitude must be taken to habitual ‘leftists’, professional doubters and sceptics and the dilettante and demoralised elements in the Party who form circles easily permeable by the Trotskyists’. It was further recommended that ‘special attention [be paid] to certain branches and factories to be named by the DPC on the basis of our information. The sub-DPCs to undertake responsibility for opening up the struggle.’45 Evidently then, there were a number of communists, veterans in particular, who could not stomach the new line.46 But by dint of education, persuasion and expulsion the leadership managed to assuage whatever doubts the majority of the membership may have had concerning either the pro-war line of the Party or the anti-fascist credentials of Churchill and his government. The few dissidents seem not to have gained much support. In PB circulars there is no suggestion of substantial dissent. The only occasion on which relatively large-scale opposition to the leadership emerged was, as we shall see, late in 1945 but by that time opposition was expressed within the context of general support for the war-time policy of national unity. The leadership’s determination to maintain the ‘political truce’ does though appear to have stirred up some unease within the Party. Two byelections in particular, Wallasey and Rugby, both held in April 1942, caused resentment among the rank-and-file. They came shortly after the Grantham by-election, at which the CP had supported the losing Conservative.

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Grantham was the first of a long series of by-elections at which government candidates lost, reflecting popular dissatisfaction with various aspects of the conduct of the war. The Grantham result must have made many CP members reluctant to uphold the ‘political truce’ at Wallasey and Rugby, especially given the record of the previous incumbents. Wallasey was the former seat of Moore Brabazon, who had become notorious when, as Minister of Aircraft Production, he had expressed the view that it would be best for Britain if Germany and the Soviet Union ‘should seek to destroy each other’.47 But the CP’s members had had to turn out for the Conservative candidate, who flew the red flag over his committee rooms while his Communist supporters bedecked their headquarters in red, white and blue.48 Rugby was the former seat of David Margesson, another ‘notorious Munichite’, and recently sacked from his post as Secretary of War. Here too the Conservative candidate enjoyed the support of the CP. In both cases the antipathy of some Party members to the ‘political truce’ was no doubt heightened when both contests were won resoundingly by maverick independent Labour candidates.49 These matters caused the leadership considerable concern and were discussed at a May meeting of the CC. A reference in a PB circular on the CC meeting to ‘an exchange of opinion regarding the character of the report to be presented to the National Conference’ of the Party later that month suggests that there may well have been a sharp struggle at the meeting. But the Party’s support for the ‘political truce’ was affirmed. The PB advised members that they should be very clear that ‘we will not place ourselves in the position of disrupting national unity by refusing to vote for a government candidate because he happens to be a member of the Conservative Party’. As for the qualms of LP members, ‘painful [as] it is for them to vote for a Tory, it will be far more painful to have fascism victorious, as they would be the first to find out.’50 But the leadership did significantly adjust its policy on by-elections. Though the Party would continue to recommend the government candidate ‘whatever shortcomings may be attached to particular candidates’, it would seek to gain agreement from the other parties to organise selection conferences ‘so that the candidate finally chosen shall be the best representative of national unity it is possible to get’. A letter requesting such an agreement for the forthcoming Llandaff and Barry by-election was sent to the main parties. It, and similar ones later, were ignored.51 The CP’s staunch support for the ‘political truce’ cannot have helped its campaign to affiliate to Labour, launched in December. The campaign was, the leadership made clear to the membership, not to be regarded as a

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temporary expedient in the interests of winning the war, but as one means of achieving the Party’s fundamental aims: affiliation would ‘strengthen the pre-requisites for the victory over fascism, for a people’s peace and a real solution of the economic, political and social problems that peace will inevitably bring’.52 Needless to say, the right-wing leadership of the labour movement fought hard against the CP’s campaign. But even those in the labour movement who might in normal times have responded to the CP’s campaign, the Labour left, were precisely those who were, as we have seen, repelled by the CP’s support for the ‘political truce’. As Tribune argued, ‘normally’ the left would support the CP’s campaign to affiliate, ‘but now the membership will hesitate. Surely the Right Wing of the Labour Party needs no reinforcement with a Conservative Communist Party wing?’53 The CP’s membership of the Comintern was a major obstacle to unity with Labour. Its dissolution in May 1943, shortly before the LP’s June Conference, was therefore most timely for the affiliation campaign. A PB circular emphasised the implications of the dissolution for the campaign: it would ‘facilitate the advance to unity of the labour movement within each country’ and the ‘[affiliation] campaign in these final weeks before the Labour Party Conference’.54 But the dissolution of the Comintern probably made little difference. The support of a large number of labour movement organisations for affiliation proved insufficient to significantly affect the vote.55 If the Party’s policy of national unity caused disquiet among some of the membership and in the wider labour movement, it had begun to prove attractive to other people. By November 1941 the London district had more than doubled its membership to 9,00056 and in 1942 the influx of members into the Party turned into a flood. The leadership was gratified but not satisfied: in March a campaign to win 15,000 new members was launched. Far more than this were recruited: by June the Party had grown to 59,319 members.57 We must assume that few, if any, of these new members joined in order to overthrow the state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. At a branch meeting attended by a Mass Observation correspondent, one Branch Committee member had only recently defected from the Conservatives.58 Many doubtless joined in fits of patriotic but transient enthusiasm fired by party orators at public meetings. Many years later Harry McShane observed of the new membership that: They had no education in Marxism and the whole character of the Party changed. For the first time we had a predominantly paper membership. Thousands of people filled in membership forms during the huge Second Front meetings . . . but only about one third of them

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ever turned up to branch meetings. The older Party members didn’t take supporting the war to its extremes . . . but the new members did: I remember being on a demonstration where members of the Communist Party were carrying Union Jacks!59 The policy of national unity promoted by both the Labour and Communist Parties meant that those on the left who wished to oppose the government’s policies had to look elsewhere for a political home. This, no doubt, was one reason for the sudden emergence and growth of Sir Richard Acland’s Commonwealth Party. Though Commonwealth was broadly supportive of the war, it was initially denounced by the CP as a divisive and proto-fascist party.60 We have also seen the venom with which the ILP was denounced for breaking the ‘political truce’. But it was the Trotskyists, much smaller in number than the ILP, for whom the CP’s most vicious attacks were reserved. Though small in number, the Trotskyist groups of the time were militant, serious revolutionaries who did attempt to follow a ‘revolutionary defeatist’ line. But the CP’s sensational pamphlets on the Trotskyists suggested or claimed that they were more or less conscious agents of the Nazis.61 Doubtless, the CP had been kept up to scratch on this matter by the NKVD agents who on the eve of war had been sent to Britain to ensure a ‘responsible’ treatment of Trotskyism.62 In the fevered atmosphere of 1942, even Pollitt came under suspicion.63 A lurid CP pamphlet aimed at members of the labour movement proclaimed ‘you’ve heard of the Fifth Column. The Trotskyites are their allies and agents in the ranks of the working class. They are a greater menace than enemy paratroops’. Under the heading ‘These Men are Enemies’, the allegations made at the Moscow trials were rehearsed. The Trotskyists had ‘attempted to assassinate Lenin’ in 1918 and had ‘organised spying for Germany’ inside the Soviet Union ever since 1931. The Trotskyists’ activities were designed to ‘hold up supplies of arms’ to the Soviet Union, to ‘delay and sabotage the Second Front’ and in general aimed at creating the conditions that would ‘lead to a pro-Nazi Government’ in Britain. The Trotskyists were ‘Hitler’s men’ who ‘must be cleared out of every working class organisation in the country’.64 A typical CC circular on this theme demanded that Party members ‘expose the Trotskyists as fascists before the workers so that the workers treat them like Blackshirts’.65 In 1942 Party investigators into Trotskyist and Fascist activities in the universities reported that they ‘made investigations of a preliminary character in thirteen universities . . . and have noted enemy trends or activities in almost all of them’. Most of ‘the individuals concerned’ were

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‘students who are very young and inexperienced, and whose political confusion can be cleared up’. But some of these individuals were deemed to be more sinister characters. A report on the Institute of Statistics in Oxford claimed that there was to be found there ‘a group of very dubious elements who manufacture new theories of a reactionary and near-fascist character’. The leader of the group was one Heipern who ‘according to reliable information was an organised Trotskyist in Austria’. A.L.Rowse, ‘a dangerous individual with a good academic following’, was claimed by the investigator to be an associate of Heipern.66 Information on these academics could quite easily have been gathered by observation and enquiry, but some internal information on Trotskyists was evidently gathered by infiltration or informants. Lists of the names of Trotskyists (including Gerry Healey, later to be leader of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, and the future Labour MP Sidney Bidwell) and minutes of meetings at which they spoke survive in the Party archives. An analysis of the activities of the Worker’s International League (WIL) – which was said to ‘constitute a wing of the Goebbel’s propaganda for a general strike in Britain’ – provided the minutes of a WIL Central Committee meeting and a list of leading members, including Ted Grant, later to acquire fame (or notoriety, according to taste) as the founder of Militant.67 Some of the materials in the archive raise the strong suspicion (no more than that) that the CP passed on information to the authorities. At this desperate stage of the war, particularly given the precedent of the sentences meted out at the Moscow trials of the late 1930s, it would not be surprising if some of the information had been passed on: the Party certainly seems to have had no scruples in giving information on industrial militants to employers.68 An unsigned letter marked ‘urgent’ refers to one ‘Andrew Scott’, a member of the WIL. He had been ‘evading call-up’ but ‘last Friday the police called at his address.’ The WIL was said to be ‘panic-stricken’ and attempting to ‘register him as a conscientious objector’.69 The letter raises several questions. Who sent the letter? A nark or snoop unconnected with the CP? Perhaps, but then why keep it? Could it have been a policeman? Who else, unless the Party maintained a constant watch at Scott’s address, would know that the police had called? Was it a CP infiltrator? Perhaps, but it would have had to have been someone very close to Scott to know that the police had called. Probably the materials were gathered to hand to the authorities. Why not? Party members believed that at least the leaders of these organisations had deliberately chosen to ally with German Fascism against the socialist Soviet Union. As for those who innocently joined these organisations, well, they were, to use the Party jargon, ‘objectively’ on the side of Fascism.

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The Party’s stance on war-time industry demonstrates even more clearly its belief that nothing should stand in the way of defending the Soviet Union and the British nation. One of the prime objectives of CP policy after June 1941 was the maximisation of war production. The Party launched a mass campaign to sweep away all obstacles to increased production at whatever level, from boardroom to shop-floor. For instance, it enthusiastically supported government-inspired Joint Production Committees (JPCs) which sought to bring together management and workers in a joint effort to maximise production. But here only certain aspects of the CP’s industrial policy, those which most illuminate the argument of the present work, will be discussed.70

Tanks for Joe: Industrial Work 1941–45 Nina Fishman has applied the oxymoronic concept of ‘revolutionary pragmatism’ to the CP’s industrial policy in our period.71 Similarly, James Hinton argued that the CP’s production campaign was an expression of an attempt to find a middle way between ‘class collaboration’ and ‘the maintenance of restrictive attitudes to production’.72 Fishman makes the CP’s pragmatism very clear. What was revolutionary about it is hard to discern. Fishman argues that even after June 1941 the Party’s response to strikes remained essentially pragmatic, that it took each case on its merits. There is some truth to this, but much more significant than the leadership’s occasional indulgence to this or that strike is its determination to nip, as far as possible, strikes in the bud and to end strikes as quickly as possible. Fishman herself argues that the leadership ‘distinguished between members who led strikes with the intention of minimising the disruption caused and others who were keen to escalate the conflict with regard to lost production’.73 Quite so. The leadership’s attitude doubtless furthered its objective of supporting the war effort. A completely intransigent attitude to strikes would have alienated members, supporters and workers and thus been counter-productive. Pollitt’s speech at the CP’s National Conference of 1942 epitomised the Party’s industrial policy. There, Pollitt lauded a Hull docker, a Party member, who had refused to join an unofficial strike: ‘What courage, what a sacred spirit of real class consciousness, to walk on the ship’s gangway and resume his job. That is not strike-breaking. That is striking a blow against fascism as vital as any blow a lad in the Red Army is striking at the present time’.74 Though Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson characterise Pollitt’s remarks as a ‘vicious attack upon trade union rights . . . against . . . all

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feelings of class solidarity and the elementary instincts of class consciousness’, 75 Pollitt would no doubt have insisted that many war-time strikes in Britain were expressions of crass economism: to insist on continuing to work was the result of a deeper class consciousness, a recognition that the general interest of the international working class demanded that considerable sacrifices be made by British workers in order to defeat fascism and defend the socialist Soviet Union. The Party’s propaganda was suffused with a deep feeling that it was precisely out of considerations of class interest, the general class interest, that the British working class should eschew the strike weapon. Bornstein and Richardson’s criticism reveals a lack of understanding of their subject, a failure to engage with the subjective world of men like Abe Moffat who put his call to the miners to increase production in the internationalist context of ‘the struggle of 1926, when our Russian Comrades came to our assistance in our struggle to defend our wages and conditions’.76 The CP’s denunciation of the Tyneside ‘total time’ strike of late 1942,77 as ‘a disgrace to all concerned . . . the issue is not worth a day’s struggle in peacetime, let alone in the most critical period of the war’,78 only makes sense in the context of the war on the eastern front. The strike came at the height of the battle of Stalingrad, a factor not mentioned by Bornstein and Richardson in their criticism of the Party’s attack on the strikers.79 The first comprehensive guidance to the membership on the question of industrial matters came in July 1941, in a PB circular which contained subdued echoes of the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the past. Arguing that ‘the job of the British people is to smash Hitler in the West while the Soviet people batter him in the East’, the circular complained that ‘production delays in war industries are a scandal’. The party’s job was to ‘expose those who are responsible for their perpetuation as enemies of the people’. Essential Work Orders (EWOs), which allowed the government to dictate a worker’s place of work and prevent him or her leaving that place of work, were criticised as having ‘caused great resentment’. The PB argued that ‘the right to strike in the last resort remains the indispensable weapon of the workers for defence of their vital interests. There can be no question, therefore, of giving up the right to strike.’ It should however, the Party asserted, be possible to solve problems in the workplace by other means, by ‘negotiations and discussion’.80 Within a very short time the Party leadership was backtracking on the question of strikes, evidently influenced by the CPSU. A special conference on the question of production was held on the 30th July. A circular to the membership on the results of the conference in early August suggests that there had been some disagreements as to how much the Party could ask the

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working class to give up in the interests of the war effort. Some delegates had apparently referred to the ‘bitter experience’ of the past, but, the leadership enjoined the rank-and-file, ‘we cannot live only in the past’. This war was a ‘people’s war’. The membership’s attention was drawn to a ‘recent broadcast’ by the Secretary of the Russian Trade Union Congress expressing his belief that the British people would ‘increase their efforts’. This had ‘a special meaning for Communists’.81 Significantly, no mention was made of the ‘indispensable weapon’ of the right to strike. But the Party leadership experienced some difficulties in persuading its industrial militants of the merits of industrial peace. The engineers dispute at Vickers-Armstrong, Barrow in late 1943 illustrates the problems faced by the CP, its difficulties in this and other cases complicated by Trotskyist involvement.82 The workers at Vickers-Armstrong had the support of local officials and the District Committee (DC) of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU). The appeals of the CP, which turned from entreating to vicious denunciation and smear-mongering when the workers went on strike, were completely ignored. George Crane, the Party’s National Organiser for the AEU claimed that he was threatened with being thrown down the stairs whilst addressing the strike committee.83 True or not, the claim is indicative of the bitterness stirred up by the strike. Within days of the decision by the DC in late August to give the statutory 21 days strike notice, the CP was playing the Trotskyist/5th Columnist card, an aspect of the CP’s activities in this and other disputes completely ignored by Fishman.84 A Worker editorial commented on the global ambitions of the Trotskyists who stood ‘for the defeat of the Soviet Union and its allies, they hate the anti-fascist unity and determination of the Soviet Union. They abhor the disciplined activity of the unions and shop stewards in war industry. And so they seek to influence and prolong every strike, not hesitating to split the unions to gain their ends.’ This last comment referred to the decision of the Huddersfield DC to resign from the AEU in protest at the decision of the AEU’s national leadership, supported by the CP, to suspend the Barrow DC.85 During the course of the strike the Party commented that the strike was ‘arising out of the workers’ claim that the management have failed to implement the last engineering award. The blunt truth is that Barrow has become the cockpit of Trotskyist agitation.’86 The strike was settled after nearly three weeks by a management capitulation that led to pay increases substantially greater than those awarded by the tribunal.87 The CP could not of course now admit that a strike had proven a far more effective weapon in fighting an obdurate management than arbitration. Pat Devine insisted that ‘the strike could have

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been prevented, and an effective remedying of grievances secured if the Barrow trade unionists had found ways and means of utilising the machinery of their unions and brought strong pressure to bear on the Government.’88 In parliament, Gallacher asked if the Ministry of Labour would consider ‘modifications of the Essential Work Order for the purpose of speeding up negotiations and the rapid settlement of grievances’.89 The Party made it quite clear that whatever the workers did, CP members would not go on strike. But the majority of the Barrow membership resigned.90 The CP’s Barrow members were not the only ones who opposed or who had doubts about the Party’s policy on strikes. The Lancashire District leadership doubted if the rank-and-file fully supported the Party’s policy on strikes: there was ‘too much of a tendency to pander to the strikes’. It argued that several strikes in the engineering industry were caused by ‘genuine grievances’ and complained that there had been no ‘clear lead’ by the Party on ‘alternatives to strike action’.91 A similar point was made by the Scottish DPC which complained that the shop steward movement had ‘completely collapsed because of a failure on the part of our Party to give a clear line and leadership to the movement. This is seen in the steadily declining sale of ‘New Propeller’ [an engineering shop stewards’ newspaper] in the area, a 25% reduction in sales being noted over the last quarter.’92 Bert Williams, then a Party shop steward in Manchester, recalled that whilst few Party members thought that strikes were in most cases justified, many also thought that the Party’s intransigent attitude to them was counter-productive. In some cases, they had believed strikes were the appropriate response to managements taking advantage of the war to erode established procedures and conditions.93 But the difficulties of rank-and-file members should not be exaggerated. Given the widespread popular support for the war, many Party members were able, as Nina Fishman has shown, to find some sort of middle way between traditional militancy and crass classcollaborationism. The shop stewards committee at Metro-Vickers in Manchester, led by Hugh Scanlon, succeeded in ‘‘squeezing little bits here and there’ from management after the National Tribunal award.’94 But Party members in factories and pits where workers were determined to strike were in an invidious position that the Party leadership could do little to alleviate. Judged by the increasing levels of industrial unrest in the war-years, the CP’s fight for industrial peace was fruitless. In 1940, 940,000 working days were lost, 1,808,000 in 1943 and 3,714,000 in 1944.95 If we acknowledge, as we should, that this level of industrial militancy is not to be compared with that of the First World War, it is nevertheless noteworthy that the total for 1943 was the highest since 1932.96 It is probably true that most strikes

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were on ‘bread and butter’ issues and were not directed against the war.97 But the number of strikes does suggest that there were a considerable number of workers who were not prepared to give unconditional support to the British war effort. Probably a higher number of workers would have been prepared to strike had it not been for the ideological climate of the time, the opposition of the trade union hierarchy and the possibility of arrest and imprisonment under the provisions of Order 1305.98 In the winter of 1943–44, the winter of the ‘coal crisis’, the CP was to become especially concerned with the situation in the mining industry. The mines were of course a key sector of an economy still mainly reliant on steam-power. The CP was therefore very keen that the miners should play their part in the war effort to the utmost. But in the early months of 1944 a combination of falling production and rising militancy was seriously threatening preparations for the invasion of France.99 The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain’s (MFGB) view for some time had been that only nationalisation could solve the intractable problems of coal production.100 During the ‘coal crisis’ there were renewed demands, not just on the left, that the war-time system of ‘dual control’ be ended by full nationalisation.101 Though Noreen Branson has claimed that ‘throughout, the [CP] argued that the solution to the coal mining problem was nationalisation of the mines’,102 it was not until the ‘coal crisis’ that it supported the miners’ demand for nationalisation. In 1942 Dutt had spelt out the Party’s objections to any such measures. The demand recently raised by some Labour MPs for nationalisation of key sectors of the war economy played ‘into the hands of the reactionaries who are on the eager look-out to resuscitate the ancient controversy and run a nationalisation scare’. Control and planning, not nationalisation, was the answer to production problems.103 In response to the ‘coal crisis’ the Party convened a special conference of District Secretaries and leading activists in the MFGB. Though the conference affirmed the Party’s opposition to nationalisation, it did effectively call for an end to ‘dual control’ by demanding that the government take ‘full financial and operational control’ of the coal industry. The delegates were careful to stress though that this would be a war-time measure only and that the Party did ‘not ask for nationalisation’ at that time.104 Pollitt, who had attended the conference, appraised positively the delegates’ proposals in a report to the Party EC.105 The crisis in the mining industry was heightened by the strikes that followed the ‘Porter Award’ of January 1944.106 Anticipating trouble, Arthur Horner, a CP CC member and leader of the South Wales miners, had in December warned the Miners’ Executive Committee against strike action at

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a time ‘when thousands upon thousands are due to die in the great onslaught on the continent of Europe’.107 Though the CP had supported the miners’ claim, its initial response was that the award should be accepted, as the miners’ National Delegate Conference had decided. The Party hoped that the miners would ‘accept the decision of their National Delegate Conference’ while negotiations were carried out to remove wage anomalies.108 Early signs of trouble in the Lancashire coalfield were greeted with the statement that there was a ‘suspicion’ that the strikes were being ‘deliberately fomented’ by unspecified ‘elements who are out to destroy the prestige of the Miners’ Federation and to impede the successful prosecution of the war.’109 Deepening unrest in February convinced Pollitt that the Party must change tack. In a speech to an International Brigades rally he supported, apparently without prior consultation with his comrades, the clamour which had started for the government to finance the full claim and argued that the government, ‘no doubt under the influence of the coalowners and the millionaires in the coal-using industries, has provided the spark by refusing to provide the finance for an increase to the piece-worker.’110 Pollitt’s speech prompted an angry letter from Idris Cox, the Party’s leading member in South Wales, where there was bitter resentment at the ‘Porter Award’. Cox was ‘extremely disturbed’ by Pollitt’s speech and a leading article in the Worker that had taken up Pollitt’s call. The line now taken by the Worker, could, Cox declared, ‘only inflame the unrest which now exists’.111 The PB replied that the Worker article and Pollitt’s speech had prevented a ‘serious dislocation of coal production’, rather overestimating the influence of the Party.112 At its February meeting, the EC decided that the situation in the coalfields was so serious that its opposition to the call for nationalisation must be abandoned. The meeting also endorsed Pollitt’s stance on the ‘Porter Award’.113 Cox voted against both these decisions and afterwards wrote a furious letter to Pollitt. There were, he complained, tendencies ‘to impose decisions from the top and to stifle discussion on controversial points’. Nationalisation, he argued, would not ‘solve immediate problems in the coal crisis’.114 In reply, the PB argued that nationalisation was now essential: the situation had ‘got to the point in the coalfields’ where nationalisation was ‘the only way to win the whole-hearted confidence of the miners in this critical situation’. As for the charge of undemocratic methods, the decision on the ‘Porter Award’ had not come from the PB but from a meeting of the Party Miners Committee prior to the EC.115 Despite its concessions to rank-and-file sentiment the Party was unable to restrain the miners; as was their union. In February, March and April

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around two hundred thousand miners struck in the Lancashire, South Wales, Yorkshire and Scottish coalfields. The response of the CP was to play the patriotic card, to urge a return to work, pending negotiations over the anomalies created by the ‘Porter Award’, and to press harder its demand that the mines be nationalised. A Worker editorial deplored the strike in South Wales but argued that bad industrial relations were due ‘to starvation wages and harsh conditions’. The ‘removal of the deep-lying causes of [the] unrest requires the removal of coalowners. The miner will give of his best when he is no longer exploited by vested interests. That means the nationalisation of the mines and its operation as a public service in the interests of miners and public alike.’116 Pollitt and Campbell both travelled to South Wales to urge a return to work. In Swansea Pollitt called on the miners to be less ‘selfish’ and chided them that ‘we are so taken up with our own problems that we are getting out of focus with the problems of the armed forces’. Unsurprisingly, both men seem to have received a frosty reception. Even the Worker admitted that they had ‘met with much opposition’.117 In April a pamphlet by Pollitt set out the Party’s case for nationalisation. He was extremely careful to present the case in national, not class terms. After appealing to the miners ‘to spurn provocative actions that result in unnecessary strikes’, he argued that: A position has now been reached, in the paramount coal crisis this country is faced with, where only at our peril dare we any longer refuse to face the only real solution of the problem – the nationalisation of the mining industry . . . the coalowners have wasted the industry’s resources, shamelessly exploited the miners . . . and proved themselves . . . to be the most reactionary and backward of the employing class of Britain.118 Little more was heard of the case for immediate nationalisation once the miners began to return to work after the government decided in April to fund the miners’ full claim. But the Party’s opposition to strikes hardened as more and more workers struck. As the miners were returning, engineering apprentices on the Clyde, the Tyne and in Huddersfield came out on strike. The rumours that Trotskyists were behind the wave of industrial unrest became much louder. Though Trotskyists were involved in these events, their role was probably peripheral.119 Though Party leaders believed that grievances rather than agitation were behind nearly all strikes, and probably knew that this was so in the case of the apprentices’ strike, they found it

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expedient to fall in behind the prevailing hysteria. A headline in the Worker ran ‘lads duped to aid Trotskyist and ILP anti-war campaign’.120 After police raids on Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) premises in Wallsend and London (the WIL had now merged with another Trotskyist organisation to form the RCP) the Worker commented that a ‘nation at war with a deadly Fascist enemy is entitled to protect itself from action that would imperil its victory. The Government is therefore fully justified to take action to bring the present reckless and unnecessary strike action to an end.’121 This, presumably, is why the CP offered no criticism of the arrest and imprisonment in July of Jock Haston, the leader of the RCP, and three of his comrades. These events were reported without comment in the Worker.122 It is worth reiterating that in the CP’s view, strikes were inimical to the most fundamental interests of the working class. They sapped Britain’s defensive capability, jeopardised national unity and threatened to delay a British invasion of France, the main way that Britain could render assistance to the Soviet Union. But it was not strikes that for three years delayed the invasion. The Party’s support for the government was to be sorely tested by its tardiness in opening the Second Front. It also offered stern criticism of the government’s colonial policy, especially its policy towards India.

Second Front Now! The Campaign to Open a Second Front in Europe The CP’s campaign had two phases. It first fought for a firm Anglo-Soviet alliance. When this appeared to have been effected in mid-July, it then attempted to win mass support for the Second Front. For the CP the Second Front meant an invasion of France: nothing less would do. Its campaign was highly effective in mobilising public opinion but had no effect on the government. On more than one occasion the Party stepped down a gear in the belief that the Second Front was to be opened, only to have to try to relaunch the campaign as its hopes were dashed. Even so, the policy of national unity was resolutely maintained. Rather than directly attack the government, it almost invariably blamed the influence of the ‘Men of Munich’ for the failure to open the Second Front. On being reinstalled as Party leader Pollitt demanded that the government seal its initial declaration of support for the Soviet Union with a formal pact of alliance.123 Party activists began the usual round of pavementchalking, resolution-passing, petition-gathering, factory-gate meetings and deputations. Edinburgh Trades Council passed a resolution pledging full support to the Soviet Union, whilst five shop stewards from ‘an aviation

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factory’ went to see the Soviet ambassador, Maisky, to deliver the same message. Resolutions on this theme were passed by numerous trade union organisations, including the familiar railwaymen, engineers and miners, but also the much less familiar Association of Architects, Surveyors and Technical Assistants, who were ‘determined to do all in our power to forge weapons for the victory and common cause of the Soviet and British peoples.’124 When the British-Soviet Pact of Mutual Aid was signed in Moscow by Stafford Cripps and Molotov on the 12th July, the Party’s attentions turned to creating pro-Soviet public opinion for the opening of a Second Front. In late August Pollitt called for the more-or-less immediate opening of a Second Front: ‘the most urgent need of the moment is the creation of a Second Front in the West and the despatch of fighter planes, bombers and tanks to Russia . . . if it is not created it will mean death for millions.’125 Though the campaign was unrewarded, the Party had considerable success in helping to create a climate of opinion favourable to the Soviet Union. Hewlet-Johnson, the famous fellow-travelling ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury, assured those attending the Whist and Bridge drives organised during the British-Soviet Campaign Week in Aberdeen in December that Stalin was not the bogey-man of legend: ‘a passionate assertion of atheism no more means that a man is fundamentally irreligious from a Christian point of view than a passionate profession of belief in God necessarily stamps a man as really religious. Much depends on the meaning we attach to the words religion and God.’ Beatrice Webb reassured those worried by the charge that Stalin was a dictator that he was the ‘General Secretary of the Communist Party in which office . . . he does no more than carry out the decisions of the Central Committee.’126 But much more significant was the participation of people who in normal times would have been most unlikely to have worked with the Party. A ‘service of intercession for the USSR’ was held by the Vicar of Feltham. During an Anglo-Soviet solidarity week in October 1941, Party members in Windsor prevailed upon the Conservative Club to stage a production by the Unity Theatre of a Soviet play, on clergy to mention the Soviet Union in their Sunday sermons and on the Rotary Club to arrange a meeting on the Second Front.127 In Hayes, Party members were instrumental in organising a civic procession in support of the Soviet Union, with ‘Home Guard, Civil Defence, St. John’s Ambulance Brigade, Special Constables, Church Lads Brigade, etc.’.128 In January 1942 the pages of Labour Monthly were graced by the Bishop of Chelmsford, who in time-honoured fashion noted that God was on the side of the Allies: ‘the first point to grasp firmly is that

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circumstances have thrown our nation and Russia into one another’s arms. Writing as a Christian, I would say God has done this!’129 To many members of the labour movement, of greater import even than the support of God would have been that of Arthur Deakin, the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). Deakin chaired a delegate conference, attended by such veterans of the movement as Ben Tillett and Will Thorne, which heard speakers from the Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Committee. The Chairman of the Kirov works in Leningrad ‘told the magnificent story of production in besieged, bombed, shelled Leningrad, where we long ago gave up the pre-war rate of production, so that 200% is about normal and 500% not unusual’.130 Though Deakin attended the conference under the auspices of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, not a proscribed organisation, his presence, and similar activities by other labour movement leaders, could only have stimulated the co-operation which had begun to be built between Communist and Labour activists. Labour Party Conference resolutions notwithstanding, those in the labour movement disgusted by the CP’s line on national unity were quite likely to have been outnumbered by those who were sympathetic. Though the Party press contained, from time to time, reports of labour movement organisations prohibiting their members from working with CP members, these were outnumbered by reports of grass-roots co-operation. In St. Pancras, for instance, the Labour Mayor ‘took the lead’ in forming a Committee ‘which has already carried out a gigantic demonstration, bringing in every section of the civil and military population of the borough . . . On the platform . . . were Labour, Conservative and Communist speakers’.131 Public opinion was one thing; action by the government another. In response to Churchill’s statement in the House of Commons on 6 September 1941 that there was no immediate prospect of a Second Front being opened the Party organised a huge demonstration. Pollitt told those attending that Churchill’s speech had ‘revealed complacency right in the centre of the Government’.132 By the end of September, convoys of war materials had begun to sail for Russia, but for the CP nothing less than the Second Front would do. The CP was however clearly reluctant to attack the government directly. Churchill’s tenure of the Premiership was not secure in this early phase of the war. In 1942, after reverses in Africa and the Far East, he and his circle were to become the target of conspiracies from the right of the Conservative Party.133 These intrigues were not a matter of public knowledge, but it is likely that the inner leadership of the CP were aware of them. Churchill, the CP could very likely have calculated, was the best Prime Minister they were

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likely to get. Moreover, to have attacked the government as a whole would have made it very difficult to maintain the support of the rank-and-file for the policy of national unity. Who then could be blamed for failing to open the Second Front? Thus the influence of the ‘Men of Munich’ was blamed for government inactivity in the Party press and internal circulars. The release in October of Lord Gort’s report on the debacle at Dunkirk was, according to the PB, done only to ‘stifle’ the demand for a Second Front. And in any event why had those responsible for the defeat of the BEF not been ‘dismissed, sent to prison or shot?’ ‘The whole political situation . . . now raises in the sharpest fashion the need for all aid to Russia, a Second Front, a strengthening of the Government, and especially the immediate clearing out of the Men of Munich.’ Hoare, Baldwin and Halifax were condemned and the Daily Telegraph denounced as their mouthpiece which ‘day after day puts forward the policy of the Men of Munich.’134 It is also possible that the policy of attacking ‘Munichites’ rather than the government as a whole was a compromise between the different lines favoured by Dutt and Pollitt. In the Summer and Autumn of 1941 Dutt was labouring on The Crisis of the British People. This work was fated not to appear, but a copy of the Preface survives in Dutt’s papers. The general tone of the proposed book suggests that Dutt was still in favour of a ‘war on two fronts’ line, witness the opening lines: ‘The title ‘The Crisis of the British People’ was first used by the author in June, 1940, to describe the grave and menacing situation to which the crimes and follies of their rulers over many years had brought the people of this country.’135 It may be that Dutt tried to relaunch the People’s Convention in an attempt to shift Party policy leftwards. As we saw in the last chapter, a decision to recall the Convention had been taken in the Spring, after British military reversals in the Balkans. The original objective of the Convention – forming a People’s Government – was quite incompatible with the CP’s post-Barbarossa policy of unconditional support for the government. A National Emergency Assembly of the Convention had therefore been held in London on July 5th 1941. Given the majority line, the logical move would have been to have dissolved the Convention. But though a decision was taken that it would not be recalled, the Convention continued to lead a shadowy existence. Such die-hards as D.N. Pritt, the fellow-travelling KC, issued the odd pamphlet in the name of the Convention,136 though it was hardly mentioned in the Party press. But shortly after the German capture of Kiev, a pointed article in Dutt’s Labour Monthly noted that after the attack on the Soviet Union ‘there were people

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who imagined that there was now no more work for the Convention to do. Facts quickly proved the absurdity of this position.’ A Convention rally was to be held in London in November.137 A week later it was reported that the National Committee had met.138 A manifesto drawn up by the Committee noted that it was ‘vital’ that the ‘decisions of the Moscow Conference should be carried into reality without any delay or hindrance’.139 The ‘decisions’ in question were those made in Moscow on the 1st October that the British and US governments would supply war materials to the Soviet Union. Whoever was behind the attempt to mobilise the Convention again probably ensured its demise. Nothing more was heard of the rally scheduled for November. Presumably the PB intervened to stop it, for fear that reviving the Convention would jeopardise the Moscow agreements, sealed at the height of the German offensive on the Eastern Front. But Dutt was still convinced that the Convention had a role to play. It was around this time that he wrote to Pollitt, as James Hinton showed some years ago, to suggest that the Convention could lead a vigorous prowar mass movement.140 The letter was to no avail. The National Committee of the Convention met on January 3rd to dissolve it.141 At around the same time, it was decided that The Crisis of the British People would not be published, apparently due to the ‘rapidly worsening paper situation’. But those readers of Labour Monthly who had already subscribed were offered an ‘attractive alternative – Britain in the World Front’. This was a wholly orthodox exegesis of the new line.142 The Moscow agreements notwithstanding, the Party continued its clamour for the immediate opening of a Second Front. These reached a crescendo after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Dutt declared that ‘at last the World Democratic Front, for which we have striven for these ten years since Japan’s first aggression in Manchuria, confronts Fascism . . . Fascism is now faced by a non-imperialist coalition of states and peoples.’143 The Party was now more convinced than ever that an immediate opening of a Second Front was possible and that victory could be won in 1942. Successful Soviet counter-attacks in the Spring were contrasted with the ‘weak, hesitant, leadership in Britain, which has been unable to mobilise the people and all Britain’s resources for the decisive struggle of this year.’144 Enormous demonstrations in London were only the apex of a sustained effort by the CP to pressurise the government to open a Second Front For a while, a short while, the CP was convinced that its campaign had come to fruition. The Anglo-Soviet Treaty of Alliance was signed in London in late May. A communiqué issued after Molotov’s visit to Washington.

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whence he had flown from London, was deliberately ambiguous but gave the impression that the Second Front would be opened in 1942. In fact it had been decided that it would not.145 But, the PB told the membership, the signing of the Treaty marked a ‘new and vital development in the struggle against fascism . . . it opens up an entirely new perspective . . . for winning the war this year.’146 Second front agitation was temporarily replaced by expressions of public support for the Treaty. In Luton on United Nations Day, for instance, the CP marched ‘with flags of the four main Allies.’147 But the Party’s enthusiasm for the Treaty was soon dashed by reversals in the war and a dawning realisation that there was not after all to be a Second Front in 1942. The ‘fall’ of Tobruk to the Germans in June led to renewed calls for changes in the government and a purge of ‘Munichites’. 148 The German capture of Sevastapol and a renewed threat to Moscow led to a swift resumption of the Party’s Second Front campaign, including a Trafalgar Square mass rally addressed by Pollitt.149 But the leadership’s ecstatic response to the May treaty had stalled the campaign. A CC circular rebuked members for ‘passivity’ and ‘waiting to see what the Government would do.’150 In August, Churchill went to Moscow to inform Stalin that there would be no Second Front that year and on his return made this very plain to the Commons. Shortly afterwards the Battle for Stalingrad began. These events served to kick the CP’s Second Front campaign, greatly strengthened by the Worker’s resumption of publication, into an even higher gear. The Battle for Stalingrad occupied the front page of the Worker for weeks. A penny leaflet echoed widespread popular sentiment: ‘One word is on the lips of all humanity – STALINGRAD.’ But ‘fifteen months after the first BritishSoviet Agreement . . . still there is no Second Front . . . the fault lies with the pro-fascist politicians who have held the Government back, who are sabotaging the treaty with Russia’.151 A rattled Pollitt argued that the government’s ‘position can be changed. [it] can still be forced to carry out the only policy that can save Britain, and can help the United Nations to defeat fascism – to open the Second Front.’152 CP activists responded in the usual way. The Worker began to carry the usual reports of meetings, demonstrations and petitions. ‘West London Post Office workers’ pledged themselves ‘to make all sacrifices necessary for the Second Front’, ran a typical report.153 In early October the CP announced that there would be a ‘National Deputations Day’, a lobby of parliament, to be received by Gallacher on October 28th.154 Issue after issue of the Worker contained news of this or that Trades Council or Trade Union which had decided to support the lobby.

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Stalin had now become deeply suspicious of the Soviet Union’s allies’ motives in postponing the Second Front, and made public criticism of them in a letter to an Associated Press Correspondent. ‘The aid of the Allies to the Soviet Union has so far been little effective’, Stalin claimed, ‘in order to amplify and improve this aid only one thing is required – that the Allies fulfil their obligations fully and on time.’155 Stalin’s letter was immediately published in the Worker with an accompanying remark from Pollitt: ‘no one in political life can fail to understand how serious the situation must be when Stalin is compelled to cut through all accepted diplomatic convention.’156 Stalin’s letter led to a notable sharpening in the tone of Party criticism of the government and to intensified preparations for ‘National Deputations Day’. The CC directly attacked Churchill, a step the Party had hitherto refused to take: Churchill bore ‘a heavy personal responsibility’ for not leading the government ‘to overcome the defeatist attitude of the pro-fascists who are obstructing the war effort.’157 Pollitt’s anger at the government was made very obvious by his demands for the removal of Leo Amery (the Secretary of State for India), Grigg, Halifax, Simon and Hoare and that the labour movement fight for a ‘Government that will organise the Second Front . . . [and] which can command the complete and unstinted confidence of the whole of the British people.’158 This formulation was little short of a demand for a People’s Government. Its use suggests that Dutt was once more trying to move the Party to the left: if so, the series of allied military and diplomatic advances which began at El Alamein can have served only to have bolstered the Pollitt line. Though preparations for ‘National Deputations Day’ were intensified, it was cancelled shortly after the commencement of the battle of El Alamein. Conceivably, the Party leadership had advance warning of the AngloAmerican landings in Morocco and Algeria on November 8th. On the 3rd the Worker reported that Deputations Day had been rescheduled for November 10th; moreover it would be local authority offices, not parliament, that would be lobbied. Ted Bramley claimed popular support for the decision: ‘from my experience in London this last week since the offensive opened in Egypt such a decision will be more than welcomed’. On November 11th there appeared in the Worker a tiny report which simply said that the deputations had been ‘welcomed all over the country’.159 Clearly then, the CP shared the popular perception, expressed by Churchill in his famous observation that El Alamein was ‘the end of the beginning’, that November 1942 marked the turning point in the war. But for the CP the eastern front was at least as important. News of the lifting of

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the siege of Stalingrad in late November was greeted by the Party with jubilation. Dutt was convinced that the Soviet victory there was ‘the decisive turning point of the war’.160 The Daily Worker carried a special masthead: ‘Salute to Stalingrad. The siege is lifted, the enemy is in flight. The immortal heroes of Stalin’s city have given mankind its opportunity.’161 In contrast to earlier refusal to discuss questions of post-war reform, the CP gave a warm welcome to the Beveridge Report, published shortly after the news from Stalingrad. But the Party’s hopes that the Allied victories in north Africa were the prelude to British and US landings in France were soon dashed. In January, Dutt argued that though the need to maintain the Second Front campaign was urgent, ‘in contrast to the high level of the campaign for the Second Front during last summer, there has been perceptible a degree of dispersion of the mass movement’.162 But the CP’s leadership had itself been largely responsible for the ‘dispersion’ of the campaign. It had effectively suspended the campaign by cancelling National Deputations Day and by informing the membership that whilst the landings in north Africa did not constitute a Second Front, the ‘Government . . . does stand for the complete defeat of Hitler and rules out any question of a compromise peace with Fascism.’163 Such an affirmation of the anti-fascist credentials of the government, circulated at a time of growing popular sentiment that victory was assured, could only have served to convince many Party members that they need only wait on events. That January, Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca and decided that the cross-channel invasion would not take place until August that year at the earliest. An emollient post-conference press statement, in which Churchill and Roosevelt stated their determination ‘to draw as much of the weight as possible off the Russian armies’, was welcomed by the Worker.164 But shortly afterwards Pollitt expressed scepticism: ‘the ocean of words poured out in the past about these meetings has been in marked contrast with the deeds that followed them’.165 Casablanca was however followed within days by the German surrender at Stalingrad. In consequence, the Party made no serious attempt to relaunch its Second Front campaign until March, following a German offensive which culminated in the capture of Kharkhov. These new Soviet defeats caused discussion of post-war reform, prominent in the Party press since the publication of the Beveridge Report, to vanish as quickly as German forces advanced in the east. A Worker editorial asked ‘how much attention is being diverted to post-war planning and post-war settlement’ and quoted the Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg who had sternly remarked that ‘the time will come for world reconstruction. But now

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is the time to fight, to slay the slayer’.166 The popular mood had however changed by the Spring of 1943: Churchill was thus able at the height of the German offensive to devote a radio broadcast to questions of post-war reconstruction. His broadcast ‘astounded many viewers’ according to the CP.167 But would it have done? Churchill’s broadcast was made at the time of a renewed Anglo-American offensive in Tunisia: no doubt most of his listeners would have concluded that the course of the war was set fair and that discussion of post-war reform was not inappropriate. Despite the new threat to the Soviet Union, the CP’s leadership had considerable difficulty in mobilising the membership and gaining popular support. Leadership circulars complained of apathy and inactivity in the Party. In contrast to the heady days of 1941–42, when the Party was able to report massive demonstrations and the participation in Second Front work of vicars, mayors, lords lieutenant and Conservative Party agents, demonstrations were on a much smaller scale and fewer. Now expressions of support came overwhelmingly from the CP’s traditional constituency – trade union activists. The spring and early summer saw the final defeat of the Axis in north Africa, the Allied invasion of Sicily and then the Italian mainland and a successful counter-offensive by the Red Army. These, particularly the latter, were most welcome to the CP. It was doubtless these advances which made the leadership consider some discussion of reform appropriate at a July Congress dominated by discussion of the situation in the war.168 But of the Second Front there was no sign. In June, Stalin was informed that there would be no Second Front in 1943. 169 This decision raised new tensions between the Soviet Union and its allies, which came to a head during the Quebec Conference between Britain and the USA. Clearly prompted by articles in the Soviet press criticising the western allies’ tardiness in opening the Second Front and demanding a Three Power Conference, the Party launched what was to be the last phase of its mass campaign for a Second Front. At a Second Front rally in Montagu Place the Worker reported ‘faces set in determination, voices shouting for military action’.170 At a rally in Trafalgar Square Pollitt’s comments on the successful Anglo-American landings on the Italian mainland were notably cool: ‘unless the Second Front in Western Europe’ were quickly organised, Pollitt argued, Hitler would be able ‘to fight a long delaying action in Italy without having to draw decisive forces from the Eastern Front’. Pollitt resurrected themes not heard for some time by blaming the failure to open a Second Front on ‘fifth columnists’ and ‘reactionaries’ who wanted Germany and Russia to exhaust themselves.171

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Dutt warned that ‘Munich is still an open wound, it is not old history’. The survivors of Munich were ‘still powerful in the Government and in commanding positions . . . They continue their old policies in new forms. They work to prevent or delay the Second Front.’172 But the Party leadership was swimming against the tide of popular sentiment in trying to organise this campaign. Organising the sending of telegrams and the passing of resolutions was one thing: raising a mass movement entirely another. Some insight into the difficulties faced by the Party in this respect is provided by a commentary on strikes by Pat Devine, the Secretary of the Lancashire and Cheshire Party. Devine noted that some workers believed ‘that as the war is going well the fight against the employers can be given first preference’.173 Such moods had clearly also crept into the Party. In August, Pollitt had circulated CC members with a complaint that it was ‘no use shirking the issue, the mass activity of the Party is far from what it ought to be . . . Our branch meetings are badly attended, there is a marked falling off in the sales of literature and there is in general a slackness in Party work . . . which we must endeavour to eradicate.’174 The leadership must then have been overjoyed when news came of the meeting in Moscow in October between Molotov, Eden and the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, swiftly followed by the Teheran Conference at which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met to discuss the further prosecution of the war and to deliberate on the shape of the post-war world. These meetings were as much about the latter as the former (in particular the future of Germany and its borders with Poland). There was a sniff of Versailles in the air for those who wished to detect it. But the CP was not in this company. In response to the Moscow Conference the Party rushed out a pamphlet in which Dutt declared that the conference decisions had ‘dealt a mortal blow to the hopes of the Fifth Column in all countries . . . The Moscow Conference of 1943 represents the great historical reversal of the Munich betrayal of 1938.’175 Moscow and Teheran convinced the CP’s leadership that the Second Front would soon be opened. Though ‘D-Day’ did not come for several months, there were to be no more mass campaigns for a Second Front. The CP did though continue – as it had since 1941 – to be concerned that the resources of the Empire be fully utilised in the war effort.

The Communist Party and the Empire The CP’s policy towards the Empire from 1941 was essentially a development of that social-chauvinist policy discussed in the previous chapter. The

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Party’s policy was on the one hand to urge colonial reform in order to gain the support of nationalist movements for the allied war effort and on the other hand to urge the leaders of such movements not to take advantage of Britain’s difficulties. The CP was however much more concerned about events in Europe than in the Empire until Pearl Harbour, which caused great anxiety among the Party’s leaders regarding the threat to British colonial possessions in the Far East, especially India. In August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt committed their respective countries to uphold the principles of what became known as the Atlantic Charter. Amongst other sophistries it pledged that the two governments would ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.’176 On his return to London Churchill made it quite clear that the provisions of the Charter were not to be applied to the British Empire. Churchill remained adamant on this matter throughout the war. At the Yalta Conference of early 1945 he was to be emphatic that the principles of national self-determination enshrined in the Yalta Accords ‘did not apply to the British Empire’.177 Nevertheless, the CP firmly supported the government’s defence and eventual reconquest of the Empire. How could it do otherwise? As we have seen, the Comintern had for several years been determined that nothing should stand in the way of the maximum mobilisation of the resources of the British Empire in the defence of the Soviet Union against Germany. According to Overstreet and Miller’s standard history of the Indian Party, this general orientation was reiterated in September 1941 in an article in the Soviet Party journal Bolshevik. Entitled The Role of the British Empire in the Current War it gave to the Empire the ‘highest place side by side with the USSR in the great coalition of democratic peoples fighting fascism’. The fact that the peoples of Britain’s colonies did not enjoy democratic freedoms was apparently not addressed. Bolshevik’s ‘treatment of India put it in the same category with the self-governing dominions, as though to conceal the fact that it was not already a free country.’ The main import of the article was bluntly made clear: India’s resources had not yet been fully utilised, but ‘the further the mobilisation of these forces for the struggle against Hitlerite fascism proceeds, the better.’178 This was essentially the stance of the British Party throughout the war. Party members seem to have accepted without question the anti-fascist rhetoric with which the CP justified its support for the defence of the Empire. But as we saw in previous chapters, very few of the members were at all concerned with the Empire. Though members serving in the armed forces have since claimed that ‘the underlying imperialist objectives [of

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Britain] were never lost sight of, particularly by those members in the Burmese, Indian and Middle East theatres of war’,179 there is little contemporary evidence that Party members reflected that the British Empire was no more democratic, even if it was less barbarous, than the Axis powers. The Party leadership retained its formal commitment to the cause of colonial freedom, and was no doubt quite genuinely concerned that the colonies should gain their freedom after the war. But it was determined that until then the colonies must play their part in the defeat of the Axis. For Dutt, and no doubt many other members, this was essentially a matter of internationalist priorities – that everything must be subordinated to the defence of the Soviet Union. But for those less versed in the dialectic than Dutt, the rugged patriotism typified by Pollitt was probably a bigger factor in their ready defence of Empire. British reverses in North Africa and the Mediterranean in 1941 were followed by the shock of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Dutt was swift to see the danger to the Empire and complained that the government was failing to fully mobilise ‘all the five hundred million people of the British Empire’ against the Axis Powers. In India, ‘only 0.25% of men had been recruited to the army . . . and meanwhile the authorities here wring their hands over the problems of man-power’. Therefore, reform in the Empire was essential to win the support of the colonial peoples for the war. In this respect, Churchill’s recent reiteration that the principles of the Atlantic Charter did not apply to the Empire was ‘a blow in the face to the aspirations of India and the colonial peoples’.180 Japanese advances in the Far East in 1942 caused great alarm in King Street. In a speech at London’s Stoll Theatre, Pollitt emphasised the threat to British national interests. Without troubling to ask whose interests were at stake, or which powers already controlled these territories, Pollitt roused his audience by alerting them to the Japanese ‘menace’ to the ‘Dutch East Indies, Burma, India and Australia’. Indicative of the anxieties aroused by the Japanese threat, Pollitt deployed the bellicose style he reserved for such occasions, and, after making an aside that the enemy could not be negotiated with, demanded that ‘whoever tries in any way to support the enemy brands himself a traitor who should be shot out of hand’.181 Nothing was heard of the Party’s professed internationalist sentiments as the Japanese captured one after another of Britain’s Asian colonies in early 1942. Instead, the military authorities, colonial administrators and planters were excoriated for incompetence and selfishness. The loss of Malaya prompted the Party to complain that ‘in four weeks Britain has lost practically the whole of Malaya, a country fabulously rich in tin and rubber.

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The people of Britain are amazed and angry.’ With no discussion of the interests of the Malayan people in the matter, it was asserted that there should have been a ‘scorched earth’ policy. But this had not been applied because ‘big merchants, rubber planters and tin-mine owners did not like to see the mines and estates going up in flames.’182 A pamphlet by the old India hand Ben Bradley proclaimed that ‘wherever the flame of freedom still burns, people have watched with bitter anger the advances made by the Japanese . . . one after another the enemy seemed to walk through our defence as a knife goes through butter. Now Burma is in peril, and India.’183 Particular alarm was roused when it was learnt that Burmese had taken up arms to fight with the Japanese: this was ‘a serious warning to how dangerous the situation can become in India as the Japanese approached the frontier’.184 Whether such people were to be numbered among those to be ‘shot out of hand’ was not clear. The CP’s attitude to Indian independence is worth examining in some detail, illustrative as it is of its general attitude to the colonial question after June 1941. The British Communist Party appears to have played a significant role in overcoming widespread resistance to supporting the British war effort in the Indian Party. True or not, it was widely believed in India that the authorities allowed to be smuggled into India a message from Pollitt to the Communist Party of India (CPI) informing them of the Comintern’s post-Barbarossa line. According to Indian Communist veterans, the Indian Party finally accepted that they must support the war after the return from Britain of a member who had discussed the matter with Pollitt and Dutt.185 The British Party was adamant that the support of the Indian people for the war should not be conditional on the offering of reform and eventual independence. But Overstreet and Miller exaggerate in claiming that the CPGB advised their Indian comrades ‘to set aside all goals except that of mobilising India’s resources in the service of its British rulers in order to secure a Soviet victory.’186 It is true that the British Party initially made no specific demands of the British government. Presumably, it had been fearful that to do so would jeopardise its fight for a national front. But publicity had been given to the demands made at an August 1941conference of the CP-backed India League that the government ‘recognise the right of the Indian people to their independence’ and ‘release all political prisoners’.187 And by the end of 1941, agitated no doubt by Pearl Harbour, the Party was again demanding the release of political prisoners, that the government declare the Atlantic Charter ‘applicable to India and Burma’ and ‘enter into direct negotiations with the Indian national movement and with the

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Burmese Cabinet with a view to finding the effective basis of co-operation for the common war effort’.188 But if the Party did make these demands, it seems to have made little effort to achieve them: the Party press and archives suggest little more than ritualistically raising them on demonstrations and at meetings and occasional low-key public meetings. PB and CC circulars did occasionally urge Party members to raise the question of India, but whatever they may have done has left little trace. In the considerable files left by the Manchester & Salford DPC, for instance, virtually the only reference to India is contained in a hand-bill for a Second Front demonstration which demanded, in the interests of the war effort, that India should have ‘their own National Government’.189 The CP gave a warm welcome to the ‘Cripps Mission’ to India, undertaken in an attempt to gain the support of Congress leaders (released from prison shortly after Pearl Harbour) for the war. Stafford Cripps, previously entrusted as British ambassador with cementing relations with the Soviet Union, flew to India in March 1942 with authority to offer India full independence after the war. Congress was not impressed: only immediate self-government would do. Talks broke down, and in April Cripps returned to Britain. At an emergency meeting of the India League, Gallacher showed some internationalist sentiment by declaring that it appeared that the British ‘were specially appointed by God to rule over other peoples’.190 But the Party’s general response to the breakdown of negotiations was to stress the resultant threat to the national interest: ‘The failure of negotiations and the return of Sir Stafford Cripps is a great tragedy . . . India is in grave danger, the threat of Japanese invasion is imminent’.191 In the summer, the Party demanded that the government ‘take immediate steps to re-open negotiations with the responsible Indian leaders on the basis of the recognition of India’s independence and the immediate formation of an interim popular Indian National Government for organising resistance to Fascism.’192 The Party became extremely concerned by Congress’s threat to resort to civil disobedience. Utilising the CP’s close links with Congress leaders,193 Pollitt wrote to Nehru to attempt to dissuade him from this step. Asserting that everything had to be subordinated to the defeat of Fascism, Pollitt professed his admiration for the ‘forbearance Congress has displayed, despite all the insults put upon it and the senseless prosecution of its leaders’. Nevertheless, the ‘suggestion’ that Congress might adopt a policy of nonco-operation had ‘caused grave disquiet amongst all who fight in this country for India’s freedom’. Pollitt’s advice was that Congress should

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support the war effort notwithstanding British intransigence: if Congress ‘proclaimed to the whole world that while reiterating its claim for independence, it was going to take its place alongside the Chinese, Russian, American and British people in active resistance to fascist aggression . . . then I am convinced that your world influence would be enormously strengthened.’194 In public, the CP argued that though the main responsibility for the failure of the Cripps Mission lay with the British government, it had been ‘a grave mistake’ for Congress to consider ‘the use of civil disobedience’. The Party hastened to stress the essential moderation of Congress: it was ‘vital that the British people should know that no immediate civil disobedience was decided on; on the contrary, it was definitely stated that every effort would be made to secure a settlement by negotiation.’ 195 The British government was not so forbearing as Congress: in the Summer its leaders were once more arrested. This provocation was vigorously denounced by the CP, but the respectful tone of a letter sent by Pollitt to Churchill makes it very clear that the CP would not let the matter jeopardise its policy of national unity. Referring to the Party’s requests (a more appropriate word than ‘demands’) that the detainees be released and that ‘fresh negotiations’ to ‘secure a National Government for India’ be opened, Pollitt wrote to ‘submit with all urgency that these steps are essential in the interests of Britain, no less than those of India, as well as of the United Nations and the cause of victory over the common fascist enemy’.196 Leo Amery’s statement to parliament that he had refused to release Nehru and his colleagues was given considerable prominence on the front page of the Worker, which a few days later carried a prominent article by Krishna Menon in which Menon declared that the ‘Government’s India policy stands out in marked contrast to the freedom to which millions aspire . . . the war is still the Empire’s war in India’ 197 But though there appeared shortly afterwards photographs of demonstrators being forcibly dispersed by the use of tear gas,198 the CP maintained its steadfast refusal to do anything concrete to fight for Indian independence. In early October the paper published a letter from the CPI (which opposed the Congress policy of non-cooperation).199 The Indian Party complained that although it ‘had saved the majority of industrial centres in India from stoppages and sabotage . . . some of the trusted leaders of the Party are still in gaol, and hundreds of communists have been arrested’. The letter concluded with a call to the CPGB to lead a campaign against Britain’s India policy.200 The implications of Menon’s analysis were clear enough, but neither this nor the call from the CPI roused the British Party into action on the question of India.

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Popular unrest in India in 1943 caused increasing anxiety in the CP. Though the British authorities were denounced for callousness in their response to famine in Bengal, the Party’s overwhelming concern was the defence of India against Japan.201 In March the Party demanded that new negotiations be opened with Congress and stressed its essential moderation: ‘the sincerity of the Congress leaders cannot be questioned. Their main aim is to free India, to reach a position where the full resources of India can be mobilised for the defence of the country against aggression and for the fight against fascism.’202 Continuing unrest was met by the colonial regime with considerable repression. In the first six months of 1943 over 1,000 were killed. In April, after a failed appeal to the Privy Council, four members of the CPI were executed for the murder of a policeman in the course of a demonstration. The issue of the Worker in which the execution of the ‘Kayyur Martyrs’ was announced appeared with a black border and an appeal fund was established.203 Pollitt claimed that the establishment of the fund was ‘a particularly important gesture that may have very far-reaching effects. There can be no finer way of showing solidarity with the people of India . . . than by a donation to this fund’. As Pollitt said, it was a ‘gesture’. Nothing more concrete than this was done by the Party in solidarity with the people of India.204 The CP’s refusal to contemplate any practical steps in solidarity with the colonial peoples has, of course, to be set in the context of the Party’s fight for national and international united fronts against fascism. In the CP’s eyes any attempt to do more than pass resolutions, hold public meetings, make criticism and so on would have posed a serious threat to national unity. This in turn would have threatened the Anglo-Soviet alliance and hence the mobilisation of the resources of the British Empire to aid in the defence of the Soviet Union. But this was probably not the only factor in the Party’s calculations. They may well have believed that the British government would have no option but to give in to pressure from the other allied governments to implement the self-determination clauses of the Atlantic Charter. Prior to the Party’s Congress of 1943 the leadership asserted that the Charter was ‘not the property of one government but of the United governments.’205 Colonial freedom was then conditional on winning the war and also its assured outcome. To fight against colonialism in the Empire was therefore counter-productive. Let us leave the last word on this matter to Dutt, who wrote a special preface, designed to reassure progressive opinion there, to the American edition of his A Guide to the Problems of India: ‘Indian national interests cannot be regarded in isolation, but must coincide, as they can and

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do in truth coincide, with the common interests of all nations, and specifically of the United Nations, of victory over fascism.’206 The CP’s colonial policy was but one aspect of the Party’s lurch rightwards in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Nominally committed to revolution, its war-time objectives were limited to mobilising all possible resources for the defence of the Soviet Union and liberal democracy. Unsurprisingly, this praxis led to the development of an explicitly reformist political strategy, discussed in the next chapter, and had organisational consequences.

A Drift into Menshevism: Party-Building 1941–45 As the CP began to jettison even nominal revolutionary perspectives, its organisational principles and structure underwent corresponding change. There were two profound organisational developments. Firstly, an attitude which had begun to emerge in the later 1930s – that members could be inactive – was formalised. In the Bolshevik tradition, the CP had regarded it as essential that Party members should work in a Party organisation. The principle that members should be active was the organisational aspect of the concept that communists were the ideological and political vanguard of the working class, the most conscious and dedicated elements. Even if this principle was frequently breached,207 inactive members were regarded as not living up to the requirements of communist party membership. But from 1942, the leadership began to criticise this attitude. Secondly, there was a gradual change from a workplace to a residential basis of organisation. Organising primarily at the point of production, where the worker met the class enemy on a daily basis, had been seen as fundamental to the Party’s project of educating and organising the working class in preparation for the insurrectionary overthrow of capital. It had been regarded as a key factor differentiating communists from Social Democrats, whose mainly residential forms of organisation reflected their parliamentary strategy. By 1942 the Party had grown to around 56,000 members.208 It was then confronted with the problem of what to do with these members, the vast majority of whom evidently found the traditional rigours and austerities of CP life deeply unattractive. In the Summer of 1942 the leadership accepted that large numbers of the recruits could not be drawn into activity and instituted a system of dues-collectors.209 Hitherto, these had been regarded as unnecessary, as it had been assumed that members would at least regularly attend branch meetings. Clearly, many of the new members were not even prepared to participate in Party life to this minimum level. Branches were

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urged not to collect dues perfunctorily, but to regard this as a political task, a means of raising the political awareness of inactive members and of drawing them into activity. The Peckham group of Camberwell branch, it was noted, which had previously been able to entice only 5 out of 28 members to attend meetings, raised the average attendance to 14 by dint of this new approach.210 But a majority of the recruits remained inactive. Many found it too taxing even to read the Daily Worker: ‘Approximately 50%’ did not, according to a complaint of the leadership in the Spring of 1943.211 Many did not even pay their dues. The Lancashire and Cheshire DC complained to the CC that only seventy-two per cent of members were paid up.212 This same DPC complained that apart from the factory groups ‘the Party only lives through the Branch Committee. There is little or no organised life in the form of active area and ward groups’213 In February 1945 the Hampshire and District DPC would report that committee meetings at ‘both Southampton and Portsmouth were irregular and ill-attended’.214 In its attempts to deal with this enormous influx of the half-hearted and uncommitted, the CP began to drift into being a party of ‘sympathisers’, rather than a cadre party of committed Communists. In the lead-up to the 16th Congress of June 1943 the centre attempted to confront the dichotomy between the Party’s principles and its practice by changing its principles. Betty Reid argued that there was much ‘confusion’ in the Party about what constituted a member, and that some more experienced members were therefore reluctant to admit the new type of member. Reid claimed that a redefinition was needed of the obligation of working in a ‘Party organisation’. On joining the Party, a new member should have placed before “him”: the perspective of a simple and limited sphere of work, by giving him the conviction that this is our war and that the Party relies upon him in winning it, and that he can best do this by setting the example in his own work, and by winning support from his fellow-workers, in his department and in his Trade Union branch, for the policy of the Party.215 In effect, Reid was arguing that it should be recognised that the new type of member had joined the Party to help win the war, not to fight to overthrow capitalism and that the organisational implications of this should also be recognised. A Party member need not take a direct part in branch activities, but could fulfil the obligations of membership by popularising the Party’s

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policies in the workplace, in the community, in trade unions and professional organisations and among friends. In 1944 the leadership was to sanction a by then well-established practice by arguing that members should not necessarily be expected to attend branch meetings.216 Despite its problems with newcomers, the CP decided at its Sixteenth Congress to aim for 100,000 members by the end of 1943.217 But the Party had already reached its zenith of popularity. Membership had peaked in 1942 and thereafter continually declined. Moreover there was an extraordinarily high turnover of members.218 James Hinton has argued that the fundamental reason for the Party’s failure to capitalise on the popularity and prestige it enjoyed in the period 1941–42 is that it was not tuned in to the swing to the left in public opinion. If the Party had not refused to campaign for social change, had not refused to countenance an offensive against capitalism, then the membership could have been galvanised into action.219 There may be something to this, but there was probably a bigger factor. How many of those who joined the Party in 1941–42 did so out of a desire for radical social change? That the surge and decline in CP membership more or less corresponds with the national emergency of 1941–42 and the emergence of widespread sentiments from the end of 1942 that victory in the war ‘was in the bag’, suggests that most recruits were radical patriots. By the end of 1942 most of those who were potential recruits to the Party had probably joined it. After El Alamein and Stalingrad those of them who did not leave may well have found little to motivate them into activity, as the leadership found when it tried to reactivate the Second Front campaign in 1943. Further significant steps towards Menshevism followed Teheran. The euphoria induced by the Teheran Declaration and the seemingly rosy prospects for post-war peace and harmony intensified a fundamental reappraisal of the nature of a communist party already underway. Though the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was dissolved, the British Party was adamant that it still had a vital role to play. But, explicitly recognising a reality that had existed for some time, it now argued that its role was that of a ginger group for the wider labour movement rather than of a vanguard party.220 The Party was reorganised on an electoral rather than factory basis, a manifestation of its new view that its principal role was to win representation in parliament for itself and the Labour Party. Early in 1944 there appeared in World News and Views a series of articles and correspondence on a new concept of membership in a mass party. The key shift in attitude was made clear by R.W. Robson: it should not be expected that new members should ‘fully understand’ the Party’s

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programme, merely that they should ‘accept’ the programme and support its current policies. This was a fundamental change in the CP’s view of itself. The Party programme was a statement of its ideological and political outlook, aimed at establishing clear lines of demarcation with bourgeois and opportunist thought. Though it had not in practice governed recruitment for some years, the principle that recruits should understand the programme had been intended to ensure that the Party’s principles were not diluted by the admission of those not committed to communism. But Stalin’s authority for a new view of the Party was now invoked. He had argued in 1937 that to demand that would-be members should ‘fully understand’ the programme ‘would lead to the Communist Party consisting only of old members and intellectuals’. Robson criticised those who thought that the Party should ‘go in only for ‘selective’ recruiting’’. The import of Robson’s argument was clear enough. It was not necessary to be a Communist to join the Communist Party; when recruiting, members should not concern themselves overmuch with questions of doctrine, theory and the Party’s ultimate goal of communism. What mattered was support for the Party’s policies for the immediate questions of war and reconstruction.221 The CP’s move to reformist methods of organisation was completed in 1944–45 by a shift to a residential basis of membership. It had been recognised as early as 1929 that many potential recruits – housewives, professionals, clerks, isolated workers or whatever – were unable or unwilling to work in factory branches. Such members were organised in street rather than factory ‘cells’ (called groups from 1936, in deference, like dropping the hammer and sickle from the masthead of the Daily Worker, to British unease at foreign seeming names and practices, by which time around ninety per cent of members were in street cells222). But whether through factory or street cells or groups, the Party’s organisation was intended, at least nominally, to further revolutionary objectives. Factory and street organisation was appropriate to a party which still in theory anticipated insurrection. After 1941 though, and more particularly after Teheran, the Party’s developing reformist strategy led to a concomitant reorganisation according to ward and constituency boundaries. This process had been initiated in 1943,223 but did not get firmly underway until September 1944. The EC of that month appointed an Organisation Commission to study the Party’s existing organisational structure and to make recommendations for appropriate changes.224 Approval for this decision was sought and gained from the 17th National Congress of the Party. The composition of the Commission indicates the seriousness with which its work was viewed by the Party. Headed by Peter

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Kerrigan, the Party’s National Organiser, such Party luminaries as Emile Burns, Idris Cox, John Gollan, Rueben Falber and Tamara Rust sat on it. The Commission was to report to the EC, which was given the authority ‘to operate any changes in organisation which it considered necessary’, after ‘consultations with the Districts and Branches’.225 Previous work meant that the Commission’s report was quickly done. It was received and largely accepted by the EC in December.226 A circular explaining the changes that were to be made was sent to the membership the same month. Perhaps to satisfy rank-and-file critics, the rule stipulating that members must be active was not be changed. In practice though, the rule was subverted and the new concept of membership ratified by stipulating that promotion of the Party’s policy and payment of dues was now to be regarded as a sufficient level of activity. The Party’s basic structure was to be changed. The ‘basic unit’ of the Party was to be the branch ‘covering all members residing in the locality, wherever they work’. Branches were to be organised ‘to cover an area which is a natural existing community of the people’. Furthermore, where a community was too large for a single branch, then smaller branches were to be established ‘to cover a natural section of the main community, such as a ward, constituency, etc.’.227 Wards and constituencies are not of course ‘natural’ community divisions: they are the forms of political organisation appropriate to parliamentary democracy. Though there remained a commitment to organising in the workplace, several proposals show that the leadership regarded factory work as subordinate to electoral work. Factory branches were to be abolished, and although Factory Committees were to take their place they were to be answerable to a local branch or to a higher level committee, depending on the particular circumstances of the factory. Significantly, not all Party members in a factory with a Factory Committee were to regard factory work as their main sphere of activity. Other than those elected to Factory Committees, Party members, whilst having the responsibility of working for the Party’s interests in the factory, would do so ‘as members of the branch’, not of the Factory Committee. Furthermore, ‘after working hours their main concern should be to participate in the life of the area where they live’. These organisational principles were adopted by the EC in February 1945228 and then implemented throughout the Party shortly after the Yalta Conference, discussed more fully in the next chapter. The electoralism which had been growing in the Party throughout the war was given renewed impetus by Yalta, seen by the CP as guaranteeing the promises for the postwar world made at Teheran. Intoxicated by Yalta and by Communist participation in several European governments, Kerrigan argued that Yalta

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had introduced a ‘new conception of democracy’. One of the most ‘significant aspects’ of this new concept was ‘the open acceptance of Communists as one of the essential factors in the new democracy’. But if the Party was to play its part in the post-Yalta world to the full it would have to ‘carry into effect’ the new rules. All members had to understand that: The changes to a residential basis of membership, the new methods of factory organisation, the concepts about the responsibilities of members . . . all have one principal objective . . . To make the Communist Party in Britain, with a mass membership, the principal political force in a new Britain playing a dynamic part in the New World, towards which Crimea points the way.229 We shall see in the next chapter that the new world was to be not that different from the pre-war world out of which it had emerged. But the CP itself was very different from the pre-war, certainly from the pre-1935 CP. The organisational changes which Kerrigan had shepherded into the Party were the logical organisational concomitants of the policy followed since 1935 and especially since 1941. What need to build a cadre party if it is not proposed to prepare for the insurrectionary overthrow of capitalism? Why not organise mainly on a residential basis if electioneering is to be the central political activity? What had been the main aspects of the CP’s war since June 1941? The Comintern had intervened to ensure that all other considerations were put to one side in the interest of building an alliance between Britain and the Soviet Union. There was to be no question of fighting to replace the Coalition government with a left-wing government or for radical reform. Nothing was to be done that might impede the swift opening of the Second Front. The CP’s pro-Soviet and patriotic stance led to a huge growth in membership, but of people of uncertain political quality. It also led to the loss of some, probably the most class-conscious, of its members. By late 1943 the Party was poised to make a transition to open reformism. Teheran was the midwife of this transition.

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CHAPTER FIVE

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

A

fter Teheran the CP developed a new, reformist strategy. Between then and its 18th Congress of 1945 the Party completed a transition from Bolshevism to Second International Marxism. Socialism would grow organically out of mature capitalism rather than be the fruit of revolution. The Party’s conflation of the categories of class and nation, traceable back to the ‘social patriots’ of 1914, became even more marked. It is one of the ironies of history that many of those who presided over the 18th Congress – Harry Pollitt, J.R. Campbell, Willie Gallacher, Rajani Palme Dutt and others – had as youthful militants helped to found a Party which aimed to emulate the Bolsheviks. The CP’s determination that there should be widespread reform after the war led to a gradual weakening of its support for the coalition, dominated by a Conservative Party widely identified with pre-war politics and conditions. The CP became insistent that defeat of the Conservatives was a necessary precondition for the implementation of the principles of Teheran and Yalta but also became adamant that it was essential to build the broadest possible support for these principles. It argued for a policy of an electoral alliance of all parties to the left of the Conservatives. Teheran convinced the leadership that the Second Front would definitely be opened, and opened soon. More fundamentally, the appending of the signatures of Churchill and Roosevelt to the Teheran Declaration had shown, so the Party argued, that the reactionary forces of the world had been greatly weakened in the course of the war and the progressive forces correspondingly strengthened. The wartime alliance of the Soviet Union and the allied imperialist powers was to be continued into a post-war world of peace and plenty assured by the Allies. These perspectives were reinforced by the Yalta Conference of February 1945. Yalta, according to the CP, had created an opportunity for a new order. The democratic forces of the world could cooperate, through such bodies as the United Nations Organisation, to ensure a new world. Within each country these forces could similarly co-operate in

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national reconstruction. The task of the left now was to fight the reactionary forces to ensure that the Yalta accords were fulfilled. It became clear in 1944 and 1945 that as far as the western Allies were concerned the new world would be one run on their terms. Assertion of British, French and US power in such places as Greece, Indo-China and the Philippines did not greatly trouble the CP. As it had been for the past ten years, the Party’s line on these matters was essentially a rationalisation of Soviet foreign policy, aimed at dominance in eastern Europe and a peaceful international environment. Increasing strains between the Soviet Union and its allies led to some tacking to the left in Communist policy, notably in the Spring of 1945 when ‘Browderism’, the policies pursued by the US Party after Teheran was criticised by the French Party, but the fundamental outlook of Teheran and Yalta was not questioned. Labour’s landslide election victory of 1945 was hailed by the Party as evidence of the inexorable advance of the forces of progress. Communists thought that the general election had inflicted a devastating defeat on monopoly capital. Labour’s programme was held to be one that would help to create the conditions for the advance to socialism. The CP gave full support to Labour’s domestic programme and insisted that the working class must work as hard to build the peace as it had to win the war.

The CP and International Relations Though the CP’s new strategy was its own work, it evolved in response to developments in the war and was greatly influenced by the utopian (perhaps cynical is a better adjective) promises made at Teheran and Yalta and by the Soviet Union’s diplomacy. For the CP, Teheran was the harbinger of a new world. It showed that a second front was now assured and that there would be no return to pre-war poverty, strife and hunger. Teheran marked a ‘great new stage’ in the war; The ‘SECTIONAL PHASE OF THE WAR IS NOW ENDED, the new blows will be struck on the basis of a unified strategy.’ In almost millenarian terms Party members were assured that the unity of Britain, America and the Soviet Union meant that when peace came, it would, in the words of the Teheran Declaration, be a peace that would ‘command the goodwill of the overwhelming masses of the peoples of the world and banish the scourge and terror of war for many generations’. Other calculated pledges made by the Allied leaders, for instance that they were determined to ‘eliminate tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance from the face of the earth’, were similarly endorsed by the Party’s Executive Committee (EC (The

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Central Committee had been renamed the Executive Committee at the Sixteenth Congress of 1943)).1 It is not just the benefit of hindsight that makes the CP’s reaction to the Teheran Declaration seem almost millenarian. Many on the British left expressed extreme scepticism regarding the promises made at Teheran. It is hard to grasp how the CP leadership could have believed them. But for the CP, a ‘progressive’ policy was whatever policy the Soviet Union was following. The Declaration’s nostrums had, after all, Stalin’s imprimatur. Indeed, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Party’s new reformist strategy was, indirectly and partially, Stalin’s work. In the interests of maintaining unity with Britain and the USA, Stalin was anxious that the communist movement’s developing post-war strategy should be moderate. In the Spring of 1944, for instance, he saw no objection to communists joining the Badoglio Government in Italy.2 Apart from whatever direct communications there may have been with Moscow at this time – Dmitrov continued to play a leading role in the direction of communist parties through a newly-formed Department of International Information (OMI) 3 of the Soviet Party – British communist leaders were astute enough to take their cue from the Moscow media. Any doubts that were harboured in the Party with regard to Teheran must surely have been heightened by the Government’s decision to release from detention Oswald Mosley. Mosley epitomised in Britain everything that the CP had been fighting against for the previous ten years. Even so, although his release was greeted with outrage, the leadership was careful to stress that this was ‘only one side of the picture’, which had to be balanced against the ‘great positive achievement’ of the Moscow Conference. Nevertheless, a campaign to prevent his release was launched, culminating in a lobby of Parliament on the 7th December.4 The membership was warned early in 1944 that such events as Mosley’s release had shown that continuing struggle would be necessary against reactionary elements.5 But the CP still looked with confidence to the future. Continuing Allied military success in 1944 confirmed the CP’s rosy view of the future. D-Day was greeted by an edition of the Worker with a special cover hailing ‘Britain’s Greatest Hour’.6 It soon became apparent that ‘liberation’, as in Italy in 1943–44, would be on the Allied governments’ terms.7 In France ‘order’ was restored with Communist assistance.8 In Belgium, leftwing partisans who were reluctant to accept the right-wing government imposed by the Allies were forcibly suppressed.9 Some criticism of the events in Italy and Belgium was offered by the CP, but they did not cause the Party fundamentally to question its support for the Allied war effort.

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In the winter of 1944–45 there occurred events which would surely have dented the CP’s optimism regarding the post-war world, had there been in it some vestige of Bolshevism. It was presumably not known by the Party that the British intervention in Greece to promote a right-wing regime there was facilitated by Stalin’s agreement that Britain could have dominance in Greece.10 Many members would doubtless have been appalled had they known. But the Party’s pusillanimous reaction to the intervention is indicative of growing social-chauvinism in the Party. It had become apparent that the working class in Britain was going to get substantial reward for its support for the war. The 1944 Education Act had been passed and there would be a health service, full employment and social insurance. Compared to these reforms, the affair in Greece was small beer: the CP was certainly not going to react with measures that would threaten national unity. The Party’s condemnation of the British intervention was muted and expressed in conciliatory tones. Its initial reaction was to claim that the news of the intervention would ‘send a thrill of horror through the British people’.11 But it soon began to stress that the events in Greece had to be seen in a wider context. At a CP rally Rust criticised those who were now ‘standing aside and saying ‘I told you so! This is going to end as I told you it would’’. But now there was news that De Gaulle and Stalin had signed ‘a Franco-Soviet pact of alliance, which is going to be one of the firmest bastions of peace’.12 The Party was also keen to stress the reasonable nature of the Greek partisans: ‘one thing was not sufficiently stressed – the willingness of the resistance to make a settlement which will end the fighting.’13 Even so, the CP clearly considered some protest had to be made. In early December an article appeared in the Worker under the page one banner headline ‘Hands off Greece. Storm is Rising. Strong Motion in Commons: Big Unions Act.’ ‘The great trade unions were . . . on the move in defence of the Greek people’, the article announced, in response to expressions of ‘grave concern’ by the TGWU. On a CP-organised lobby of Parliament, a worker from Napier’s aircraft works told the Worker’s correspondent that ‘we are not making planes to be used against our fellow anti-fascists in Greece’.14 But they were: short of a mutiny by British soldiers in Greece, the only significant way workers in Britain could help their fellow-workers in Greece was by going on strike. This would have been a grave step to take, but a few days later there appeared a brief report that the North London District of the AEU had decided to ‘down tools at 1 p.m. next Wednesday’. This decision was almost certainly CP-inspired and the low-key nature of the announcement suggests that it was intended as a shot across the Government’s bows.15

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But the strike did not take place: the Worker announced that it had been called off ‘in view of the German offensive’ in the Ardennes.16 If the CP had been behind the decision to call a strike, it was perhaps not a decision taken at the highest levels of the Party. Pollitt told the December EC – in a speech given great prominence in World News and Views – that the events in Greece needed to be seen ‘against the background of the whole war against fascism, now nearing its final battles’. The Greek business was bad but there were ‘at the same time also very positive developments’, for instance the participation of Communists in the new French and Italian Governments.17 Thereafter, though the CP continued to criticise the British intervention in Greece, no more attempts to mobilise opinion were made. The Party’s leaders clearly considered that the unpleasant events in this faraway country were of little long-term consequence. In January, Ivor Montagu argued in Labour Monthly that whilst it was understandable that the British should wish to protect their strategic interests, there were better ways of going about it: ‘Mr Churchill’s concern to secure the Mediterranean route in relation to the interests and needs of the British Empire is understandable. Unfortunately, in pursuing his objective in the Mediterranean Mr. Churchill’s peculiarities of temperament stand in the way of achieving it’. Dutt made it clear that the Party’s objections to British intervention were not made on revolutionary grounds but because they impeded the common anti-fascist strategy. The ‘fascistcontrolled armed formations’ had not ‘been dissolved.’ If they had been then it would be appropriate for the partisans to disarm also. Dutt cited the French experience as a better way of going about these things: ‘there has always been readiness to integrate . . . armed formations in the national army, and the example of France, where the counter-revolutionary plots have so far been held in check, has shown that this can be done’. In any event, Dutt found cause for optimism in Communist participation in various ‘democratic countries’.18 (Communists continued to participate in the French Government while it carried out savage repression of a colonial revolt in Algeria).19 The Party’s relative indifference to the events in Greece was but one manifestation of a growing nationalism in the Party, which was particularly marked in its attitude to Germany. The Marxist method which the Party had once used to analyse the causes of war and the differentiation it had once made between the German ruling class and the Nazis on the one hand and the German people on the other, had been increasingly replaced with a strident anti-German attitude which veered towards jingoism. This change did not come all at once – in 1942 the Party had taken pains to refer to those

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Germans who had fought in the International Brigades in Spain20 – but steadily crept into Party discourse, probably influenced by the similar tone gradually adopted by the Soviet press and radio. By 1943, Worker readers were regularly regaled with nationalist sentiments. A cartoon with the caption ‘creatures that once were human’ depicted German housewives as pigs taking home Russian youths to work as domestic slaves.21 An article on the saturation bombing of German cities noted that ‘those who light-heartedly sent off their sons and daughters to loot and destroy the peaceful homes of others see war comes back to them’.22 A nadir was reached with the reproduction of an article from Soviet War News which proclaimed: ‘for a popular movement you need people; but what we have in Germany is millions of Fritzes and Gretchens, a greedy and stupid people, some brazen, some timorous, but all incapable of thinking and feeling’.23 Whilst such sentiments did not appear often in World News & Views and Labour Monthly, both aimed at a less popular audience, these journals also propagated anti-German nationalism, albeit of a more cerebral kind. Here, such questions as German war guilt, the necessity for unconditional surrender and reparations and the future borders of Germany were frequently addressed. In late 1944 Ivor Montagu discussed the ‘problem of how to deal with the German nation whose aggression against peaceful countries has aroused the justified hatred and anger of the peoples of the world’. Territorial changes were needed: amongst other adjustments, ‘East Prussia, Poznan and Silesia’ should be ‘incorporated into Poland, thereby limiting Germany’s heavy industry and destroying the basis and influence of the Junkers’.24 It is not surprising, in this nationalist atmosphere, that one Party member wrote to complain that despite Britain’s ‘rich literary and political heritage we have to speak an unintelligible ‘International Marxist Language’, to sing an ugly Belgian song [ the Internationale] and wear the emblem of a great Socialist state to which honour we are not entitled’.25 That Britain and the other great powers should have the right to order and police the world was now taken for granted in King Street. At around the same time that Montagu was discussing the German problem, Dutt was admonishing those who were critical of the proposed new world security organisation (soon to be established as the United Nations Organisation (UNO)) mooted at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference: ‘The partnership of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States of America’ would be ‘fully adequate to protect the world peace, providing this co-operation is maintained’. The critics who argued that the plan would ‘amount to a dictatorship of great powers’ were wrong: ‘under modern world conditions decisive power rests overwhelmingly with the principal great powers . . . the

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question is whether these powers shall use their strength . . . to maintain world peace or in mutual opposition promote world war.’26 There was then apparently no alternative to accepting whatever dispensation the great powers chose to hand out. Teheran significantly changed the CP’s view of the road to colonial freedom. If the Party line since 1935 had been essentially liberal democratic, in as much as democratic reform, rather than revolution, had been seen as the means of achieving national liberation, this reform was nevertheless seen as something to be wrested from the imperialists by the colonial peoples and their supporters in the imperialist heartlands. Now, colonial freedom began to be regarded more as something to be given to the colonial peoples by their colonial masters. International economic and political co-operation by the great powers was the key to progress. Of considerable significance in this respect was the production in the summer of 1944 of a new primer for recruits by the Party’s Education Department. Imperialism, we should recall, had been for the CP virtually synonymous with colonialism. Yet the primer did not mention imperialism. 27 In the CP’s new zeitgeist relationships between the imperialist states and their colonies need no longer be antagonistic. Revealingly, the word imperialism had virtually disappeared from the Party’s lexicon, a point made in a letter of complaint in the Worker. The letter drew no response.28 In late 1944, the Party published an EC Memorandum, drafted by Ben Bradley, on the colonial question. Suffused with the principles of the Teheran Declaration, it called on the British Government to institute programmes for all-round development and to govern constitutionally through a ‘properly elected assembly or legislature’, not through a Governor. Though the Memorandum criticised the Labour Party’s argument that some colonial peoples were not yet ready for independence, there was in truth little essential difference between Labour and Communist policies on the matter. The CP’s view that it was the responsibility of the British Government to hand over power to the colonial peoples smacked of the ‘white man’s burden’ hardly any less than Labour’s. Bradley was an old dog who could be taught new tricks. Completely gone was the revolutionary outlook which had informed his earlier activities. In paternalistic tones reminiscent of the Fabians, Bradley expounded how the British Government could emancipate the colonial peoples and institute relations of mutual benefit. The British should ‘eliminate present forms of exploitation’, develop the economies of the colonies, ‘introduce labour legislation’ and so forth. Lest any of his readers should react with scepticism to these schemes, Bradley assured them that ‘a prosperous Britain cannot be envisaged without prosperity for the colonial countries.’29

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These social-chauvinist assumptions were greatly reinforced by the Yalta Conference. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Yalta in February 1945. The Yalta Communiqué was replete with familiar Wilsonian platitudes. The three leaders were, for instance, determined to build a ‘world order under law, dedicated to peace, security, freedom and the general well-being of all mankind’.30 The reality was somewhat different. Though the Communiqué stressed that ‘democratic’ means were to be used in solving the problems of the post-war world the three leaders had spent their time together assigning peoples and nations to their respective spheres of influence in much the same spirit as had prevailed at the Congress of Berlin. It was at Yalta, for instance, that the Allies agreed that in return for Soviet entry into the war against Japan, the Soviet Union would receive Port Arthur, the Kurile Islands and parts of China previously ceded to Japan. The status quo in Outer Mongolia was to be preserved. The views of the Chinese Government on these arrangements were not solicited.31 Why did the CP’s leaders give such enthusiastic support to Yalta? Was it, as one Trotskyist critic claims, ‘precisely because’ it was their ‘intention to ease the contradictions of capitalism’?32 Hardly. They were misguided and opportunist, but they were not part of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. In the CP’s eyes, the war had gravely weakened world capitalism. The Yalta accords, if translated into action, would hasten its departure. Reporting to the EC in February, Pollitt claimed that Yalta represented a decisive advance even on Teheran. There, only a desire for world peace and prosperity had been expressed. But now the Allies had stated their determination to establish world bodies to administer, monitor and, if necessary, police the postwar world.33 Asinine as the perspectives of Yalta now seem, especially with the benefit of hindsight, it is as well to remind ourselves that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt appeared united in a determination to build a new world. If the Yalta Communiqué had Stalin’s signature, who were the leaders of the CP to argue? We shall see that increasingly fractious relations with the Soviet Union caused the CP later in the year to denounce sternly British and US foreign policy and to attack the democratic credentials of the US Government. But the basic outlook of the Yalta accords was not questioned. There was an implicit assumption in the CP’s post-Yalta policy that class struggle was no longer the motive force of history. The ‘national and international unity between the most diverse states, classes and opinions’34 which had nearly achieved victory over fascism could now proceed to build the post-war order of harmony and progress. In this schema, classes could cooperate in rebuilding their war-torn societies and the colonial powers and

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their colonies could co-operate in colonial development. The bourgeoisie would now help to create the conditions for a peaceful transition to socialism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they had created their own grave-diggers. In the second half of the twentieth century they would dig their own graves. The Yalta accords were lavishly praised in the CP press. Such unpleasantness as that in Greece had to be seen in this context. According to Pollitt, 1945 was ‘going to be the greatest year in world history’. There would be ‘difficulties and setbacks’, but Yalta had been a ‘great inspiration’. Its impact would be felt ‘in every liberated country, and not least of all in Greece’.35 World News and Views assured its readers that the agreements reached between the ‘Big Three’, these saviours from on high, would enable humanity to ‘achieve new conquests over poverty and insecurity, and guarantee the same united use of the world’s productive resources in peace as we have seen done in war.’ Though the extreme left and the extreme right would attempt to ‘undermine’ the Yalta accords, the CP would do everything ‘in its power to make these things possible. In doing so, it will – along with all other men and women of goodwill from all sections of the nation – best serve the men and women in the Armed Forces, the people of Britain, the rising generation, and posterity.’36 Indicative of the CP’s cheerful view at the time of Yalta is a schoolmasterly ticking-off by J.R. Campbell of the British and US representatives for squabbling at a civil aviation conference in Chicago over production quotas. There was now no need for such conflict. Post-war reconstruction, financed by the World Bank (recently established at the Bretton Woods Conference) would ensure world plenty. The reconstruction of ‘backward countries’ would create markets ‘for the capital goods industries of Britain and the USA’. Before quarrelling ‘over the division of markets in the world, there should be a concerted effort on the part of the United Nations’ to expand markets in such countries.37 Promotion of such agencies as the World Bank presented some knotty problems for the ostensibly Marxist CP. It used to argue that relationships between the colonial powers and the colonies were necessarily exploitative. But under the new democratic dispensation, the western powers could take a leaf out of the Soviet Union’s book. There, resources from its ‘more advanced republics’ were transferred to its ‘less advanced’ ones. If this practice were followed in the west, then relations of mutual benefit could be established between the great powers and the more backward countries. Furthermore, the representatives of the great powers in the new international agencies would ‘be responsible directly to their Governments and not to

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banking and financial circles’. And ‘with progressive governments in such countries, these members . . . will be pressing for policies beneficial to all countries’.38 Even in the context of 1945, such views were naive. It should be noted though that the CP envisaged in the post-war world a radical extension of democracy, in which far more power would be given to the common people. In a popular pamphlet on the Yalta Conference, Pollitt outlined an idealistic vision of a democratic society, clearly based on the war-time experience of popular participation in the control of production and owing something to Lenin’s remark in State and Revolution to the effect that every cook should learn to run the state: All over the world there is a new conception of democracy developing, in which the people are no longer content to leave the management of things and affairs to others, but want to display the same leadership, initiative, talent and power so strikingly brought out on the battlefield, in the workshops, civil defence and the Resistance Movements. Pollitt contended that this extension of democracy could stop a post-war struggle for markets with other countries and consequent ‘attacks on wages, mass unemployment, curtailment of social services’.39 The Party which had once condemned democracy as a sham and a charade now eulogised it. In June there appeared a Whiggish account of the historical development of democracy. Democracy ‘first took shape in England two and a half-centuries ago’, and had developed through such progressive measures as the extension of the franchise and such progressive legislation as the Factory Acts. Socialism was the most complete expression of democracy and the Soviet Union had ‘revealed in achievements that all could see that our ideals are the best in practice as well as the most noble in aspiration’. Of the dictatorship of the proletariat, nothing was said.40 Whatever the democratic pieties of the Yalta Communiqué, the governments of the great powers were manifestly determined that they, and not the common people, would administer the post-war world. This determination was evident in the Communiqué, which included Churchill’s interpretation of the Atlantic Charter. Self-determination was defined as ‘the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations’.41 Clearly, the principles of Yalta did not necessarily apply to the subject peoples of the Allies.

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Dutt was a master of nuance, an expert in the exegesis of such texts as the Yalta Communiqué. He had never failed to find underlying class interests in this or that formulation. It is therefore extremely unlikely that he and the rest of the CP leadership had failed to notice the ambiguities of the Communiqué. Nevertheless, the CP continued to welcome the reconquest of Britain’s colonies, always qualified with platitudinous remarks to the effect that Britain should respect the desires of the colonial people. In March, for instance, the Party welcomed the continuing advance of the British in Burma and applauded ‘the magnificent fighting march of the 14th Army through the jungle hills of North Burma which has brought them out into the plains of Central Burma’. It was important though to ‘convince Burma that the British armies really come as liberators. This means, in the first instance, a clear-cut declaration of our intentions for the broad outline of Burma’s political future’.42 It soon became apparent what ‘our’ intentions were. British colonial rule in such places as Burma and Malaya was forcibly re-imposed, but this did not unduly trouble the CP. In May, the Party issued a mild rebuke to the Government after it had been made plain that Burma was to be ruled by a governor for at least three years. There could be no doubt, the Party argued, that the effect of this decision would ‘be to increase distrust of Britain to a disastrous degree’. It would ‘also damage the prestige of the British Government’s profession of democracy in all liberated countries’.43 The CP was nevertheless not deflected from its determination to promote the clearly bogus prospectus issued at Yalta. Party members may though have believed that once the war was won the democratic forces of the world would be able to compel the old colonial powers to grant self-determination. Maurice Levitas, who fought in Burma, claimed to have believed that the Soviet Union would force Britain to grant national freedom to Burma.44 But whatever their private beliefs, the CP’s leaders continued to promote Yalta. In June, the Communist Party of Burma, appalled by the brutality of the British authorities, wrote to the CPGB complaining about such activities as forcible dispersion of meetings and confiscation of newspapers. The Burmese Party requested the British Party to raise these matters with the ‘Secretary of State and members of the Government’.45 It may well have done this, but no public fuss was made. In the Autumn, Inside the Empire chose to print an article by the Burmese Than Tun which painted a very different picture of post-war Burma. Tun was ‘confident that Britain, America and the Soviet Union’ would ‘help Burma in their national effort’.46 That summer, in a further sign that Yalta had as much relevance to the colonial question as biblical injunctions to be good neighbours, the French

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army shelled Damascus to quell popular protests against France’s re-conquest of Syria and the Lebanon. The CP’s response was to tick off the French for the use of force and to point out that the British, US and Soviet Governments had demanded that the French desist: ‘the whole effort of the free world today is to replace force in international affairs’. But there were other issues than the use of force. Oil in the middle east was owned by British and American oil companies. The French, in response to protests against their use of force, had demanded negotiations on the oil resources there. This was quite reasonable. The British and the Americans could not ‘maintain they, and they alone, are to have exclusive control of the world’s oil, while British intrigues to extend the grip of British finance on this oil can only lead to antagonism’. The oil should be therefore be shared with the French. Of the interests of the Arab people in this matter, the Party had nothing to say.47 During 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and its allies, which had become increasingly strained in 1943 and 1944, became bitter indeed.48 In April, the French Party published Duclos’s attack on ‘Browderism’. Browder was alleged to have ‘transformed’ the Teheran Declaration, a diplomatic agreement, ‘into a political platform of class peace in the United States’.49 The probable explanation – as we shall see later – for this episode is that Soviet Union was warning its allies that they should not take for granted that the Communist Parties would continue their policies of class harmony. The British Party now abandoned its brief campaign for a national government and began again to attack the Conservatives as representatives of monopoly capital. Relations between the Soviet Union and its allies had become particularly strained over various issues unresolved at Yalta. The future of Poland had been especially vexatious. The Potsdam Conference of July-August was convened to discuss these matters The conference caused more nationalism and anti-German prejudice to surface in the CP.50 Pollitt hailed the decisions to demilitarise Germany, to extract reparations and to eliminate the Nazi Party.51 The territorial transactions of Potsdam were unproblematic for the CP leadership, which had been prepared for them for over a year. In May 1944 the EC had been circulated with a memorandum, suffused with realpolitik, on the question of Poland’s borders. Noting that Stalin had recently spoken of the need for ‘a strong and independent Poland’, the unnamed author, prescient or well-briefed, noted that the creation of a strong Poland would involve the transfer of Silesia, an area with a predominantly German population. ‘The people of Silesia would not vote to join Poland’, he or she observed, but ‘self-determination is not an absolute right but one the exercise of which at any given time must be considered in relation to the

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whole situation’. No less authorities than Marx and Engels were cited to support this contention. In the Nineteenth Century they had opposed Czech nationalism because of its pro-Tsarist outlook.52 The Second World War ended on 14th August 1945 with a Japanese unconditional surrender forced by the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the war was beginning to move seamlessly into the Cold War. Relations between the Soviet Union and its allies had by now become even frostier. British international relations were now the responsibility of a Labour Government, which soon began to disappoint the CP. Speaking at a rally to celebrate the Party’s 25th anniversary, Pollitt attacked Bevin’s first speech as Foreign Secretary, in which he had made it clear he would continue with the previous government’s policy on Greece and had attacked the Soviet Union’s policy in Eastern Europe. Pollitt called on the labour movement to exert the ‘strongest pressure to obtain a reversal of this foreign policy which represents the continuation of the influence of the Tory Party in foreign affairs’.53 This theme of the baleful influence of the Foreign Office was to dominate CP discourse in this period. A generally ‘progressive’ domestic Labour policy was contrasted with a ‘reactionary’ foreign policy. Churchill’s interventions in foreign affairs confirmed the Party’s suspicions. In his response to the King’s Speech, Churchill had claimed that ‘at the present time, police governments ruled over a great number of countries . . . almost everywhere Communist forces had obtained or were in the process of obtaining dictatorial powers’. Responding to Churchill’s outburst, Emile Burns remarked, despite the unity on this matter between the Labour and Conservative Parties, that ‘if anyone needed proof of the dangers from which Labour’s victory in the General Election has saved us and the world’, it was provided by Churchill’s contribution to the debate in Parliament. His speech showed ‘that with the defeat of Nazi Germany the Tory Party – and not only the vocal anti-Crimea section – is resuming its basic policy that found expression in Munich’.54 The CP contrasted the reactionary shenanigans of the western powers with the reasonableness of the Communists. One of several articles on the Chinese Communists in the early Autumn was a potted biography of Mao Tsetung which, presumably for fear of raking over old coals, completely omitted any mention of the bloody events of the 1920s and 1930s. According to the CP, both Mao and Chiang Kai-shek were adamant that they would in no circumstances provoke civil war. This fortified the hope ‘that a truly united China will be forged before long’.55 A few days later, no doubt much to the CP’s chagrin, the Worker had to carry news of Chiang’s

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attack on Communist-held areas. In notable contrast to its extremely muted coverage of industrial unrest until then, and presumably to indicate that Communist co-operation in Britain should not be taken for granted, the paper that same day gave front-page coverage to a building workers’ one-day strike and march through London.56 Shortly afterwards, talks of the Allied foreign ministers in London collapsed. Presumably in response, Moscow signalled to the Communist movement that it was time to turn up the heat a little more. An article in Pravda, entitled ‘The Study of Marxism’, argued that Communists had neglected theoretical questions during the war and that a renewed study of Marxism was necessary to resolve certain ‘current problems’. The British Party printed the article in full and commented ‘that these views should be expressed by the CPSU at this time is of the greatest significance for the working class movement in Britain, and especially for the Communist Party’.57 Dutt argued (with some relish, it seemed) that it was not a ‘matter of surprise or disheartenment that in the first onset of the transition from war to peace, the new problems, the latent antagonisms which have partially been held in check under the iron pressure of war should burst into the open with extreme harshness.’ Further, ‘any illusions that the electoral defeat of Toryism and the return of a Labour Government would open a smooth path to the millennium . . . have been speedily dispelled.’58 Was Dutt pleased with the new left turn? Kevin Morgan has suggested that he may have lacked ‘intellectual commitment’ to the politics of Yalta.59 This seems a reasonable supposition, given what we know of Dutt’s history. Certainly his Notes of the Month in 1945 lacked sparkle and vigour, prompting a contributor to the pre-18th Congress debate to complain of the ‘dull practicalism of ‘Labour Monthly’’.60 But if Dutt wished to play Cassandra, his prophecies were not what the Party wished to hear. The CPSU’s call made little practical difference to the CPGB’s politics. As we shall see, the Party continued to preach class unity at home and though the tone of its comments on British foreign policy became harsher, the Party did virtually nothing to oppose it. Moreover, its principal point was that the Government was in breach of the spirit of Teheran and Yalta In September, CP-led dockers and Indonesian seamen in Australia had ‘blacked’ a cargo of arms headed for Indonesia. This had been the subject of a page one banner headline in the Worker.61 A dockers’ industrial dispute in Britain then erupted. Here was a golden opportunity for the CP to put into practice its professed internationalist sentiments, an opportunity to link British workers with the independence movement in the colonies. But though a circular to the membership in October suggests that such action

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was being considered, nothing was done. It was known that Dutch troops and materials bound for Indonesia had passed through British ports. ‘Comrades engaged in war industries’ were therefore urged to ‘look out for materials and Dutch troops to Indonesia’. It was ‘essential’ that the Party ‘should try and emulate the splendid example of the Australian dockers and seamen in refusing to handle any cargoes destined for Indonesia.’62 Shortly after members had been urged to ‘look out for’ materials bound for Indonesia, the Worker carried a report that dockers in Sidney had found ‘British ships . . . loaded with cargo which included munitions’ which they ‘suspected’ were bound for Java. It was further reported that ‘Australian Labour circles are expressing anxiety at the lack of any concrete action by British Labour against the dispatch of Dutch troops and munitions to Java’.63 If the leadership had been considering calling on British workers to ‘black’ ships bound for Indonesia they had second thoughts. Responsibility was passed on to the Government: the anxieties in Australia were now said to be about the ‘continued absence of news of action from the British Labour Government’.64 The Party leadership should surely not have expected that the British Government would take any action to impede their Dutch allies. By this time British troops too were involved in the suppression of the uprising in Indonesia. Only recently, the Worker had admonished Attlee for insisting in the Commons that Britain had an obligation to support the Dutch: the British Government also had ‘an obligation to the Atlantic Charter’, which the events in Indonesia had ‘put to shame’.65 Even so, the Party continued to insist that the cause of Teheran and Yalta was not lost: ‘the fight of the Indonesian people’, insisted Arthur Clegg, ‘is the fight of the United Nations for prosperity, democracy and peace’.66 Similarly, the ‘offensive’ of British imperialism in Indo-China, where the British were using Japanese troops to suppress the nationalist movement, was said to be in conflict with the principles of the UN Charter which the people of Indo-China were dying for.67 These intimations that it was going to be business as usual in the postwar world did though prompt the Party to issue some thoughtful commentaries on theoretical matters. In November, World News and Views suggested useful reading for those who wished to take up Pravda’s call to study Marxist theory. Readers’ attention was drawn, by the same R.W.Robson who had written on democracy in such glowing terms in June, to various works by Lenin and Stalin. The latter’s Problems of Leninism was deemed especially useful. Readers were enjoined to remember that democracy ‘in capitalist countries . . . is in the last analysis for the propertied

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minority’.68 As with the question of Indonesia, the matter of the limitations of bourgeois democracy had first surfaced during the conference of foreign ministers, at which the United States representative had criticised Sovietstyle democracy and demanded that his government help supervise the forthcoming elections in Bulgaria. In response, a prominent cartoon in the Worker had shown a Negro looking at a notice bearing the legend ‘Georgia election today. VOTE. Negroes barred’, with the caption ‘Democracy begins at home’.69 The CP could of course have pointed to similar restrictions on democratic liberties in Britain and its Empire. They could, for instance, have mentioned the gerrymandered constituencies of Northern Ireland. But they did not. A Labour Government was now in power, deemed by the CP not to be representative of finance capital. In December, Labour Monthly carried an article on democracy by Gallacher which was an implicit refutation of everything the CP had had to say on the matter since Yalta. Its political purpose was clearly to assert the democratic credentials of the Soviet Union and to denigrate those of the United States. Gallacher levelled strong criticism at the limitations of bourgeois democracy and even more at the political system of the United States. The gross inequalities of wealth in the USA meant that there could not be genuine democracy. The political, legal and judicial system in the USA was constructed to favour the rich. Gallacher pointed out that James F. Byrnes (the US Secretary of State, the US representative at the recent meeting of foreign ministers) who had questioned the democratic credentials of the new regimes in eastern Europe, came from the Jim Crow state of South Carolina.70 But there was a chasm of opportunism between the CP’s criticism of colonialism and bourgeois democracy and its actual practice. The Party continued to insist, against all the evidence, that the spirit of Teheran and Yalta was not dead. In November, for instance, after Molotov had announced, in response to the refusal of the USA to share the necessary technology, that the Soviet Union was determined to have its own atomic weapons, the Worker argued that ‘atomic secrecy [is] incompatible with solving the problems and cementing the unity of the Big Three, which remains the only hope of the world.’71 The contortions of the CP’s stance in 1945 on the international situation had been principally caused by the international manoeuvres of the Soviet Union. But beneath these contortions was a fundamental consistency of line. The strength of the ‘democratic camp’ was such as to be able to ensure that any reactionaries or backsliders would not be able to get their way. Despite the Party’s two turns to the left in 1945, its commitment to a policy of class

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and international harmony was scarcely dented. There may have been hiccups, reactionaries in Whitehall and the State Department might be intriguing against the progressive forces, this was only to be expected. But the democratic forces of the world, led by the Soviet Union, were strong enough to defeat them and build the new world.

A New Road to Socialism: the Communist Party and Post-War Reform and Reconstruction We saw in the previous chapter that victories in the war made the CP much more willing to discuss the question of post-war reform. But until Teheran its internal deliberations and public discussions of reform had been rather ad hoc and unfocused. Teheran – which had convinced the leadership that the opening of the Second Front was now assured – spurred the leadership into developing a new, reformist strategy based on the perspectives of Teheran. It was noted earlier that this new strategy bore Stalin’s stamp and it is remarkable just how similar the CP’s policy was to that of the Parties of Eastern Europe. There, the Soviet Union, could, as Fernando Claudin noted, impose a moderate solution through the ‘presence of the Soviet army’.72 That this solution was still too radical for Stalin’s allies does not substantially affect our argument. As with its stance on the war, the British CP’s new strategy was a synthesis of its own revisionism and Soviet foreign policy. In January 1944 the EC appointed Dutt to lead a Post-War Commission. It argued in an internal circular that ‘it is essential that preparations for the offensive must present to the people not only the battle before us and the sacrifices for which it is necessary to be prepared, but also the inspiring aims of the battle, the perspective of victory and the measures which victory will enable us to carry through’.73 Even so, while the Party press now regularly promoted the cause of post-war reform it was not until after the successful invasion of France in June that a vigorous campaign was launched. In this campaign and in subsequent efforts to help elect a government committed to reform, the national interest was stressed as much as, and at times more than, the interest of the working class. A key element in the development of the new strategy was an attempt to find theoretical justification for the implicit assumption of the Teheran Declaration that capitalism and social advance were compatible. Before the war, under the influence of the vulgar Marxist general crisis theory, the CP would have treated with derision any such notion. Indeed as late as 1944, in a popular pamphlet written to defend the ‘law’, attributed to Marx, of the ‘absolute deterioration of labour conditions’, we find the claim, in the face

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of all the evidence to the contrary, that ‘labour conditions under industrial capitalism have deteriorated absolutely as well as relatively’.74 But such views had by then become exceptional: the dominant view in the Party was that expressed in an EC circular shortly after the Teheran Conference: The talk of a ‘poor Britain’ after the war is being put about by monopolists who wish to keep the people poor so that they can pile up their riches. The country’s wealth is its people, industries and productive capacity. Of these we have an abundance. They must be put to full use, so that the people enjoy a steadily rising standard of living.75 Keynes provided the economic component of the CP’s new strategy. Keynesianism, which neatly gelled with the outlook of Teheran, seemed to offer a way out of crises through demand management of the economy. It is not surprising that the Party took up Keynes, for its economic views had never been quite Marxist in the first place. It tended to have an underconsumptionist view of capitalist economic crises. Crises were attributed, as in the classical view, to consumption, to the restricted purchasing power of the masses, rather than, as in the orthodox Marxist view, to production, to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Though Stuart Macintyre has shown that in its early days CP theorists and ideologues offered some criticism of underconsumptionist theories, he has also shown that there was a considerable degree of inconsistency and confusion in the Party’s critiques.76 Theoretical confusion on this matter must have been greatly exacerbated by the use in the 1930s and 1940s of the Soviet economist Leontiev’s Political Economy as an economics primer. Here, it was asserted that the cause of crisis was the contradiction between the tendency of capital to expand production and the ‘limited powers of consumption of the broad masses of the workers’.77 Such views would have made a transition to Keynesianism relatively painless. Though the odd contrary voice was still sometimes heard,78 the reformist economics associated with Keynes and Beveridge were widely propagated by the Party after Teheran. The dominant view was authoritatively expressed in the EC’s response to the 1944 White Paper on Employment: ‘A policy of high and steadily increasing real wages is not solely in the interests of [trade union members], but represents the national interest in a prosperous Britain contributing to the prosperity of the world.’79 Similarly, a review by Campbell of Beveridge’s Full Employment in a Free Society endorsed Beveridge’s views: ‘Spend on social reforms, Sir William argues, and you will stimulate demand for goods and so increase employment’.80

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A great deal of the work of developing a strategy for the post-war situation was carried out by the Economic Sub-Committee of the EC, which discussed questions of post-war reconstruction at great length.81 One member seems to have been asked to consider the Party’s developing concept of using state monopoly capitalism as a transitional step to socialism in the light of the canon of Leninism. This member thought that textual sanction could be found.82 He or she drew the attention of the Party centre to Lenin’s attacks on reformists who wanted to use the bourgeois state as a means of advancing to socialism. But, the author contended, Lenin had advanced these arguments during the First World War when the ‘negative’ rather than the ‘positive’ aspects of imperialism had become particularly acute. Moreover, in 1917, in the interregnum between the two revolutions, he had argued for the formation of a ‘revolutionary democratic state’ which could control monopoly ‘in the direction of ‘making it benefit the whole people,’ – i.e., in the direction of its ceasing to be capitalist monopoly.’ Somewhat tentatively, the author suggested some such government could be formed in Britain, especially given the wholesale development of state monopoly capitalism and the growth in the strength of progressive forces during the war.83 The fruits of such theoretical work became public on D-Day. The PostWar Commission’s report, Britain For the People, was published on D-Day and its conclusions exhaustively elaborated in several of Dutt’s Notes of the Month. Once it became apparent that the foot-hold in Normandy was secure, Party publications began to place much greater emphasis on post-war reform. How to Win the Peace, published in Harry Pollitt’s name, systematically set out the CP’s new strategy, made clear by its opening lines: On Tuesday, June 13th, I listened to the nine o’clock news and the Special Summary of one week’s events since D-Day on June 6th. The graphic dispatches about the actual landings on the French beaches, the droppings of the first paratroops, the experiences of airmen and seamen, gave a vivid picture of how one of the greatest feats of arms in all history had been organised and carried out . . . One thought kept hammering in my brain. If all this many-sided effort and sacrifice of peoples and governments, this tremendous new international cooperation is possible for war, why not for peace too. If so much effort has been put into the struggle to destroy fascism and defend democracy, then surely men and women of goodwill among all sections of the people will fight to see that the same inspiration, planning and use of the common resources of the United Nations shall be used in the coming days of peace, not to destroy but to build.84

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How To Win the Peace is usually, and rightly, regarded as the most authoritative statement of the Party’s post-Teheran perspectives. It was probably the work of Dutt’s Post-War Commission which had reported to the EC in April.85 How to Win the Peace marked the virtual completion of the transition to reformism which the Communist Party had been making since 1935. It is important to stress though that the CP did not regard itself as a reformist party of Labour’s ilk. When the Party supported the coalition’s and later Labour’s plans for reconstruction, such support was rendered in the context of a determination that reconstruction was but a step towards the building of a socialist society. The Party was emphatic that after post-war reconstruction British society would still be a capitalist society. Labour proposed to nationalise only a few key industries. The CP wished to abolish private ownership of the major means of production. Whether this would constitute socialism is another matter. How to Win the Peace brought together the various threads of the CP’s new strategy. It was a strategy which owed much to Bernsteinian revisionism in that the CP proposed to use the political institutions of capitalism to end capitalism: unlike Bernstein though the CP kept the ultimate goal of socialism very much in mind. The main elements of this new strategy were: that the ‘progressive’ forces had been greatly strengthened and the reactionary forces greatly weakened in the course of the war; that significant sections of the bourgeoisie would wish to co-operate with the ‘progressive’ forces in post-war reconstruction and that national unity could therefore continue into the peace; that a state capitalist society, which would create the economic and political foundations of socialism, could emerge from the ruins of war; that the nationalised means of production in such a society would deprive capital of its power; and that a more-or-less peaceful transition to socialism could then occur. National unity was possible, Pollitt believed, because ‘the more far-sighted elements of the capitalist class has learnt lessons from the past and the present’. In particular, they had learnt that co-operation, not conflict was the key to a prosperous future.86 The most systematic of the Party’s various disquisitions on topics of postwar reconstruction are to be found in the Educational Commentaries of Marx House. Whilst we should be aware that these documents attempted to put a case that could command the support of the whole labour movement, they reveal sentiments of a kind to be found in any Fabian soiree. The bourgeois state was not to be smashed but to be used as a highway to socialism. One Commentary argued for nationalisation essentially on grounds of ‘national efficiency’: ‘public ownership of the key industries would give the state – and take out of the hands of the monopolists – the possibility to influence,

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and largely to direct, the economic life of the country as a whole’. True, the Party did believe that nationalisation would help to lay the foundations of socialism but of the old communist case against nationalisation – that it was a form of outdoor relief for bankrupt millionaires and could serve only to strengthen the capitalist economy and state – the Party had nothing to say.87 Similarly, in a response to the Government White Paper on the Beveridge Report, there was no discussion whatsoever of the relationship of imperialism to social reform.88 In a Whiggish discussion of the 1944 Education Act, we find no discussion of that function of education admitted by Robert Lowe on the morrow of the Second Reform Act, when he proclaimed that the ruling class must ‘educate’ their ‘masters’.89 If the Educational Commentaries had been aimed at a reformist audience, after Yalta there appeared there appeared in World News and Views a remarkable series of articles which addressed various problems of reconstruction in the brisk detached manner of a business efficiency expert. In March the ‘Problem of British Exports’ was discussed. ‘What should we export’, the article began, the use of the first person making it quite clear that no sectional considerations should endanger the national interest. Nor would the question of colonial underdevelopment get in the way of rebuilding the British economy. The anonymous author was not perturbed by Britain’s patterns of trade in which it mainly exported manufactured goods and imported raw materials and foodstuffs: ‘bananas could be grown in hot houses in England, but it is surely better to obtain bananas by exchanging cotton goods produced by the skilled operatives of Lancashire for bananas grown in the tropics.’ The use of the Victorian mill-owners’ term ‘operatives’ was perhaps designed to stress the non-partisan nature of the author’s inquiry. The question of British competitiveness was then addressed in a fashion quite remarkable for one who, presumably, subscribed to the labour theory of value. Those who argued that lower wages were necessary to enable Britain to compete were quite wrong. What determined a nation’s competitiveness was not the level of wages but the productivity of industry: ‘As a matter of fact, it is not money wages, but the productivity of the worker which is the essential factor in keeping down production costs.’ The Government’s proposals to resolve the export problem, ‘mainly export guarantees’, were fine as far as they went, but much more was needed. The solution was to be found in ‘a combination of monetary, industrial and inter-governmental planning, in which government control and guidance must play a major part’.90 But if the working class was prepared to play its part in fighting for the national interest, many employers, the CP asserted, were still concerned only

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with their selfish sectional interests. The coal owners were one example of such employers, the steel masters another. In July, the Manifesto of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation was subjected to some restrained criticism. The appeal by the Confederation for ‘a complete overhaul’ of the industry was ‘timely and very needful’. The industry, ‘like the curate’s egg, was good in parts’. There were a few modern plants, and some firms had ‘spent millions in improvements’, but the main objective of ‘the big steel barons’ was to ‘restrict production here in line with the International Cartel agreements.’ Such restrictions were ‘fatal for our prospects as a nation’. To meet the needs of the nation and to keep up with Britain’s competitors, new methods of production, re-training of the workforce and a restructuring of pay agreements was essential.91 Clearly, whatever the CP’s own assessment of its differences with Labour, these were more quantitative than qualitative. Though Pollitt argued that ‘socialism would end the robbery of the poor by the rich and the exploitation of one man by another’,92 the CP tended to equate socialism with planning and public ownership, as did Herbert Morrision, intellectually responsible for Labour’s version of socialism.93 Indeed, just like Morrison, the CP envisaged that nationalised industries would be run ‘by a board appointed by [a] Minister.’94 The CP contemplated not a revolutionary transformation of the relations of production but the type of socialism typified by the National Coal Board and the National Health Service. If we want to know what the CP in power would have done, we need only recollect the stagnant socialist societies of Eastern Europe, built by the men and women of Pollitt’s generation. Appropriately enough, it would be Parliament and the Labour Party which would be the main agents of building socialism. The role of the Communists would, as we saw in the last chapter, be to provide an ideological leavening and to chivvy Parliament and the Labour Party.

The CP and Electoral Politics After Teheran the CP argued that a Tory Government or even a Torydominated coalition could not be relied upon to realise the promises of the Teheran Declaration. Only the election of anti-Tory Government led by Labour could do this. In preparation for the post-war period the CP quietly dropped in early 1944 its support for the ‘electoral truce’ and called for an electoral alliance which would unite all who could be united against the Conservatives. For a short period after the Yalta Conference of early 1945, the Party argued that a post-war government of national unity would be required to deal with the problems of reconstruction but then reverted to

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campaigning for the defeat of the Tories. It campaigned vigorously for a Labour victory in the General Election of 1945 and hailed its victory as an immense historical step forward. Its post-Teheran electoral activities demonstrated just how thoroughly the CP had conflated the categories of class and nation. In January 1944, on a 12% swing against the Conservatives, Commonwealth won a sensational victory at Skipton. This victory probably convinced the CP’s leaders that support for the ‘political truce’ was no longer sustainable. Teheran doubtless convinced them that it was no longer necessary. In early February, the CP announced that it would support the independent candidate in the Bury St. Edmonds by-election95 and the Independent Labour Candidate in the West Derbyshire by-election, a rural seat which effectively had been in the gift of the Duke of Devonshire. The Party’s propaganda in these by-elections suggests that its decision to break the truce was motivated by a desire to build anti-Tory unity in readiness for the general election. A typical Worker piece quoted a ‘man in the street’ who believed that: This is our opportunity. We have to make a change now, not only for the lads in the forces. My family have been Conservatives for generations, but I am making a clean break and voting against the House of Hartington . . . the lord of the manor decides what industry should come to the district, and we will never know anything but hard work and poverty while he dictates.96 An astonishing victory at West Derbyshire, and the success of the Labour candidate at Kirkculdy, who managed to contain the anti-coalition swing to a mere 4.7%, hardened the CP’s decision to end its support for the ‘political truce’. A Worker editorial argued that ‘the conclusion is obvious. Labour men can win seats, but there is a mass revulsion against the Tories . . . The electorate is in a critical mood. It is dissatisfied with the Government, with the conduct of the war and the preparations for peace’.97 While the CP continued to insist that it was essential to continue to support the Government, its electoral preparations for the post-war period accelerated. Shortly after the West Derbyshire by-election, the Party announced that it would fight at the General Election for a ‘Labour and Progressive Majority’. ‘Millions of people’, the EC asserted ‘are resolved that in the New Britain there shall be a decisive change. They are deeply convinced that Toryism and social justice are as wide apart as the poles . . . the servants of profit cannot be relied upon to become the champions of the people’.98

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The CP wanted an electoral pact between all Parties to the left of the Conservatives, a stance based on a widely shared assumption that Labour could not get an overall majority and on a desire to build progressive unity around the politics of Teheran. But in October, Labour’s NEC decided that it would fight the election on a socialist platform and would ‘invite the electors to return a majority pledged to support the Labour Government’.99 Between then and Labour’s December Conference the CP fought very hard for the policy to be reversed. On the eve of the Conference Pollitt appealed to the delegates to take heed of developments in the international situation, particularly in Greece, which had shown that the ‘world is now in doubt as to where Britain stands in the fight for the political and moral defeat of fascism’. The election could be won, but only on the condition that there was ‘unity on programme and candidates on the part of the Labour Party, the Communist Party, Commonwealth, Liberals and such other sections of the people as are prepared to take part in one united effort.’100 But the mood of the delegates was strongly against any compromises with other parties. A CP-inspired attempt to reverse the NEC’s policy was heavily defeated at the Conference.101 Pollitt showed considerable exasperation in January 1945 when he argued that there had been at Labour’s Conference: no real understanding of the fight that will take place at the General Election. It will be the most fateful in all our history. We shall face not only such issues as housing, full employment and national insurance . . . but also lasting peace, the avoidance of a new war, the political and moral destruction of fascism, the whole future of world humanity and the possibilities of the advance towards the conquest of power and the establishment of socialism.102 Given that Labour was failing to comprehend the enormity of the tasks to be carried out after the war and the necessity of building the widest possible unity to carry them out, the CP had determined that there had to be a strong Communist presence in the first post-war Parliament. Based on the decision of the Party’s Seventeenth Congress, held that October, it had been decided at the December EC meeting that the Party would field 52 candidates at the General Election if the Labour Party refused to form an electoral alliance.103 But these calculations were thrown awry by the decisions of the Yalta Conference. After Yalta, a major change in election policy was announced. To maintain national unity after the war it was necessary that there should be a

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government of national unity, albeit one based on a ‘Labour and Progressive’ majority, but including those Conservatives prepared to fight for the Yalta accords. In the interests of national unity, the CP would reduce the numbers it would field at the General Election. The post-Yalta policy was agreed after a sharp struggle among the Party leadership. Pollitt seems to have believed that it was necessary and actually possible to split a minority of ‘progressive’ Conservatives from the majority of reactionary die-hards. Presumably he had in mind the Conservative members of the War Cabinet, who had, after all, been partly responsible for Teheran and Yalta. But to at least some of the CP leadership the idea of continuing to co-operate even with ‘progressive’ Tories was quite repugnant. Their opposition to Pollitt’s proposal must have been stiffened by the fact that the Labour Party had made quite clear their opposition to continuing the coalition into the peace. In February, Pollitt explained to a clearly disturbed EC the practical consequences of the Yalta decisions. 104 There had to be a high level of national unity after the war: the Party had to call for a government of national unity. ‘I say that the first five years after the defeat of fascism are going to be as vital as the five years taken to achieve that defeat.’ In his closing speech Pollitt justified the proposed new approach by claiming that the capitalist class was weak. ‘Our economy, our industry is so backward’ he argued, that it was ‘beyond the capacity of the capitalist class to reorganise it along the old capitalist lines’. Progressive elements within the Conservative Party recognised the desperate state of the economy and were therefore prepared, in the national interest, to try new ways of re-building it. The CP too should be flexible: If we were meeting the Labour Party and the Tory Party and the Liberal Party tomorrow for a conference on what should be done in this election, we would not go into it with the same programme as the Tory party . . . But if in the course of that discussion we got this from the Tory Party, and this from the Liberal Party, we would be prepared to give a lot. Though much of what Pollitt had to say was not essentially very new, it had never before been spelt out so explicitly: post-war national unity should mean a government which included Tories. Pollitt’s attack at the February EC on Wal Hannington, the leader of the pre-war National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, for wishing to ‘repudiate Crimea’ and wanting a return to the ‘policy of 1928 – class against class’ suggests there must have a been

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an intense discussion. The EC endorsed Pollitt’s proposals for a new strategy but decided also, perhaps anticipating some rank-and-file unrest, that a thorough discussion of the new policy should be organised throughout the Party.105 A synthesis of the Party discussions was submitted to the March EC. Perhaps emboldened by the evidence of a degree of rank-and-file unease, opposition and scepticism,106 more members of the EC joined Hannington’s opposition to Pollitt. A minute which noted that ‘in view of the fooling of a number of comrades on the EC . . . it was necessary to give further consideration and guidance to the Party on certain fundamental theoretical questions’, suggests that the argument at the EC must have been sharp. It was decided though that the CP would run only 20 or 22 candidates at the General election, a sharp reduction from the 50 plus agreed at the previous Congress.107 Despite EC and rank-and-file unease, the leadership was determined to press on. A press statement argued that ‘national unity, essential for winning the war, will be equally essential in the critical years following the General Election to complete the victory and win the peace’. But a new government was required, one that ‘corresponded to the democratic aspirations of the people.’ The existing Tory majority ‘elected in the days of the pro-fascist policies of Baldwin and Chamberlain’ was ‘totally unrepresentative of the present state of public opinion’. At the General Election it should ‘be replaced by a Labour and progressive majority’ that could form the basis of a new national government. This new government, the Party argued, should ‘include representatives of all parties supporting the decisions of the Crimea Conference, international economic co-operation and an agreed minimum programme of economic and social progress for the people of Britain.’ In pursuit of this strategy the CP would work for ‘an electoral alliance of the Labour and Progressive movements’.108 Pollitt had had his way. Though the CP ceased to call for a national government after the PCF’s critique of ‘Browderism’, the Party struggle over this matter tells us quite a lot about its outlook in 1945. The central issue was not national unity – very few members disputed that post-war national unity would be necessary – but unity with Tories. The Conservatives were distrusted not only because, communists assumed, they would not introduce reforms beneficial to the working class but also because they were thought to be unpatriotic. They were held to be representatives of the most backward sections of monopoly capital, those who had sold the nation short before the war, had continued to drag their feet during the war and who were even now opposing the measures necessary for post-war reconstruction. These

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sentiments ran deep in the Party. In that Summer’s general election the CP stressed national unity much more than class questions. Despite the decision to call for the formation of a national government, little was done in practice to achieve this end in the few weeks before the policy was reversed in mid-April. The EC statement calling for a national government was published in the Worker in late March, but the paper did little to campaign for such a government. Indeed very little was said in the Worker about a national government and an inattentive reader would have noted only a continuation of anti-Tory sentiments, which had got stronger and stronger over the previous year.109 The CP fought with vigour for a Labour victory during the General Election campaign. The CP itself won two seats. It is a myth that the CP fought for a renewed coalition. This myth was, and is, common currency in the labour movement. It doubtless arose because for most labour movement activists the Party’s March call for a national government, even one with a Labour and Progressive majority, was the most awful treachery and more-or-less equivalent to calling for a continuing coalition. That the myth has persisted, although the Party called for a national government for a few weeks only, and that in July Pollitt urged the people to ‘vote as Red as you can’, demonstrates the power of myths. The myth surfaced in Henry Pelling’s history of the CP, where he argued that ‘the Party favoured the maintenance of the coalition after the end of the war. It was assumed that this coalition would be reformed after the General Election’. Even historians close to the Party continue to propagate this view. James Hinton has complained of the Party’s ‘grossly misjudged decision to go into the 1945 election campaign calling for a continued Labour/ Conservative coalition.’110 But the CP’s last call for a national government was made on April 18th.111 The CP had not then had sufficient time to digest the PCF’s recently published criticism of ‘Browderism’. One of the charges levelled against Browder was that he had given up the ‘struggle against the men of the trusts’, synonymous, to the CP, with the Conservatives. The CP, doubtless with relief, almost certainly took the attack on Browder as a signal that they need no longer fight for a national government. The EC’s May Day statement made no reference to a government of national unity nor to ‘progressive’ Tories. But it was emphatic that the war-time international and national united fronts must be preserved. At home the preservation of national unity required the leadership of the labour movement: Whole nations are united, regardless of different social systems, in support of the aim proclaimed by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at

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Yalta . . . The British nation achieved unprecedented unity in battle for the common purpose of destroying fascism. A new and firmer unity under the leadership of the labour movement can and must be forged. It can be the means of achieving the cherished hopes of economic and social progress. The statement ended with a clear call to reject the Tories: ‘A General Election draws near in Britain. We call upon the working people . . . to prepare for that great battle. Close the ranks. Unity of Labour, Communist and Progressive forces can win a new Parliament truly representative of the British nation.’112 The CP now resumed its campaign for electoral unity of those to the left of the Tories. But its recent call for a national government can hardly have helped its case.113 Ellen Wilkinson, the ‘Chairman’ (sic) of the Conference (who had been a CP member in the early 1920s) took up the matter in her opening address: ‘there is talk of the unity of the progressive forces. I believe that there is a longing that differences should be sunk, so that we should face the enemy together’. But Wilkinson set the price of unity at a level she would have known would be unacceptable to the CP: ‘Cannot smaller groups sink their differences and come in on a common basis for all?’ She also criticised the Party’s well known talent for fixing and manoeuvring: unity had to be won ‘honestly and on a common basis. This is a not a time for back-stairs intrigue’. Wilkinson’s preference for an arms-length unity with the CP on Labour’s terms carried the day.114 The coalition ended during Labour’s Conference: the election was set for July 5th. On the 25th May, a special meeting of the CP’s EC, district organisers and parliamentary candidates was held to discuss the election. Pollitt set the tone for the Party’s campaign by arguing that it ‘must prevent the term ‘nation’ being part of Tory propaganda’. The working class was ‘the nation, and the best defenders of its interests’. In somewhat contradictory vein though, and no doubt because of his emotional identification with the working class, he also demanded that the Party must give the people a vision of what socialism means in this country. ‘We must rouse up class feeling. We must make the people really hate Tory rule.’ But whether this hatred was to be a hatred of the Tories as a party of capital or for their alleged betrayals of the national interest was not clear.115 Labour’s manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, a melange of Fabianism and Labourism, had been given a warm welcome by the CP. That Labour made no claim to be a party of the working class had been made very clear by the title page of Let Us Face the Future on which the legend ‘A Declaration of

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Labour Policy for the Consideration of the Nation’ was superimposed on a large ‘V’ for Victory. This was not at all problematic for the CP. Labour’s programme for nationalisation, planning and controls was, the Party had argued, ‘essential not only to secure positive economic advance in Britain but also to securing that Britain can play a positive role in post war international economic life after the election and not just be a lame dog to be helped over stiles.’116 The main themes raised by the CP during the election campaign were the national interest and post-war reform. Little was said about the Party’s long-term goals. This may well have been in part the result of an opportunist calculation that this was the best way to maximise the left vote, but it was certainly also a manifestation of a deep social-chauvinism, typified by the election address of Gabriel Carritt, the CP candidate for the Abbey division of Westminster. This carried a prominent photograph of ‘gunner Carritt’ in khaki. ‘Now the Hun has been beaten’, Carritt addressed his electorate, ‘the soldiers are all agreed on this, that you all have . . . won the right to a better life. WE will not be cheated out of it as our fathers and mothers were in 1918’.117 Pollitt made a radio election address to the nation. He spoke on such themes as the pre-war record of the Conservatives, the necessity to nationalise basic industries because of the failure of private enterprise to meet the needs of the nation, the need for continued co-operation between the war-time Allies and so on. Class concerns were hardly raised. Pollitt urged his audience to vote in the national interest: The Conservatives are at their old game. They ask you to vote ‘national.’ They stump the country as if only one man had won the war, as if the Union Jack was their exclusive property. And those of you who have seen what the bosses get up when it’s a contract based on labour and material plus ten per cent know how shamelessly unpatriotic most private interests can be. To be sure, Pollitt did mention socialism once. In his peroration he played the Russian card, in those days a trump: ‘those of us who doubt whether socialism will work, consider what socialism has achieved, in peace and war, in Russia. We can do even better once we have defeated the Conservatives and move forward to a new and happier Britain.’118 The ephemera which survive from Pollitt’s campaign in the Rhondda suggest that these were the themes that he stressed on the doorstep and at meetings. The general tone of his campaign is well conveyed by a handbill in which his candidacy was endorsed by sixteen Christian clergymen who

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stated their belief that it was a ‘Christian duty, at this juncture to work for a Parliamentary majority which will serve the interests of the whole people. We consider further that this majority should contain as many as possible of the proved leaders of the working people of this country.’ Harry Pollitt was just such a man: his ‘devotion to peace, democracy and social justice is long established’. Pollitt does appear on occasion to have decided that a more militant tone might be judicious. In an election address ‘to the electors in the armed forces’, whom he presumably thought could stomach stronger stuff than most, he reminded his audience of his involvement in the struggles of the 1920s and 1930s, his participation in the ‘hands off Russia’ campaign and the hunger marches. He had been, he pointed out, a ‘life-long socialist’. Victory for the Communist Party would ‘represent a big stride towards the goal of socialism, which alone can finally abolish poverty, unemployment and war’.119 The result of the election is usually portrayed as a disaster for the Communist Party, a ‘severe shock’.120 No doubt the Party was dismayed by its failure to return more than two candidates and by its twelve lost deposits. But its average share of the poll was a creditable 12.5%.121 This is hardly a disaster, especially when we consider that CP candidates stood in such safe, even in 1945, Conservative seats as Abingdon and Birmingham, Sparkbrook. Given the enormous swing to Labour and the nature of the Party’s campaign, which was much more anti-Tory than pro-Communist, it is very likely that many who supported the Communist Party voted Labour. This was of course the logic of the Party’s campaign, a logic that was probably clear to the more politically sophisticated of the Party’s potential constituency. Though Pollitt had said ‘vote as Red as you can’, many of those who were influenced by the CP may well have concluded that its strategy was best served by voting pink not red.122 The ambiguity at the heart of the Party’s election policy is illuminated by an absurdity in the campaign in the Rhondda. There, Arthur Horner had endorsed, in his capacity as a miners’ leader, the Labour Candidate, Mainwaring. But, when wearing his Communist Party hat, he had endorsed Pollitt. This, not surprisingly, said a report from the Rhondda, had ‘caused a great deal of confusion’.123 In other post-campaign reports, Party DPCs made little mention of the ideals of socialism and the aims of the Communist Party and laid great stress on ‘getting the Tories out’. In Rossendale, the CP’s response to a Labour request that it stand down was to run ‘a terrific anti-Tory campaign (refusing to make the split vote the issue)’.124 In Hackney, where Rust was standing, the ‘main line of propaganda’ had been ‘anti-Tory. Rust the best candidate to represent Labour’s interests’.125

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Party leaders had made it quite plain that the crucial issue during the election was the defeat of the Tories. Socialism was an issue for the future. On the eve of the election the members were issued with a circular on the Party’s 25th anniversary which implicitly libelled Lenin as an advocate of the ‘inevitability of gradualness’. They were informed that the tasks of the Party ‘in the coming years’ were ‘largely new’. Victory over fascism and reaction had opened out ‘opportunities for democratic advance which can end the long decades of poverty, unemployment and war, and open the way to Socialism’. The members were warned against those: . . . in and around the labour movement who do not see these opportunities. They do not even realise the great victory that has been won. Lacking faith in the working class, they raise slogans that would distract the labour movement from ‘the next link in the chain’ and divide it from the mass of the people. There is no virtue in fighting against the stream when it is carrying us forward to our goal. As Lenin said in 1918, when the Leftists advanced slogans that would have meant disaster: ‘Fits of hysteria are of no use to us. What we need is the steady march of the iron battalions of the proletariat.’126 This was merely a theoretical summing up of an attitude that had existed in the Party since long before the election campaign. And though immediately before the election Pollitt had demanded that ‘not a single vote must be wasted on polling day. Every possible vote must be cast for the 21 Communist candidates, and for Labour Candidates in the other constituencies’, 127 it must be open to doubt if even all the Party’s members had concluded that the duty of the ‘iron battalions of the proletariat’ was to vote Communist. Considering the Party’s strategy then, the election result was not a disaster for the CP. Labour, according to the CP a working-class party, was now in power. The transition to national prosperity and socialism could begin.

The Communist Party, the Workers and the Labour Government What the CP would have done had the Conservatives won the General Election, can only be a matter of speculation. But Labour’s victory was regarded by the Party as a further giant stride forward by the ‘democratic’ forces of the world. We have seen that Labour’s foreign policy soon came under attack from the Party. But with regard to Labour’s domestic policy, the CP adopted the role of friendly critic. Labour’s programme of national reconstruction and reform was warmly supported. Here, two strands of the

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CP’s reformism were manifest. The state was no longer to be overthrown but used to foster social advance. The Labour Party was not a bourgeois party but was the main party of that advance. The CP’s stance on the industrial conflict which quickly followed Labour’s victory demonstrated these assumptions very clearly. Nationalisation was seen as a far surer way of advancing the interests of the working class. Rather than support strikes the Party urged negotiation and arbitration. Meeting shortly after the election results were announced, the EC acclaimed Labour’s victory: it had been ‘greeted with joy by democratic people all over the world. It puts an end to the policies of the past which resulted in poverty, war and fascism, and enables Britain to turn to the Socialist path leading to economic security, peace and world co-operation.’128 Pollitt declared that the forces of the Left were on the advance throughout the world, though the British labour movement would have to allow no ‘unholy alliance, either of the employers, the Trotskyists, or irresponsible socalled ‘lefts’ to divide its ranks.’129 Dutt contrasted the ‘glorious political leap forward’ of 1945 with the defeat of 1918.130 Now that the working class had elected a Labour government, the CP urged the working class on to Stakhanovite endeavours. A page one banner headline in the Worker proclaimed that ‘Coal Output Will be the Key to Government’s success.’ Great prominence was given to a speech by Horner at the South West Area Conference of the NUM in which he had declared that on current coal output it would be ‘‘impossible for the Government to face the difficulties of the war against Japan, the rehabilitation of Europe and the problems of this country . . . he [had] stressed the fact that the miners’ union had an obligation to institute an even greater measure of selfdiscipline than had existed previously.’ 131 Even before nationalisation measures could be taken to speed up production. In particular the miners should revive the ‘activity of the production committees in every coalfield’.132 But many workers did not share the CP’s sanguine view of the Labour Government. Within days of Labour taking office, London dockers went on strike in a dispute that was to rumble on and widen for months. The main issue in the strike was the employers’ evident determination to reimpose casual methods of employment.133 The CP’s response to the strike was to use the authority of Peter Zinkin, the pre-war editor of New Propeller, in a call to return to work. Zinkin’s star had waned greatly during the war, presumably because of his association with the industrial militancy of the 1930s. But now there appeared in the Worker a very rare article by him in which he expressed the Party’s sympathy with the dockers and denounced the ‘greedy,

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bullying employers’ who were endangering the ‘future prosperity of our country’. But, given the Party’s new strategy, its overriding concern with reconstruction, it is not surprising that Zinkin argued that the dockers’ unofficial strike was ‘useless and dangerous’. 134 On the same day the Government sent troops into the docks, an action that was reported but not commented on in the Worker.135 Despite this early intimation of the Government’s nature, the CP leadership gave the King’s Speech to Parliament an enthusiastic reception. An EC circular argued that victory in the war and the return of a Labour Government had lain ‘the foundations for far-reaching democratic and social advance. On these foundations, we now go forward in the new era.’ The Speech had ‘outlined a far-reaching and comprehensive programme of democratic and social reform’, which had been ‘warmly welcomed by the entire labour movement and by the widest sections of public opinion.’ Of course, the reactionaries were not reconciled to their defeat and Labour’s programme would have to be fought for ‘against the resistance of Tory reaction and the powerful monopolist interests’. The recent ‘attempts of financial circles to mobilise American financial pressure against the Labour Government’ (a reference, presumably, to the Government of the USA’s abrupt cessation of lend-lease) was an example of this resistance. The ‘mobilisation and support of the entire labour movement and of the people as a whole’ would be required to defeat the reactionaries.136 The grave economic situation which confronted the Labour Government made the CP even more determined that the working class must work harder. In October’s Labour Monthly Horner rehearsed the points he had made at the recent NUM Conference. Though the article was addressed to miners, its significance, written as it was by the man who was probably the most widely respected of the Party’s trade unionists – in an astute move, the Government appointed Horner to the post of National Coal Production Officer137 – can scarcely have escaped the notice of the journal’s readers. Horner asserted that it was ‘in the interests of the British people that our exports should be rapidly increased so as to enable us to secure payments to be made for imports’. The NUM had accordingly agreed to the request by the Ministry of Fuel and Power to increase production by eight million tonnes in the coming six months. A new approach to industrial relations was required: ‘basing ourselves on the class-consciousness of the mining community and its responsibility for the existence of a Labour Government, we are calling for the co-operation of men and management in this common endeavour’. Disingenuously, Horner argued that this did not mean that the miners need work harder. The demands of the situation could be met if

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miners were to ‘unleash their undoubted capacity and initiative in discovering better ways of working which will give the results required’. The implication of this approach – that strikes were a bad thing – did not need to be and was not spelt out.138 An EC circular made it quite clear that industrial unrest was not to be welcomed: ‘it is not in the interests of the working class to see a period of economic conflict and chaos follow on victory over fascism, but to utilise its further strengthened position in order to maintain and carry forward the gains made during the war.’ 139 In response to Horner’s call to boost production, the Yorkshire Party asserted in a handbill aimed at miners: ‘Labour is in power. With the help of the working class it can overcome all difficulties. In the pits today, miners are working for their own future and the future of the British working class. Through your Pit Production Committees and union representatives, overcome the obstacles to higher output.’140 A shop-floor critic of the Party’s productionist policy was sharply admonished: ‘catch up with the times. We are no longer busy manufacturing millionaires. We have today a Government without a single ex-company director.’141 Notwithstanding the disapproval of the CP, workers went on strike in increasing numbers. A strike by railmen in August was initially reported in the Worker without comment, though after a few days the paper reported on these workers’ grievances. Their wages were lower in peacetime and there were no rosters – they were ‘liable to be called on at any hour of the day or night’. Even so, striking was not, the Party was emphatic, the way to resolve disputes with the management: there could ‘be no doubt in the mind of any serious trade unionist today that grave disservice is being rendered to the railwaymen and to the trade union movement’ by the strikers. The strikes antagonised ‘public opinion, whose support is badly needed in the campaign for nationalisation.’142 Unofficial dock strikes of October and November caused the CP’s leadership particular anxiety: dock strikes could soon destabilise the economy. Though the Party made clear its sympathy for the dockers’ demands, it made even clearer its opposition to the strikes. For several days, the Party made no editorial comment, perhaps hoping for a speedy return to work. The first comment came from the Party on Merseyside: dockers there were criticised for attacking the union leadership. These attacks, argued the Merseyside leadership, were ‘exactly what the employers wanted, and could lead only to the weakening of the unity of the dockers’.143 But the strikes spread rapidly: by the 10th October, dockers in thirteen ports, including London and Glasgow, were on strike. Clearly, more had to be said: ‘The

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dockers, we say, have a case’, argued a Worker editorial, ‘their work is hard and irregular. Unless they kick over the traces their grievances are ignored’. But the strikes were not endorsed: instead the Government was urged to step in and use its influence over employers ‘to see that a settlement is reached without delay’. 144 In parliament, Gallacher called for a ‘conference of employers, trade union officials and representatives of the dock areas’.145 At a rally in Belfast, Pollitt warned that ‘the industrial unrest in every industry is more deep-seated than the public has yet grasped’ and urged the government to clarify its wages policy and put its ‘full support . . . behind the workers and not the employers’. ‘Certain employers’, claimed Pollitt were provoking strikes in order to destabilise the Labour Government. But the workers should remain calm, as ‘economic conflict’ was not in their interest. The conflict had revealed an ‘urgent need for all-round speeding up of trade union negotiations and arbitration’.146 But the government refused to intervene and the employers remained obdurate. The Party must then have been embarrassed when towards the end of the month a conference of London dockers took up its call for government intervention, only to use this demand as a pretext for staying on strike until it was met.147 But the CP urged the dockers to ‘face the fact that deadlock has been reached . . . all that can be achieved by an unofficial strike of this character has been achieved’. The dockers should not continue to fight but go back. In early November they did. The lesson of the strike, argued the Party, was that the unions and the Government must learn to co-operate. Furthermore, to avoid further unnecessary unrest, the Government should ‘indicate to employers that an immediate increase in wages’ for the working class in general was ‘a national necessity’ and ‘insist on a speed-up of the machinery of negotiation and arbitration’.148 Over the next two to three years the CP’s attitude to the Labour Government was to harden considerably. In 1948 it supported a bitter dock strike. But the Party’s fundamental strategy was not reassessed. Its reaction to Labour’s victory and to its first few months in office shows just how reformist the strategy developed since Teheran was. The role of the working class in the advance to socialism was to vote Labour and work hard. Socialism was in any event a distant objective, the task to hand now was national reconstruction. That this necessarily involved asserting the British national interest against other nations did not trouble the CP. Indicative of the deep social-chauvinism in the CP by this time was Maurice Dobb’s advice to the Government that the difficulties caused by the end of lend-lease could be alleviated by substituting for US imports cheaper equivalents from the empire: ‘the same quantities of imports will be available at a smaller value’.149

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‘Revisionism’ Triumphant: the 18th Congress of the CPGB The policies followed by the CP since Teheran, and even more so since Yalta, had stirred up considerable unease in a minority of Party members. The ‘Trotskyist’ elements who had troubled the leadership early in the war had long since been routed, but there were those in the Party who considered that once fascism had been defeated, the Party should return to the politics of good old-fashioned class struggle.150 The criticism of ‘Browderism’ and the CPSU’s later call for a renewed study of Marxist theory encouraged these people to come out into the open and oppose the leadership in the lead-up to the Party’s Eighteenth Congress of November 1945. Though the British Party had not gone so far as to dissolve itself, it had gone a long way down the road indicated by Earl Browder. But the Party leadership brazened the matter out. They denied that they had been guilty of ‘Browderism’ and claimed that they had in fact opposed it. The critics were defeated with ease. The vast majority of Party members had no appetite for the class struggle. In April 1945 the PCF’s Journal Cahiers du Communisme published in the name of Jacques Duclos, a prominent leader of the Party, an article in which the policies pursued by the CPUSA since the Teheran Conference were subjected to stern criticism. Two main points were made. Firstly, ‘Browderism’ had led to the liquidation of the Party. Secondly, in a ‘notorious revision of Marxism’, the CPUSA had transformed ‘the Teheran Declaration . . . a document of a diplomatic character, into a political platform of class peace in the United States in the post-war period.’ The French Party did not object to a policy of post-war national unity but their ‘anxiety for unity’ did not make them ‘lose sight for a single moment of the necessity of arraying ourselves against the men of the trusts.’151 What prompted this reprimand? It was instigated by the CPSU. The ‘Duclos’ article was written by functionaries of the OMI and approved by Dmitrov and Stalin prior to publication.152 But the article did not lead to any substantial shift in the Communist movement’s strategy. 153 The circumstantial evidence suggests that, as in the case of the earlier dissolution of the CPUSA, it was used as a bargaining chip in the Soviet Union’s fractious relationships with its allies. Earlier in the war, it had been expedient for the Soviet Union that the Comintern and the CPUSA be dissolved. This had helped to cement its alliance with the USA.154 But by April 1945, when the critique of ‘Browderism’ was published, Soviet forces were firmly in control of eastern Europe. Soviet leaders probably calculated that resurrecting the spectre of class struggle could not now jeopardise its state interests, but would be expedient in its dealing with its allies.

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The term ‘notorious revisionism’ would have it made very clear to the leaders of the British Party that here was a very serious matter indeed. How was the criticism to be interpreted? The leadership would almost certainly have assumed that the article had been sanctioned by the CPSU. A close study of the article and its wider political context would have reassured them that not a lot needed to be changed and that any adjustments that were needed would be quite congenial. The article’s support for post-war national unity and the CPSU’s continued adherence to the Yalta agreements clearly implied that no fundamental changes need be made to their line. But what about Duclos’s call for struggle against ‘the men of the trusts’? Circumstantial evidence indicates that it was this that led to the Party abandoning in April its call for a government of national unity. Thereafter the Conservatives were consistently denounced as a party of monopoly capital. No other significant changes were made to the Party line as result of the publication of the ‘Duclos’ article. According to Pollitt, the Party leadership first heard of the existence of the article around the time of its publication in April.155 Probably for fear of stirring up criticism from the rank-and-file in the period prior to the General Election they concealed the existence of the article from the lower levels of the Party until July, when their hand was forced by the public acceptance of the ‘Duclos’ charges by the refounded CPUSA. They clearly had good cause to anticipate criticism from lower levels of the Party, for the publication of the article in the British Party press helped to unleash what was clearly pent-up opposition. In August, the Party published a long statement by the PC on the background to the decision to refound the CPUSA. Those readers who wished to read the criticism of ‘Browderism’ in full were referred to that month’s Labour Monthly. The general stance taken by the leadership was to deny that ‘Browderism’ had infected the British Party to any significant degree, and they had in fact resisted pressure from foreign Communists to emulate the US Party. According to the PC, ‘advocates of the Browder line for Britain, including some enthusiastic adherents from the United States and other countries’ had criticised the British Party’s line and urged, among other things, that the British Party be liquidated. The PC was adamant that they had resisted these attempts to persuade them to embrace ‘Browderism’. The Political Committee had ‘fully discussed and rejected these proposals’.156 Dutt had early in 1944 found ingenious arguments to justify the dissolution of the CPUSA, but had been adamant that the British Party should not follow suit.157 We can therefore accept that the majority of the leadership had not wished to dissolve the British Party.

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One of the foreign Communists was probably Joseph North, the editor of the Communist paper New Masses, who was sent to London by Browder early in 1945. North’s ostensible mission was to cover the founding Convention of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). But Maurice Isserman’s conjecture that his primary purpose was to argue with the British Party leaders for Browder’s policies158 is supported by the PC’s claim that they had been subjected to pressure from the CPUSA. But who were the other leaders and what were they doing in Britain? Light is shed on this matter by an acrimonious dispute between the British and Australian Parties in 1948. The published version of the correspondence between the two Parties had removed the British Party’s claim that the leaders of the other Parties ‘who were gathering in London during this final phase of the war’ had expressed ‘grave alarm at what they regarded as our desertion of Churchill’s leadership for the post-war period.’ Given that there was no formal meeting of the leaders of the Communist movement at this time (to have met openly would have aroused deep suspicion among the Soviet Union’s allies), and the fact that the matter was obviously regarded as still sensitive by the CPGB, it would seem likely that the meeting referred to was a covert meeting, using as cover the WFTU Convention. Several prominent foreign Communists, including Thornton of the Australian Party, attended this Convention.159 But if the CP had resisted the blandishments of foreign Communists, they had already developed a native strain of ‘Browderism’, a strain that some members seemed to have wished to develop further. In a letter to Maurice Cornforth in the Summer of 1945, Pollitt argued that whilst he, Pollitt, had not been ‘as influenced as you might think by what Browder had written in America’, others had: ‘the chief fight I had to make was to prevent comrades impressing upon us the need to go much further than Browder did’.160 Many years later, Arthur Horner claimed that ‘there were quite responsible members of the British Party who were inclined to agree with’ Browder’s view that the ‘class struggle’ should be dropped from the ‘communist programme’.161 We can only surmise who these members were. Emile Burns may have been one of them. His World News and Views had been a keen advocate of the new view of the Party after the dissolution of the CPUSA. It was that paper also which had published after Yalta the remarkable series of articles on national reconstruction. These had continued after the publication of the ‘Duclos’ article in April and ceased only when the issue came into the open in July. In June, Burns had chosen to print a piece by Wilbur Blake of the Communist Political Association of the USA (the loose body set up in place of the Party), justifying the dissolution of the

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Party.162 Central Committee member Margot Heineman also seems to have been a supporter of Browder’s ideas. In a private letter she wrote that ‘those who we have discussed the question with and who have read the Duclos article do not on the whole find that his criticisms were justified or his reasoning correct.’163 Whatever the differences among the Party leadership on ‘Browderism’, Browderite tendencies had grown swiftly in the CPGB after Teheran. We have seen that it transformed the Teheran Declaration, into, to use the words of the OMI’s charge-sheet, a ‘political platform of class peace’ and developed a new, essentially Social-Democratic, concept of Party membership. But the PC contended that not only had they not been guilty of ‘Browderism’, they had taken steps to combat it. Pollitt’s pamphlet Answers to Questions, published in May 1945 to propagate the CP’s line on Teheran and Yalta, had, they claimed, been intended partly to serve as a refutation of ‘Browderism’. The pamphlet had, ‘while recognising fully’ the new world situation, ‘explicitly rejected any revision of the basic theories of Leninism with regard to monopoly capitalism and imperialism’.164 It may be that Answers to Questions was to some degree directed against those members of the British Party who had wished to ‘go much further’ than Browder, but Pollitt’s theses in Answers to Questions had not been essentially different from Browder’s ideas. If we are to call a spade a spade, Answers to Questions was a revisionist attack on fundamental aspects of Leninist doctrine. On the question of war, for instance, Pollitt argued that: We now live in a world where the most powerful section of the capitalist class . . . recognises that there is no real solution for the basic post-war problems except in co-operation with the Soviet Union and with the new popular democratic governments now arising in Europe. This means the removal of some of the principal economic, political and social causes of war.165 If Answers to Questions had been intended as a refutation of revisionism, it had not proven effective. Its effect on Maurice Cornforth had been to convince him of the correctness of the post-Yalta call for a government of national unity. He had had ‘some qualms’ on this matter, but after reading Pollitt’s pamphlet he had ‘succeeded in arguing’ himself ‘into full agreement’.166 Whatever the PC’s protestations, this had surely been their intention. The leadership of the CP was almost certainly privately unconvinced by the ‘Duclos’ article. It must have soon become apparent to them that to meet the needs of the new situation signalled by the publication of the article, it

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would be sufficient to drop their call for a national government and to attack the ‘men of the trusts’ in the Conservative Party. No fundamental adjustment to their strategy was required. But they could hardly ignore the question once the US Party made a public mea culpa. Though the publication of the article helped to encourage an outburst of criticism from the left of the Party, the leadership’s assertion that they had not succumbed to and had fought against ‘Browderism’ was no doubt sufficient to reassure the majority of those members (few in number) who were concerned that the matter should be satisfactorily dealt with. But in the period just prior to the Congress, the leadership was faced with the only serious and sustained opposition it had experienced since 1935. A pre-Congress debate in World News and Views was initiated by the publication of an anodyne EC Congress Discussion Statement.167 The question of ‘Browderism’ was not mentioned. For a while, a lack-lustre debate was conducted largely within the parameters set by the Discussion Statement. Then, no doubt stirred up by the endorsement in World News and Views of Pravda’s call for a renewed study of theory, some influential members broke cover with sharp criticism of the central leadership. It was accused of serious Social-Democratic deviations and of capitulating to ‘Browderism’. That Pollitt and Dutt were criticised by name suggests a considerable degree of acrimony. The critics were however a tiny minority. The Party debate on the question of ‘Browderism’ took place between Labour’s landslide victory in the General Election and the CP Congress. Labour’s victory had transformed the political climate in Britain, in the CP in particular. It was seen even by the critics as a major step in the inexorable advance of the progressive camp and by the vast majority of the membership as a vindication of the Party’s strategy. Most Party members evidently thought that Duclos’s strictures could not possibly, at least now, be considered applicable to the British Party. They were now, as they saw it, in the position of supporting a progressive, not a reactionary government. Pollitt routed the critics at a Congress that emphatically endorsed the party’s post-Teheran line. Several critics, notably Bob McIlhone, a veteran graduate of the Lenin school in Moscow and now the Glasgow Party Secretary, wrote to sharply criticise the whole thrust of Party policy since Teheran and more particularly since Yalta. McIlhone chose not to explicitly compare the Party’s policies with those of the CPUSA, though his criticisms were clearly modelled on Duclos’s attack on ‘Browderism’. Other critics were not so reticent. J. Sutherland made explicit criticisms of both Dutt and Pollitt. Bill Zak wrote to complain that the leadership was ‘leading the Party into a slough

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of Social Democracy’.168 But McIlhone’s criticism best conveys the tenor of criticism. The Party’s line since Teheran sprang from profound ideological and political error: The slurring over of class differences in Britain and the sharpening class struggle against monopoly capitalism. The neglect of basic propaganda and agitation on the decisive role of the working class against the dictatorship of monopoly capitalism and for socialism. The confusing of the class relations in Britain by an emphasis on the mutual interests of ‘progressive Toryism’ and the labour movement in the post-war period. The failure to study and learn from the working class that our policy of ‘national unity’ was not in accordance with the developing political sentiment of the workers.169 But the critics were swimming against a high tide of reformism and pragmatism. If a letter from a member in Wrexham accurately summed up the outlook of the Party, most members were far more concerned with the forthcoming Municipal Elections than with the fundamental matters of theory, doctrine and programme raised by McIhone, Sutherland and Zak. According to this member, because of the elections ‘not more than half a dozen people’ in his area were ‘reading the pre-Congress discussion. The majority of the membership do not realise the Congress is next month.’170 Indicative of the deeply pragmatic culture of the Party is that the question of ‘Browderism’ prompted only six resolutions. Most resolutions were of a severely practical nature.171 To be sure, several came near to open criticism of the leadership’s reluctance to support strikes. But only one went so far as to ‘deplore the lack of action taken by the Party and the lack of support given by the Daily Worker’ to the dock strike of the Autumn.172 But most critical resolutions were not on matters of fundamental orientation but on the Party’s perceived failure at the General Election, bureaucracy in the Party, lack of adequate Marxist education, methods of organisation and so on. Still, the leadership was clearly prepared for a stiff fight at the Congress. Though the critics were routed, the Congress does seem to have been stormy. Pollitt’s reply to the Congress discussion and his closing speech suggest that sharp exchanges took place. Unusually, differences in the PC came into the open. Rust made a speech – ‘greeted with cheers’, according to a reporter – in which he called on the Party ‘to sharpen their attitude towards the Labour Government’ and for Bevin to be sacked.173 Rust’s speech cannot have been cleared with the rest of the leadership, for at the next day’s session Pollitt made it clear that Rust’s demand that Bevin be sacked was ‘not an expression

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of the views of the EC’.174 According to Kevin Morgan, Rust’s speech at the Congress, was intended to undermine Pollitt. Perhaps it was. But if so, Rust’s motives may have been political, rather than simply careerist, as Morgan implies. Rust’s record, his fairly constant alliance with Dutt in particular, suggests that he would not have been an enthusiast for the CP’s national unity line.175 Whatever Dutt’s private views, he had published in World News and Views a stout defence of the Party line. His main line of attack was to portray the critics as sectarian nit-pickers who were unwittingly helping the reactionary forces of the world. Publications like How to Win the Peace and Answers to Questions were, ‘with whatever faults, a hundred times more useful as a political guide than the empty formulas of the critics’ who yearned back ‘to the conditions and formulas of the 1918–39 period.’ But the world had changed enormously in the course of the war. Reaction had been defeated but, unreconciled to its defeat, was ‘conducting an active campaign against the Crimea and Berlin Agreements’. The line of the critics, ‘under a supposedly ‘Left’ guise, plays into the hands of the reactionary campaign.’ A revelation by Ted Bramley, the London Party Secretary, that Bill Zak had been a leading exponent of the ‘imperialist war’ line of 1939–1941 would surely have been sufficient to damn the critics in the eyes of the great majority of the membership. 176 How many delegates read World News and Views we do not know, but Dutt’s arguments would very likely have swayed most doubters. Probably many delegates, given the ideological climate within the Party, regarded the arguments of the critics as arcane. The CPGB had always had a strong streak of that Anglo-Saxon ‘instinctive aversion to theory’ about which Lenin had complained. Those who had written to World News and Views in support of the EC’s policy had rarely raised theoretical questions. The tone of virtually all these correspondents had been one of brisk common-sense. It was perhaps then with the intent of appealing to that type of sentiment that Emile Burns appealed to robust British pragmatism and empiricism to close the debate: ‘I say this to the armchair philosophers,’ wrote Joe Kerstein, ‘don’t talk such a lot, get out on the job.’177 It was never likely that the leadership would be defeated at the Congress. The whole weight and tradition of the Party were in their favour. The leadership’s line was fundamentally consistent with the opportunist and pragmatist Party ethos that had grown over the previous ten years. The vast majority of the delegates had been steeped and trained in this ethos.178 In private correspondence, Emile Burns complained that ‘much of our war-time membership has dangerously little concept of what Marxism is . . . so much

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of what discussion there has been in our Party has taken place above the membership, so much of branch meetings is taken up with routine jobs and organising work.’179 The leadership’s tactics at the Congress were skilful. Pollitt tackled the question of ‘Browderism’ head-on, but claimed that apart from the shortlived call for a government of national unity the leadership had not been influenced by it. His trump card was to disingenuously point out that the CPSU had not criticised Browder: ‘to those of you who are so worried about this problem, I must draw your attention to the fact that I have not yet seen any criticism of the Browder policy in any of the theoretical organs of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – not an unimportant Party of the World.’ We can imagine also that after six years of war most delegates longed for peace and quiet. Pollitt’s heartfelt cry that ‘are we never going to learn? I have been in too many campaigns which had as the main motive against, and not sufficient with’ must have resonated with the sentiments of many of the delegates.180 For Pollitt, and, clearly, the great majority of the delegates, the promised land of socialism was in sight. ‘The working class,’ claimed Pollitt, ‘have built up in this struggle against fascism that which capitalism is never going to be able to destroy.’ Dmitrov had argued at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern that fascism was bound to create ‘those forces which are bound to serve as its grave-diggers, the grave-diggers of capitalism’. That, he concluded, was ‘the historic process which is now taking place, intensified before our very eyes’. But the great majority of Communists evidently believed that the grave-diggers’ role in Britain was to vote Labour. In urging the delegates to reject the critics’ demand that the Party should lead strikes (dockers and gasworkers were currently on strike), Pollitt baldly stated: I am going to face you with the direct issue and I do not propose that you shall get away with anything. You are in favour of the line of the report, or of the line that has been expounded here of mass strikes as the only way to realise the workers’ demands. If the latter, I warn you, you are playing with fire that can help to lose the peace and reduce this country to ashes.181 Such demagoguery no doubt played its part in ensuring that not one resolution seriously critical of the leadership was passed by the Congress.182 Much steam was probably taken out of the debate by a resolution on Party organisation tabled by the leadership. The resolution directly contravened the new rules adopted earlier in the year by allowing any member to become

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a member of his or her factory branch rather than a residential branch. The resolution demanded: . . . a very great strengthening in our industrial work, and immediate systematic attention by all responsible Party committees to the election of Factory Committees in every job and factory, pit, mill, rail centre and transport depot. Every effort must be made to free our most capable industrial comrades for undertaking work on these Factory Committees, and where necessary such comrades should be allowed to become members of the branch where they work.183 This resolution may have been intended as a sop to the critics. Or it may be that the leadership had decided that factory branches should be strengthened to aid the Party’s production drive. Whatever the leadership’s intention, this change did meet some of the criticisms that had been made of the Party’s turn away from industrial work and it was doubtless seen by those on the Party’s left as a change which would be conducive to promoting the class struggle at the point of production. One matter which received little attention at the Congress, even from the critics, was the colonial question. Whilst there were several manifestations of disquiet regarding Labour’s foreign policy, it was the anti-Soviet aspect rather than the colonial aspect of this policy that had aroused particular concern. The indifferent tone for the discussion was set by the EC’s Discussion Statement, which contained a perfunctory four lines on the matter. The question was first raised eight weeks into the pre-Congress discussion. A complainant argued that the Party devoted far too little time and energy to the colonial question. Inside the Empire, he pointed out, ‘appears once in three months, a mere eighty pages a year’, whilst ‘the space devoted to the Colonies in ‘World News and Views’ seems to get smaller and smaller, while anything more than a few lines ‘mention’ in the ‘Daily Worker’ is a rarity.’184 Few members of the Party seem to have been moved by such criticisms.185 Those who took up the colonial question almost invariably did so from a Liberal or Social-Democratic standpoint.186 Most resolutions argued for the application of the Atlantic Charter to the Colonies, that the Labour Government should grant independence to, or implement democratic reform in, the colonies, and so forth. Pollitt made a few references to the colonial question in his Congress speech. He demanded, for instance, that ‘the old imperialist basis of the British economy, the imperial tribute from foreign and colonial investment’ must go. But statements such as this must be assessed in the

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light of the Party’s energetic support for measures designed to advance the national interest. On the question of trade, for instance, Pollitt was quite prepared to accept the continuation of unequal trading relationships. Modernisation of Britain’s basic industries would ‘place Britain in a position where her chemicals, machinery and consumer goods can take a leading place on the world market.’187 We should note also that the Congress took place at a time when it had become quite evident that the Labour Government’s foreign and colonial policy was not going to be one whit less imperialist than that of previous governments. During the Congress, British troops were involved in the suppression of national liberation movements in Indo-China and in Indonesia. In a remarkable and complacent reference to these colonial wars, Pollitt claimed that: . . . our British lads did not put on uniform to protect the profitmaking interests of imperialist exploiters in Asia, whether British, Dutch, French or American. They did not join up to shoot down their own comrades of other lands, who for so many long years have put up such a magnificent fight for freedom from imperialism.188 The fact is that ‘British lads’ were shooting down the people ‘of other lands’. Whilst we need not doubt Pollitt’s sincerity in opposing this policy, it was probably not that important to him. The CP’s preoccupation was with the British nation and the British working class. How else could the Party have given its enthusiastic support to Labour’s impeccably social-imperialist election programme? What is clear is that British colonial policy was not going to divert the CP from supporting the Labour Government. Thus, in his reply to the Congress discussion on Labour’s foreign and colonial policy (which had concentrated on Labour’s attitude to the Soviet Union), Pollitt argued ‘Don’t let us forget that the people of this country see nationalisation of the coal industry and the Bank of England and the reduction in income tax, as well as Greece and Indonesia, and we are making a great mistake if we don’t grasp this.’189 Not surprisingly then, a Congress resolution which expressed the Party’s ‘dissatisfaction’ at the colonial policy of the Labour Government and which welcomed ‘the growth and strengthening of the national liberation movement’, failed to commit the CP to any attempt to build a mass movement in support of that movement. Responsibility was shuffled off onto the Labour Government, which was asked ‘to outline a clear policy for the achievement by the Colonial peoples of equal and free status among the

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nations of the world’ and to institute a programme of democratic reform in the colonies.190 That such a resolution could be passed at a time when the Government was making very ‘clear’ indeed its policy on the colonial question, is indicative of the CP’s purblind stance on the colonial question. The CP’s Congress of 1945 revealed the enormous ideological and political distance that it had travelled in the ten years since the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. Though the Party talked Marxism there was little that was revolutionary in it. The pre-Congress and Congress debates show that there were certainly revolutionaries in the Party, but they were swamped by a majority schooled in reformism and social-chauvinism. The revolutionary minority was itself hamstrung in its opposition to the leadership by its basic acceptance of Seventh Congress politics. But the majority were more consistent than the minority. Not since the very early days of the Popular Front had the essence of Marxism – the doctrine of the class struggle – been the heart and soul of the CP. To invert the old adage, politics is the continuation of war by other means. If it had been appropriate for the British working class and bourgeoisie to form a united front in war against the Axis threat to Britain, then why not unite for post-war reconstruction and reform? The CP’s post-Teheran stance was maintained, though with increasing doubts, until the eruption of the Cold War in 1947–48. The Party then began to use once more the language and concepts of the Popular Front. Sam Aaronovitch’s attack on American ‘comics’, women’s magazines and dance music191 was but one element of a reprise of the politics of 1935–45, this time directed at US imperialism, rather than German fascism. This new turn in Communist politics did not however presage a fundamental reassessment of the Party’s strategy. Over the next three years or so it developed the deeply reformist British Road to Socialism, the new Party Programme adopted in 1951. But the foundations for this new strategy had been well and truly laid by 1945. Trotsky had been premature in characterising the Seventh Congress of the Comintern as the ‘liquidation Congress’ of the Third International, but by 1945 there were few adherents of revolutionary Marxism in the CPGB.