Those old ones are the best: Barnaby Raine and Salvage on the CPGB

Writing on factional battles in the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the 1980s, Mark Fischer, active in The Leninist of that era, observed: “… the revolutionary left outside the party took an extremely passive, intensely insular and – initially – factually inaccurate view when large-scale factional war in the CPGB broke out openly in the 1980s. If I were feeling charitable, I might say that this was at least partially explained by the troglodyte existence of the oppositional trends – with the exception of The Leninist, of course. However, I think the real reason was the crude caricature of the CPGB and its internal life that most had lumbered themselves with.”[i]

Such caricatures fed off a schema regarding how such groups pictured their future. Fischer added: “The demise of the CPGB was celebrated by many of the revolutionary sects, as they held that, with the party out of the way, the time had come for their group at last. In the 1990s generally, a similarly sanguine view was common: the death of the ‘official’ world communist movement was not an ideological victory for imperialism, but, rather, their particular brand of Trotskyism…”[ii] An achingly beautiful illustration of such idiocy can be found from Ian Birchall in 1985, then writing for the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP): “In itself the demise of the CPGB will bring no profit to the revolutionary left; but at least a confusing diversion has been removed from the political scene. At the end of Balzac’s novel Old Goriot the ambitious young Rastignac gazes down at the vast city of Paris and pledges: ‘It’s between the two of us now!’ With the CP out of the way, the SWP can address the Labour Party in similar terms.”[iii] Now, this dozy hubris was the cause of much mirth in 1985, let alone in 2022, but it does illustrate that the SWP and others thought about the old CPGB in much the same way as boy racers think about OAP drivers (i.e. get out of the way).  

Rival paper-sellers
The SWP therefore had no real insight to offer about the CPGB in the 1980s; it knew little about the party’s left factions (more rival paper-sellers as far as the SWP was concerned); overused the term ‘Stalinist’ in a pejorative manner that explained very little; and while I wouldn’t accuse the SWP of being Eurocommunist, it wrote in occasional diplomatic terms about Marxism Today and the Euro faction (the Euros, were, like the SWP, extremely hostile to the Labour left, and the entryist Militant was a much more successful organisation than the SWP in this period).

This ‘us-next’, ‘collapse of communism’ mentality quickly evaporated, and, in fact, political groups associated with the legacy of ‘official’ communism, Maoism and JV Stalin survived and have recently shown signs of relative prosperity. In that situation, one would perhaps expect the inaccuracies and impatience of the 1980s to drop away in favour of cold-headed realism among those in the Trotskyist (and perhaps post-Trotskyist) milieu given that it patently hasn’t been their ‘turn’ and the idea of addressing the Labour Party on even the grossly unequal terms that the CPGB once did has been exposed as a lurid fantasy.

One of the fragments of the British SWP is around a journal called Salvage. Barnaby Raine has written an article that deals with the return of what he calls ‘campism’ i.e. an attachment to ‘really existing’ communism, past and present, its leaders and other accoutrements. For Raine, that is a form of ‘Left Fukuyamaism’, a political pessimism that bears “witness to the awkwardness that accompanies talk of hope and freedom and equality today”.[iv] ‘Salvage’ is an interesting word in this context in that Raine’s article, while offering what appears to be a critique of ‘campism’, in fact involves a conservative salvage operation of the SWP’s sectarian hostility to the CPGB and its left factions. Thus, sectarian taxonomies are revived, and all the old crap of the 20th century reappears in new clothes.

‘Young things in black leather jackets’
You can find on YouTube a 1991 Channel 4 documentary called The end of the party, some of which documents a CPGB-PCC/The Leninist picket of the ‘official’ CPGB’s liquidation congress (pictured above).[v] Raine recounts these scenes: “[CPGB veteran Rose Kerrigan] walks past a small band of young things in black leather jackets. ‘No matter how you change your name’, they shout into the hall, ‘you still play the bosses’ game!’ These are the savvy twins to the Eurocommunist reformers, the young Stalinists who know which way the wind is blowing. They’ve left the party, and they call it a corpse. Their newspaper is The Leninist, and against the stream they champion (albeit critically) the Russian tanks that once rolled into Budapest and Prague. Theirs is no mass party. They are the enlightened few. To them, as to the Eurocommunists, Rose who will not give up her old party is an old fool.”[vi]

This passage relies on an old Trotskyist/SWP canard: that the internal factional battles of the CPGB’s last decades were about ‘tankies versus Euros’; symbiotic twins underpinned by the master label ‘Stalinist’. Therefore, the CPGB could be dismissed in toto as an obstruction and barrier to the SWP et al. There were a variety of factions in the CPGB and, on its left, those factions had tended to use either Mao’s China or the Soviet Union as a symbol of communist virility, allied to a revolutionary critique of the CPGB’s reformist strategy. Such groups were thus a unity of opposites and later factions such as The Leninist studied Lenin and Trotsky to understand the CPGB’s history and elaborate a critique of the world communist movement. But, of course, such groups reflected to some degree their emergence inside the CPGB (i.e. on issues such as Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968); they weren’t perfect in the same way that Salvage couldn’t possibly emerge as a perfectly rounded enterprise, pockmarked as it was by the experience of the SWP.

Raine accurately recounts what the CPGB-PCC picket shouted at the congress: ‘No matter how you change your name, you still play the bosses’ game!’ This shows that these supposed “young Stalinists” had a sense of their history, in that the CPGB was still playing the bosses game, a recognition of the party’s reformist role under the likes of Stalin (The Leninist, in fact, used the pre-Stalin CPGB of the 1920s as an inspiration). As I said recently on this blog, genuine “young Stalinists” are much more cautious in relation to the party’s history and haven’t yet shouted anything quite like that.

The rest of Raine’s passage, judged by historical evidence easily available these days, is composed of similar nonsense. The CPGB-PCC did not leave the ‘official’ CPGB and call it a corpse. Some of its members were expelled but it argued that comrades still had duties to the party, in this instance, to reforge the CPGB, of which it saw itself as a faction and not the party. Raine says: “Theirs is no mass party. They are the enlightened few.” In that case, why then did the group announce its provisional status (then as now) and call activists back to the party to help reforge it? The tragedy of the CPGB-PCC is that this part of its enterprise failed, and it has been left with the title ‘CPGB’ and little else. But it is clear from The Leninist of the period that its future existence was not planned as an elect body of the “enlightened few”.

Raine adds: “To [the CPGB-PCC], as to the Eurocommunists, Rose who will not give up her old party is an old fool.” Again, nowhere will you find articles in The Leninist of the time urging older CPGB members to simply give up on the party. I don’t think Raine should get too carried away with the sight of all those young people in black jackets. The Leninist had a few activists that had been members of the Young Communist League since the 1960s and, as the 1980s went on, a small number of older CPGB veterans (Ted Rowlands, Tom May, Reg Weston etc.) contributed to the group; Jack Dash and Vic Turner were involved in campaigns such as the Unemployed Workers’ Charter and Turner became a CPGB-PCC supporter in the mid-1990s for a short period when he was a sitting Labour Party councillor.[vii] It would be a mistake to over-emphasise this and The Leninist was still primarily composed in 1991, as The end of the party shows, of kids. (The majority of the veterans went to the much-larger Morning Star/Communist of Party of Britain, which split from the ‘official’ CPGB in 1988.) But The Leninist or the CPGB-PCC never showed the loutish and defeatist attitude to party veterans that Raine alleges.

Ramelson the ‘tankie’?
Other parts of Raine’s article show an ignorance of the history of the CPGB: “In Britain, whose Communist Party was never a national electoral force but held serious industrial significance, ‘tankieism’ means memories of brilliant and effective organisers like Bert Ramelson and Derek Robinson: ‘Red Robbo’, who terrified the press.”[viii] This clumsy epithet ‘tankie’ seems to have appeared, according to veteran journalist Sam Russell (interviewed by Beatrix Campbell in a 1989 Arena documentary for the BBC on the history of the Daily Worker), in internal arguments after the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. One editorial member of the Daily Worker team was remembered to have said, in response to criticisms of the Soviet action, that he “would sleep far better at night if there were Soviet tanks in Farringdon Road”.[ix] It seems that this positive appreciation of Soviet tanks was then worked over into a negative term of abuse, whose later history has been partly traced by Evan Smith.[x]

But this has precious little to do with Bert Ramelson because it was Ramelson who took the call from the Soviet embassy telling the CPGB what had occurred in Czechoslovakia. As recounted by Reuben Falber: “In the heated exchange which followed, Bert challenged the truth of the claim that the Czechoslovak Party leadership had invited the Warsaw Pact troops in and warned that the British Communist Party would not accept so blatant an intrusion into the affairs of a fraternal party and another socialist country.”[xi] At the 1969 CPGB congress, it was Ramelson who answered the pro-Soviet arguments of the veteran Rajani Palme Dutt, who supported the Soviet invasion.[xii] So, whatever Bert Ramelson was, he wasn’t a ‘tankie’ but in a sense that doesn’t matter for Raine because he has elastic and pejorative terminology (‘Stalinist’, tankie’ etc.) that can simply explain all kinds of heterogenous people and things in the old CPGB without reference to its actual history. As with Raine’s material on The Leninist, some very simple research would have led him away from such howlers.

Whatever the motivations of Raine himself, the roots of such literary practice lie in the impatient and snide mythology of the SWP that itself contains a pessimism in favour of the perpetuation of its own sect existence. So, if Raine says that recent relative enthusiasm for Stalin and the Soviet Union is evidence of pessimism inside the workers’ movement then he has only arrived at a tautology given that such a view was already inherent in the insensitive categories so clearly inherited from the SWP. In fact, the historical trajectory of the left versions of pro-Sovietism (and pro-Maoism) that emerged in the CPGB were also shot through with an optimism in relation to the critique of the politics of ‘official’ communism in Britain, and an idea that they could be reforged anew. Unless you face that startling contradiction then you will understand little of the so-called ‘new Stalinism’, which itself is partly lodged in a critique of existing organisations and leaders; and partly in an unedifying reification of the past.

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[i] https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/940/cpgb-history-illuminating-the-factional-struggles-/

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/birchall/1985/xx/cpgb.html

[iv] https://salvage.zone/left-fukuyamaism-politics-in-tragic-times/

[v] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbZeqwFxaQw The CPGB-PCC picket appears after 7.00.

[vi] https://salvage.zone/left-fukuyamaism-politics-in-tragic-times/

[vii] https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/89/defending-the-pretence-of-socialism/

[viii] https://salvage.zone/left-fukuyamaism-politics-in-tragic-times/

[ix] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq_LQYOb90M 50.48.

[x] https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2020/01/27/tankie-the-origins-of-an-epithet/

[xi] Cited in R Seifert and T Sibley Revolutionary communist at work: a political biography of Bert Ramelson London 2012 p161.

[xii] Ibid p162.

This charming man: obituaries for Harry Pollitt in 1960

Harry Pollitt, the most well-known of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB’s) general secretaries and the party’s leader for many years, died on 27 June 1960, on board a liner bringing him back from a speaking tour of Australia. Pollitt’s death was widely covered in the British bourgeois media and, as such, that coverage represents an early attempt to incorporate part of the CPGB’s history into anti-communist narratives. This has become relatively common in recent years, with the Labour Party right looking to recuperate communist actions such as the Kinder Scout mass trespass (1932) and the Battle of Cable Street (1936), while there has been a false attempt to picture CPGB figures such as Shapurji Saklatvala as pioneers of intersectionalism.

When one reads the obituaries of Pollitt from 1960 as a group, you quickly realise that bourgeois newspapers wrote fundamentally the same obituary across a variety of titles. The CPGB itself twigged what was going on. William Gallacher wrote in July 1960: “All who knew Harry admired the human, comradely side of his character. But many of them tried to dissociate his wide humanity from his dearly held political convictions. This is an old game with the lackeys of capitalism, particularly in the yellow press.”[i] As we shall see, this was an entirely apposite observation.

Politically, in terms of the CPGB and its goals, the obituaries were hostile. For The Times, Pollitt’s “life was devoted to an impossible task – that of attracting the mass of the British people to Soviet communism”.[ii] Similarly, for the supposed left-facing Guardian, “Pollitt’s communist policies bedevilled British trade unionism for a generation and, indeed, still weaken and disrupt it”.[iii]

‘Communist with a sense of humour’
However, Pollitt was cast in all the obituaries as an exception to the rest of the CPGB and thus as a stick to beat the party. For The Times: “Pollitt was often described as what many people regard as almost a freak of nature, a communist with a sense of humour. Short and bald, with a quiet manner and a twinkle in his eyes, he had likeable qualities which endeared him to some of his most bitter political opponents.”[iv] For the Telegraph: “He was a genuine British ‘rebel’ who was undoubtedly sincere in his devotion to the cause he espoused. His uncomplicated personality and sense of humour earned him a measure of popularity few communist leaders enjoy.” It added: “Unlike the majority of communist leaders, Mr Pollitt was no ‘intellectual’.”[v] For The Guardian, Pollitt, “enjoyed the respect of men who were his bitter political opponents. His sincerity in believing that his militant and revolutionary aims were in the interests of working people were unquestionable, and he carried his communism with a robust sense of humour that never deserted him”.[vi] For the Labour Party-supporting and resolutely anti-communist Daily Herald, Maurice Fagence argued: “Not everybody in this country likes communism. But everybody, of every political or religious belief, who met Britain’s number-one communist, Harry Pollitt, liked him.”[vii] Douglas Brown in the News Chronicle said: “Pollitt was known in wider left-wing circles than any other communist official. It was a tribute to the man that many who knew him received the news of his death with the comment: ‘Harry wasn’t like the others – he was a human being.’”[viii]

A picture emerged from this repetitious account of a sincere, humorous, and well-liked individual, British, a talker but a doer and someone who unquestionably loved his mother. Accompanying this as a negative was an impression of the rest of the CPGB as intellectual, insincere, unliked and unloved, anti-British. Indeed, on the issue of patriotism, the British establishment owed Pollitt one for his post-1941 conduct in the Second World War. As Fagence wrote: “… Russia was in our side and Harry Pollitt was rushing round trying to settle strikes.”[ix] (It is important to note that Pollitt was inspired in this by his attachment to the Soviet Union and not the British establishment although the political outcome wasn’t any less inspiring.) Indeed, while the CPGB offered another narrative in the 1960s of Pollitt as the loyal and dedicated communist, it did partially feed into this establishment narrative of Britishness, in line with the ‘British road to socialism’ that Pollitt had trailblazed with Stalin’s approval. Pollitt was thus deemed to be “a symbol of everything that was best in the British working-class tradition”.[x]

However, despite these memories of Pollitt being offered up as part of an undifferentiated establishment line, not all of it can be classed as opportunist and insincere. Fagence drew on memories travelling in a train with Pollitt and a group of industrialists: “Harry kept them all chuckling with the day-to-day fun of boilermakers and pitmen, weavers and shoe ‘clickers’ and all the men and women he knew and loved.”[xi] Similarly, Brinley Evans talked of how Pollitt was solicitous towards journalists’ welfare: “In a long bus queue on the opposite side of the square I noticed Harry Pollitt who was on a visit to the Rhondda [south Wales], and he waved to me: and then he sent one of his friends across the road to me to inquire whether I was ‘all right for the night’.”[xii]

The bourgeois media was clearly making use of Pollitt’s human attributes in the cause of discrediting the CPGB, but it should be emphasised that this would have been part of Pollitt’s job. What would have been the use of having a leader, who was, to some extent, a national figure, who didn’t know how to talk to people and encourage people to join the party; to talk to the media and engage his opponents without walking off in a huff? (Internal and external opponents on the Marxist left would tell a different story: Pollitt didn’t extend this natural bonhomie to members of the CPGB’s post-war opposition, for example.) This charming side of Pollitt only appears strange to us now because of the activities of certain modern (usually Trotskyist) sect ‘cadre’ who, in a parody of the worst aspects of the Stalin years, appear to see being anti-social and obnoxious as almost a professional calling. Pollitt’s basic political skills, whatever we make of his undoubted reformist political trajectory as leader, are ones that urgently need to be re-learnt by the contemporary revolutionary left.

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[i] W Gallacher ‘We worked together for a great cause’ Daily Worker 2 July 1960

[ii] ‘Mr Harry Pollitt’ The Times 28 June 1960.

[iii] ‘Harry Pollitt’ The Guardian 28 June 1960.

[iv] ‘Mr Harry Pollitt’ The Times 28 June 1960.

[v] ‘Mr Harry Pollitt’ Daily Telegraph and Morning Post 28 June 1960.

[vi] ‘Harry Pollitt’ The Guardian 28 June 1960.

[vii] M Fagence ‘You just couldn’t hate Britain’s number-one communist’ Daily Herald 28 June 1960.

[viii] D Brown ‘Harry Pollitt dies in liner’ News Chronicle 27 June 1960.

[ix] M Fagence ‘You just couldn’t hate Britain’s number-one communist’ Daily Herald 28 June 1960.

[x] ‘Harry stood for Britain’s best’ Daily Worker 28 June 1960.

[xi][xi] M Fagence ‘You just couldn’t hate Britain’s number-one communist’ Daily Herald 28 June 1960.

[xii] B Evans ‘When in Rome…’ South Wales Gazette 15 July 1960.

Eric Hobsbawm on Rajani Palme Dutt in the mid-1960s

Introduction
As Richard J Evan’s recent biography of Eric Hobsbawm reiterated, the latter distanced himself from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) after the events of 1956, although he didn’t leave the party. What is perhaps less well known is that Hobsbawm (along with other left luminaries such as John Berger) carried on contributing to Rajani Palme Dutt’s Labour Monthly and, further, voiced his ongoing admiration for Dutt.

This interrupts a narrative that functions in the shadows of Eurocommunist-influenced accounts of the CPGB. The implicit line runs that after his dogmatic response to Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 (where he said of Stalin: “That there should be spots on any sun would only startle an inveterate Mithra-worshipper.”[1]) and the fact that he subsequently enraged sections of the party, Dutt was finished. In fact, Dutt continued to be influential among the CPGB’s pro-Soviet left, where he was viewed as an ally of ‘anti-revisionism’.

As these two reviews from the mid-1960s, reproduced in full below, show, Dutt was also influential on the CPGB’s right wing beyond 1956. Hobsbawm was unambiguous in 1963: “Several generations of Marxists have received a great part of their political education from R Palme Dutt. He is, as every reader of Notes of the Month knows, one of the most distinguished living practitioners of contemporary history, and both the subject of his latest book and the occasion which produced it – the award of an honorary doctorate by the University of Moscow – are therefore very well chosen.” Similarly, Hobsbawm offered some fulsome praise for Dutt’s interesting 1964 work The Internationale, a history of the First, Second and Third internationals. Dutt was praised as having “long been associated in theory and practice with the history of working-class internationalism”.

Hobsbawm also approved Dutt offering up his own opinion, rather than an ‘official’ view, of controversial aspects of the Comintern’s history such as the Third Period and 1939-41, when the Second World War was classed as ‘imperialist’ (Dutt was critical of the first but more sympathetic to the second). Hobsbawm didn’t agree with all of Dutt’s conclusions but hailed his critical method.

In Geoff Andrews’ biography of James Klugmann, Dutt is pictured as having become something akin to a village idiot in the ranks of the CPGB by the 1960s.[2] This was emphatically not the view of Eric Hobsbawm.  

Review of RP Dutt Problems of contemporary history (1963), Labour Monthly May 1963
Several generations of Marxists have received a great part of their political education from R Palme Dutt. He is, as every reader of Notes of the Month knows, one of the most distinguished living practitioners of contemporary history, and both the subject of his latest book and the occasion which produced it – the award of an honorary doctorate by the University of Moscow – are therefore very well chosen. The four papers on ‘History and truth’, ‘The Cold War’, the ‘Delay of the socialist revolution in the West’, and ‘Marxism and socialism in Britain’, which make up this volume, were originally given as lectures in Moscow.

Contemporary history has, as R Palme Dutt points out, a number of special difficulties. It is written on the basis of incomplete and often misleading information, for even several years after the event many official documents are still kept secret, or only made available to selected generals and politicians. Also, “the political controversies of the period may still be smouldering while the historian is at work, and may inevitably affect judgement in the consequent treatment”. These difficulties, as the author notes, affect both Marxists and non-Marxists. Nevertheless, the history of the present can be written scientifically, that is to say in such a way that its analyses and forecasts stand the test of time. Marx himself has proved this, for some of his most brilliant works were written in the rush of day-by-day political commentary and not in the quiet of the research library, e.g. the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or the Civil war in France. Conversely it is easy to demonstrate the blindness and muddle of those who face the world without the guidance of a scientific theory. The author very effectively recalls the confusion, the wild errors and miscalculations, of bourgeois politicians and scholars when faced with the events of the past 50 years: Lord Milner predicting (a few weeks before the 1917 revolution) that the Russian soldier would never rebel; The Times believing that there would be no Second World War; the late JL Garvin arguing on the eve of the 1929 slump, that slumps had become too mild to disturb the world economy.

RPD points out that this superiority of Marxism is not due to a lack of commitment, but to the fact that it is part of an advancing historical movement. It does not need to be afraid of the conclusions of scientific enquiry, because these show that socialism is a rising, capitalism a declining force. This is why the “period of partial interruption of the full range of fruitful Marxist-Leninist studies in the field of contemporary history” to which he draws attention, is so much to be regretted. Its effect has been to “discredit the theory in place of demonstrating its strength”. On the other hand many bourgeois historians shy away from science, or even deny its possibility, because they are afraid of the conclusions to which it may lead. No doubt few of them nowadays still claim to be superior to Marxism because they are unbiased searchers for truth. If any do, RPD does well to remind them that in 1914 the bulk of Oxford historians, as historians claimed that Britain was right, while the bulk of German professors, if possible even more academic and scholarly, published a manifesto arguing that history showed the rightness of Germany. The point is, that the commitment of anti-Marxist historians inhibits and does not assist their writing of contemporary history.

This the author illustrates by the example of the Cold War. The official Western theory, supported by much scholarship, was about as wrong as any theory can be. No serious scholar now maintains that the Cold War was due to the determination of the USSR to ‘communise’ the world by means of armed aggression and local revolutionary action, and that only the firmness of the West with its nuclear weapons prevented this. On the contrary, RPD shows that US and British governing circles were planning to push back Soviet power even before 1945 and in doing so took over Nazi arguments (such as the very phrase ‘iron curtain’); and that the Western military theory of massive bombing was based on methods first developed to suppress colonial risings through the use of the technical superiority of industrial over backward nations. Whatever its weaknesses in that period, it is useful to remind ourselves that Marxist analysis of the Cold War has stood the test of time better than anti-Marxist propaganda.

The last two chapters are slighter. The discussion of the socialist revolution is particularly valuable, however, because it shows that Marx himself did not (as vulgar criticism alleges) expect the victory of socialism to occur first in Western Europe, but sketched out a forecast which led naturally towards the Leninist analysis. The last chapter also, and rightly, goes back to Marx himself, stressing the importance of the liberation of formerly colonial peoples for the emancipation of Britain.

RPD has written a most useful and instructive book. One may in conclusion welcome the fact that he has not kept himself in the background entirely. He has included a short account of his career at Oxford, his expulsion on the eve of the October revolution, and the subsequent political discrimination against him. This is in itself a small, but by no means unilluminating, contribution to the history of our own times.

Review of RP Dutt The Internationale (1964), Labour Monthly April 1965
R Palme Dutt has long been associated in theory and practice with the history of working-class internationalism. Indeed his first major publication was The two internationals (1920), a study of the breakdown of the second and the origins of the third international, which is of great value to the historian. It is therefore not surprising that, in the centenary year of Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association – the ‘First International’ – he should have turned again to this theme and produced a survey of the entire course of socialist internationalism from the early nineteenth century to the present. The Internationale “lays no claim to original or profound historical research”. This is a slightly misleading piece of modesty. It ought not to suggest that the author does not possess original and profound knowledge, for obviously he does, especially about the period of the Communist International. It simply indicates that he did not set out to address a public of historians or other experts, or to add to the already vast specialist literature on the internationals. His book, in his own words, “is no more than a very rapid and elementary sketch for the new reader”.

The Internationale begins by analysing internationalism, distinguishing the bourgeois from the working-class kind. The author then deals with the forerunners of the international, and the First and Second internationals. The greater part of the book – about two-thirds – is devoted to the period since 1914. The core of this section lies in the six chapters which cover the period of the Communist International. Three chapters on ‘The world system of socialism’, ‘International communist conferences and relations’ and ‘The social-democratic international’ since World War Two, round off the book.

The bulk of RPD’s volume therefore deals with a period full of past and present controversy, or rather suppressed controversy, for among communists the convention prevailed for many years that the main questions of the history of international socialism had been settled, or else that vexed and tangled problems should not be publicly ventilated. As a result the history of the Communist International was long left either to communist non-historians or to non-communists, and indeed overwhelmingly to anti-communists. RPD is to be congratulated for breaking with this tradition, and the credit should be all the greater because he is himself a political figure deeply and responsibly involved for almost half a century in national and international communist organisation.

Thus he raises in public, what every informed communist has long known, namely that international policy was open to criticism in at least two major periods: in the years after 1928 and between the outbreak of World War Two and the Nazi attack on the USSR in 1941. RPD’s personal view – and the book marks a notable step forward in this readiness to put forward a personal view in advance of “any final verdict on these disputed questions, still less any official viewpoint of the Communist Party in this country or communists elsewhere” – is that the criticisms of the post-1927 period are on the whole justified, but not those of the 1939-41 period. In the earlier period he regards the slogan ‘class against class’ as “potentially misleading” and the description of social-democracy as ‘social-fascism’ as wrong. He points out that in the 1920s “there took place, alongside heroic leadership of mass struggles, errors of tactics and direction in particular countries, normally corrected by the International Executive, but sometimes, especially in the later 1920s, with some participation of the International Executive”. He notes “some trends to sectarianism” in some of the formulations of the Sixth Congress in 1928, and makes valid criticisms of the German communists in the period before Hitler’s advent to power. On the other hand in 1939 he comes down on the side of the policy which the British Communist Party adopted shortly after the outbreak of war, though without fully analysing the International’s repeated description of the war as “imperialist”.

The important thing about such judgements is not that we should agree with them. It is that they should be made in this form at all by leading communists, i.e. that the history of the Communist Party should be presented as a subject for critical enquiry which has not yet produced a ‘final verdict’ – though some reviewers of this book appear to think that their own by no means uncontroversial views are definitive. In Britain this initiative is particularly welcome, though there are other countries in which it is no longer necessary, e.g. Italy, where the Communist Party has deposited its archives in a research institution and opened them to qualified historians until, at all events, the Second World War. Nor can we perhaps expect a writer who is still deeply involved in responsible political functions, including international discussions, to treat certain topics – especially current ones – with as much ease as less involved historians. But that is not the point. Though it might be desirable, it was not to be expected that RPD would treat many controversial aspects of the history of international communism other than with great – perhaps some would say at times excessive – caution. The value of his book is that it opens a new phase in the study of their history by communists in this country. It also does something to remind us that internationalism is at the very heart of socialism, and that the history of the international working-class movement, in spite of its errors and difficulties, has been one of achievement rather than failure, and above all a history of the hope of humanity. One hundred years after the foundation of Marx’s International the point is worth making, for it is often in danger of being forgotten.

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[1] RP Dutt ‘Notes of the month’ Labour Monthly May 1956.

[2] G Andrews The shadow man: at the heart of the Cambridge spy circle London 2015 p219.

The CPGB and ‘Browderism’: Lenin in 1944?

In the period of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB’s) November 1945 congress, left oppositionists claimed that the party leadership had been infected with ‘Browderism’. J Sutherland, for example, argued in the pages of party journal World News and Views: “When Browder was leading the American Party astray, what was our attitude?… finally, the Daily Worker printed an article defending and explaining Browder’s line as being correct – at least in American conditions. In view of this, it is not perhaps so surprising that tendencies of liquidationism also found some expression in the [CPGB].”[1]

This argument was a reference back to the actions of Earl Browder (1891-1973), general secretary of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), who dissolved his party in May 1944 in favour of the looser Communist Political Association,[2] a move based on Browder’s expectation that a wartime coalition with ‘progressive’ capitalists and the diplomacy between the US, Britain and the Soviet Union (for example, the Teheran conference of late 1943) would usher in an extended period of social peace after the war. Hence, the CPUSA was no longer needed to lead the class struggle. In fact, the CPUSA was rapidly re-established in the summer of 1945 and Browder was stripped of the leadership. This was after an article appeared in April 1945 in the French Communist Party’s theoretical journal by Jacques Duclos, which denounced Browder’s liquidationism as a “notorious revision of Marxism” (this article had been reproduced for a British audience in Labour Monthly in August 1945[3]). It is now also clear that Duclos’s article was reflective of the discomfort with Browder’s line voiced in Moscow by former Comintern head Georgi Dimitrov.[4] This was not known in the CPGB at the time although CPGB members might have guessed the ultimate source of such criticism.

Once Browder’s arguments had been dispensed with by these authoritative sources there was then an interrogation on the part of the CPGB’s left, never happy with Browder’s stark ‘revisionism’, as to how such a line had at least been treated as plausible by the British leadership. CPGB general secretary Harry Pollitt argued at the November 1945 congress that the CPGB had a disagreement with the CPUSA over Browder’s dissolution of the party and that a book by Browder[5] had been refused publication by the British party. Pollitt slightly undermined this account by also suggesting that the CPGB didn’t have the authority to counter Browder and that the Soviet leadership hadn’t publicly pronounced on the US heresy.[6] But who was correct? Had the British party leadership been guilty of ‘revisionism’ back in 1944? Or had it been in opposition to Browder?

A sympathetic treatment
In general terms, Browder’s line of early 1944 was given sympathetic treatment by CPGB publications. On 12 January 1944, the UK Daily Worker featured an article written by CPUSA member Louis Budenz.[7] This was largely a puff piece reporting a CPUSA national committee, featuring large chunks of Browder’s speech to this meeting. These offered familiar tracts of Browder’s idealistic rhetoric of the time. For example: “The Moscow, Teheran and Cairo agreements [between the Allied leaderships] give a programme to banish the spectre of civil wars and war between nations for several generations.”[8] And: “… the national committee will place a number of proposals among which will be that the communist organisation [the CPUSA] cease to carry the word ‘party’ in its name and instead adopt a name more exactly representing its role as part of a larger unity in the nation, not seeking any partisan advancement…”[9]

Browder was given further generous space to explain his policy to Daily Worker readers two days later.[10] In this piece, Browder contextualised his line on the party’s dissolution in the context of ‘Leninism’: “It is 20 years since Lenin died and today the vast majority of Americans know the state [that] Lenin founded. We who have always treasured the legacy of Lenin for our country now have the opportunity and duty more than ever to make available to Americans the full wisdom of Lenin [that] made the Soviet Union strong and great.”[11]

Following these articles, the CPGB itself quickly started to comment on Browder’s new line. Rajani Palme Dutt followed up slightly obliquely in late January 1944 with an article entitled ‘Lenin in 1944’, picking up on Browder’s theme that developments in the American party could be squared off with a more traditional ‘Leninism’, which was probably an appeal to the CPGB’s left. Dutt argued: “When the American communists showed their understanding, expressed in Browder’s recent speech, of the crucial political battle over the whole Teheran line now developing in the United States – decisive for the immediate world future, no less than for the future of the United States – and drew there from the necessary organisational conclusions in order to throw their maximum strength into the fight, the press commentators, as usual, expressed their ‘surprise’ and proclaimed the ‘end of communism’ in the United States. They have always been ‘surprised’ and have always been discovering the ‘end of communism’ these past 20 years and more. So it was over Brest-Litovsk: so it was over the New Economic Policy – equally while Lenin lived.”[12] In other words, Browder was elevated to a level of tactical flexibility on par with Lenin.

However, by the time Daily Worker editor William Rust answered readers’ questions in ‘Communist policy in the United States’ on 28 January, the tone was noticeably more defensive and obviously aimed at inner-party critics of the Browder line. In fact, Rust set out to deny that the CPUSA was being dissolved: “There is no question of dissolution. In view of its new tasks the name ‘party’ is being dropped… Browder emphasised that the New York Daily Worker must be grealy strengthened, and the full wisdom of Lenin made available to all Americans.”[13] Similarly, Rust denied that Browder’s line applied to Britain and therefore there could no question of following the US communists who were intending to throw their weight behind Republican and Democratic candidates, because the “two major parties… are coalitions of many groups, each including both left and right”.[14] In Rust’s view, the situation in Britain was different as “the labour movement is capable of uniting all the progressive forces of the country… and winning a majority”.[15] As the CPGB was focused on strengthening such unity there was thus no need for it to stop being a party. Conditions pertaining to individual countries were thus important in the context of a “general international line” of “democratic unity”.[16] The enthusiasm for ‘Browderism’ thus remained in the CPGB’s public pronouncements, in a slightly chastened manner.

The Labour Monthly response
Things were no better in Dutt’s Labour Monthly. The February issue had an enthusiastic article by Frank Pitcairn (an alias of the journalist Claud Cockburn), which praised the CPUSA for taking steps to “ensure that its full resources and energy will be applied in the most practical and effective form to meeting the urgent demands of the situation as it is”.[17] Dutt elaborated on the arguments of Rust and again took a leftist tack in relation to the Browder doctrine in March 1944. In the context of US working class and progressive forces lacking the requisite strength to exert “independent political leadership” the policy of US communists was hailed as corresponding “to the interests of the American working class and people, and to the eventual path of advance to the victory of socialism in the United States”.[18] In other words: back Browder and jam tomorrow. Dutt made it clear that the Browder line did not apply universally. In European countries that had been overrun by Nazism, such as Yugoslavia, “the national front necessarily takes a very different form, and finds its principal expression in the underground movements of resistance, with the working class playing the foremost role”.[19] Like Rust, Dutt stated that the situation in Britain “differs in very important respects” from the US or Europe under the Nazi heel, with a still functioning mass labour movement, “the strongest at present in the capitalist world”.[20]

So, in answer to the original question: the CPGB’s leaders had been enthusiasts for the path that had been taken by Browder’s CPUSA and the fears and alarms that this caused among the CPGB’s left-wing militants was thus not unfounded. But, as left critic Sutherland hinted above, this enthusiasm was slightly stifled by presenting ‘Browderism’ in a leftish context (continuation of Lenin, a route to socialism, strengthening of US communism and so on). The CPGB’s response also came in a form that would come to be known as ‘national roads to socialism’, which could forestall critics of ‘revisionism’ by emphasising specific peculiarities of certain communist tactics. Just as CPGB militants had a right to be concerned at this liquidation of the CPUSA and the friendly way it was initially treated by British party publications, Pollitt also had some partial justification in suggesting that the British party hadn’t entirely backed Browder.

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[1] World News and Views 10 November 1945.

[2] ‘American communists form new “political association”’ Daily Worker 22 May 1944.

[3] J Duclos ‘On the dissolution of the Communist Party of the United States’ Labour Monthly August 1945.

[4] H Klehr The Soviet world of American communism New Haven and London 1998 pp105-106.

[5] Probably the work that appeared in the US as E Browder Teheran: our path in war and peace New York 1944.

[6] ‘Reply to discussion [at November 1945 congress] by Harry Pollitt’ CP archive CP/CENT/CONG/05/02.

[7] ‘American communists consider big change: ‘part of larger unity’ Daily Worker 12 January 1944.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] ‘America’s role in war and peace: Browder explains communist policy’ Daily Worker 14 January 1944.

[11] Ibid.

[12] ‘Lenin in 1944’ Daily Worker 21 January 1944.

[13] ‘Communist policy in the United States’ Daily Worker 28 January 1944.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] F Pitcairn ‘The USA and Teheran’ Labour Monthly February 1942.

[18] RP Dutt ‘Notes of the month’ Labour Monthly March 1942.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

Why is the Communist Party of Britain squeamish about Stalin?

I have recently commented on the Communist Party of Britain’s (CPB’s) social-media protocol that its members should not indulge themselves in “adulation of Stalin and support for the substantial abuses of state power which occurred under his leadership”. It has become subsequently clear that this bureaucratic-centralist injunction is primarily aimed at the Young Communist League (YCL) associated with the CPB. The YCL comrades stand in a long line of oppositionists inside the old ‘official’ CPGB (going back to Edward Upward, Eric Heffer and Arthur Evans in the 1940s) that combine militant class-struggle politics with support for Stalin as an ‘anti-revisionist’ icon.

It’s quite clear that the solution to the friction being caused by this protocol is for the CPB and the YCL to have a lengthy, frank, rational and well-informed debate on Stalin. Such a debate would be open to all partisans of the working-class movement in the best democratic traditions of Lenin and Bolshevism. In its social-media protocols, the CPB claims to support the traditions of research, inquiry and discussion on historical matters and CPB/YCL members should be testing those limits to the hilt, regardless of whether that involves adulation or critique of Stalin. (The CPB’s absurd protocol on Stalin would mean that, technically, no one could post on social media Lenin’s comment of 1913 about the “marvellous Georgian”, i.e. Stalin, who had worked with him on the national question.)

Unfortunately for the YCL comrades (some of whom will be members of the adult CPB organisation) they are alongside an organisation that only has a very attenuated relationship with the ‘anti-revisionist’ pro-Stalin opposition so clearly visible in the CPGB’s post-Second World War history. Some of the older CPB leaders, most obviously general secretary Rob Griffiths, were involved in this opposition (which had varying degrees of enthusiasm for Stalin; Griffiths seems to have been at the lukewarm end).

However, what was the Communist Campaign Group, which controversially split from the CPGB to form the CPB in 1988, also incorporated a section of the CPGB’s right-centrist bureaucracy, exemplified by a veritable patron saint of paper clips: Morning Star editor Tony Chater. Chater (who had historically opposed the CPGB’s pro-Soviet left opposition at congresses in the 1970s and was not remembered at all fondly by old supporters of The Leninist in Luton) and his allies were always at pains to express continuity with the pre-Eurocommunist CPGB of the mid-1970s, although Chater and company were rightly hesitant at claiming their 1988 split was the party. This meant adopting the CPGB’s rules, its pre-1977 British road to socialism programme (initially sponsored by Stalin in the 1950s, of course) and the received wisdom of the CPGB’s right-centrist leadership on Stalin and Soviet historical questions in the 1960s and 1970s (its inheritance from the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras). The CPB was thus essentially a conservative operation that broke with the odious Eurocommunists in order to preserve the post-1956 cultural mores of the old CPGB.

‘A shameful blot’
Griffiths was perfectly open about this operation shortly after becoming leader of the CPB in 1998. In introducing a 1992 CPB congress resolution on the Soviet Union, Griffiths assessed this as a “qualitative development in our analysis” from a 1956 resolution of the CPGB’s executive committee about the Stalin period and an article by former CPGB general secretary John Gollan, ‘Socialist democracy – some problems’ (1976). Griffiths referred to “violations of socialist democracy during the Stalin period”, which were “a shameful blot on the proud history of the communist movement”.[1] But this existed alongside a contradiction: the Soviet Union, despite these abuses of democracy, was still adjudged to be a socialist society and one where the “positive features of the socialist experience would far outweigh the negative ones”.[2] It was, of course, under the Stalin faction’s leadership that ‘socialism’ was established and it was largely his bureaucratic command system, in rapid decay under Brezhnev and Gorbachev, that ignominiously collapsed in 1991. In fact, this method of analysis adopted by the CPB had a similar impact on it to those Trotskyist groups that dogmatically reproduced Trotsky’s formulas of the 1930s about the Soviet Union being a ‘degenerated workers’ state’): such groups are simultaneously repelled and attracted by the subject matter. In public, CPB leaders have become coy about pronouncing on issues such as the legacy of Stalin, seeing it as a divisive matter. (Private conversations were always another matter, at least until recently.)

It is important to understand that the developed position of the CPB in the late 1990s was not a major or qualitative development of the old CPGB’s musings on the Stalin period in the 1960s and 1970s. These show the same mix of empathy and criticism subsequently emoted by the CPB. Betty Reid, in 1969 concerned to combat a proliferation of Trotskyist and Maoist groups, said: “It was thus not the principal policies developed by the CPSU while Stalin was its general secretary which we believe are at issue. On the contrary it was these policies which inspired a whole generation, gave a hope to mankind, and when the crunch came provided the major obstacle (at the cost of 20 million Soviet lives) to the advance of fascism. What is involved here are those policies which arose from Stalin’s theory that with the advance of the Soviet Union to socialism the class struggle would sharpen, and the multiplicity of its enemies would increase. In this way any opposition on policy became equated with treachery, against which every weapon was permitted and justified; and the sharp edge of the security forces was then turned against leading and loyal comrades.”[3]

These themes were repeated in the 1976 article from John Gollan (pictured above) mentioned by Griffiths, which largely repeated the Khrushchev critique of the Stalin personality cult and the latter’s rigid centralisation of the party, allied to an approval of Stalin’s role in initiating ‘socialism in one country’ in the Soviet Union. (It led to a long-running debate in the party during that year where Gollan and the CPGB leadership were ranged against the party’s ‘anti-revisionist’ opposition.)

Gollan argued: “Stalin’s role and that of his supporters in routing the Trotskyist and right opposition was undoubtedly of great historical significance. The key issues of the controversy for our consideration here are the building of socialism in one country and whether the revolution was socialist or not; the vital nature of the bloc between the workers and the peasantry; and the unity of the party. While argued out in theoretical terms, these were, in fact, supreme issues of practical political and economic policy, which had to be operated. They involved the whole question of socialist industrialisation, the first and succeeding five-year plans, the socialist transformation of the country, the creating of the modern Soviet working class and technical, specialist and administrative cadres, and the collectivisation of agriculture. That the opposition line was defeated, the decisive social basis of the revolution was continued, a great socialist industry was created and collectivisation carried through, was, as the resolution correctly observed, an historic achievement without which the victory in the Second World War would have been impossible. It has proved decisive for world development ever since.”[4]

Post-1956, the CPGB was thus cautious, under Soviet influence (where Stalin had become a relative ‘unperson’), about anything that reeked of ‘personality cult’, while not wishing to undermine Stalin’s role in the initiation of ‘socialism’ in the 1920s. It is this cautious, conservative, critique that still controls the ideological boundaries of the CPB and its attempts to police pro-Stalin YCL members. It is all part of the fantasy that the CPB is the continuation of the CPGB under the leadership of John Gollan.

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[1] https://issuu.com/southdevoncommunists/docs/assessing_the_collapse_of_the_soviet_union

[2] Ibid.

[3] https://splitsandfusions.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/betty-reid-ultraleftism-in-britain.pdf

[4] J Gollan ‘Socialist democracy – some problems: the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in retrospect’ Marxism Today January 1976.