Marxism and Stalinism in Britain 1920-1926 (Part III)

[p038] Marxism and Stalinism in Britain 1920-26 (Part III) THE theme of the initial sections of this article has been the failure of L. J. Macfarlane, in tracing the history of the Communist movement in Britain from the 1900s through to the late 1920s, to relate the development of the revolu- tionary tendencies that emerged across this period to the specific stages of development of the working class, its consciousness and the organiza- tional forms through which this was expressed, and the changing character of British capitalism; the relatively rapid change from the booming imperialist economy of the immediate pre-war years to the stagnant, crisis-ridden economy of the 1920s, and the impact this had on wide sections of the working class, is completely ignored by Macfarlane. Without such analysis, however, it is really impossible to explain in any satisfactory manner how the weak revolutionary sects that came together to form the CPGB in 1920-1921 were in a position, at least potentially and in a fair degree actually, to play an extremely influential role in the major developments that took place in the Labour movement around ‘Red Friday’ and the General Strike. Shortcomings of Macfarlane’s method In the earlier sections of this article an attempt has been made to indicate the main phases of development of British capitalism across the period dealt with by Macfarlane’s book and to delineate the main revolutionary tendencies that established themselves in the Labour movement by the end of the First World War. It has been argued, against Macfarlane’s purely descriptive approach to these tendencies, that it is crucial to understand theoretically the political signifi- cance of the tendencies, syndicalist and centrist, which were to be so influential at the time of the formation of the CPGB and which were to determine its character and general political role in its early years. In fact, it was only by a con- scious struggle to overcome the legacy of these tendencies that the CPGB was able to create the 72 by M. Woodhouse conditions for its emergence as a party of the Bolshevik type and in studying the early years of the party’s history it is this process that one is studying. Inevitably, therefore, Macfarlane’s book provides much information on this process; the theoretical significance of the process, however, and the degree to which the CPGB had estab- lished, by 1924-1926, the pre-conditions for effective communist work, he largely ignores. It is because he ignores these factors that the section of Macfarlane’s book with which this part of the review deals, the years from the forma- tion of the party up to the General Strike, is so unsatisfactory and, as a historical evaluation of the significance of the party in the most crucial period of its development, misleading and con- fused. For those who are concerned with under- standing why the CPGB failed dismally in its first serious test as a revolutionary organization during the General Strike of 1926 a clear estimation of the tendencies operating in the party during its early years is essential. The failure of the CPGB to develop the undoubtedly revolutionary poten- tial of the General Strike, its failure to learn from its weaknesses in this period and its inability to resist the pressures working for the Stalinization of the international Communist movement in these years, resulted in the consummation of the pro- cess, operating from 1925 at least, whereby the CPGB became utterly subordinate to and depend- ent on the bureaucratized apparatus of the Comintern. After 1926 the CPGB was never again to be in a position to play any revolutionary role in the British Labour movement. The struggles in the party at the end of the 1920s were not in any real sense connected with an attempt to reverse the rightward tendencies displayed by the majority of the leadership from the time of the General Strike but were, essentially, struggles between two contradictory phases of Stalinism. Significantly enough, it is in this section of his book, where Macfarlane is not concerned with the crucial rela- tionship of the party’s theory and policy to the Fourth International, August 1968

[p039] working class in a period of revolutionary develop- ment, that one finds least to complain of. What is of the greatest concern is Macfarlane’s apparent inability to explain why the CPGB was unable to develop the revolutionary potential of the General Strike and at least win from this struggle the basis for its emergence as a mass revolutionary party. As was pointed out in the first section of this article, an explanation of the party’s failure entails examining the degree to which it overcame the weaknesses apparent at its origin, the degree to which it was emerging as a really effective alter- native leadership in the Labour movement in the period before the General Strike, and to what extent the pressures of Stalinism on the party checked its exploitation of the very favourable conditions that existed for communist work in the period around and after ‘Red Friday’. It has been suggested that because Macfarlane never really examines the CPGB as a revolutionary party in the process of development and never in the context of developments in the international Communist movement, except very formally, he portrays the history of the party in static terms and argues, implicitly and from an idealist and superficial standpoint, that the party could play only a limited role in relation to the Labour movement as a whole. In what follows it is suggested that a very different interpretation, based on material from Macfarlane’s book and a study of the original sources, can be advanced for the history of the CPGB between 1920 and 1926. Within the scope of a review of this character it is impossible to deal in any adequate manner with the crucial movements amongst the working class from the latter stages of the war through to the miners’ struggle in 1921 which formed the background against which the negotiations to form a united Communist Party took place. Some under- standing of these movements is clearly needed, however, for an understanding of the factors which made for the formation of the CPGB by January 1921. Macfarlane recounts at great length the de- tails of the tortuous process whereby the CPGB was formed, but by treating this process in clinical isolation from the potentially revolutionary de- velopments in the Labour movement he negates much of the value of his account and reveals his deep attachment to the technique of bourgeois formalism endemic amongst students of ‘political institutions’. Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part III) The war and the impact of 1917 The factors making for potentially revolutionary action by the British working class in the period 1917-1921 cannot be separated out in any clear- cut away; they interacted and reinforced each other. The Russian Revolution aroused tre- mendous sympathy among wide sections of the working class and a_e great readiness to defend the revolution from attack by the Coalition Government in 1919 and 1920. At the same time there is plenty of evidence from 1917 of intense war-weariness and a growing determination to demand and fight for major im- provements in wages and conditions as some com- pensation for the intense sacrifices the working class had made in the workshops and on the battle front. The example of the Russian Revolution was of major importance in strengthening the determination of British workers to fight their own bourgeoisie, and while it would be a-histori- cal to argue that the Russian example encouraged direct revolutionary emulation, except among the revolutionary sects that came together to form the CPGB, the very fact that the revolution en- couraged the militancy of British workers, and led important sections of them (e.g. the miners) to identify themselves in a general sense with the Bolshevik success, strengthened the consciousness in the bourgeoisie of the need to retain a united front against Labour in the anticipated ‘difficult situation’ in the post-war period. Moreover, the fact that this united front was maintained in the form of the Coalition Government, which had con- firmed itself in power by the most blatant use of political chicanery in the 1918 election, streng- thened the consciousness of wide sections of rank- and-file workers of the need to fight the bourgeoi- sie as a class. That the Labour Party had made few gains in the 1918 election and was an insignifi- cant group in Parliament dominated by some of the most conservative representatives of the bureau- cracy of the Miners’ Federation meant that in the post-war situation there could be no question of seeking parliamentary channels into which to divert working class struggles. The fight for im- proved post-war conditions and for the defence of the Russian Revolution inevitably had to be a fight between the organized working class in the trade unions and the Coalition Government. In these conditions, particularly in the crucial year 1919, the very real possibility existed of a general political struggle by the unions against the Govern- ment which would inevitably have had revolu- tionary implications. 73

[p040] The Triple Alliance and the Sankey Commission The fact that the possibility never became reality in 1919 and the fact that the events of 1920 (Councils of Action against intervention in the Russian-Polish war) and 1921 (the Miners’ lock-out) never developed their full potential for revolutionary opposition to the Government was due to the interaction of two opposed tendencies: the opposition of the trade union leadership, both left and right wings, to any form of action against the Government which raised the question of poli- tical power, and the inability, both organizational and theoretical, of the revolutionary groupings at the time of the formation of the CPGB to develop the very real revolutionary potential amongst the trade union rank and file which was so clearly held back by their leadership. As noted above, 1919 was the crucial year. The claims of the rank and file, held up during the war by the trade union leadership in the interests of the war effort, could no longer be postponed. The three most important unions, the miners, the railworkers and the transport workers, the constituents of the Triple Alliance, were advancing demands for major improvements in wages and conditions. The Triple Alliance had, in fact, concluded an agreement for mutual support in the furthering of their post-war programmes with a stipulation that none of the constituent unions was to come to terms until the demands of all three unions had been realized. This agreement, coming into force at the time when the struggle for the 40-hour week, with its insurrectionary overtones, was being fought on the Clyde, had very clear political implications. If carried out, it inevitably meant taking on the Coalition Government and being prepared to un- dertake a general strike. All the evidence, how- ever, indicates that the leadership of the Triple Alliance concluded its agreement very much under the pressure of rank-and-file militancy. None of the leaders of the Alliance, and this in- cluded the left-wingers, Smillie and Hodges of the miners, were prepared to make their unions’ de- mands a political, revolutionary issue, i.e. one which raised in a clear way the question of which class held power. After all, while Robert Smillie was a pioneer of the ILP in the Miners’ Federa- tion, his political beliefs had become very much shaped by the strait-jacket of orthodox trade unionism, particularly after he became president of the MFGB in 1912, and while he supported in words the’ pacifist section of the ILP during the war, in practice he lent his services very fully to the Government’s war-time schemes for coal pro- 74 duction with all that they involved in increased ex- ploitation and the maintenance of the slaughter on the Western front. Neither he, nor his colleague Hodges, one-time supporter of the South Wales unofficial movement, now MFGB Secretary and convert to the specious theories of Guild Social- ism, was prepared to envisage a struggle against the Government if it could be avoided. Both wanted the nationalization of the mines not as a step in the process of winning working-class power but as a co-operative enterprise between miners, Government and consumers (i.e. private industry) to increase the efficiency of the industry with higher wages and shorter hours as a quid pro quo. Any strike against the Government, in the conditions of 1919, would sacrifice what they re- garded as a practical proposition; moreover, to impose the miners’ claims on ‘the community’ by strike action would be unethical. This viewpoint was summed up by Smillie at the crucial confer- ence of the MFGB which met to consider whether to participate in the Sankey Commission or whether to strike for the union’s demands: . we had no right to force conditions on the nation because of our strength if the claims we put forward were not just [he argued] in favour of participating in the Commission. Moreover: If we get into a fight it must be to secure im- provements for our people, and if we can get these improvements for our people with a fight, then in God’s name, do we want a fight if we can secure them without. . .7 What lay behind these pleadings was a clear understanding that, with the mood of the rank and file, not only in the MFGB but the Triple Alliance as a whole, a strike would soon pass from a limited economic to a general political affair. The Webbs, who acted as go-betweens for Lloyd George and the MFGB leaders, realized exactly what a miners’ strike implied: If the Government, confident of their power to beat the miners, go into battle—theirs is the responsi- bility . . . [wrote Beatrice Webb] ‘Blockading the miners’ will be a difficult and dangerous task: the railwaymen and transport workers might be drawn in, the army might refuse to act. And then? .. 2? In the event, the Webbs, as Beatrice Webb’s diaries show, were largely responsible, in consul- tation with Lloyd George and Smillie and Hodges, for working out the idea of the Coal Commission and thus offering the miners’ leaders a possible way out of the apparent impasse. 1 MFGB conference, February 28, 1919. 2 Beatrice Webb’s Diaries, 1919-1924, p. 150. Fourth International, August 1968

[p041] Nationalization abandoned for Collaboration The success of the leaders of the MFGB in in- ducing the union to participate in the Commission, together with the concessions that came from the first stage of the Commission (the ‘Sankey wage’ and the 7-hour day), sufficed to blunt rank-and- file pressure for immediate action on the question of nationalization, with the result that Lloyd George was relatively safe in rejecting the Commission’s recommendation for nationalization later in 1919. The long-term reaction of the miners’ leaders to this rejection was of the greatest significance in the context of the general trends within the unions in the inter-war years. After the formalities of the ‘Mines for the Nation’ campaign and the predictable rejection by the TUC of an appeal for general strike action in support of the miners in March 1920, the leadership of the MFGB moved steadily towards the evolution of some per- ‘manent system of wage regulation in the industry which would take over from the system of Govern- ment control of the mines which survived from the war period. The ideas that were crystallizing in the minds of the leaders of the MFGB, notably Hodges, and the leaders of the Mineowners’ Asso- ciation from the time of the ‘datum line’ strike in October 1920 through to the eve of the 1921 lock-out involved co-partnership, with the miners being tied in by their leadership to a long-term productivity deal in which wages were related directly to the profitability of the industry. The owners in the various districts guaranteed a defi- nite level of profits which had to be met before wages could rise. It was a scheme on these lines that came into force after the defeat of the miners in 1921; its essentials had been worked out by the bureaucracy of the MFGB well before this struggle broke out, and had been clearly un- derstood and rejected by the majority of the rank and file at the time of the ‘datum line’ strike. What had been envisaged in October 1920 was the rela- tion of wage increases to the achievement of higher levels of output by the rank-and-file miner; what came into force in 1921 was a more developed form of this basic idea and the practical results of this system were clearly explained by a representative of the South Wales left-wing: If our Executive Council would take into con- sideration what the establishment of a datum line means they would realize that they are playing the same game as the coal-owners ... to exploit the men to produce coal for the mining industry. To establish a datum line, we have for the first time Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part II) admitted that the miners are to blame for the shortage of output today.® Genera! Retreat by the miners’ leaders These developments among the miners have been noted at some length because they displayed in a very clear way the pressures acting upon the trade union bureaucracies, even where these had an established ‘left-wing’ content, to come to terms with post-war capitalism once the alternative, the objective need to fight the state and undertake re- volutionary action, had been faced and rejected. Amongst the right-wing leaders of the unions, in both the TUC and the Triple Alliance, there was never the slightest hesitation over their role in the critical situation of 1919. During the crucial period in February and March 1919, when the miners were poised on the brink of action which might have precipitated a general strike, the leaders of the MFGB studiously avoided any appeal for joint action to their allies in the Triple Alliance, although both the Transport Workers’ Federation and the NUR were pressing their own programmes at this time and the NUR was being held back with the greatest difficulty by J. H. Thomas from strike action. Similarly, in Septem- ber 1919 when the rail strike did take place the role of the NUR’s allies, along with members of the TUC Parliamentary Committee, was to depu- tize the Government in the hope of obtaining a compromise solution which would end the strike. There was no consideration of sympathetic action in support of the railworkers. These developments, furthermore, negated threats by the Triple Alliance in the latter part of 1919 to undertake industrial action to force the Government to drop its inter- ventionist activities in support of the White Guards in Russia. Under the pressure of rank- and-file opinion the leaders of the Alliance talked in militant terms, but when they failed to get the TUC to take up the question they neglected to 3 MFGB Conference, September 20 and October 1, 1920. This same speaker, Ted Williams, miners’ agent in the Garw, gave a dramatic illustration of what the tendencies in the MFGB leadership to- wards an exploitative form of co-partnership meant. ‘I have here on my left,’ he said, referring to a delegate at the conference, ‘a man of 40 years of age who is absolutely finished as a pro- ducer of coal. . . . He is finished because he has been all his life on the piecework system. He has put into every single tram of coal every ounce of energy he possibly could and as a consequence he is old at 40. . .. This is what happens to thousands of men in the mining industry today owing to this speeding up system... .’ 75

[p042] consider unilateral action despite the fact that they formed the most effective industrial bloc within the TUC. What was at stake in all these developments, it must be emphasised, was the fear of the trade union leaders that once strike action was un- leashed on any of the issues noted above the potentially revolutionary tendencies working amongst the rank and file would come to the sur- face and destroy all chance of control of the strike movement from above. As Clynes warned at the special conference of the TUC in March 1920, which met to consider sympathetic action in support of the miners’ demand for nationaliza- tion: It is far easier to get your men out than to get them back, and all the time your government and the other remaining parts of the community, you imagine, will be doing nothing. . . . Surely all experience is against such lame and impotent con- clusions as that. You cannot bring millions of men out to begin a great struggle like this without anti- cipating a condition of civil war.‘ Clynes was, of course, completely correct. The Government, during 1919-1921, had fully pre- pared itself to deal with strike movements which, it considered, might very well develop along the lines envisaged by Clynes. During 1919, particu- larly at the time of the rail strike, the Govern- ment had elaborated plans for an emergency system of communications, maintenance of essen- tial services and the use of the army for strike breaking; in fact, the plans produced by the Government at this time almost directly antici- pated those put into effect during the 1926 strike. In addition, the Government had, under the war- time Defence of the Realm Act, unlimited and implicity dictatorial powers which it hastened to renew via the Emergency Powers Act introduced during the miners’ strike in October 1920.5 All the preconditions for the 1926 General Strike were thus established in this period of near revo- lutionary ferment in the immediate post-war years. The essential difference between the two periods was that in 1919-1921 the trade union bureaucracy was, to a considerable extent, able to maintain control. This it did by blocking potentially danger- ous working-class movements as far as possible, and where it was impossible to avoid action, as in the 1919 rail strike or the movement against the likelihood of British intervention in the Russian-Polish war in 1920, leading these move- ments in order to confine them within safe chan- 4 Quoted by W. H. Crook, General Strike. 5 For details, cf. W. H. Crook, op. cit. 76 nels. The militant, even revolutionary, demagogy of the right-wing Labour Party and trade union leaders at the time of the 1920 Council of Action was employed in exactly this context. In 1919 J. H. Thomas had stated that he had led the rail strike to maintain control over the rank and file and avert the dangers of revolution: the country, he claimed, had never been nearer to civil war.® In 1920 the actions of Thomas and his colleagues were construed in the same terms; at the 1920 TUC, a month after his famous militant speech at the Council of Action, Thomas warned, in con- nection with developing industrial struggles: We are far too near the precipice to allow dig- nity or pride on either side to prevent a peaceful settlement. Let the motto for the workers of the country be, ‘Settle Down’.’ Revolutionaries unable to capitalize It would be wrong, however, to imagine that the Labour bureaucracy was in any material sense more powerful than in 1926. Its work of assisting the Coalition Government to overcome the dangers of the post-war period was greatly assisted by the high political consciousness of Lloyd George and his acute perception of the character of the Labour leaders, of how to manoeuvre with them and when to make judicious concessions to assist them in their task of con- trolling the rank-and-file (as his handling of the miners and rail workers in 1919 demonstrated). Even more important, in fact crucial in this con- text, was the inability of the revolutionary groups and the unofficial movements in the unions to which they were related to develop among the rank-and-file of the trade unions and Labour Party a level of political consciousness which would have enabled them to exploit the real revo- lutionary possibilities which existed in the post- war period. It would be too simple, indeed falla- cious, to argue that because the _ revolu- tionary groups were involved in the negotia- tions surrounding the formation of the CPGB they were too pre-occupied to play any significant part in the working-class struggles of this period. Basically it was because these groups were so imbued with syndicalist, propa- gandist and sectarian tendencies that they were unable to give conscious, political expression to the objectively revolutionary currents that be- came apparent in the struggles of 1919-1921. Even in 1921, when the work of unification of the 6 The Times, October 1, 1919. 7 Quoted by Blaxland, A Life For Unity (Biography of J. H. Thomas). Fourth International, August 1968

[p043] revolutionary tendencies had been completed, the CPBG was to show that, at this stage, it was little more than a better organized form of what had existed before in the revolutionary move- ment in Britain. Given the deep-rooted nature of the pre-1920 tendencies, outlined in the earlier sections of this article, this was inevitable. The CPBG was involved from the moment of its in- ception in a potentially revolutionary situation with which it had neither the theoretical nor organizational equipment to deal. The working- class struggles of 1919-1921 provided the essential pre-conditions for the unification of the previously diffuse revolutionary tendencies and, despite the considerable weaknesses shown by the newly- formed CPGB in coming to terms with these struggles, the experiences of this period were to provide invaluable lessons for the party in its period of consolidation and development in the years after 1921. In short, it took this experience, particularly of the miners’ lock-out of 1921, to reveal to the party in a very concrete way the failings of its syndicalist and propagandist methods; without this experience and the assimi- lation of its lessons the conditions for the estab- lishment of a potentially effective revolutionary party could not have been realized by 1924-1925. Bolshevism: a new experience The most distinctive feature of the CPGB as it emerged from the final round of unity nego- tiations in January 1921 was the extremely formal character of its adherence to the decisions of the Communist International (notably its Second Congress) on the organizational forms and methods of work of Communist Parties. What the vital Second Congress of the CI had attempted to instil in the consciousness of the delegations attending the Congress was an understanding of the character of the Bolshevik form of political organization and its relationship to the successful seizure of power in 1917. In short, what the leadership of the CI was attempting was to generalize upon the Bolshevik experience and educate the participants in the Congress in those principles of Bolshevism which were of general application to Communist work outside Russia. To the British delegates the idea of a disciplined, centralized party, working in a planned, organized way in the trade unions and Labour Party was something completely new and outside their pre- vious experience, as was the emphasis of the CI upon the need for a theoretically-trained member- ship educated to use Marxism not in the sterile, formal manner of the Second International but Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part !I1) creatively, as a method to evaluate the political perspectives before the party and for relating to this, the day-to-day work of the party in its various forms. The revolutionary groups that had come together to form the CPGB had been attracted by the success of the 1917 Revolution and had been attracted to the ideal of a Communist Party, but it took the Second Congress and then the experi- ence of the working-class struggles in Britain in 1921 to produce any real understanding of the major departure from previous political practices required in the formation of a Communist Party affiliated to the CI. J. T. Murphy, a delegate at the Second Congress, described very graphically the shock which the Congress administered to his previous political conceptions which, it may be noted, were those of the British revolutionary groups in general: I had left England as a young provincial skilled workman with a clear-cut theory of how society could be reorganized under the control of the workers ...I1 was quite sure that capitalism was breaking down everywhere and in the process help- ing the workers to see their way to Socialism through industrial organization and the General Strike. . . . My experience in Russia ... had shown me the real meaning of the struggle for political power. Instead of thinking that a Social- ist Party was merely a propaganda organization for the dissemination of Socialist views, I now saw that a real Socialist Party would consist of revolutionary Socialists who regarded the Party as a means whereby they would lead the working class in the fight for political power. 1921: Sectarian-Syndicalist hangover The leadership of the newly-formed CPGB in 1921 had undergone the same process of political re-orientation as Murphy but the attachment to the new political concepts and methods of work was inevitably formal; when the crisis of the miners’ lock-out arose the party reverted quite instinctively to the predominantly sectarian and syndicalist traditions of its constituent groups. The formal character of the party’s acceptance of the directives of the CI for an orientation of party activity towards serious mass work came out initially over relations with the Labour Party. As Brian Pearce notes, the application for affiliation to the Labour Party in 1920 was presented in terms designed to invite rejection and there was clearly general relief in the party, particularly among the tendencies emanating from the SLP and syndicalist groups, at the escape from the 8 J. T. Murphy, New Horizons, pp. 189-190. 77

[p044] possible compromise with reformism.’ In fact, this sectarian attitude to the mass political organi- zation of Labour, in a period when the Labour Party was beginning to establish an increasingly strong appeal to the working-class electorate, was to arrest the CPGB’s own development as an in- fluential force within the Labour movement; until the sectarianism of the early period was overcome, by 1923, much of the potential goodwill among left-wingers in both the Labour Party and ILP was left unrealized, a fact which may well have helped consolidate the ascendancy of the centrist currents around Macdonald and Clifford Allen in the 1922- 1923 period. More important, however, in the context of the events of 1919-1921 was the continuing predomi- nance, indeed strengthening, of the syndicalist element of the revolutionary movement. As noted above, the very weakness of the Labour Party in Parliament meant that the Labour struggles of the period had to be fought out very largely on the industrial front with the intervention of the Coali- tion Government giving these struggles an inevit- ably political character. The weakness and ineptitude of the Parliamentary Labour Party together with the existence, up to the end of 1920, of boom conditions in the economy provided the pre-conditions for the resurgence of syndicalist tendencies amongst wide sections of the working class particularly at a time when, under pressure, employers and the Government, in its role as controller of the mines and railways, could make economic concessions. This background is essen- tial for understanding the continuation of syndi- calist tendencies in the groups that formed the CPGB for, up to the end of the boom, it seemed to provide the conditions for continuing and extending the established methods of work; while powerful trade union action, ‘direct action’, could yield results there was no great pressure to think in political terms about the significance of these trade union struggles. This factor was to be of the greatest importance for what might be termed the ‘industrial wing’ of the CPGB. It was noted, in the second part of this review, that despite the formal policy differences amongst the _ revolu- tionary groupings that formed the CPGB there was a general tendency to share a common syndi- calist outlook in relation to work in the trade unions. Effective industrial unionism, the steady encroachment on the power of the employers and the eventual take-over of industry through the general strike, these were the commonplaces of 9 Brian Pearce (Joseph Redman), The Early Years of the CPBG, Labour Review, Jan.-Feb., 1958. 78 the BSP, the SLP, the WSF of Sylvia Pankhurst, and the Shop Stewards’ and Workers’ Committee Movement (SS & WCM), in which representatives of the revolutionary groups and ‘non-party’ syndi- calists were active. The SS & WCM did in fact become the industrial basis of the CPGB by March 1921 following discussions between its representatives and the leadership of the CPGB after the Second Congress of the CI and, although the SS & WCM formally agreed to the subordina- tion of its industrial activities to the political direction of the party, there were many indica- tions that leading members of the Movement regarded the party’s industrial wing as being of prime importance, a fact which pointed to the likelihood of the continuation of its syndicalist methods. Syndicalist organization as substitute for the Party During the period 1920-1921, when the CPGB was being formed and the SS & WCM was being brought into an organizational relationship with it, there was considerable evidence that, despite the work of the Second Congress of the CI, the ten- dency was to regard the CPGB as a more highly developed form of the syndicalist movement that had existed, in various forms, from the early 1900s. At the Second Congress Jack Tanner, the official delegate of the SS & WCM, explicitly denied the need for any separate party; in his speech he indicated that the SS & WCM now accepted the need for a revolutionary seizure of power, as carried out by the Bolsheviks, but held that this task could be accomplished by the SS & WCM: We understand and realize that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be wielded by a minority —the revolutionary minority of the proletariat as expressed through the Shop Stewards’ Committee Movement ..., but he added that ...a number of those who are active in the shop stewards’ movement are not greatly concerned about the formation of the party because they have been convinced by their experience in other parties that it was a loss of time to share in the work of such parties... .¥ Other members of the SS & WCM who were actively involved in the political revolutionary groups might have disagreed with Tanner on the question of the party but at the same time indi- cated that, essentially, they saw the same role for the SS & WCM as Tanner; such a movement 10 Cf. Proceedings of the Second Congress of the CI, July-August 1920. Fourth International, August 1968

[p045] would carry out the practical tasks of the revolu- tion, the party would provide the propaganda and the organizational apparatus for bringing the various unofficial, syndicalist groups in the unions into effective contact with each other. It was this sort of attitude to which MacManus, a prominent figure in the formation of the CPGB, gave expres- sion when he stated to a conference of the SS & WCM that: They (the Bolsheviks) have got to the roots and have found a way out, and what is of even greater interest is that they have found the way out to be by means of just such committees as we are building up in this country. They call them Soviets, we call them Workers’ Councils." It is of significance that the movement of the SS & WCM towards this position marked a very definite shift away from its war-time attitudes. Then it had existed purely as a co-ordinating organization for the local, autonomous unofficial movements in the engineering industry. Now it was adopting a specifically centralized form in connection with its development into a definite revolutionary tendency. As MacManus’ remarks indicated, this had come about very much through the influence of the Russian Revolution; at the same time, the passing of the special war-time conditions which had provided the SS & WCM with its original strength forced the movement to reconsider its position. As the unions asserted control over the Shop Stewards during 1919-1920 and effectively limited their role through agree- ments with the engineering employers, and as em- ployers were increasingly able, particularly outside Scotland, to break up the workshop committees, so the SS & WCM was forced to move, quite empirically, to realise the weakness of localized, autonomous forms of unofficial movement, particu- larly at a time when the trade union bureaucracies were holding back the rank and file as far as possible and when there consequently existed the chance of rebuilding the unofficial movement on a much higher level. Two trends in the SS&WCM The SS & WCM was made painfully aware from the immediate post-war period of its considerable weaknesses and the need to evolve some more effective form of organization. The action of the Clyde Workers’ Committee in January 1919 in launching the action for the 40-hour week with- out consulting the English section of the move- ment was an indication of this, as was the total 11 SS & WCM conference, January 10-11, 1920. Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part Hl) inability of the movement to give any organized expression to the rank-and-file unrest in the Triple Alliance at the time of the miners’ agitation in February-March, 1919. On this occasion the Worker, organ of the Scottish section of the SS & WCM, was forced to admit that only rank-and- file committees would make the Triple Alliance act, yet these were non-existent in the TWF while as for the unofficial movement in the NUR ‘. . . SO Spasmodic and at the same time amenable to any emotional outburst on the part of Mr. J. H. Thomas has it been that it can be written down as the unreliable quantity’. The work of the SS & WCM, or those fragments of it that remained after the war, thus took two lines of development from 1919. Increasingly it tried to establish itself as the focal point for unofficial movements in the unions generally, paying particu- lar attention in this context to the miners and railworkers, and at the same time played an in- creasingly significant part in the events surround- ing the formation of the CPGB. By the early part of 1921 the SS & WCM, now formally united with the newly-formed CPGB, had brought within its scope the important unofficial movements which were developing in virtually all the major coalfields, the vigilance committees on the rail- ways and the rank-and-file committees in the docks, notably Liverpool and Glasgow. In addi- tion, the remnants of the workers’ committees in the engineering industry remained attached to the movement. In short, the SS & WCM brought into the CPGB all the ‘organized’ syndicalist move- ments that existed in the post-war period and brought them in largely on the understanding that the CPGB offered a more effective way of organi- zing the economic struggle in the workshop or mine. The fact that the Convention of the SS & WCM which met in March 1921 to ratify the alliance with the CPGB formally accepted a con- stitution which subordinated it to the political control of the party did not alter the fact that the industrial base of the party in its formative years was purely syndicalist in outlook, that many of the leaders of the party were drawn from this industrial base and that no attempt was made in the period of the formation of the party to under- stand the limitations of syndicalism and to draw the lessons of its weaknesses in a period when working-class struggles in all their forms needed to be fought with a political perspective. On the contrary, the party went out of its way to appeal to industrial militants in purely syndicalist terms. 12. The Worker, March 3, 1919. 79

[p046] The best example of this was in South Wales where considerable potential existed for building a mass CP given the rapid extension of the un- official movement there. Appealing to the many thousands of militants who followed the lead of the unofficial movement, the party’s South Wales organizer, Alf Cook, wrote: The Communist branches in the coalfield areas can be the centres of the unofficial agitation in the Miners’ Federation. Communist branches in areas like Cardiff, Newport, Barry, Swansea, etc., can be a connecting link between the miners’ unofficial movement and the unofficial movement among dockworkers, seafarers, railway and_ transport workers, and at the same time being attached to a centralized and disciplined national Communist Party, connect South Wales rebel activities with those of the rest of the country.. 8 Background to the failures of the Party in 1921 The tendency to present the function of the party in this way, the very formal character of the understanding of the leadership of the work of the Second Congress of the CI, and the total failure of the party during 1920-1921 to make a thorough analysis of the tendencies in British capitalism and the inevitably political, revolu- tionary struggles to which these must give rise, meant that the party functioned in a purely syndi- calist manner during the great struggles of 1921 occasioned by the miners’ lock-out. It must be kept firmly in mind that the lock-out was, from the start, an objectively political struggle. The collapse of the demand for coal, with the end of the post-war boom, meant that the coal-owners demanded savage cuts in wages and attacks on working conditions to maintain their economic viability, particularly in South Wales, which was hit most severely by the collapse of the export trade. At the same time the Government, in the midst of its deflationary programme, had deter- mined to rid itself of its control of the industry and its attendant obligation to finance the mount- ing losses of the coal-owners. State and owners were thus united in a move to force down, through decontrol, many hundreds of thousands of miners literally to the starvation level and many thous- ands more into permanent unemployment. The owners launched the attack on the industrial front; the Government backed them with the full resources of the State in meeting the resistance 13. The Communist, September 20, 1920. Alf Cook, a veteran SLPer in Cardiff, must not be confused with A. J. Cook. 80 of the miners. The attack on the miners, more- over, could not be divorced from the mounting pressure in all major sections of industry, to destroy the gains made by the working class during the post-war boom; the railwaymen were faced with the decontrol of their industry in the ‘Jatter part of 1921 and although they were a ‘sheltered’ trade could anticipate wage cuts and speeding up forced through by railway companies, strengthened by the Government-sponsored amal- gamation of 1920, anxious to cut freight costs to industry as a whole. The 1921 depression held the same implications for the dockers, while in en- gineering and the cotton industry pressures were building up for major rationalization of produc- tion. During the latter stages of the miners’ lock- out a great lock-out in the cotton industry to reduce wages developed; early in 1922 the defeat of the miners encouraged the engineering employ- ers to launch their attack; the turn of the dockers came in 1923, when the gains of the Shaw award of 1920 were challenged. All these developments were implicit in the miners’ struggle, for the miners were the strongest, best-organized of the working class with their leadership kept very much in line with rank-and-file militancy by the activities of the unofficial movements. The break- ing of this power made possible the attacks on the other sections of the working class which followed the lock-out. The CPGB was generally aware of the implica- tions for the working class as a whole if the miners were defeated in 1921, but it approached the struggle with all the syndicalist preconcep- tions noted above and with all the syndicalist illusions of the unofficial movements attached to the party that the struggle could be fought out in purely economic terms. The aim of the party across the lock-out was to hold the MFGB and its allies in the Triple Alliance to the demands of the miners—for the pooling of the profits of the industry to allow the richer districts to finance those worst hit by the depression. But its role in this process was, as Macfarlane rightly implies, totally negative. Macfarlane quotes the constantly repeated slogan of The Communist during the lock-out, ‘Watch Your Leaders’, and indicates that the party’s actual activity was confined to the issuing of admonitions from the sidelines. Certainly in terms of its material resources in the unions, other than the miners’, it was not at the outset of the struggle to play a very influential role. On the eve of the lock-out The Communist was forced to admit: Only in one industry, the mines, is there any Fourth International, August 1968

[p047] real organized ‘Left’ wing opinion, and even that is of recent growth. Can the same be said of any other industry? With the possible exception of the railways—and that exception only partial— the answer is ‘No’... The National Administra- tive Council of the Shop Stewards represents powerful ideas, but it is not a powerful organiza- tion. ... Everything has yet to be done.. 4 An opening for alternative leadership Yet having admitted this the CPGB did not go on to analyse the very favourable conditions that were being created in the unions by the develop- ments in 1921. The fact that the leadership of the MFGB, and this included some of the left-wing like Ablett, were opposed to a fight explicitly because of its political character, placed the great- est responsibility on the party and its unofficial groups in the MFGB to seize the initiative and work for the consolidation of rank-and-file strength around a definitely political perspective. Such a campaign would, in the conditions of 1921, have driven home in a very clear way the need for powerful unofficial movements in other unions, most notably in the unions allied with the miners in the Triple Alliance. A close examination of the actual developments around Black Friday indi- cates that in South Wales and other important areas of the country conditions were ripe, had the CPGB been able to take the initiative for the organization of unofficial strike movements in support of the miners, particularly in the NUR. In South Wales, for example, the bitterest con- demnation of the action of the executive of the NUR was manifested in a very large number of branches and calls for strike action were wide- spread, yet there was not the slightest evidence that the CPGB or the local unofficial movement attempted to exploit this situation. The right wing on the South Wales Miners’ executive were well aware of the dangers of the situation immediately after Black Friday; Vernon Hartshorn, the prominent South Wales leader, went out of his way to excuse Hodges’ actions on the eve of Black Friday and warned: If the miners only remain passive . . . maintain- ing their resolution not to return to work until they had terms which they could accept, they would be acting perfectly within their rights and the silent pressure they would exert would be far greater than any action of violence.5 The most significant feature of the situation around Black Friday was the fact that unless the 14. The Communist, March 23, 1921. 15 Merthyr Pioneer, April 4, 1921. Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part (11) initiative could be seized at once movements of spontaneous anger amongst the rank and file in the Triple Alliance would fail to develop into effective unofficial action and the mood of militant anger rapidly degenerate into demoralization. It was, however, a week before The Communist had any positive advice for the rank and file, other than that they should continue to watch their leaders. It urged that money be sent to the Daily Herald miners’ fund and that ‘decent’ officials in the Triple Alliance should resign. Its other advice took the form of a purely propagandist exhorta- tion which explicitly discounted the hope of organizing unofficial action: Overhaul the whole (union) machinery from top to bottom, it urged, link up the unofficial move- ments from industry to industry. Make war... on every waverer.... But having made this general point it went on, The mining lock-out continues and it seems that the rank and file of other unions will have to express their sympathy in financial help now that their leaders have thwarted for the time being the general strike.!® Too little, too late Admittedly, at a Congress of the party on April 24 (i.e. ten days after Black Friday) dele- gates who were active in the industrial wing of the party agreed to initiate an ‘intensified cam- paign’ among rail and transport workers with the aim of bringing them out in support of the miners”, but by this stage, inevitably, the momen- tum of rank-and-file militancy which could have provided the success for such a campaign had largely died away. In South Wales, for example, a conference of the unofficial movement right at the end of April took up this decision of the Congress and decided to co-ordinate action with the railworkers, yet the intense militancy of the South Wales NUR, so apparent at the time of Black Friday, had evaporated. Only two branches out of some twenty which had originally pressed for action agreed to consider the proposals of the miners®, and in the event, nothing more was heard of the campaign. This sketch of the response of the CPGB to the events of 1921 is not meant to detract in any way from the party’s militancy and courage in support of the miners during the lock-out. In fact its members bore the brunt of the arrests that were made during the struggle. What it is in- 16 The Communist, April 23, 1921. 17 Solidarity, May 5, 1921. 18 Merthyr Pioneer, May 5, 1921. 81

[p048] tended to make clear is the powerful tendency operating in the party, both among the leaders and the membership generally, towards fighting the struggle on purely syndicalist terms. Although Macfarlane indicates implicitly that this was the line adopted during 1921 he totally fails to bring out the very serious effect this had in restricting the very great potential influence the party could have had if it had not succumbed to spontaneity, a-politicism, and the type of ‘ginger group’ activi- ties which characterized the unofficial movements which made up its industrial wing. Only the pre-conditions established It is of importance to note, in this context and as a conclusion to this characterization of the for- mative years of the CPGB, that the tendencies evident in the party in 1921 were not solely the ideological product, in some sort of isolated way, of the sects which united in 1920-1921. The power- ful impulses towards spontaneity and the various syndicalist forms of action were, as has been pointed out in earlier sections of this article, deeply ingrained in the traditions of important sections of the working class. These traditions had been most firmly established in the years of Labour upsurge before the First World War; in the ferment of the post-war period they revealed how strongly they determined the outlook of ‘the Left’, both leaders and rank and file, in the Labour move- ment. The CPGB was as much a reflection of these tendencies as it was a conscious participant in them. If the formation of the party had, by 1921, brought the revolutionary tendencies into organi- zational relationship with each other around the formal agreement on the policies of the CI, it had, in practice, done little by this period to break down the local autonomy which was so charac- teristic of the revolutionary movement in Britain up to the formation of the CPGB. A really com- prehensive history of the party would inevitably have to show that, despite the movements towards Communist unity in 1920-1921, the CPGB as it emerged in 1921 was not a great deal more than a federation of local revolutionary tendencies with a propensity towards forms of action which con- tinued in practice in their day-to-day work what- ever the formal decisions of the party nationally on the application of the theses of the CI. This local autonomy had been apparent in the British Labour movement from the formative period of the SDF and the ILP; it was inevitable that so strongly entrenched a tradition should carry over into the CPGB and it was to be one of the most fundamental tasks of the party in the early 1920s 82 to fight this tendency through the struggle for a centralized, disciplined party based upon a highly politically conscious membership. In 1921 the success of the unification negotiations meant that the preconditions for the achievement of this task had been established, but only the pre- conditions; the real fight for the revolutionary party in Britain was still to come. In 1921, there- fore, the history of the CPGB is as much the history of the local Communist groups—the move- ment in South Wales, on the Clyde, on Tyneside or in the various districts of London—as it is a history of the national developments in the party. These local tendencies came very much to the fore in the struggles of 1921 and in reality imposed their own pattern on the activities of the CPGB in this period. With their own conception of the character of Communist work still at a very formal stage, the party leadership was not really in a position to attempt to counteract these localized movements whose ideas on revolutionary practice they themselves shared and reflected. Something to be desired: more research The present stage of research into the Labour movement in this period does not allow any clear picture to be built up of the way the CPGB in its early years was largely a reflection of local revo- lutionary tendencies. Had Macfarlane placed his account of the formation of the CPGB in this context and initiated this research the value of his work would have been very greatly enhanced. Evidence that exists on the revolutionary move- ment in South Wales, however, does show very clearly how the established syndicalist tendencies there did impose themselves very firmly on the work of the CPGB in its formative years and would suggest that a similar state of affairs existed elsewhere. South Wales as an example The post-war boom in the coal trade, particu- larly in the export field in which South Wales was prominent, placed the South Wales miners in an extremely strong economic position and gave a great boost to the revival of the unofficial move- ment after its dispersal during the war. This revival of unofficial activity took place within the general context of the impact of the Russian Revo- lution for which there was widespread enthusiasm among the rank-and-file miners, particularly the younger generation, and at the same time that the unofficial groups began to multiply in the mining valleys under the influence of ‘missionary’ tours by representatives of the SS&WCM and the local Fourth International, August 1968

[p049] branches of the Labour College movement, im- portant elements of the unofficial movement be- came involved in the activities between 1919 and 1921 surrounding the formation of the CPGB. The most significant feature of these developments was that the revolutionary movement in South Wales, whether it sided with the BSP and the Communist Unity Groups that formed the CPGB in July 1920 or with the ‘left wing’ Communist organization of Sylvia Pankhurst”, was that it centred around a revival, in a far more developed form, of the syndicalism which had been endemic in South Wales since the Cambrian Combine strike of 1910. The great economic strength of the rank and file of the SWMF meant that they were in a most favourable position for wringing concessions on wages and conditions from the local owners and were in a position, furthermore, to force the predominantly right-wing executive of the SWMF to keep closely in line with their demands. These were conditions in which the tendency for the unofficial movement to function purely as a ‘ginger group’ upon the union leadership could flourish to the fullest extent. So long as the leaders could be kept in line the long-established aims of the Miners’ Next Step, which could be summarized as the development of an industrial union with the aim of seizing control of the mines, could be realized. The work of the un- official movement, and in practice the Communist movement which it dominated, thus came to centre around the task of building up the strength of the union in the mining valleys so that, by progressive stages, the miners would begin steadily to en- croach on the power of the owners until, eventu- ally, they would have neutralized the owners’ rights of control over production and the work of taking control could be completed. In this context the need for a strongly centralized un- official movement, closely linked to the overall political strategy of the CPGB, seemed very remote. What mattered was the realization of the full strength of the district organizations of the SWMF in each mining valley for which purpose the agitational enthusiasm of a few local militants in the various unofficial groups could be con- sidered sufficient; the fact that they were at the same time members of the CPGB made little dif- ference and in practical terms merely served to register their adherence to the idea of revolution. 19 Involved in the latter were A. J. Cook and George Dolling, two leading members of the pre-1914 unofficial movement, who found in Pankhurst’s organization the complete expression of their a-political revolutionary syndicalism. Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part I!) The achievements of the unofficial movement were thus represented in the establishment of 100 per cent trade union membership and the bringing into the SWMF of the various ‘craft’ grades of miners, enginemen, etc., so that a fully effective industrial union might be established. By 1920 this process had gone a long way, particularly in the Rhondda, which embraced a quarter of the mining population in South Wales. So effective was the trade union organization here under the stimulus of the Rhondda unofficial groups, led by militants like Cook, Horner, Dolling, etc., that the power of the coal-owners was very effectively constrained; for example, on two occasions during 1920 the whole of the Rhondda struck against the victimization of a few union members and forced their reinstatement, and at one point in mid-1920 the unofficial movement was able to bring the whole of the SWMEF to the verge of a strike in defence of two miners denied the payment of the minimum wage. It was the experience of this sort of strength which gave so great an impetus to the syndicalist belief that the process of seizing power was well advanced. As the South Wales corres- pondent of Solidarity observed: Each and every time the management of a col- liery seek to serve notice on any employee they are faced with the prospect of an immediate stoppage of work... .“Intolerable’ is the word used by one coal-owner ... but for the worker it is the first step that has ever been made on the road to real Freedom.” At the meetings of the SS&WCM that took place during 1920, delegates from the South Wales unofficial movement made even clearer their con- fidence in their strength. Describing the situation in the mining valleys, Charlie Gibbons (one of the original authors of The Miners’ Next Step) stated: They (the unofficial movement) manufactured pre- texts and created situations whereby the workers were forced into a spirit of antagonism to the employers. As a result of their efforts there were now 150,000 in the South Wales coalfield pre- pared to ‘do’ the employers as soon as the oppor- -» tunity came... .! In this context it did not matter that the nation- alization campaign of the MFGB had failed in 1919. There was no need to examine the political reasons for this failure or to consider the role played in it by the State when the local economic power of the miners was, apparently, increasing so rapidly. It was this situation which prompted a rank-and-file miner to write that 20 Solidarity, July 1920. 21 SS&WCM conference, January 10-11, 1920. 83

[p050] Whether the official scheme for nationalization and joint control is granted or not, the South Wales miners are going on quietly with the work of taking control. Some day, when the Government at last enacts some scheme of joint control, it will wake up to find that it is only legalizing what already exists in practice.” The exception of Wales submits to the rule The circumstances that produced this attitude in South Wales were, of course, purely temporary. The slump which set in from the end of 1920 com- pletely removed the economic conditions which had given the impetus to syndicalism but this rapid change in material conditions did not in any way force a re-assessment of the syndicalist character of the Communist movement in South Wales. The whole work of the unofficial move- ment in this area in the period leading up to the 1921 lock-out was conducted on exactly the same lines as in 1920. In the propaganda of the movement there was not the least consideration of the inevitably political character of the coming struggle; all that was necessary for success, it was argued, was an extension of the unofficial move- ment to ensure that the union leaders did not retreat from the policy of the profits pool and the national wages board. Similar considerations dominated the development of the unofficial move- ment nationally in this period when the SS&WCM was formally uniting with the CPGB. The South Wales unofficial leaders had been arguing during 1920 at meetings of the SS&WCM that what was needed for the realization of their policy for the seizure of the mines was the extension of their type of organization to all the major coalfields. This would ensure that the MFGB followed the policies laid down by the rank and file. In the months before the lock-out the SS&WCM was successful in initiating on quite an extensive scale unofficial movements of this type in all the major coalfields and the formation of the ‘British Miners’ Reform Movement’ in February 1921 seemed to indicate at last that rank-and-file opinions could be impressed on the union leader- ship and the coal-owners and Government defeated in the coming struggle in purely economic terms.” In this development the leadership of the CPGB gave its complete support to the conception that the preparations for the lock-out should be con- ducted on purely syndicalist lines. At the Con- 22 Workers’ Dreadnought, April 17, 1920. 23 Communist Review, December 1921. 84 vention of the SS&WCM, at the end of March 1921, right on the eve of the lock-out, when the alliance with the CPGB was ratified, there was no consideration given to the coming struggle. Obviously it was held that the work of the party would devolve on the local unofficial groups who would act in a purely spontaneous, ‘ginger group’ fashion in response to the struggle as it developed. It was because the local, autonomous syndicalism of the unofficial movements imposed itself on the party in this way that the CPGB played so nega- tive a role in the lock-out, as outlined above, and it was this development which prompted the critique of Radek, at the Third Congress of the CI, part of which is quoted by Macfarlane. Radek’s comments revealed very clearly how the traditions of the unofficial movements asserted themselves during the struggle: In many places, he noted, the Party appears on the scene under the cloak of the ‘Workers’ Committees’ and any success that is achieved by the propaganda does not bring the masses near to the CP... 1921, a necessary condition for change In his further comments, based on interroga- tions of delegates from the CPGB, he revealed how completely the party had failed to prepare politically for the struggle and had fallen back on the spontaneity of its members: To my question, what do you tell the masses, what is your attitude to nationalization? What is your attitude to the present concrete claims of the workers? One of the comrades replied: ‘When I ascend the rostrum at a meeting I know as little about what I am going to say as the man in the moon; but being a Communist, I find my way along while I speak’.”* It was with this evidence before him that Radek forcibly stated: . .. We consider it our duty to say the following, even to the smallest CPs: you will never have any large mass -parties if you limit yourselves to the mere propaganda of the Communist theory. In fact, it was only by assimilating the lessons of 1921, in the context of the critique of the CI and with the guidance of the latter, that the CPGB was to proceed towards the establishment of con- ditions for effective mass Communist work by 1924-1925. The experience of 1921 was a neces- sary condition for the escape from the previous syndicalist, sectarian traditions of the British re- volutionary movement. Fourth International, August 1968

[p051] The boom .. . that was Western Capitalism Since the War by Michael Kidron Weildenfeid & Nicholson. 36s. THE MANUSCRIPT of this book, the author tells us, was complete except for details in March 1967. By the time it was published in May 1968, the post-war boom, whose perma- nence it attempts to ‘explain’, no longer existed. The only interest the book retains, therefore, lies in the light it throws on the author’s method, not in anything he has to tell us about capitalism. The publisher’s blurb describes Dr. Kidron as ‘an eminent political economist’. We know him better as a disciple of T. Cliff of the ‘Inter- national Socialism’ group. The title of this book, Western Capitalism, has the intention of distinguishing its subject-matter from what Cliff's group calls the ‘state capitalism’ of the Soviet Union. The closing chapters expound their ideas about rank-and-file action in the trade unions, which lead them to oppose actively any attempt to develop Marxist leadership in indus- try. What becomes very clear on reading this book is how closely the reading this book is how closely these views were bound up with the boom, and with the crude vulgariz- ation of Marxism which passed for a theoretical analysis of the period of economic expansion whose end we are now experiencing. * More than any other section, the middle class in the metropolitan countries did well out of the boom. Not only did they seem to have found some kind of stability, but the spectre of independent working- class action seemed to have been laid to rest. This was reflected among the ‘New Thinkers’ and in the revisionist trends inside the Marxist movement. The permanence of boom conditions