Towards The Leninist – first outings in the New Worker, 1979

We reproduce here a July 1979 article from the New Communist Party’s (NCP’s) New Worker newspaper by John Chamberlain, who was one of the founders of The Leninist faction that re-entered the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the early 1980s. Chamberlain had been made national organiser of the NCP in March 1979, although he was removed in December 1979 and expelled in November 1980 after he and his supporters had come under the influence of the Communist Party of Turkey/Işçinin Sesi (Workers’ Voice) faction. To the best of my knowledge, it hasn’t been published on the internet previously.[i]

Of course, I’m sure the comrade might not completely welcome its republication given that some of it is standard NCP fare of those years and a quack diagnosis of the problems facing the world communist movement (an analysis inherited from the NCP’s founder, Sid French). ‘Proletarian internationalism’ is equated with support for whatever the Soviet Union was doing and is the proposed cure for the opportunist ailments afflicting the CPGB. Factions and factionalism are seen to be tools of the social-democratic right in communist organisations (despite this being the view of Sid French’s faction). And a struggle against 1979’s revisionism is premised upon the re-establishment of yesterday’s revisionism in the shape of Harry Pollitt’s CPGB of the 1940s and 1950s. So, there is nonsense aplenty here, although the strange notion of the “Soviet Trotskyite Bukharin” is one refreshingly innovative take on history.

Nevertheless, the article is interesting in that it illustrates how quickly the four comrades who founded The Leninist then developed their ideas under Turkish guidance. Remember, the first issue of this latter journal only appeared in 1981 and nearly all of the NCP’s assorted dogmas had disappeared by this point. I’m aware that comrade Chamberlain is now partially embarrassed at early issues of The Leninist but when put in the context of crude articles such as the one below, a different perspective arises. If The Leninist was a ‘warts-and-all’ product of the CPGB’s post-war left opposition, those warts had rapidly diminished in size from a few years earlier.

A careful reading of the article also shows that comrade Chamberlain’s gaze was not solely on the NCP. Despite the valedictory headline and surface denunciations, here is a young activist who was prepared to partially admit the NCP’s problems both in relating to comrades left behind in the CPGB and gaining recognition from the Soviet Union (a fool’s hope for the NCP if ever there was one). Also, Chamberlain’s gaze is on the CPGB and assessing the struggle inside that organisation and its failing Young Communist League. After all, why bother to go into such detail about the CPGB if you didn’t fundamentally care about it? In reality, it wasn’t too much of a jump from analysing the inner machinations of the CPGB (and later producing a review article on the CPGB’s Marxism Today in August 1979[ii]) to pitching up a faction inside it and calling for pro-party comrades to join in the cause of facing down liquidationism.   

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[i] https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2023/01/01/new-communist-party-1977-80/

[ii] J Chamberlain ‘Revisionism Today!’ New Worker 31 August 1979.

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John Chamberlain ‘After two years… history has absolved us’ New Worker 29 July 1979

The New Communist Party had its second birthday last Monday. It has had its problems, but nothing like those of the ‘official’ communists we left behind.

Today, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) is engaged in a bitter internal struggle with the battle lines being drawn for its forthcoming national congress.

Just this week, the executive committee of the CPGB was forced to admit a 20 per cent drop in claimed membership, though avoiding any serious estimate of its causes.

In fact, and significantly for the future, the main reasons given added up to a catechism of complaints about existing socialism. Hoary old tales about ‘dissidents’ and even an outrageous allegation that China and Vietnam are both ‘socialist countries’, though at war, came into the CPGB’s list of excuses.

It might be reasonable to suppose that, with the working class facing an onslaught from the Tories and with the British capitalist system plunging into a new economic crisis, the CPGB would be engaging in a serious debate on the best way to overthrow the Tories and construct a strategy to lead the working class to the conquest of state power.  

If you did suppose that, you would be very wrong. In fact the party is consumed in a debate over inner-party procedure.

There would, of course, be nothing wrong with such a debate if its purpose was to build a party with an organisational structure suited to the overthrow of capitalism. In fact, however, the debate is over whether to discard the last vestiges of communist organisational principle.

At the heart of this furnace of irrelevant chatter is a hefty document, the ‘Report on Inner-Party Democracy’. Its weight arises, at least partly, from the fact that it contains both a majority and a minority report.

The minority report appears under the signature of six members of the reporting commission, most notably the CPGB national organiser Dave Cook. It calls, in essence, for the permitting of factions in the party during the pre-congress period.

‘Factions’ is not, it seems a useable word – yet – and is studiously avoided but, call them what you will, they smell the same.

‘Organisations’, says the minority report, should be allowed to be established, uniting party members with similar views and with the authority to call private and public meetings to put those views forward. These ‘organisations’ would be permitted to publish their own documents.

The CPGB is, as is well known throughout the ‘left’, already riddled with factions, tolerated by the party leadership in a desperate effort to preserve the appearance of unity. Cook’s proposals would mean throwing away this pretence and ceasing to make any claim that the CPGB is a disciplined Leninist party.

Cook further proposes that the party abandon the recommended list election system for party congresses. Similar proposals have come from the revisionist right in the CPGB on several previous occasions.

This time, adoption of the proposal would inevitably leave Cook and his allies in a stronger position within the party and would lead to a further reduction in the proportion of working-class representation within the party leadership.

‘Hardcore’ social-democratic elements within the party would also get a boost from adoption of Cook’s plans to open up party advisory committees (committees of party members in particular spheres of work) to people from outside the party’s ranks.

Added to this change in the composition of the committees would be a change in their powers. The word ‘advisory’ would, in fact cease to have any meaning as they would be permitted to decide policy rather than merely to make recommendations to the leadership.

In short, the power of the leadership would be circumvented and the party’s democratic procedures turned into a charade with decision-making placed in the hands of elements not even formally in the organisation. 

When the New Communist Party was formed in 1977 we pointed out that the CPGB would inevitably move to the right at an accelerating pace.

We added that, in conditions of developing crisis, unprecedented attacks would be made on the living standards of the working class, attacks dictated by the need of the capitalists to restore profit ratios.

In these circumstances, we concluded it was vital to the entire working-class movement that there should be a party committed to Marxism-Leninism. We proceeded to found one.

Some of our old comrades did not agree with us at that time, and, even though our basic propositions have each been proven, some continue to disagree…

The struggle against the right in the CPGB is not a new phenomenon. As far back as 1965, Sid French, the man who was to become the national secretary of the NCP, was warning the party membership of the growing revisionism within the CPGB.

The struggle intensified in 1966 over the question of abandoning the historic Daily Worker and launching the allegedly ‘broader’ Morning Star. From then on the merry-go-round whirled ever faster.

The more the party abandoned Marxism, the fewer workers there were in the party, the more remote the party leadership became from the realities of class struggle, the more irrelevant their positions became to the task of revolution.

Inch by inch their obsession with ingratiating themselves with ‘liberal’ opinion grew, until, ultimately, it became a monster. From small differences with the mainstream of world communist opinion they moved to alliance with the chorus of abuse against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.

They attacked the 1968 defence of Czechoslovak socialism, denounced aspects of working-class power in the socialist world as undemocratic and began to praise ‘dissidents’ as clarions of freedom.

Today, even the man who formally leads the opposition to Cook over the ‘Inner-Party Democracy’ proposals is a person who has previously called for the rehabilitation of the convicted Soviet Trotskyite Bukharin. So much for the prospects of a ‘centre-left’ alliance!

These developments have been mirrored in the party’s youth organisation, the Young Communist League, but the youth have gone far further, far faster.

As long ago as 1968, YCL general secretary Tom Bell had the sheer cheek to call for an ‘International Brigade’ to save Czechoslovakia from the socialist system re-established as a result of the fraternal assistance operation.

The YCL has, inevitably, now almost collapsed, even its paper membership running only to a few hundreds. At its most recent congress it formally abandoned Marxism-Leninism and democratic centralism – thus moving decisively ‘ahead’ of the party congress fixed for this November.

From 1965 to 1977 the main characteristic of the inner-party struggles was the clash between the forces of the left and those of the leadership. The main fight now is within the leadership itself.

The majority centrists are being challenged by the growing forces of the right, forces which are proposing changes which go far beyond what anyone would have dreamed a mere matter of two years ago.

The inner struggle in the party lasted in distinct form for 12 years before the break was formalised, but the subsequent gallop to the right is not a mere result of that break and the consequent removal of the firmest of forces.

The attacks on the Soviet Union and other socialist countries and the process of changing the CPGB into an openly social-democratic organisation arise from far deeper causes than the positions of mere individuals, however outstanding and committed.

The roots of the process lie in the continued strength of reformism among the British working class, a strength based on Britain’s continued powerful imperialist position.

Opportunism is not a force which has to be created but a force which will gain strength wherever vigilance against it is relaxed.

The process having commenced in the CPGB, the ‘centre of gravity’ in the party inevitably tilted towards middle strata elements and the number of those elements and their importance was caused to grow yet more.

Despite all the evidence, despite all the political proofs, there remain some in the CPGB who say they agree with the political position of the New Communist Party but add that it is always wrong to split.

This view shows a mechanical approach to politics. Just because the CPGB had a fine tradition – exemplified by such communists as [Rajani Palme] Dutt and [Harry] Pollitt – does not negate the fact that these traditions are now being discarded as quickly as possible.

Splits are not wrong in themselves. It depends on the nature of the split.

The formation of communist parties in both France and Italy was only possible as a result of splits. The formation of the Bolshevik party itself only became possible as a result of a split. The Third International represented a complete split on a world basis between revisionism and the revolutionary parties…

… For us, the futile attempt to change the rotting corpse of the CPGB is a diversion. The real struggle lies far from that dead body, in the living world of class struggle, of the battle to overthrow the Tories and of the battle to achieve socialism.

Lenin broke with revisionism not over hair-splitting details but over the necessity to construct a revolutionary party capable of leading a successful revolution, none of which could have been done without a split.

The voices raised so loudly just two years ago against the decision to split are now notably muted, hushed by the unarguable fact that the CPGB shows not the remotest prospect of positive change. As for those who said the New Worker would last only a few weeks, their answer can be seen coming off the presses every Thursday of the year.

There were even people who said that the NCP would prove irrelevant to the working-class movement.

In fact, our role in combatting anti-Sovietism, in exposing the lies about the Ethiopian revolution, in the fight for peace, in supporting the heroic people of Vietnam in their resistance to Maoist invasion, in projecting a principled stand over the ‘Euro-elections’ and in a host of other matters – bread-and-butter working-class issues included – speaks for itself.

A party based on Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, we are not afraid to state, will never be irrelevant to the working-class movement of any country.

The world communist movement also gets mentioned in debate over our party.

Some sincere internationalists express concern because we do not as yet have fraternal relations with parties – particularly the CPSU – which have achieved state power for the working class. These sincere people are joined by a rather larger band of who cloak their opportunism and political bankruptcy in ‘internationalist’ robes.

From whichever group the argument originates it is both wrong and dangerous. Communist parties do not have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other parties.

If this were not so, then, presumably, we would have to believe that the Soviet party’s silence indicates that it agrees with the positions of Dave Cook! The fact that the CPSU does not denounce every speech by [opportunist Spanish communist leader] Santiago Carrillo would have to be accepted as evidence that they agree [with] his views!

Extending the argument, we would have to accept the absurd view that splits in parties such as those of Greece, Australia and Sweden should not have taken place except with a guarantee that recognition would be immediately withdrawn from the revisionists and granted to the new party.

The sobering fact is that recognition is a privilege which must be earned, earned as the result of consistent struggle. To base political decisions on whether recognition is immediately forthcoming is not a Marxist view but the stuff of political cowardice.

Our party has already gained a great deal of international respect for the work it has conducted. Our efforts on such issues as those of peace, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Turkey, anti-Sovietism and solidarity with Czechoslovak socialism have meant that we are certainly not short of friends abroad.

We have no intention whatsoever of demanding recognition from anybody merely so as to encourage the faint-hearted. We will win international recognition through struggle.

The New Communist Party is still very small and beset by problems apart from those created simply by its size. It has to face constant attack from both the overall capitalist ideological offensive mounted through the mass media and from the forces of revisionism and opportunism within the British working-class movement.

This two-pronged attack has had its effects on our party but the struggle to resist has led to a strengthening of our resolve to build the party, to transform it into the true vanguard of the British working class.

For us there can be no question of retreat, no question of following the path of conciliation…

We call upon all genuine communists, all class-conscious workers, whether in the CPGB or not, to join us in the fight. Britain has only one party based on Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism and that party is the NCP.

Those who believe themselves to be revolutionaries must now decide which path they are going to follow. The choice is between the path of struggle and the path which leads straight to the marsh.

Young and grey: Communist Party of Britain youth in the 1980s

The Young Communist League attached to the Morning Star’s Communist of Britain (for the purposes of this article we’ll abbreviate that to CPB YCL) has invested some time in investigating the traditions of the official Young Communist League, founded in 1921 by the old Communist Party of Great Britain (abbreviated to CPGB YCL in this article). For example, Wessex CPB YCL has produced an interesting historical pamphlet looking at the work of the old CPGB YCL in its area, portraying the latter-day CPB version as a continuation of the old YCL.[1] This, I think, is incorrect from a historical point of view. In many ways, the CPB YCL that has emerged in recent years seems to me a substantively new organisation in terms of its dynamic and political contours. It even appears different to, say, the CPB YCL of circa 2000 in which Morning Star editor Ben Chacko cut his political teeth.

But the CPB YCL is also different to the CPGB YCL because, like the CPB itself, it cut its ties to the old party in 1988. The CPB YCL’s actual parents are the Communist Campaign Group (CCG) Youth (the CCG being the ‘non-factional’ faction set up by Morning Star supporters in the mid-1980s); and something called the CPB Youth Section, formed in 1988 by the CPB. The CPB decided to rebrand its Youth Section as the ‘Young Communist League’ in 1991. The original CPGB YCL was disgracefully liquidated by the Eurocommunist leadership of the old party in 1987/88. (I do hope you’re still awake after consuming this lethal dose of alphabet soup, dear reader.)

In the 1980s (when factional struggle inside the CPGB was significantly heating up), Morning Star supporters were very thin on the ground in the CPGB YCL. As Kenny Coyle, then secretary of CCG Youth, said in late 1987: “In fact there were all too few Star supporters at that time. The bulk of the anti-Eurocommunist wing were from the anti-Star group Straight Left.”[2] (The group around the paper Straight Left and the journal Communist were the rump old left opposition remaining in the CPGB after the departure of Sid French’s New Communist Party in 1977. Straight Left strongly disapproved of the CPB split and the CPGB being stripped of the Morning Star; as did many other communists.) Coyle himself was a relatively late convert to the CCG and, in the words of The Leninist, had previously “played the role of a non-aligned and relatively principled leftist”.[3]

It also must be said that the CPGB YCL of the early 1980s, under the control of a supposedly ‘freedom-loving’, ‘democratic’ Eurocommunist wing, was a particularly toxic environment for young revolutionaries. Even for groups such as The Leninist and Straight Left, who had more substantive support in certain areas and branches, this was a harsh political setting. This was colourfully expressed to me by Mark Lewis, who had got onto the national leadership of the CPGB YCL in the early 1980s. He had this to say about the Eurocommunist faction in general: “They had a deep, toxic hatred of political organisations to the left of them… ; at the same time, a toxic envy of the elan of revolutionary politics; a morbid suspicion of the left of the Communist Party/YCL and a willingness to cynically ride roughshod over members’ rights to enforce control from the centre; a contempt for the healthy revolutionary traditions of our party; a vile morality that could see nothing amiss in unleashing the police on to young YCL members to enforce the bureaucracy’s petty dominion over the organisation.”[4] Safe to say he wasn’t impressed.

Even some of the Eurocommunists who had latterly run the CPGB YCL, such as its last general secretary Mark Ashton (subsequently immortalised in the film Pride), were quite scathing about what the organisation had become by the 1980s. Ashton had kept up a dialogue with YCL comrades in The Leninist and, after his untimely death in 1987, the paper reproduced parts of an unpublished interview with the comrade. Ashton said of the YCL: “I tend to see it as a fairly irrelevant organisation. In my history of being involved with it, it was never really a relevant organisation. In reality it wasn’t doing anything, it didn’t have a programme of action…”[5] This sloth was partially the product of a host organisation, the CPGB, which was in decline by the 1980s but also due to the CPGB YCL being used as a kind of laboratory for fledgling Eurocommunist bureaucrats to pick up a few tricks before they graduated to the adult organisation. This, for example, was where Nina Temple, the official CPGB’s last general secretary, learnt her noxious trade.

The Euro-led CPGB YCL drags itself onto the streets for one of its final outings in the mid-1980s

So, the CCG Youth/CPB Youth Section (which developed branches in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester) was on somewhat stony ground and lumbered with an unappetising and very conservative ‘sell’ to other young communists; essentially the rules, reformist programme and achingly dull newspaper of the official CPGB as it existed in the early 1970 i.e., before the Eurocommunists emerged. It wasn’t very interested in resurrecting the more rebellious revolutionary history of the CPGB’s YCL because that would have run the risk of embarrassing the grey men and women who composed the early leadership of the CPB. I’ve looked at some of the CPB Youth Section’s Young Communist magazine from the late 1980s and early 1990s and I regret to say that, despite the occasional nice cover and half-interesting review, it’s incredibly bland and boring. It feels like the product of an organisation that’s desperately struggling to establish an identity in what was a very crowded far-left marketplace.

The CPB was an organisation that presented itself very conservatively in the early days of the split from the CPGB. Thus, for example, a pamphlet it issued in 1990 said: “The CPB is now clearly the inheritor of the traditions of the 70 years of struggle of the Communist Party in Britain.”[6] Note that this passage does not claim that the CPB was the Communist Party. This reflected a lack of hubris on the CPB leadership’s part at the time of the split. It wasn’t popular among other varied sections and factions of the CPGB and the CPB tops knew it. As Tony Chater told the breakaway’s first congress in April 1988: “There are many comrades opposed to the revisionists, including some who have been expelled [from the CPGB], who still have reservations about the re-establishment process we are initiating.”[7] But in a reversal of this anti-hubris in 1991, the CPB decided that its Youth Section was to become the YCL, just as it increasingly presented itself as the Communist Party from the 1990s onward.

The CPB YCL was launched over the course of a two-day meeting in May 1991 in North London, with a five-person leadership being elected. It was accompanied afterwards by an extremely downbeat report in the Morning Star that perhaps inadvertently revealed some of the rather turgid existence of what had been the CPB Youth Section. “Congress chairman Ben Richards praised the ‘gritty realism’ of delegates who were under no illusions as to the scale of the task set them. Delegates self-critically evaluated both the achievements and failures of the CPB Youth Section and identified the problems and challenges which young communists faced. The need for greater public work, combined with Marxist education, was emphasised.”[8] Now, there’s nothing wrong with being realistic, of course, but this does suggest, for example, that not much public work or Marxist education had been undertaken by what I guess was an organisation that hadn’t recruited substantially from the CPGB YCL and thus had very slender human resources. When I started out in revolutionary politics in the early 1990s, the CPB and its youth wing were generally invisible on demonstrations and in public more generally.  

These then were the uncertain and fumbling beginnings of the CPB YCL and I’m sure young comrades now in this organisation, with its claimed membership of 500, will feel some sense of achievement and pride at taking substantial steps forward. But the instinct of some of its comrades to rebel against their reformist CPB ‘parents’ is a fundamentally correct one. It was the staid and conservative politics of the Morning Star (thoroughly ‘revisionist’ if you want to use that parlance) that meant the CPB Youth Section was practically stillborn and a hard sell to young socialists and communists in the late 1980s.

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[1] https://archive.org/details/red_star_over_wessex/

[2] 7 Days 5 December 1987.

[3] WH ‘Our future?’ The Leninist 21 January 1988.

[4] Correspondence with Mark Lewis 31 March 2022.

[5] ‘Mark Ashton’ The Leninist 20 March 1987. Lewis, who maintained some of this contact with Ashton, told me: “Here was an intelligent, seriously minded young man whose critical approach did not exclude a good sense of humour, generosity, and oodles of charisma. In my limited experience of the comrade, he had strong opinions on most things under the sun – and was not shy telling you about them… He was a fucking breath of fresh air compared to [other Eurocommunist YCL leaders]. I really liked the comrade because – despite our many serious differences and the very different political templates we worked with, he had the ability to think. When I proposed some ‘mad’ idea like abolition of the police, he would listen and – sometimes – change his mind.” Correspondence with Mark Lewis op cit.

[6] CPB 70 years of struggle: Britain’s Communist Party, 1920-1990 London 1990.

[7] Morning Star 25 April 1988.

[8] ‘Young Communists re-established’ Morning Star 28 May 1971.

Pravda reproduces the CPGB’s British road to socialism in 1951

I had heard about the Soviet daily newspaper Pravda reproducing the CPGB’s British road to socialism (BRS) programme in 1951. For example, historian Kevin Morgan argues it was clear “from the day it was splashed all over Pravda that the programme bore the imprimatur of the Kremlin”.[i] But Morgan provided no reference for the Pravda piece, and I’d never seen a copy of the actual text.

As I pointed out in the previous article, there are historical reasons for this, given the programme’s difficult birth.[ii] The old CPGB itself was never too keen to broadcast the centrality of Stalin and the CPSU to what was meant to be an independent, national road to socialism through native bourgeois institutions such as the Labour Party and parliament. The pro-Soviet CPGB left largely treated the BRS as a joke, while its Maoist left saw Stalin’s involvement in the programme as an embarrassment to his otherwise revolutionary, ‘anti-revisionist’, credentials.

But on top of Vijay Singh and Revolutionary Democracy’s well-known work in uncovering the various recorded discussions between Stalin and CPGB general secretary Harry Pollitt,[iii] we now have access to the Pravda article through the wonders of the internet.[iv]

The article (see picture above), which was headed ‘The road of Britain to socialism: programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain’, appeared on 3 February 1951 and took up nearly two pages of what was usually a four-page paper. I am not a Russian linguist, but I have been able to translate some parts. It appears to be a straight reproduction of sections of the version produced by the CPGB.[v] The text in the top left-hand corner is Pollitt’s original foreword. As far as I can see, the CPSU did not add its own editorial preface but, as I say, my Russian isn’t great so I’m willing to be corrected on that score.

So, for those familiar with the British text, this won’t be a wildly exciting read. It’s the fact that it exists that is the most significant thing about it. For example, Harpal Brar of the CPGB-ML is on record as saying he has “no evidence to suggest that the BRS had the approval of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of Stalin”.[vi] This is obviously nonsense. The CPSU under Stalin liked it so much they did indeed splash it all over Pravda. But we already knew the truth about all this. Pravda’s excitement at the BRS only underlines it. Unless of course Pravda was a nest of revisionist counter-revolutionary vipers in 1951. But let’s not go there, eh?

Amended on 15 December to add a more accurate rendering of the Russian headline.

If anyone would like an electronic copy of the original article, drop me a line.

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[i] K Morgan Harry Pollitt Manchester 1993 p169.

[ii] https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2022/12/13/british-road-socialism/

[iii] https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.postww2/stalin-pollitt.pdf

[iv] https://www.eastview.com/resources/gpa/pravda/

[v] https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/brs/1951/51.htm

[vi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePsqU1AhlyY

Notes on the CPGB and communist Jews, 1943-45

In the introduction to the Communist Party of Britain’s recent A centenary for socialism: Britain’s Communist Party 1920-2020, editor Mary Davis set out her requirement that chapters “avoid academic jargon and style, but not at the expense of intellectual rigour” and that “footnotes and endnotes have been excluded or kept to a bare minimum”.[i] The problem with such anti-academicism is that it makes it difficult for readers to check the veracity of the narrative. Properly footnoted articles and books are thus much more transparent and open to this type of verification. I saw more than one passage in the aforementioned tome that seemed dubious to me when I was producing a review for the Weekly Worker.[ii] But, luckily, I have been able to trace some of the more contentious parts back through the secondary literature.

One section that struck me as particularly problematic is in Davis’s own chapter in A centenary for socialism, ‘The fight against antisemitism and fascism’ (pp33-38). The historical context for Davis’s questionable passage is the old CPGB’s establishment of a National Jewish Committee (NJC), itself a subcommittee of Rajani Palme Dutt’s International Affairs Committee, in April 1943 to study problems specific to the Jewish community. Davis discusses Dutt’s stance at the NJC’s third annual conference of communist Jews in January 1945, who apparently advised “Jewish communists NOT to concentrate on general party or trade union work. Rather, he instructed, they should devote their energies to working in Jewish organisations. It is in this context therefore, that the CPGB’s contribution to the linked fight against fascism and antisemitism must be considered”.[iii]

Having read Davis’s chapter in detail, her unacknowledged references appear to be mostly drawn from Henry Srebrnik’s work on communist Jews in Stepney and London. This is how Srebrnik’s fully referenced account records Dutt’s intervention at the January 1945 conference already mentioned. “R Palme Dutt, vice-chairman of the CP and head of the International Affairs Committee, opened the conference by noting that ‘there has been a marked advance and development in the past year as a result of the work of the NJC and the Jewish comrades generally’. Dutt went so far as to regret that some communists who were Jewish preferred to do general party and trade union work, to the neglect of work in Jewish organisations. The NJC, according to Dutt, had been formed to combat this tendency without becoming too particularistic.”[iv] It is immediately clear that Davis’s rendering of Dutt’s intervention is incorrect. Dutt did not tell Jewish CPGB members not to concentrate on general party and trade union work; he told them not to neglect work in Jewish organisations: a very different instruction. Neither did Dutt want such work to get stuck in a particularistic groove; the specific had to be related to the general.

Similar problems relate to Davis’s reporting of a conference held in April 1944 under the auspices of the East London district of the CPGB entitled ‘The Jewish problem and the role of the Communist Party’. Davis records that William Gallacher MP “stressed the necessity for Jewish communists to remain active in Jewish life by working as Jews”.[v] Srebrnik records this intervention differently: “It was not enough, according to Gallacher, that [Jewish communists] take part in trade union and working-class activities; they must also work as Jews so that all Jews, led by their communist brothers, would support the working-class movement, which in turn would support freedom for the Jewish people.”[vi] Jewish organisations and Jewish life were not to be neglected but this work was clearly contextualised in the context of the party and the working class as a whole.

CPGB members could be notably blunt on the Jewish question in this period, seeing it as subordinate to prosecuting what the party saw as a popular anti-fascist war. For example, John Gollan argued in Labour Monthly in 1943 that “just as the workers form the vast majority of the British people as a whole, so the vast majority of Jews are workers, with the same problems as all other workers”.[vii] Gollan added that “Dispelling anti-Jewish prejudice is a necessary but comparatively unimportant step”, as against national unity in the cause of winning the war. He said: “Whatever their race, colour or creed, Jew and non-Jew, the people must be solidly united into a mighty force which can organise the will and sacrifice which alone can bring victory over fascism.”[viii]

Davis asks the question of whether Jewish CPGB members were “either communist Jews or Jewish communists”. She infers the latter was the context for the party’s work among Jews but, in fact, both interventions from the two CPGB leaders discussed above, Dutt and Gallacher, would suggest that they were more sympathetic to the appellation of ‘communist Jews’. Everything else in their CPGB careers would attest to that. Communism and the working-class movement (and, we might add, the Soviet Union) was the all-important context of what appear to be sensible tactical considerations of which forums Jewish members should work in to engage with and recruit other working-class Jews. This was not about staking out specialisms or a specifically Jewish identity in the modern parlance; that would not have made any sense to CPGB leaders in 1943-45.

The conclusion of this short piece is that comrades should beware when things presented as serious historical studies are missing proper references and footnotes. Be even more wary when the producers boldly parade this as a virtue. It usually means something important may be in the process of being lost.  

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[i] M Davis ‘Introduction’ A centenary for socialism: Britain’s Communist Party 1920-2020 Croydon 2020 p1.

[ii] https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1339/lamb-dressed-as-mutton/

[iii] A centenary for socialism op cit p34.  

[iv] Henry Felix Srebrnik The Jewish communist movement in Stepney: ideological mobilization and political victories in an East London borough, 1934-1945 DPhil thesis University of Birmingham 1983 p114. My emphasis.

[v] A centenary for socialism op cit.

[vi] Srebrnik op cit p113.

[vii] J Gollan ‘Anti-semitism’ Labour Monthly June 1943.

[viii] Ibid.

Sid French and Mike Hicks clash over the CPGB’s 1977 British road to socialism draft

The British Library recently digitised a recording of a 1977 Surrey district CPGB public meeting around the 1977 draft of the British Road to Socialism (BRS) issued by the party’s executive committee (EC).[1] What sounds like a very large meeting is mainly addressed by Sid French (1920-79), Surrey district secretary, and it is explicitly set up by French and the chair (whom I think is Surrey CPGB member Maisie Carter) as a wholehearted rejection of the EC’s draft. French told the gathering: “A large majority of the Surrey district committee among thousands of comrades up and down the country believe that this document is a revision of Marxism; that it is an attempt to compromise and to avoid the inescapable class struggle. As such, it must be totally rejected and replaced by a Marxist-Leninist programme…  [loud applause].” French and 700 others (many in Surrey and Hants and Dorset) were shortly to leave the CPGB in July 1977 to form the breakaway New Communist Party (NCP).[2]

A large section of the party was in rebellion against the EC’s BRS draft during 1977, as can be seen by the correspondence columns of Comment and Morning Star in that year, but sources of this kind are priceless and this passionate, often cacophonous and angry, meeting allows the listener to gauge how fierce this struggle was between factional sides who strongly disliked one another.

Sid French has suffered from the usual “enormous condescension of posterity” in academic and other histories of the CPGB, often being passed over with a few brief designations (‘hardliner’, ‘Stalinist’ and so on). I know a little bit more about French from having access to two of his former comrades in the NCP in the late 1970s (John Chamberlain, who became youth organiser and then national organiser; and Jim Moody, who was Yorkshire organiser for a time). Both pictured French as a nice guy who was rather at a loss what to do with his new organisation and who seemed perplexed by some of the youthful ex-CPGB revolutionaries joining his NCP.

This recording shows a Sid French very much in his political element: organising and leading his faction against the party ‘centre’, albeit in the framework of the flawed politics of the CPGB left, in a witty, reasonably well-informed, and English manner (references to the MCC and cricket). Historians must explain why figures such as French had a personal following, and I could hear from the recording that he was at least the equal of most other CPGB national leaders of the era. (French was no Jimmy Reid but more interesting than drab CPGB apparatchiks such as John Gollan and Gordon McLennan.) This does not mean there is a need for a new political cult of Sid French – the NCP ‘experience’ has probably killed that one stone dead – but condescension is clearly a device politically slanted in favour of historical ‘winners’ (in this case, British Eurocommunists).

Other platform speakers
There are some other platform speakers at the meeting. The composer Alan Bush (1900-95), a prominent supporter of the CPGB’s pro-Soviet left,[3] offered a whimsical peroration as to why people should join the party in the context of achievements of the world communist movement and figures such as Dimitrov, Ho Chi Minh and Angela Davis. Bush couldn’t resist one sideswipe at the CPGB EC’s idea that a future socialist government would stand down to respect the wishes of the electorate: “This is the theology of the football field [audience laughs]. It supposes a celestial umpire [laughs] looking after the special interests of the British working class… an abysmal absurdity, you can’t understand how it could be written by anybody, let alone passed by a drafting committee [laughs and applause].”

French also drew attention to this idea, stating “no successful Marxist party or socialist government has ever given such an undertaking. It is not only a recipe for disaster… it is also the formula for undermining the Leninist understanding of the state”. The latter enlarged on this issue in relation to events in Chile, where the adoption of a BRS-type programme by Chilean communists had led to disaster: “It is not surprising that the lessons of Chile are not taken to heart in this draft [BRS]. They do indeed come too near to the bone to be comfortable. In a number of ways, the Chilean road to socialism was similar to the one we are proposing. It was a constitutional road. It was to have been a peaceful road.”

Other speakers from the platform were London dockers’ leader Jack Dash (1907-89), who (loudly) orchestrated a financial collection and the Young Communist League’s (YCL’s) Colin Jones, a shop steward from the Hawker aircraft factory and member of the CPGB’s Surrey district committee, who spoke on the People’s Jubilee. It’s clear that Surrey CPGB composed the platform to underline its party and labour movement credentials, as is usually the case. Indeed, the presence of Jones on the platform contrasted with French’s general piss-taking aimed at the national YCL, which he (from a bitter experience shared by many others) saw as a repository of trainee Eurocommunist bureaucrats, anti-left politics and diminishing political returns. For example, French talked about “all those open appeals to the Czech Young Communist League to revolt against its socialist government. Of course, if the British YCL appeals to Czech youth are as successful as they unfortunately are in this country… [audience laughs]”. French pointed in his speech to the CPGB’s distinct lack of success in recent years, linking this to the British party leadership’s tepid support for the Soviet Union and its concentration on dissidents in the socialist world, all of which went down well with a generally supportive audience.

Who made the tape?
The British Library catalogue entry says the tape came from the Communist Party Library and Archive Recordings, so it had obviously been taken back to King Street for the EC to listen to. This is also apparent from the youngish voices making various critical comments that rather give away who the tapers are; Eurocommunist YCL members, highly antagonist to French and the CPGB left, would be my estimation. When French took the mickey out of the YCL’s lack of success, a voice near the microphone heckled, amid audience laughter, “you should help us, not slander us!” When Alan Bush said “I don’t want to be sectarian”, there was a stage whisper of “you are” near the recorder. Not what you might call a comradely dialogue. During and prior to 1977, the CPGB and YCL leaderships had kept tabs on the party’s left and its alternative command structures in both organisations. Disciplinary measures against the left had been stepped up, with the full support of the YCL and its uber-sectarian general secretary Tom Bell. French drew attention to this control-freakery: “… it’s beginning to look from the reactions in one or two parts of the country that the executive committee is not now so keen on the public debate as it may have first appeared to the naïve… [shouts of hear, hear].” He later added: “I am getting a certain number of letters asking me… to explain my activity and the character of certain meetings I am alleged to have been at…”

The CPGB EC did have a limited number of supporters in the Surrey area and one of them, Peter Latham,[4] questioned French and Surrey’s commitment to “de-Stalinisation” and what he classed as French’s “ultra-leftism”. EC supporters and Eurocommunists, as with Trotskyists, stuck with this standard labelling procedure of French and other CPGB lefts as ‘Stalinists’. In fact, this was a significant misunderstanding. The left had a loyalty to the socialist camp and the latest general secretary of the Soviet Union (which later led to the touting of Gorbachev as the ‘Lenin of today’ and other such nonsense) and not particularly to the historical figure of Stalin. As French replied to Latham: “The criticism of Stalin was first made inside the communist movement, not in 16 King Street [the CPGB HQ], not even in Rome but made at a congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by its general secretary. What I object to about what Peter calls de-Stalinisation is that there’s an old British phrase to cover it and that’s the throwing of the baby of working-class struggle out with bathwater.” We are dealing here, as more latterly with the Communist Party of Britain (CPB)/Morning Star, with a fundamental equation of Soviet Union plus class struggle equals socialism. Stalin was largely incidental in 1977 to the CPGB’s pro-Soviet left.

Hicks intervenes for the CPGB EC
Mike Hicks (1937-2017), executive member of printers’ union SOGAT, CPGB EC member in 1977 and later the first general secretary of the Morning Star’s CPB breakaway from the old CPGB in 1988, made the most dramatic intervention in the meeting (on behalf, remember, of a CPGB EC that had just introduced a draft of the BRS that had been widely denounced by the left as reformist). Speaking from the floor, he said: “My question is to Sid French. Will Sid French give a guarantee that if the Communist Party congress this November goes along with the British road draft as it is now that he would accept the decision of congress and denounce any attempt to split the party or form a new party?” Hicks boiled it all down to playing by the rulebook and constraining French in the CPGB’s bureaucratic mesh. French angrily replied that he would have been pleased if Hicks and the executive had put the same question to John Tocher and Jimmy Reid, two recent high-profile departures from the CPGB.[5] He added: “I have been a member of the Communist Party for 41 years. I will give no guarantee that whatever happens to any organisation of which I am a member, whoever takes it over, that I will remain formally in membership… [uproar, cacophony].” This was a diplomatic way of French saying he would give no such guarantee to Hicks.

This episode underlines a point about the later ‘rebellions’ of people such as Hicks and Morning Star editor Tony Chater in the 1980s when they too fell foul of the CPGB’s bureaucracy. Chater controversially deprived the CPGB of its paper on a technicality that had been established in 1945 to ensure party control: namely that People’s Press Printing Society shareholders ‘owned’ the paper. Similarly, the Communist Campaign Group (forerunner of the 1988 CPB split) was dedicated to upholding the rules of the CPGB and its reformist BRS, and denied it was any kind of faction. The alternative to a political struggle against the CPGB’s long-standing reformism was this type of bureaucratic/technical manoeuvre. This explains why Hicks had to be removed from the CPB leadership in the late 1990s, leading to the infamous Morning Star journalists’ strike. Dismal and unimaginative reformist politics carried over from the 1960s and 1970s meant that the stillborn CPB had very little to show for 10 years of existence in 1998. It’s not entirely unsurprising to hear Hicks arguing this way against the CPGB left in 1977; it was very much a shape of things to come.

Not that French was necessarily any better on the issue of factions and party rules. In response to an International Marxist Group member who was supportive of French’s right to form a faction, French wasn’t impressed: “You talk about factions and tendencies. Let us make it absolutely clear, there was a man who was the greatest leader of the world communist movement called Lenin and he fought against factions and tendencies in a Marxist-Leninist party.” This was obviously a different historical figure to the Lenin who was the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP. The logic inherent in this would see French split from the CPGB in July 1977 just as it led Hicks and Chater to split in 1988. If you can’t imagine the right of factions to form, you can’t fight for your politics in mass parties; hence, you carry on with often troglodyte underground struggles or form small sects such as the NCP and the CPB. The whole idea of Sid French, one of the CPGB’s ultimate factional leaders, arguing this way was self-delusional in the extreme.

Dubious post-war history
In relation to the EC’s 1977 draft, French told the meeting: “What is surprising is the attempt to present these anti-Marxist views as something new. They were all dealt with so many times before by all the great communist leaders from Marx down to Harry Pollitt… [shouts of hear, hear].” He added: “Didn’t the party leadership in this country abandon the whole idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the first edition of the British road to socialism in 1951? Did they? If they did, I don’t think they did but, if they did, they didn’t tell John Gollan who in 1961 [1963?] was the general secretary of the party writing on behalf of the executive committee in a booklet called very appropriately Democracy and the class struggle…” French exhibits the classic ideological fault of the old CPGB left in trying to use yesterday’s reformism, that of 1951, to tackle the reformism of 1977. As myself (in The kick inside) and many others have argued, there was very little that was substantively new, other than points of style, in the 1977 draft BRS and the idea of a succession of leftward-moving Labour governments in alliance with the CPGB heading towards socialism had been a strategical canard of the party since the 1940s. As for the dictatorship of the proletariat, this had been ditched long ago in Harry Pollitt’s 1947 work Looking ahead. I haven’t yet traced French’s reference to Gollan’s booklet but it seems likely that the former was clutching at straws. French’s ambiguity foreshadows the later history of the NCP, which has often formally opposed the BRS while remaining true to the pro-Labour broad leftism that is the hallmark of the CPGB’s post-1945 drift.

I heartily recommend interested people go to the British Library to listen to this fascinating recording. It is a priceless record of the vivid colour and life inside the CPGB of the 1970s, an organisation riddled by factional struggle and factional leaders, however much they denied it.

POSTSCRIPT
I think this meeting was held on 9 June 1977 in Wimbledon, south London, judging from a report, ‘Communist split may be on the way’, that I found (somewhat randomly) in the Belfast Telegraph of 10 June 1977. It lists French, Bush and Dash as platform speakers and, according to the report, was attended by almost 1,000 people. French and others who left to form the NCP in mid-July had only a little over a month left in the CPGB. Assuming the above is the same meeting, this would account for the hectoring tone of Mike Hicks, given that the split was imminent.

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[1] http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=BLLSA7501722&indx=3&recIds=BLLSA7501722&recIdxs=2&elementId=2&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&frbg=&&vl(488279563UI0)=any&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope%3A%28BLCONTENT%29&tb=t&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&srt=rank&tab=local_tab&dum=true&vl(freeText0)=sid%20french&dstmp=1654018031572

[2] The fullest account of events of 1977 inside the CPGB is in L Parker The kick inside: revolutionary opposition in the CPGB, 1945-1991 London 2012, pp75-95.

[3] Bush’s attachment to the CPGB’s left is traced here: https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2021/05/03/alan-bush-cpgb-left-opposition/

[4] Latham had a long history on the British left that is detailed in this interview in the British Library: http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=BLLSA6922341&indx=1&recIds=BLLSA6922341&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&frbg=&&vl(488279563UI0)=any&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope%3A%28BLCONTENT%29&tb=t&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&srt=rank&tab=local_tab&dum=true&vl(freeText0)=peter%20latham&dstmp=1654013618498

[5] John Tocher (1925-91) was Stockport AEU’s lay district president, who resigned from the CPGB around press harassment of his family. Jimmy Reid (1932-2010) was leader of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in during 1971-72 and left the party in 1976.