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

The British road to socialism: friends and enemies

It would be fair to say that the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB’s) 1951 programme, the British Road to Socialism (BRS), has had a very difficult history and reception, including its subsequent revisions in the CPGB and adoption by the 1988 Morning Star/Communist Party of Britain (CPB) split. Even the CPGB-PCC faction, which has no sympathy with either the BRS or any of its British or Soviet historical co-sponsors, failed to generate much external interest in a book-length critical analysis of the BRS back in 1991.[i] The CPGB-ML has recently embarked on a similar project to analyse the CPB’s Britain’s road to socialism that I suspect will also fall on stony ground.[ii] Some of this, of course, is due to factional rivalries but it is partly the result of the fact that the BRS was never enthusiastically adopted by the CPGB.

The BRS was simply imposed on the CPGB by its leadership in 1951 (as was subsequently admitted by Rajani Palme Dutt), after general secretary Harry Pollitt had taken the advice of Stalin in Moscow. Pollitt voiced his own doubts about how inspiring or otherwise the programme had been for his activists. In relation to the party’s 22nd congress in April 1952, in which the rank and file was given the dubious opportunity of rubber-stamping a programme adopted a year before, leadership figures quickly twigged that this had led to an absence of debate. Certain CPGB members such as Fred Westacott (in his Shaking the chains autobiography) have made claims about lively local meetings discussing the BRS in 1951 but there is precious little evidence to back this up.[iii]

The BRS always had a measure of unreality inside the CPGB. Members of The Leninist faction told me how the party’s pro-Soviet left in the 1960s and 1970s (i.e., they thought of the Soviet Union and the CPSU as morally upright revolutionary leaders of the world communist movement as against the British deviations of the CPGB) saw the BRS as a piece of silly reformist window dressing wheeled out during election time, with the real business of revolution being something that involved taking up arms and the use of force (I’ve heard oral reminiscences of this type from comrades in areas such as Luton, Hants and Dorset and Wales; and it’s a common theme in criticisms of the BRS of this era). There was extreme scepticism as to the likelihood, as imagined by the BRS, of the patriotic Labour left leading the struggle towards the first steps of socialism through parliament (an idea now in even more rapid retreat after Corbyn’s demise).

In the inner-CPGB parlance of its leadership in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, such people were dubbed ‘sectarians’ and hostile to the reformist project of the BRS. (Although, in fact, the leadership’s identification of ‘sectarian’ anti-Labour trends went back much further to the 1930s.) But the right-opportunist leadership was prepared to collude with the CPGB’s left because those elements were, at the very least, a large minority of the membership and, in some areas, most of the dues-paying activists. By the late 1960s even the Labour Monthly journal had started to exude certain themes dear to the CPGB’s left, albeit in very soft focus, after editor Palme Dutt went into opposition over the CPGB leadership’s unwillingness to back the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. So, the leadership acted with caution and was forced to enlist the ideological support of its left around events such as the fallout in 1956 from Khrushchev’s secret speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The leadership’s language was of a struggle against revisionism; for the leading role of the CPGB and the Soviet Union; and for democratic centralism (i.e., those concepts as they had been rendered under Stalin). Those on the party left went along with this and took up ideological cudgels with the leadership against its ‘revisionist’ critics. But re-stating the pre-eminence of the CPGB’s vanguard role could only but undermine the BRS, which was premised on the Labour Party leading Britain’s socialist revolution.

As late as 1964, one can find then CPGB general secretary John Gollan making obvious appeals to the inclinations of his party’s left wing (at that point containing both pro-Soviet and pro-Mao elements). He sets out a process of “socialist-communist united action” (socialist means Labour Party in this instance) focused on an anti-monopoly alliance inside and outside parliament. According to Gollan: “This, in British terms, is what the dictatorship of the proletariat means.”[iv] But dictatorship of the proletariat, as Gollan well knew, had an entirely different appeal to the CPGB left, based around the forcible suppression of the bourgeoisie and the more dramatic military events of the Russian Revolution. But Gollan almost makes the BRS a mere form of the proletarian dictatorship and this is partly the root of how the CPGB left treated the BRS as mere window dressing. There’s also a sub-theme here of what took place in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, when communist parties took power, at least in theory, under multi-party ‘people’s democracies’.

And the CPGB left wanted to believe that figures such as Pollitt, Dutt and Gollan were genuinely on the side of the angels and to make the ‘anti-revisionist’ canon as broad as possible. As Sid French, leader of Surrey CPGB and future New Communist Party leader, said in 1977: “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?… I don’t think they did but, if they did, they didn’t tell John Gollan who in [1964] was the general secretary of the party writing on behalf of the executive committee in a booklet called very appropriately Democracy and class struggle…” The left wanted to believe party leaders were ‘anti-revisionist’; and the party leadership wanted its left to believe it was ‘anti-revisionist’. So, the BRS was being undermined because of the CPGB having no true mechanism for dealing with factional struggle other than opportunist manoeuvre.

This spilled over into the Morning Star/CPB split’s adoption of the BRS, which it later renamed Britain’s road to socialism. The CPB’s history has been one of it making small groups of communists at least accept the BRS as a basis of action but nevertheless the historical record shows that several of its leading members (Rob Griffiths, Mary Davis and Andrew Murray, for example) cut their political teeth struggling against the method of the BRS, both in the old CPGB and the CPB.[v] More recently, there has been a palpable unease about Stalin’s role in overseeing the CPGB’s adoption of the BRS. This is a hard sell to some of the CPB’s broad-left constituency and the leadership does not want to oversell the virtues of Uncle Joe to its Young Communist League, which is much less uneasy about being associated with Stalin.  

The Maoist movement is another that has an odd relationship with the BRS. Most Maoists have revered Stalin as a revolutionary icon and branded the BRS as a counter-revolutionary programme. Which became embarrassing as long ago as 1964 when Gollan told the world that the BRS had Stalin’s approval. More recently, Stalin’s correspondence with Pollitt on the matter has come to light.[vi] The CPGB-ML has been unable to face up to Stalin’s role here as it celebrates his general revolutionary probity in line with leader Harpal Brar’s origins in the Maoist movement. Its recent publication on the CPB’s Britain’s road makes no reference to Stalin’s involvement in the 1951 original. In private, Brar has apparently stated that he thinks the documents showing this are forgeries, despite their being uncovered and translated from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History by Indian comrades supportive of Stalin’s legacy. The Indian comrades are not being blamed for this, but such tales of forgery are a fantasy to save CPGB-ML blushes.   

Brar’s public position is much better. When speaking to CPB members 11 years ago, he said: “Our position on the subject is that we have no evidence to suggest that the BRS had the approval of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of Stalin but on the worst-possible assumption that it had such approval, our basic position is that the BRS is a wrong programme; it’s not a programme of revolution, it’s a programme of subjugation of the communist movement to social-democracy. That’s more important to me than whether it had the approval of Stalin or Saint Paul or Jesus Christ, it doesn’t really matter to me…”[vii] But comrade Brar’s “worst-possible assumption”, that Stalin did sponsor the BRS, is the truth. So, what does that mean for Stalin’s status as a revolutionary icon?

The BRS was the unloved bastard child of ‘official’ communism in Britain. Nothing screams that more clearly than the conflicted relationship supporters and opponents have had with it down the years.

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[i] https://archive.cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/resources/Which%20Road.pdf

[ii] https://shop.thecommunists.org/product/britains-road-to-socialism/

[iii] For more on the non-debate around the BRS, see L Parker The kick inside: revolutionary opposition in the CPGB, 1945-1991 London 2012, pp35-36.

[iv] J Gollan Democracy and class struggle London 1964, p37.

[v] https://academic.oup.com/manchester-scholarship-online/book/16022/chapter-abstract/170998382?redirectedFrom=fulltext

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

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

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.