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

[p024] _ Marxism and Stalinism in Britain 1920-1926 (Part IV) by M. Woodhouse This the fourth and concluding instalment of a study of the early history of the Communist Party of Great Britain based on the book by L. J. MacFarlane and original research by the author. The third instalment appeared in Fourth international, Volume V, Number 2. AS INDICATED IN the previous section of this article the practice of the CPGB at its formation was fully representative of the syndicalist and sectarian ten- dencies which came together in the party in 1920-1921 and whose methods dominated its work during the revolutionary crisis in 1921. The 1921 experience was to be of the utmost significance for the party’s future development. It provided the basis for understanding theoretically the limitations of syndicalism in a period of re- volutionary industrial struggles and for the party to orientate its practice towards mass work in the unions and Labour Party in conscious prepara- tion for seizing the revolutionary initiative in future conflicts. At the same time, for large sec- tions of the organized working class 1921 stimu- lated intense hostility towards the labour bureau- cracy which had featured so prominently in the ‘betrayal of the miners. With the passing of the worst effects of the 1921 defeat the conditions existed in the unions and the Labour Party for a sympathetic response to the CPGB, and a readi- ness to follow the practical lead of the party which was to be of crucial importance in the events around ‘Red Friday’, 1925, and which pro- vided the pre-conditions for its development into a mass organization. Post 1921 and the first four Congresses The realization of this potential in the post- 1921 situation depended absolutely on _ the assimilation by the CP of the lessons of the 1921 experience and its relation to the work of the early congresses of the Communist International (CI). The whole emphasis of the second, third and fourth congresses was on the need to develop, Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part IV) from the groups and parties that adhered to Communism from 1919, parties of the Bolshevik type, based, that is, on the generalized experience of the Russian party and in particular on the ex- perience of 1917. The temporary passing of the post-war revolutionary crisis in Europe had re- vealed the general inability of the groupings ad- hering to the CI to provide concrete revolutionary leadership and had underlined the need for basic education of the emergent communist tendencies in the theory of Bolshevism. The work of the third and fourth congresses was particularly im- portant in this context. The emphasis placed by these congresses on the central role of the party, the elaboration of the tactic of the united front, the struggle for the development and application of Marxist theory to the immediate and overall perspectives of the party, all these flowed from the historical experience of the Bolshevik party, com- bined with the theoretical estimate made of the character of the situation in post-war Europe. In the period of permanent economic crisis ushered in with the 1920s the conditions existed for sharp fluctuations in the consciousness of the working class, for rapid radicalization in reaction to the periodic deepening of the crisis and the predict- able attempts of the bourgeoisie to stabilize their system at the expense of the working class. In these conditions the way forward for the consti- tuent parties of the CI could only be through their orientation towards mass work combined with the development of a centralized, disciplined or- ganization and a theoretically trained membership. It was, moreover, only through the constant deep- ening of theoretical understanding in relation to the work of the party that the relations forged 19

[p025] ~ Marxism and Stalinism in Britain 1920-1926 (Part IV) by M. Woodhouse This the fourth and concluding instalment of a study of the early history of the Communist Party of Great Britain based on the book by L. J. MacFarlane and original research by the author. The third instalment appeared in Fourth International, Volume V, Number 2. AS INDICATED IN the previous section of this article the practice of the CPGB at its formation was fully representative of the syndicalist and sectarian ten- dencies which came together in the party in 1920-1921 and whose methods dominated its work during the revolutionary crisis in 1921. The 1921 experience was to be of the utmost significance for the party’s future development. It provided the basis for understanding theoretically the limitations of syndicalism in a period of re- volutionary industrial struggles and for the party to orientate its practice towards mass work in the unions and Labour Party in conscious prepara- tion for seizing the revolutionary initiative in future conflicts. At the same time, for large sec- tions of the organized working class 1921 stimu- lated intense hostility towards the labour bureau- cracy which had featured so prominently in the betrayal of the miners. With the passing of the worst effects of the 1921 defeat the conditions existed in the unions and the Labour Party for a sympathetic response to the CPGB, and a readi- ness to follow the practical lead of the party which was to be of crucial importance in the events around ‘Red Friday’, 1925, and which pro- vided the pre-conditions for its development into a mass organization. Post 1921 and the first four Congresses The realization of this potential in the post- 1921 situation depended absolutely on _ the assimilation by the CP of the lessons of the 1921 experience and its relation to the work of the early congresses of the Communist International (CI). The whole emphasis of the second, third and fourth congresses was on the need to develop, Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part IV) from the groups and parties that adhered to Communism from 1919, parties of the Bolshevik type, based, that is, on the generalized experience of the Russian party and in particular on the ex- perience of 1917. The temporary passing of the post-war revolutionary crisis in Europe had re- vealed the general inability of the groupings ad- hering to the CI to provide concrete revolutionary leadership and had underlined the need for basic education of the emergent communist tendencies in the theory of Bolshevism. The work of the third and fourth congresses was particularly im- portant in this context. The emphasis placed by these congresses on the central role of the party, the elaboration of the tactic of the united front, the struggle for the development and application of Marxist theory to the immediate and overall perspectives of the party, all these flowed from the historical experience of the Bolshevik party, com- bined with the theoretical estimate made of the character of the situation in post-war Europe. In the period of permanent economic crisis ushered in with the 1920s the conditions existed for sharp fluctuations in the consciousness of the working class, for rapid radicalization in reaction to the periodic deepening of the crisis and the predict- able attempts of the bourgeoisie to stabilize their system at the expense of the working class. In these conditions the way forward for the consti- tuent parties of the CI could only be through their orientation towards mass work combined with the development of a centralized, disciplined or- ganization and a theoretically trained membership. It was, moreover, only through the constant deep- ening of theoretical understanding in relation to the work of the party that the relations forged 19

[p026] between it and the working class could be streng- thened and the conditions for consolidating the practical revolutionary leadership of the class understood and realized. 1921-1925: applying the lessons For the CPGB as it existed in 1921-1922 the emphasis of the CI on the central role of the party meant a complete break not merely from the practice of the party in 1920-1921 but from the traditions of spontaneity and empiricism which had characterized the Marxist and syndicalist groups over the previous generation and which were in many respects the militant expression of trade union politics. The struggle for a party of the Bolshevik type in Britain required the con- scious rejection of these traditions; the transforma- tion, in the first place, of the whole character of the party from the loose groupings devoted to spontaneity typical of the syndicalist period to a disciplined party capable of effective communist work in the mass organizations of the labour movement. In the second place, and no less im- portant, a conscious break was required from the formalized, mechanical Marxism of the pre- 1920 period (as analysed in part two of this series) and its replacement by an approach to Marxism which emphasized the need for the Systematic application of theory to the work and development of the party. The history of the CPGB in the period 1921-1925 was bound up essentially with the struggle in the party to apply and develop these new methods of work, and in this process the twin questions of party organiza- tion and the fight for theory were inextricably connected. This period saw the party move a long way towards overcoming the weaknesses which had attended its inception. With the for- mation of the National Minority Movement (NMM) in 1924, and the beginning of the Left- Wing Movement in the Labour Party with the launching of the highly successful Sunday Worker in 1925, the party began to establish the basic pre- conditions for its emergence as a decisive poli- tical force within the labour movement. These favourable developments were, essen- tially, the practical expression of the theoretical lessons derived from the experience of 1921 and the work of the early congresses of the CI. They cannot be seen, however, as the outcome of some straightforward, automatic process of reversal of the party’s original weaknesses. The movement towards the creation of mass influence in the period before the General Strike was the out- come of a series of struggles within the party, 20 a process which has to be seen in dialectical terms. By 1925 the party had the potential for rapid growth as a result of its orientation towards mass work, but at the same time it still contained within it, both in the leadership and the branches, a strong disposition towards the empiricist, syndi- calist methods characteristic of its formative period. It was still only in a very formal way that the tendencies present at its formation had been overcome by 1924-1925; on questions such as party organization, the relation of theory to practice, the party’s grasp of Bolshevik method was necessarily imperfect. By 1925, then, only the pre-conditions for a potentially effective revo- lutionary party existed, and this was why the experience of 1925-1926, particularly the General Strike, was so crucial. It represented the first decisive test of the political strength of the party as established by the mid-1920s. Theoretical backwardness and dependance on the Cl The most vital aspect of the development of the CPGB in the early 1920s therefore centred on its ability to apply Marxist theory creatively to the overall work of the party. Without such a development, without the growth of a theoreti- cally trained membership, the work of the party must necessarily be empirical and spontaneous, lagging behind the revolutionary developments in the working class as a whole. In this context, the most striking feature of the CPGB’s development was the formal way in which the main aspects of Bolshevik method were adopted. While the permanent crisis in the British economy and the sharp confrontations of workers, employers and the state made clear the vital necessity for a revolutionary solution to the problems confront- ing the working class, the strongly entrenched traditions of spontaneity, propagandism and em- piricism established within the revolutionary movement from the 1900s clashed with, and to some extent negated, the adoption of Bolshevik methods of work. It would, of course, be the purest idealism to consider that the CPGB could develop in any other way than through a conflict between established practice and the struggle to apply communist principles of organization, and it is clear that in shaking off its past practices the party could only develop in a consistently revolutionary direction by reflection upon its past work in the labour movement and conscious efforts to change it in line with Bolshevik prin- ciples. Yet although efforts were made in this direction in the early 1920s, the considerable Fourth International, Summer 1969

[p027] theoretical backwardness of the party meant that in its endeavours to transcend its past it was very heavily dependent on the assistance, theoretical and practical, of the CI; and what was to be of the utmost significance throughout the 1920s was the party’s tendency to rely absolutely for theo- retical guidance on the CI. While this guidance was to be vital in directing the CPGB into posi- tive revolutionary work in the early 1920s, notably in the establishment of the NMM, the CPGB’s de- pendent relationship to the CI meant that it be- came quite impossible for the leadership to under- stand theoretically and resist the complete change of theory and practice in the CI which flowed from the growth of Stalinism and the international con- sequences of the ‘theory’ of Socialism in One Country. The nature of the relationship of the CPGB with the CI is an essential guide to understanding the degeneration of the CPGB from the later 1920s which followed, in the first instance, from its in- ability to develop the revolutionary potential in the General Strike. It is, therefore, a major fail- ing on Macfarlane’s part that he does not really consider, except in a very formal sense, the inter- relationship between the CPGB and the CI. True, he records the campaign of the CPGB against Trotsky in 1925 in accordance with CI policy, together with the role of the CI in the adoption by the CPGB of the disastrous ‘new line’ at the end of the 1920s, but nowhere does he place these actions in the general context of the Stalinization of the CI or assess the effects of Stalinism on the work of the CPGB. However, it is demonstrably impossible to understand the overall development of the CPGB in the 1920s unless this is closely related to the role of the CI in this period, and this means considering not only what might be called the more ‘dramatic’ episodes, which Macfarlane uses to good effect, but also the positive revolutionary work con- ducted by the CI in the early period of its exis- tence. The Cl fights for Bolshevik principles It is the work of the CI in this early phase, its encouragement to the CPGB through theoreti- cal training and practical assistance, which Macfarlane virtually ignores. But this assistance was of the utmost importance in laying the basis in Britain for the growth of an effective revolutionary party. In fact, the early years of the CPGB were characterized by the persistent efforts of the CI to educate the party’s leadership in Bolshevik principles and to fight against the Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part IV) tendency to the purely formal application of these methods. The Executive Committee of the CI (ECCI) was acutely aware, not only in relation to the British party, of the dangers implicit in a rigid, mechanical application of the principles of communist organization as laid down by the second congress that would negate the cardinal principle of democratic centralism. The third congress explicitly warned that: . A formal or mechanical centralization would be nothing but the centralization of power in the hands of a bureaucracy in respect of its domination over other members of the party or the masses of revolutionary workers outside the party . . and it stressed that the formation of centralized, disciplined parties was inseparable from the creation of a theoretically trained membership fully understanding and participating in the for- mulation of party policy. The validity of this warning was amply demon- strated as far as the CPGB was concerned. The way in which the theses of the CI on the organiza- tion of the party were applied indicated the highly formal, untheoretical approach of the party lead- ership that was to characterize the relations generally of the CPGB with the CI. Recalling the response of the party to the re-organization in the early 1920s, J. T. Murphy illustrated this point very clearly: We were of course far from having put into opera- tion all that was required by the CI resolution to reconstitute the new Communist Party. We had made our political declaration of adherence to its principles, but it is one thing to accept a principle and another to apply it to life. The CP was sup- posed to be a Marxist party, but there were few in it who had more than a nodding acquaintance with the writings of Marx .. 2 Re-organization 1922-1923 The significance of Murphy’s observation and the warning of the third congress was revealed in the way the re-organization of the CPGB was carried out in 1922-1923, following the presentation of the report of the Reorganization Commission (largely the work of Palme Dutt) to the Fifth Party Congress in October 1922. The material pro- vided by Macfarlane on the Commission and the way its report was applied is of the utmost value in assessing the extent to which the CPGB was still dominated by the old conceptions; devotion to pure propaganda, to loose, undisciplined party organization and spontaneity.* Clearly, such an 1 Theses on Tactics. 2 J. T. Murphy, New Horizons, p. 181. 3 Macfarlane, op. cit., pp. ?? _ 21

[p028] organization was totally unsuited to any serious revolutionary work; as the report noted, centrali- zation and a strong leadership were needed. At the same time, the way the report was drafted and applied displayed a lack of real political understanding and a tendency to intro- duce centralization as a purely organizational task divorced from the overall political perspectives of the party. Macfarlane is absolutely correct in pointing out there was no attempt by Dutt to explain how the report related to the political work of the party; as a result, a highly complex, top-heavy structure was imposed on the party in just the way which the theses of the CI had deplored. There was really no attempt at political preparation of the membership and the fact that the centralization scheme was introduced largely through the instrumentality of Dutt and Pollitt was not altogether accidental. The collaboration of these two, the main exponents of the formal and pragmatic approach to party re-organization, marked the beginning of what was to prove a life- time partnership in the leadership of the CPGB in which they were to play a crucial part in the process of the party’s Stalinization. The partner- ship was an ideal one, based on a division of labour between Dutt, the facile intellectual ready to provide a sophisticated veneer for the policies of Stalinism, and Pollitt, the intensely pragmatic party functionary and speaker. In the immediate circumstances of 1922, of course, their actions were not as yet related to the process of Staliniza- tion, which still lay in the future, but their whole approach to re-organization revealed a conception of party work in general which was at a later date to allow them to play this role very effectively. Formalism and organizational fetishism The growing volume of criticism in the party press on the way re-organization had been carried out indicated graphically how divorced the pro- cess had been from the political perspectives of the party and from the theoretical preparation of the membership. Murphy effectively summed up the essentials of this criticism when he stated that: If I were asked what are the principal defects of the party today, I would answer unhesitatingly, formalism, organizational fetishism, and lack of political training .. .* There can be little doubt, from the contributions in the Workers’ Weekly and the Communist Review, that there was serious concern at the abysmal level of theoretical development in the 4 Communist Review, January 1924. 22 party at the very time when a, breakthrough to mass work was being achieved through the for- mation of the NMM. Yet on the part of Pollitt there was virtually no recognition or apparent understanding of the. political problems posed by party re-organization. For him, it was a purely practical task, and he dismissed with evident con- tempt the vital points raised by Murphy and others: The greatest hindrance to the growth of our party is not the lack of political training, it is a number of practical difficulties that our members are meet- ing with ... Ask any local organizer in South Wales or Scotland what their biggest problem is, they won’t say it was the absence of ‘the will to revolution’, they will say it was the lack of a common meeting place. Ask them what other things they were up against and we would find it wasn’t ‘the fetish of mechanical formalism’ but lack of finance due to the poverty of the members.° Aversion to theory persists Given this inbuilt bias on the part of a section of the party leadership at national and local level to treat the question of party development in a purely organizational way, it is possible to pose the important question of how far the CPGB entered the period of its most substantial growth in the 1920s, 1924-1926, with a membership con- scious of the revolutionary perspectives open to the party and ready to relate immediate issues of party work to an overall theoretical understand- ing of the chances for revolutionary development associated with the deepening of the economic crisis and the shift to the left among the rank and file of the trade unions and the Labour Party. The point here is not simply that the CPGB in- herited from the work of the Re-organization Commission a bureaucratic, unwieldy party struc- ture; in fact, once the worst abuses of re-organiza- tion were corrected, by 1924 the party was cer- tainly far more able to carry out effective disci- plined work in the labour movement. The crucial issue was whether there was any real attempt, after re-organization, to take up the theoretical training of the membership in a serious way. It was quite possible for the party to undertake practical tasks associated with the building of the NMM in the unions and the Left Wing Movement in the Labour Party, but how far was there a develop- ing ability on the part of the membership to understand the theoretical and political considera- tions from which party practice flowed and to relate this to their day-to-day work? 5 Ibid., February 1924. Fourth International, Summer 1969

[p029] To some extent this must be an open question ' as the limited evidence available does not permit any direct examination of the effectiveness of the political training of the party membership. An answer must, however, be attempted insofar as it was the theoretical weaknesses of the CPGB which rendered it so unresistant to the process of Stalini- zation in the CI in the mid-1920s and which pre- vented it giving any revolutionary lead during the General Strike. There can be little doubt as to the generally low theoretical level of the party leadership in the 1920s. The tendency to apply the policy decisions of the CI in a mechanical way unrelated to the conscious development of Marxist theory was very marked. The Executive Committee of the CI was continually criticizing this failing, and its comments on the weaknesses of the theoretical organ of the CPGB, the Communist Review, summed up the approach of the party to theoretical questions in general. The ECCI found, for example, that: . . the aversion to theory revealed itself every- where in the columns of the Communist Review . . Whenever any theoretical questions were touched upon, their presentation and analysis were of a purely descriptive nature. No attempts were made to co-ordinate these questions systematically in conceptions and formulae. As a consequence the officials and advanced workers could gather nothing of the theory of Leninism as the uniform method of Marxism during the present epoch.§ In a letter (written shortly before his recent death) J. T. Murphy confirmed the general point implied by the critique of the ECCI, that the party leader- ship were very much steeped in empirical trade- union attitudes and saw Marxism still in the formal way in which it had been approached in the pre-1920 period. - We were ardent trade unionists, most of us experienced in leading unofficial movements. That was our strength . . . (but) the theoretical equipment of the leadership as a whole was not of a high standard. I remember there [were] only Tommy Jackson and myself who were at all familiar with the philosophical aspects of Marxism. The CPGB and the Left Opposition The clearest expression of the persistence of these long-established empirical traditions was provided in the position adopted by the CPGB over the struggle of Trotsky and the Left Opposi- tion in the mid-1920s against the growth of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its ramifications through- out the international Communist movement. Thus 6 Letter from the Agitprop department of the ECCI, February 24, 1925. Communist Papers, Cmd. 2682. Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part IV) while the struggles in its Russian Party in the 1923-1926 period provoked a sympathetic response among important sections of the major European parties, notably the French, Polish and German, in Britain, they aroused virtually no interest. As Macfarlane observes, the sole contribution of the CPGB was the completely uncritical acceptance of the position of Stalin against the Left Opposition; in fact, it was this docile acceptance of the pro- cess of bureaucratization which prompted Stalin to hail the CPGB as a ‘model party’ by 1926. The point was that the CPGB never seriously attempted to understand what was at stake in the struggles in the CPSU. As far as the British leadership was concerned, this was a purely internal affair of the Russian party, having no relevance to the work in Britain. Indeed it was only after speci- fic pressure had been applied by the ECCI’ that the CPGB took up the issue of the fight against Trot- sky and duly echoed the theses of Stalin and the right bloc in the CPSU. The anti-theoretical atti- tude of the CPGB towards the crisis in the CPSU, and hence towards the overall development of the work. of the CI, was clearly demonstrated in such contributions as the party did make to the debate on ‘Trotskyism’. These showed a failure to grasp the issues involved and from this failure stemmed the inability of the party to grasp the disastrous international consequences of the ‘theory’ of Socialism in One Country with its emphasis on the recovery and equilibrium of post-war im- perialism. There are definite indications that the CPGB was forced by the ECCI into taking an orthodox line on Trotskyism without seriously debating the issue or attempting to find out the reality of the situation in Russia. This is aptly demonstrated by the initial response of the party to the debate on the New Course in Russia. In 1924 Tom Bell was providing a full and accurate synopsis of the arguments advanced by the oppo- sition against bureaucratization in the CPSU and was recording that: . it was especially Trotsky who brought this discussion to the front which is proof enough to all who have the slightest acquaintance with the Russian Party that this crisis did not represent any danger for the unity of the Party.® This article was mainly designed to answer those elements in the Labour left who were asserting that the Soviet system was on the point of collapse; the significance of it was that it evoked no evi- 7 Communist Papers, p. 33. 8 Communist Review, February 1924. 23

[p030] dence of contradiction on the part of the CPGB leadership as a whole. It was not until 1925 that the CPGB swung completely to the other side on the question of Trotsky upon the intervention, as noted above, of the ECCI. What was so notable about this change of line, compared with Bell’s position in 1924, was that the attack on Trotsky was now conducted on an anti-theoretical and consciously anti-intellectual basis. The most bla- tant example of this came from MacManus. Re- viewing Max Eastman’s Since Lenin Died (a work which exposed the bureaucratic degeneration occurring in the CPSU written by a member of the American Communist Party who supported Trotsky) he argued that the attacks on and purges of the opposition combined with the recruitment of politically untrained workers to the CPSU (the ‘Lenin Levy’) were purifying the CPSU and restoring its proletarian character and unity hither- to disrupted by intellectuals.? The whole effect of this article was to appeal to the more backward elements in the CPGB still at a trade union level of consciousness to contrast the proletarian com- mon sense of Stalin to the instability and divisive methods of the middle-class intellectuals. This same approach, as Brian Pearce notes,” was again clearly displayed in the handling of ‘Trotskyism’ in the party press and conferences throughout 1925. The significance of these developments must be seen in the context of the overall work of the CPGB in the mid-1920s. The way the CPGB, with virtually no sign of resistance, was pressurized by the ECCI into the campaign against Trotsky was evidence of the extreme theoretical depen- dance of the party on the CI. In the early 1920s this dependance had helped the CPGB overcome some of its initial weaknesses and orientate itself towards mass work. In the mid-1920s it was re- sponsible in a big way for the subordination of the CPGB to the anti-revolutionary line of Stalin, and for reinforcing the empirical, anti-theoretical tendencies in the party at the very time when its influence was growing rapidly in the labour move- ment. The failure of the CPGB to prepare any re- volutionary: leadership for the General Strike was intimately bound up with the campaign against Trotsky and the associated confirmation of the theoretical backwardness of the party. The prac- tical expression of these developments was to be revealed in the party’s trade union work in 1925-1926. It was the retreat from the fight for revolutionary politics in the unions into an essen- 9 Ibid., June 1925, 10 Labour Review, January-February 1958, pp. 20-22. 24 tially syndicalist type of trade-union militancy which was at the centre of the failure of the CPGB in its first and, as it proved, only decisive test as a revolutionary party in 1926. The retreat of the party into syndicalism in the General Strike was. all: the more disastrous when seen in the context of the substantial ad- vance made from 1921 in developing revolutionary methods of work in the unions. By 1925 the pro- cess of forming Minority Movements in major trade unions was well advanced and the CPGB was consciously working through the Minority Move- ments and its own factory and pit groups to politicize the growing industrial militancy of the rank and file. Yet by 1926, although the influence of the CPGB had continued to grow, preparations to provide a revolutionary initiative had been virtually abandoned and the party entered the General Strike as a critical but essentially loyal ally of the TUC. In so doing, it reversed the whole of its revolutionary work from 1921 and the lessons of revolutionary organization learnt during that period. Effects of the defeat of 1921 The ability of the CPGB to prepare seriously for revolutionary work in the unions derived from the inter-relationship of the lessons drawn from its experience in 1921] and the intervention of the CI to correct syndicalist manifestations in the party. Soon after the 1921 conflict the party was aware that the defeat of the miners had been bound up with its own theoretical and organizational in- ability to give expression to the revolutionary potential in the situation. J. T. Murphy noted self-critically that all sections of the labour move- ment, including the syndicalist unofficial move- ments and the CPGB ‘. . . missed or ignored the revolutionary political significance of the power accumulating in the growth of their organizations . . The crises of the last three years have de- livered smashing blows at all our old conceptions of the struggle . . . Who can now say: This is an industrial issue and that is a political issue?” Although a correct appreciation of the change in the character of trade union struggles, this re- mained a purely formal response to the questions facing the CPGB in its trade union work until 1923-1924. While the mistakes of 1921 might be recognized, the party remained in the early 1920s utterly confused as to how to organize effectively 11 Labour Monthly, January 1922. This point was repeated editorially by Dutt in the April 1922 issue. Fourth International, Summer 1969

[p031] in the unions. The depression and mass unem- ployment had knocked the bottom out of the syn- dicalist idea of squeezing out the employers by the escalation of pure industrial militancy; at the same time, sectarian and ‘dual unionist’ ideas persisted among those elements in the party who had come from the SLP, while among party activists in the localities the 1921 defeat and the depression promoted demoralization and dis- orientation which was matched by that of the trade union rank and file. The practical reflection of this situation was shown by the criticisms made by the party’s Control Commission to the Sixth Congress (1924). The party’s Industrial Depart- ment, it stated, had been bandied around from one EC member to another and had not even got down to the basic task ‘of ascertaining the strength and co-ordinating the work of the Party nuclei in the Trade Unions and the Trades Councils’.“ The unofficial movements in the unions had fared no better. Merged with the British Bureau of the RILU in 1922, they had been orientated towards pure propaganda for RILU affiliation by the trade unions and had given no effective lead on basic problems affecting the rank and file. As Lozovsky, head of the RILU, later noted, the British Bureau was totally unsuited to British conditions, not least because it allowed the trade union right wing to accuse the CPGB of splitting the unions by en- couraging disaffiliation from the TUC.“ Recovery and the intervention of the Cl The chaos in the CPGB’s industrial work was only partly a reflection of demoralization in the trade unions. The miners, badly hit by their defeat, were recovering in militancy by 1923 and became increasingly antagonistic to the collaborationist attitude to the owners on the part of the Execu- tive Committee of the Miners’ Federation. Their radicalization preceded that of other major trade unions, but by 1923-1924 there were signs of a general recovery from demoralization and a growth of combativeness on the part of the rank and file. This trend created favourable con- ditions for the expansion of the party’s influence, yet theoretically and organizationally it was not really capable of seizing the opportunity. The in- tervention of the CI was decisive in this context, and the way it intervened was indicative of the weaknesses of the party leadership at this stage. The first steps towards the formation of an effec- 12 Macfarlane, op. cit., Part 1, pp. 121-122. 13. E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, Vol. 3, part 1, pp. 121-122. Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part IV) tive opposition block in the unions under party control were taken in 1922. Borodin, the CI agent in Britain, by-passed both the national and district leaderships of the CPGB to obtain information from local party members in South Wales on the way the pre-1921 unofficial movement had operated and how far a revival of its methods would allow an opposition movement to be recreated in the MFGB. From this point he went on to organize party members and sympathizers at the MFGB’s annual conference in 1922 into the nucleus of such a movement, now for the first time given the title ‘minority movement’. The movement’s aim was to rally all dissatisfied sections of the rank and file around an agitation for the overthrow of the 1921 agreement, the winning of a living wage and the destruction of the pernicious leadership of Hodges.“ Initially the movement was confined to South Wales, but by the latter half of 1923 minority movements were developing in other coalfields and by January 1924 an effective national movement was formally established. Belatedness of the NMM The encouragement of this type of unofficial movement did not amount to a tacit encouragement of syndicalist methods. Via Borodin, the CI was endeavouring to orientate the CPGB towards the immediate problems of the trade union rank and file, to advance policies which would maximize opposition to the existing collaborationist union leaders and thereby bring the rank and file to- wards the party as a necessary preparation for politicizing their industrial militancy and thereby recruiting to and building the party. In line with this the immediate programme of the NMM started from the existing level of consciousness of the rank and file, but by advancing demands based on the desire of the rank and file for major improvements in conditions, the NMM sought to develop a revolutionary consciousness on the un- derstanding that these demands were basically in- compatible with the private ownership of industry, and that the unions could fight for them only through the growth within them of a revolutionary opposition to the union bureaucracy. On the basis of the growing success of the Miners’ Minority Movement the CI sought to convince the CPGB of the urgent need for the adoption of this method of organization generally in the party’s trade union work. At a meeting of 14 Information based on interview with member of the CPGB in the Rhondda in the 1920s; also see The Times, December 23, 1926. 25

[p032] the party leadership with the ECCI and the RILU in Moscow in mid-1923 the CPGB was censured for its failure to make any real attempt to form revolutionary minorities in the unions and was urged to set about the immediate task of organiz- ing them into a cohesive national movement.” It was a sign of the continuing confusion in the party leadership and the strength of the attachment to the earlier syndicalist and sectarian methods that, even though the British Bureau was re- organized and Gallacher put in charge of it with the specific task of organizing a national Minority Movement, it was not until the latter part of 1924 that its first national conference was held™® Significantly, one of the factors inhibiting the party leadership in the rapid implementation of the Minority Movement policy was the deep- rooted belief that it represented a purely reform- ist tactic unrelated to the revolutionary aims of the party. It was later observed that: . at the beginning of the National Minority Movement considerable time and energy had to be expended to fight down the belief that there was no room for a movement dealing with immediate and ‘narrow’ economic issues . .. and that such an organization would stand in front of and hide the party from the workers.” After 1924: growing combativeness The existence of this attitude was an indication of the basic difficulty of developing in the party at this stage a real appreciation of the necessary relationship between the ‘pure theory’ of Com- munism and practical mass work. Yet while the party was never able to overcome fully this ten- dency to compartmentalism in its thinking on questions of theory and practice, there was all the same a sense in which the development of the work around the NMM from 1924 did take the CPGB a long way towards realizing the necessary conditions for creating a mass party by the mid- 1920s. 1924 saw the start of a marked radicalization among the working class which was to build to a peak in 1925-1926. The election of the Labour government was only one sign of this; it was accompanied by a clear tendency on the part of organized labour to fight for a restoration of the gains lost after the defeats earlier in the 1920s which took sections of the working class to the 15 Carr, op. cit., p. 121. 16 These developments are detailed in M. Woodhouse, ‘Syndicalism, Communism and the Trade Unions’, in Marxist, Vol. 4, No. 3, 17 Communist Review, Vol. 4, 1932. 26 verge of a direct confrontation with the Labour government and produced, on the part of the miners, a build-up in militancy, stimulated by the NMM, which resulted in the winning of a ten per cent wage increase in the new agreement signed in mid-1924, Taken together with the disillusionment bred by the Labour government and the return of a strengthened Tory government in the autumn of 1924, these developments served to promote a leftward swing in the labour movement expressed, initially, through the strengthening of centrist tendencies in the trade unions and Labour Party (the election of the ‘left’ union leaders, Purcell, Hicks, et al., to the TUC General Council; the growth of the Maxton grouping in the Independent Labour Party) but related, basically, to the grow- ing readiness to challenge the employers and their state through mass industrial action. Accompanied as it -was by a down-turn in the economy and a particularly acute situation in the mining industry, the growth of rank-and-file combativeness pre- saged a profound intensification in the class struggle and the opening of a period of industrial conflict bound, objectively, to challenge the private control of industry and lead to a direct confron- tation between organized labour and the state. It was the fact that a clear tendency in this direction was established during 1924, implied particularly in the mood of the miners after the conclusion of their new agreement, which allowed the CPGB to reach a clearer understanding of the significance of the trade union policy which flowed from the establishment of the NMM and the way forward to the development of a revolu- tionary leadership in the unions. The advances made by the party since the early 1920s shaped the way it approached the deepen- ing industrial crisis in 1925. From the failure of the miners to win their full objective in the 1924 agreement, the living wage, the CPGB drew the conclusion that it was impossible for the miners, or any other individual trade union, to win ad- vances in the prevailing economic conditions through isolated action. The way forward must be through the formation of an offensive alliance of trade unions which could take joint action around a common programme. Behind this alliance should be ranged the TUC and the overall direction of the mass movement placed in the hands of the General Council, mandated by and responsible to the rank and file."* The proposal was made more concrete by the formulation of a definite pro- 18 The first proposals for such an alliance were made in mid-1924. Workers’ Weekly, June 6, 1924. Fourth International, Summer 1969

[p033] gramme by the first annual conference of the NMM, August 1924, which centred on the £4 mini- mum wage and the 44-hour week,” and by the development of a widespread movement for wage advances from the start of 1925 by a number of the bigger unions, the NUR, AEU, Shipbuilders and T&GWU among them. The most striking feature of the campaign by the CPGB to bring these developments together into a unified, offen- sive trade union movement was the fact that from the start the party fought against any tendency for its activities to become entangled with the centrist currents so strongly evident in the labour movement after the collapse of the Labour govern- ment and fought, too, against any syndicalist trend in the work of the NMM which would merely serve to strengthen the opportunism of the official left wing in the unions. For the CPGB, the policy of the industrial alliance was under- stood wholly in the context of the building of the party in preparation for the revolutionary turn which the coming industrial struggles must take. In its work in the unions the CPGB and the NMM did not operate with the idea of gingering the union leadership into militant actions from below but rather with the fundamental perspec- tive of establishing rank-and-file control over the leadership through their day-to-day work among the rank and file and winning them to a revolutionary position. The practical work of the CPGB in the unions was therefore directly related to the deepening class conflict in Britain and the chances this created for the expansion of the party. As the Resolution on the Minority Movement, adopted by the CPGB’s 6th Congress put it: In the actual fight to achieve their immediate demands the workers will be brought up against the whole organized power of capitalism—the State . . . Therefore, as the struggle develops, the importance and absolute necessity of the Com- munist Party to the working class becomes more and more clearly revealed. The opposition move- ments can only go forward under the leadership of a powerful Communist Party. Out of the struggle of the opposition movements of today will be forged the Communist Party of tomorrow. ' The resolution then went on to warn, very emphatically, against the dangers of syndicalism in the work of the NMM: . the Communist Party, while working inside 19 The conference had been preceded by the for- mation of MM groups in the rail, dock and engin- eering industries as well as mining. the minority movement, will on no account sacri- Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part IV) fice its separate existence or limit its freedom of agitation and propaganda. By this means it will win the workers to the Party in ever-increasing numbers, and prepare the working class for the real problems that confront them, that of the conquest of power.” Attitude to the ‘lefts’ It flowed logicaily, and correctly, from the 6th Congress and the contemporaneous launching of the NMM, that the CPGB should be cautious towards and critical of the leftward movements in the official leaderships of the trade unions, as demonstrated at the 1924 Congress of the TUC. While the Congress was marked by the active association of the ‘lefts’ with proposals for inter- national trade union unity and the strengthening of the powers of the General Council to co- ordinate trade union action in Britain, the CPGB saw this tendency as a reflection of the pressure building up from the rank and file for effective mass industrial action and an adaption to this mood by the official left-wing. In itself, the activity of this left wing was of little value unless it led on to the formation of an industrial alliance under rank-and-file control. If the ‘lefts’ were to asso- ciate themselves with the NMM programme their support would be welcomed and every effort must be made, argued the CPGB, to win them to this position. At the same time this should in no way be made a substitute for the winning of the leading position among the rank and file by the party. It would be a suicidal policy, however, for the Communist Party and the Minority Movement to place too much reliance on what we have called the official left-wing, wrote J. R. Campbell. On prob- lems of TU organization this element is fairly clear, on other problems it has not broken away from the ‘right’ position. It is the duty of our Party and the Minority Movement to criticize its weaknesses relentlessly and endeavour to change the muddled and incomplete left wing viewpoint of the more pro- gressive leaders into a real revolutionary viewpoint. 20 That this resolution was indicative of the fact that the CPGB had, at least formally, learnt the lesson of its syndicalist trade union work in 1920- 1921 was underlined by the observation of J. R. Campbell that ‘. . . the chief danger is that it (the NMM) will develop into a purely industrial move- ment concerned only with union problems unrelated to the general struggle of the workers. That is... a marked trait of the old left official leadership. It is no less marked amongst the active rank and file in many of the unions.’ Communist Review, October 1924. 27

[p034] But the revolutionary workers must never forget that their main activity must be devoted to cap- turing the masses.”! 1925: Stalin begins the change of course The CPGB therefore approached the crucial year 1925, the year which saw the acceleration of in- dustrial militancy and the anticipation of the General Strike in the events around ‘Red Friday’, in a potentially strong theoretical and organiza- tional position. At the same time the party was placed in an increasingly contradictory position in 1925. In a period when the CPGB was beginning to make a decisive breakthrough in the establish- ment of its influence in the unions and the Labour Party it was subject to pressures emanating from the Stalin bloc in the CPSU for the adoption of an uncritical approach towards the centrist ten- dencies in the union leaderships. At the very time when the crisis of British capitalism was deepen- ing, Stalin was seeking, through the intermediary of Tomsky and the Russian trade unions, a détente with British imperialism via the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. While the Committee had obvious relevance to the RILU’s strategy of seeking membership of the Amsterdam Trade Union International, the main emphasis came to be placed on the Committee’s utility to the dip- lomatic interests of the emergent bureaucracy in the CPSU, and the CPGB was consequently placed in a position where it would be obliged increas- ingly to support, and in a practical sense identify with, the centrist currents considered so favour- able by Stalin to the interests of the USSR. It would be a-historical to suggest that the course on which the CPGB was launched from 1924 was negated in any immediate sense by this develop- ment, but across the period between 1924 and the General Strike the international implications of the policy of Socialism in One Country served in the British context to confuse and neutralize the important steps which the CPGB was taking in the mid-1920s towards a full understanding of Bolshevik methods of party work. It is a crucial failing on the part of Macfarlane that he almost wholly ignores the significance of this development for the work of the CPGB before and during the General Strike. While he throws valuable light on the struggles between Trotsky and Stalin in the context of Trotsky’s fight in the CPSU and CI for theoretical clarity on the approaching revolutionary crisis in Britain, and indicates how, in its theoretical agnosticism, the 2) Ibid. 28 CPGB aligned with Stalin in adopting a non- revolutionary interpretation of the British situa- tion, he appears ignorant of the fact that the adoption of this line by the CPGB flowed directly from the policy of Socialism in One Country and amounted to a complete rejection of the fight for revolutionary politics in the trade unions which the CPGB had been carrying on at least until ‘Red Friday’. Macfarlane explicitly attacks the arguments put forward by Brian Pearce” to the effect that the CPGB came to subordinate its independent, revolutionary line to the official left wing in the TUC and denies that the CPGB in any way played down its critique of the TUC up to the General Strike or departed from its own in- dependent preparations for the strike. In so doing, Macfarlane adopts a basically a-historical approach. He employs the technique of selective quotation to demonstrate criticism of the TUC by the CPGB up to the General Strike but fails to show how the party prepared in any concrete practical way (as opposed to exhortation to the TUC) for the role of independent leadership during the strike. He also seems unaware of the fact that the quotations he produces are self-contradictory, some indicating uncritical support for the TUC left wing, others expressing criticism, but the whole in fact displaying the ambiguity and con- fusion in the party’s attitude to the TUC which Macfarlane appears to share, and certainly fails to understand. Abandonment of a revolutionary position There is, in fact, the clearest evidence that, as it came to articulate more definitely the line to- wards the TUC emanating from the CI, the CPGB did gradually abandon its revolutionary position and assume instead the role of a critical, but essentially loyal, component of a bloc with the official left wing in the TUC; that instead of work- ing on a tactical, united front basis with this left wing, in which context the party sought to advance its influence among the rank and file, the CPGB became involved in an opportunist rela- tionship with the left wing which allowed the leadership of the General Strike to remain in their hands and lost the opportunity to seize this leadership which potentially existed. The only way in which Macfarlane’s distortions of the historical reality can be corrected is by looking at the work of the CPGB in the unions as it evolved in the period preceding the General Strike. The first point which must impress itself 22 B. Pearce, op. cit., pp. 17-18. Fourth International, Summer 1969

[p035] on any investigator is the marked contrast between the party’s role before and after the events which led up to ‘Red Friday’. Before August 1925 the CPGB was attempting consciously to develop a clear revolutionary lead in the unions in prepara- tion for what it felt must be a direct confronta- tion between the unions and the state in July. Thereafter, gradually at first but with increasing emphasis, it moved steadily closer to the official left wing and turned its work in the unions away from its revolutionary perspective of 1925 and towards the reinforcement of the official appara- tus of the unions in anticipation of what it assumed must now be a purely economic, industrial conflict in May 1926. This reversal of the party’s earlier work was doubly disastrous in view of the great increase in support gained by the CPGB in the preceding period; the mass demonstrations for the release of the party leaders imprisoned at the énd of 1925 were the surface manifestations of the deeper-going relationship being formed be- tween the party and the organized working class in the period following. ‘Red Friday’ and were indicative of the way the practical leadership of the party was being strengthened through the growth in influence of its press, its nuclei in the factories and mines, and through the work of the NMM and the Left Wing Movement. There can be little doubt, when these developments are seen as a whole, that the CPGB was in the process of establishing itself in a position before the General Strike where it had the potential for providing a positive alternative to the inevitable betrayals of the TUC; the line it actually adopted, however, allowed it to realize very little of this potential. Contrast between 1925 and 1926 The contrast between the position ultimately adopted by the CPGB in 1926 and that with which it approached the onset of the pre-revolutionary crisis in 1925 could not be clearer. The party’s attitude towards the official left-wing at the start of 1925 was indicated by the way in which it initially reacted to the setting up of the Anglo- Russian Trade Union Committee. For the CPGB, the formation of the Committee was welcomed only insofar as it provided a means for furthering the process of revolutionizing the British working class. An alliance between trade union leaders alone would be useless and the party made clear that it would in no way subordinate its activities to the diplomatic requirements of this commit- tee; as the Workers’ Weekly observed editorially: Unity that only means a polite agreement between leaders is useless unless it is backed up by mass Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part IV) pressure, Unity that confines itself to negotiations between Amsterdam and the Russian Unions only touches the fringe of the question . . . Vast masses of workers everywhere are moving slowly forward. Those leaders who stand in the way are going to be swept aside. The class struggle cannot be limited to an exchange of diplomatic letters. Effective unity, the paper went on to argue, could only be built up by the work of the CPGB and the NMM.* The implication of this attitude was of considerable signicance for the immediate work of the CPGB in the context of the growing industrial militancy of the organized working class in Britain, for the CPGB saw the moves of the official left wing towards Russia and their left-wing phrase- ology in relation to the industrial situation in Britain, as the pale reflection of the confused, contradictory but quite definite movement among the trade union rank and file towards a revolu- tionary position. While the official left wing must therefore be urged on from below to translate their militant promises into practice, the CPGB must in no way compromise itself with the hesi- tations and confusions of this left wing but rather intensify its activity to clarify the rank and file on the developing revolutionary situation. The meaning of this approach for the practical work of the party was very clearly demonstrated in its trade union agitation in the months culminat- ing in ‘Red Friday’. From the start of 1925 there was a very favourable situation for the formation of a new trade union alliance to replace the defunct Triple Alliance. The miners were well aware, after their frustrations over the 1924 agreement, that hopes of future gains rested on the formation of such an alliance, and from the latter part of 1924 the NMM, with the backing of A. J. Cook, was working for an alliance which would unite major trade unions around a common programme for offensive action. Yet in support- ing, indeed largely initiating, this trend it was vital that the CPGB should avoid entanglement with the opportunism inherent in the position of the trade union left wing and that it should relate the agitation for the industrial alliance directly to the question of the revolutionary edu- cation of the rank and file. This it went a long way towards doing in the first part of 1925, for while it encouraged the militancy of the sympa- thetic union leaders, it made the main emphasis of its trade union work the formation of an alliance under direct rank-and-file control in con- ditions where the CPGB and the NMM had the 23 Workers’ Weekly, January 2, 1925. 29

[p036] practical revolutionary leadership of that rank and file. In line with this, the CPGB called constantly, up to ‘Red Friday’, for the formation of an alliance of the miners, the AEU, the NUR and the Transport Workers,“ but at the same time it made its main contribution to the formation of the alliance its campaign at local level for the creation of joint committees of rank-and-file miners, dockers, railworkers and engineers. These com- mittees were designed not simply to pressurize the official union leaders into national action to conclude the alliance; their primary function was to revitalize the trades councils and convert them into Councils of Action for the direction of trade union action in the districts in the coming mass struggles. After an intense propaganda campaign on the need for such committees persistent efforts to set them up in all major industrial areas were made by the CPGB from April 1925. The response to the party’s initiative was generally favourable. Within a month joint committees had been formed in all parts of the country and the conversion or preparation to convert trades councils into Coun- cils of Action was almost as widespread,” these developments being considerably assisted by the recent rejection of the wage demands of many groups of workers, the engineers, shipbuilders, post-office, rail and transport workers amongst them. At the same time, the CPGB was laying the basis for a further considerable expansion of its influence among the working class through its drive to form party groups in factories and mines.” Anyone attempting to argue that the CPGB did not change its line towards the trade union leader- ship between 1925 and the General Strike could point to an apparent similarity in the agitational 24 Moves to form the alliance were made by the miners, the AEU, the T&GWU and the Rail Unions between April and June 1925, but the negotiations were overtaken by the events which led up to ‘Red Friday’ when the main question became that of securing the backing of the TUC as a whole for the miners. Formal moves to establish the alliance continued thereafter but broke down in practice through the deliberate attempts of J. H. Thomas to wreck unity and the hesitations of the left in the AEU leadership who did not organize a ballot on the proposed con- stitution until the eve of the General Strike. 25 Workers’ Weekly, May 1925, passim. 26 On the eve of ‘Red Friday’ 120 had been formed. Workers’ Weekly, July 31, 1925. 30 work of the party both before ‘Red Friday’ and the General Strike itself. The attempt would be an exercise in eclecticism little related to the historical reality. In contrast to its activity before the General Strike, the CPGB was, in this period in 1925, clearly relating its work in the trade unions directly to the creation of a revolutionary consciousness in preparation for the acute crisis which would arise with the outbreak of the con- flict in the mining industry. It showed that it had learnt from the syndicalist weaknesses of the early 1920s and that it was now concerned not to become a mere ‘ginger group’ devoted simply to pressurizing the more sympathetic left-wing union leaders; on the contrary, it sought to create a revolutionary leadership in the approaching con- flict and win the initiative from the official left _ wing. At the height of the party’s preparatory campaign, immediately prior to the events of ‘Red Friday’, the leadership emphasized this point quite unambiguously: - The success of the Minority Movement, wrote C. M. Roebuck (T. Rothstein), is in reality a sign that the workers are coming to look upon the unions less and less as a means of improving their individual well-being within the framework of the capitalist system, and more and more as a weapon of struggle against the capitalist class. For this reason the Minority Movement cannot be com- pared with previous ‘unofficial’, ‘vigilance’ and ‘reform’ movements in the era of capitalist vigour ... There can be no doubt that . .. many reformist leaders would rather swim with the current than against it. Without pushing away anyone who will fight, the task of the Communists in the Minority Movement is to see that this does not obscure in the eyes of the workers the fact that their fight is a class fight against a class enemy, and not a fight for small reforms. . .2” There was, furthermore, no tendency for the CPGB to see the approaching conflict as a purely economic struggle, as it did in May 1926, or to separate the problems of the miners from those of the working class as a whole. In contrast with the position before the General Strike the CPGB was highly critical of the TUC before ‘Red Friday’ not simply because of its slowness to rally support for the miners but quite basically because the TUC’s approach to the crisis was incapable of measuring up to its revolutionary implications. Thus Tom Bell commented editorially shortly before ‘Red Friday’: All talk, such as the statement of Citrine, the acting secretary of the General Council of the TUC, that this is an ‘economic dispute’ is a definite 27 Communist Review, June 1925, Fourth International, Summer 1969"

[p037] sabotage of the working-class defence against capi- talist attack. The miners’ crisis is part of the general economic crisis in British industrialism. For that reason it has passed beyond any purely economic stage. It is a definitely political crisis and can only be solved by revolutionary political means.”8 ‘Red Friday’ and the preparation for power The events of ‘Red Friday’ did nothing imme- diately to undermine this estimate of the crisis. Although the government, under the threat of a possible general strike, backed down, provided a nine-month subsidy for the coal industry and set up the Samuel Commission to investigate the industry’s problems, it was quite clear that this was a delaying tactic only. For British capitalism the mining crisis could be solved only at the expense of the miners and the Commission was merely a device for adding respectability to the brutality of the owners’ demands while making suggestions on the behalf of private industry as a whole for the necessary rationalization of the industry. The conflict had therefore been post- poned for nine months, not avoided, and when it eventually came it would have the same implica- tions as that in July 1925. A general strike, the CPGB warned, would be inevitable in May 1926, and the party and its supporters must prepare accordingly. But let us be clear what a general strike means, warned J. T. Murphy. It can only mean the throw- ing down of the gauntlet to the capitalist state, and all the powers at its disposal. Either that challenge is a gesture ... or it must develop its challenge into an actual fight for power . . .?9 It was completely in the context of these analyses of the mining crisis and its revolutionary implications that the CPGB approached the crisis as it initially developed in July 1925. Although a conference of the potential members of the Industrial Alliance was held on July 17 to con- sider a possible constitution, and although a special conference of the TUC on July 24 agreed to support the miners through an embargo on the movement of coal, the CPGB was highly sceptical as to whether these moves in themselves would lead on to any positive action. They could do so, in the party’s estimation, only through the mobili- zation of the rank and file under the party’s leadership to force forward a mass strike from below and to develop the ensuing conflict into a 28 Ibid., August 1925. (The issue went to press on the eve of ‘Red Friday’.) 29 Ibid., September 1925. Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part IV) revolutionary challenge to the state. Given the small size of the CPGB in mid-1925 and the fact that the growth of its organized influence among the trade union rank and file was still in its early stages, there was objectively no certainty that such a conflict could be precipitated by the party alone at this stage, but the CPGB entered the struggle with the aim at the very least of laying the basis for a mass membership through the political education which such a struggle must produce in the working class. As it stated when calling for the expansion of the embargo into a general strike, ‘through the efforts of its members it (the CP) will be able to convince the workers that not the least of its tasks is that of building a mass Communist Party in Great Britain.” The way in which it set about the reali- zation of this aim was indicated in the strategy which it evolved on the eve of the implementation of the embargo by the TUC. The whole work of the party was to be directed towards the mobiliza- tion of the rank-and-file committees and Councils of Action previously established to call out the trade union rank and file and thus convert the action over the embargo into an unofficial general strike. The coal embargo, stated the Workers’ Weekly, was a challenge to the govern- ment. ‘Once you challenge the government you must go all out to win’, and this led logically to a general strike. To achieve this the rank and file must prepare, under the party’s lead, for imme- diate action. Immediately a section of workers comes out on strike, mass demonstrations must be organized by the Councils of Action in conjunction with the strike committees of particular unions. If the miners come out there must be mass demon- strations to the docks and railway centres, where the workers should be told to form section and job committees and prepare for action. If the docks and railways are stopped then there must be a mass demonstration to the power stations and factory committees set up which will take unofficial action if official action is not called for.*! That this was not a mere propagandist posture on the eve of the expected embargo action but a considered statement of the party’s intentions based on previous preparation of the party member- ship was indicated by the fact that in one area at least, South. Wales, there had been full dis- cussion at an aggregate meeting some time before 30 Workers’ Weekly, July 24, 1925. 31 = Ibid., July 31, 1925. 31

[p038] ‘Red Friday’ of the implications of the coming crisis and preparations made for action exactly on the lines laid down by the Workers’ Weekly. Here, to enthusiastic applause, Frank Bright (a leading Rhondda member) declared that ‘far more important than the fight for wages is the struggle for power’ and went on to urge that ‘in the event of them [the TUC] failing to give a proper lead we must be prepared to organize unofficial action by way of mass demonstrations of miners from the valleys to the steelworks, the big rail- way centres and the docks ... To do so entailed work, sacrifice and danger. We shall be met by the armed forces of the State. Nevertheless, the work had to be done.’” It seems highly unlikely that similar preparations were not made by other aggregates elsewhere, although they were not re- ported, and what was so very significant about these preparations by the CPGB on the eve of ‘Red Friday’ was that, in contrast to May 1926, they showed the party’s readiness for independent leadership with no subordination of party policy to the opportunist elements in the union leader- ships. A new situation and new dangers There are many indications that the CPGB and the NMM had created a situation by their agitation in the unions whereby it would have been impossible for the TUC to back down in July 1925 without letting the control of the struggle fall into the hands of the party. The significance of the events of ‘Red Friday’ did not, however, lie simply in the immediate effects of the party’s work on the union bureaucracies. The experience undergone by the party in its campaigns up to July 1925 had done much to help it emerge from the position which it had occupied on the sectarian fringe of the labour movement in the early 1920s. The theoretical lessons of the earlier period would seem to have been assimilated and greatly en- riched in this first experience of practical mass work. Yet there was no sense in which the way forward for the CPGB from ‘Red Friday’ was simple or clear-cut. The development of mass work on the scale apparent by mid-1925 created con- siderable problems in terms of the maintenance of a clear theoretical conception of the party’s revo- lutionary strategy in relation to its day-to-day agitational work. The danger existed in particular that an immediate tactic might be elevated into a general perspective, that the agitational work of the NMM on questions of immediate trade union 32 Ibid., July 24, 1925. 32 significance might come to be seen by the party membership as their main work and its relation- ship to the building of the party and the fight for a revolutionary perspective lost sight of, or at best understood in a purely formal way. While there were indications that the party was aware of these dangers as it began to engage in mass work from 1924, there was always the pos- sibility that the pressures operating on the party from the conditions in which it was working during 1925 might well nullify this necessarily formal understanding unless there was a constant deepening of its theoretical grasp of the revolu- tionary opportunities opening up in the period around ‘Red Friday’ and a constant struggle to develop the practice of the party in relation to this understanding. Increasingly contradictory policies As it was, the CPGB was operating under in- creasingly contradictory conditions from the latter half of 1925. While it had fought for a revolutionary perspective in the period up to ‘Red Friday’, it was at the same time subject increasingly during 1925 to the pressures emanating from the CI for the development of a working relationship with the left opportunist elements on the General Council of the TUC. While, on the one hand, it was attempting to actualize the revolutionary potential of the union rank and file, it was, on the other, obliged to adopt towards the TUC an attitude which would not embarrass the working of the Anglo-Russian Committee. The long-term outcome of these contradictions was that, when the General Strike took place in May 1926, the understanding which the CPGB had been developing of its role in the revolutionary situa- tion into which the unions must be pushed was neutralized and the party placed in a position where, objectively, it had to act increasingly as the supporter at rank-and-file level of the official left wing on the General Council. The initiative in the deepening revolutionary crisis from mid- 1925 was therefore allowed to pass from the CPGB, which had really made the running up to ‘Red Friday’, and forced on the TUC from below, to the opportunistic element in the union leader- ships who, in their turn, assisted the right-wing in their sabotaging role during the strike. It was this process which allowed J. T. Murphy, who had written of the coming revolutionary crisis in September 1925 (see above), to place, on behalf of the Central Committee of the CPGB, the whole initiative in the hands of the TUC on the eve of Fourth International, Summer 1969

[p039] the General Strike. In complete antithesis to the line of the party in July 1925 he then wrote: Our party does not hold the leading positions in the Trade Unions. It is not conducting the nego- tiations with the employers and the government. It can only advise and place its forces at the service of the workers—led by others .. . Those who do not look for a path along which to retreat are good trade union leaders who have sufficient character to stand firm on the demands of the miners, but they are totally incapable of moving forward to face all the implications of a united working-class challenge to the State. To entertain any exaggerated views as to the re- volutionary possibilities of this crisis and visions of new leadership ‘arising spontaneously in the struggle’, etc., is fantastic .. .*8 These comments adorned the front page of the Workers’ Weekly three days before the start of the General Strike; they were fully representative of party policy and put the party in a manifestly absurd position both in view of the objective con- ditions which must operate during the strike and the correct stand taken by the party on this question only a few months earlier. Yet while Macfarlane quotes this article, he totally ignores its implications, both for the actual character of the strike and the revolutionary role of the party, which he clearly fails to comprehend. The crucial point is that Murphy’s statement was an admission of sheer theoretical confusion. Only a few months earlier Murphy and other leading party members had been at pains to emphasize the necessarily revolutionary character of a general strike and in the period intervening between ‘Red Friday’ and May 1926 the Baldwin government had made it quite evident that it was preparing for the coming conflict with its revolutionary implications very much in mind. Yet, despite all this, the CPGB could still adopt on the eve of the strike a position which basically denied the whole function of the party. Assertion of centrist and opportunist tendencies It would be a-historical to suggest that the party’s approach to the General Strike came about through some dramatic reversal of policy. What did happen in the period from July 1925 was that the tendency associated with the Anglo-Russian Committee made itself more clearly apparent, that this occurred in circumstances where centrist and 33 Ibid., April 30, 1926. My emphasis. The latter part of the statement was clearly an implicit attack on Trotsky who was at this point warning the CPGB of the dangers of under-estimating the revolutionary character of the situation. Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part IV) opportunist tendencies in the labour movement were reinforced by the TUC’s support for the miners on ‘Red Friday’ and where there was a widespread belief among rank-and-file militants that the TUC must act firmly again in May 1926 when the postponed crisis would come to a head. In these conditions there was the strong possibility that the membership of the CPGB, particularly those working in the NMM, would be affected by the general mood of euphoria and opportunism after ‘Red Friday’ and that they would come to share in, or at least compromise with, the general belief in the efficacy of the official left wing. At the very time when the party needed to fight such illusions and false optimism most vigorously it was increasingly inhibited from doing so by the line emanating from the CI. Even before ‘Red Friday’ there were signs of confusion about the role of the official left-wing in certain areas of the party’s work. In the period before the build-up to the events of July 1925 the Sunday Worker, the paper of the Left Wing Movement, ran a series of articles on the left-wing leaders in the unions uncritically extolling their virtues and fostering considerable illusions about their role in the TUC. Typical of these was the comment on Swales, chairman of the General Council, and his forthcoming address to the Scarborough Congress of the TUC: . it will be something stated in plain blunt language and will give the whole movement a bold and clever lead. It will personify the simple and rugged strength of a far-seeing and courageous leader.** Elements of confusion Attitudes of this sort towards the official left wing were not pronounced in the party as a whole before ‘Red Friday’, but thereafter there appeared a confused and vacillating attitude to their role on the part of the party leadership which marked the emergence of what was to be an increasingly uncritical approach to them in the period imme- diately before the General Strike. Characteristic of this was the CPGB’s reaction to the events of ‘Red Friday’. Very correctly the leadership ob- served that there was no occasion for euphoria; a temporary truce only had been won, preparations for a fight must continue and ‘One thing that every worker and every workers’ leader, must now recognize, and must openly and fearlessly face, is that the struggle for wages involves the struggle for power’. But it then went on to compromise this 34 Sunday Worker, May 24, 1926. 33

[p040] formally correct estimate with the confused, and confusing, assertion that ‘The leadership [of the events of ‘Red Friday’] passed into the hands of good proletarians like Swales, Hicks, Cook and Purcell. And this proletarian leadership and the proletarian solidarity it was capable of organizing and demonstrating was the real big thing that came out of the struggle.’* Such an estimate was valid only if it was related to the task of con- verting the centrist tendency predominant in the unions into a consistent revolutionary position through the expansion of the party’s work to force centrist tendencies either to work consistently with the party or to expose them for not matching up to their revolutionary protestations. The CPGB went in the other direction, however. What it came to do increasingly after ‘Red Friday’ was to work on the assumption that the TUC, under pressure from the official left wing and its Com- munist allies, would perform the same role in May 1926 as it had done in 1925, that there would be, in the last analysis, a division of labour between the leadership of the struggle by the official left wing and the supporting role of the CPGB among the rank and file. Left wing in retreat The emergence of this tendency on the part of the CPGB was illustrated by its response to the TUC’s Scarborough Congress in September 1925. The Congress was marked by the passing of left- wing resolutions on imperialism, trade union unity, workshop committees and the increasing of the power of the General Council to lead joint trade union struggles; it was marked, also, by the attendance of a well-organized NMM-CPGB frac- tion which played a leading part in the discus- sions and was influential in the decisions of the Congress. But while the Congress seemed to mark a further stage in the movement of the left wing towards the Communist position, it posed the CPGB with a considerable dilemma. It was forced to note that on many of the crucial issues the official left-wing had been almost wholly silent and the running had been made by the party delegates.” Pollitt observed of the Congress that the left wing had been curiously silent in the face of the right wing who had been strengthened on the General Council by the return of Thomas and Clynes. ‘There is now the greatest opportunity in our history,’ he wrote, ‘for those leaders claim- 35 Workers’ Weekly, August 7, 1925. 36 See, e.g., the comments of J. R. Campbell, Com- munist Review, October 1925. 34 ing to be left-wingers to come out boldly and take a prominent place in the revolutionary movement— they must do this, or they, too, will be forced to take up a position no different from that of the right-wing . . .”’ There were, in fact, increasingly clear indications from the 1925 Congress on that the left-wing were retreating, yet the party failed to draw the relevant conclusions, despite Pollitt’s comments. The post-Scarborough line of the party was not to develop the type of independent ini- tiative in the unions evident in July 1925 but to press for the TUC to implement the left-wing resolutions of the Scarborough Congress and for the General Council to take steps to assume full controlling powers over the unions in anticipa- tion of May 1926. The whole approach of the CPGB from the autumn of 1925 was thus based on the assumption that the real leadership of the coming strike would be in the hands of the General Council; the party’s task would be solely that of pressurizing it from below. As Pollitt ob- served, in summing up this approach: In view of the overwhelming decision for complete solidarity registered at Scarborough, the new General Council will simply have to prosecute more vigorously the fight on behalf of the workers. True, the right-wing of the Council is strengthened by the return of one or two people who do not give support to the idea that we are engaged in a class struggle, but I think that the mass pressure from behind will force even them to toe the lihe.8 From this point, then, the whole tendency of the CPGB in its work in the unions was to subordinate its activities to the TUC leadership, and such criticisms as it made of TUC policy (and they were often vigorous in tone) took the form basically of exhortations to the TUC to prepare for action more effectively and were accompanied less and less by independent preparations by the party among the rank and file for the approaching struggle. The first clear indication of the practical im- plications of this trend for party work came from J. T. Murphy’s observations on the resolution on workshop committees passed by the Scarborough Congress. The whole context in which the resolu- tion had been passed had indicated that, for the General Council, it was a piece of pious resolution- mongering not committing the TUC in any con- crete way to the encouragement of committees of rank-and-file workers at workshop level. The only way it could have been implemented would have been by serious agitation by the CPGB in the 37 Labour Monthly, October 1925. 38 Sunday Worker, September 20, 1926. Fourth International, Summer 1969

[p041] unions and Trades Councils locally to set up what would have been important centres of working- class organization in preparation for the General Strike. As it was, the party, via Murphy, placed the whole initiative for their formation on the General Council and pleaded with the latter to live up to their Scarborough commitments. The initiative, wrote Murphy, should come from the General Council of the TUC and its sub- committee of trades councils . . . Both need, of course, the complete co-operation of the trade union executives and this ought not to be difficult to obtain if they are at all intent on defending their own interests. Party avoids criticism of TUC In the months preceding the General Strike the trend became even clearer. It was impossible for the party to ignore the fact that the TUC was doing nothing to prepare for the anticipated strike and certainly nothing to implement the recom- mendations of the Scarborough Congress. As Citrine later made clear, the General Council as a whole expected that the Samuel Commission would result in a permanent settlement of the mining crisis and in particular on the Industrial Committee, set up by the General Council to consider further support for the miners after ‘Red Friday’, this idea was very prevalent. While the Committee had a right-wing majority it contained at the same time prominent left-wingers, notable Swales and Hicks and others of a leftish character, yet despite this the Committee met only twice between Scarborough and early 1926 and decided at its second meeting that there was no need to take up the proposals of the Scarborough Con- gress for increasing the General Council’s powers. It was a fair indication of the treacherous character of the official left wing that the four members present at this meeting included Swales and Hicks.” The left wing on which the CPGB was coming to place such reliance was thus completely involved in that process whereby the attempt was made by the General Council (both before and during the General Strike) to force the miners to accept the proposals of the Samuel Commission Report, proposals which meant wage cuts for the miners and the rationalization of the industry on an increasingly monopolistic basis under private control. The CPGB might be excused for ignorance of the decisions behind closed doors in the TUC 39 Labour Monthly, November 1925. 40 A. Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, pp. 289-290. Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part IV) but any misconceptions on this account were soon dispelled by the TUC itself when it notified the affiliated unions by letter of its decision not to seek the extra powers suggested at Scarborough to conduct a general strike. The response of the party to what it called ‘this amazing circular’ was significant of the extent to which it had de- parted from any independent preparation for the coming *General Strike, for while the party pro- tested at the circular and called on union branches and trades councils to oppose the TUC’s decision, it drew no lessons from the TUC’s action and in no way revised its attitude to the role of the TUC in the rapidly developing crisis. In fact, all that it had to suggest in a practical sense was that the issue should be taken up at the next congress of the TUC not due until the autumn, a suggestion totally irrelevant to the immediate crisis and avoid- ing any criticism of the role of the left wing in the TUC’s decision.” March Conference of the NMM: a myth dispelled . It could easily be suggested by Macfarlane and Stalinist critics that this point ignores the fact that the CPGB did expend much energy in the months preceding the General Strike in agitating for the type of trade union preparation necessary for the conflict. True enough, the party did conduct a vigorous propaganda campaign on this issue; the vital point, however, is to understand the content of this propaganda, not merely its form, for despite the fact that the party stressed that the Scar- borough decisions existed on paper only and that the NMM had the responsibility for seeing that they were put into effect, and despite the special NMM conference in March devoted to the ques- tion of ‘preparedness’, there is very little concrete evidence that the party did anything to break out of the limitations placed on preparation imposed on the rank and file by the trade union apparatus or that it saw its role as anything more than ‘gingering up” the official leaderships. In short, its activities were devoted to the exhortation of the TUC to act, not to preparing for an inde- pendent initiative in the light of the wholly likely betrayal by the TUC in the coming conflict. Stalinist writers are in the habit of making great play with the fact that it was the CPGB alone, at the March conference of the NMM, which urged the unions to prepare for the approaching General Strike. A look at the decisions of the conference dispels this myth, as far as any practical develop- ments from the conference were concerned, for 41 Workers’ Weekly, March 19, 1926. 35

[p042] while it was characterized by the display of much militant rhetoric it made no concrete plans what- soever for definite action by the rank and file to organize its strength for the strike and certainly it was altogether unconcerned, as the CPGB had been in July 1925, with seizing the favourable opportunities at rank-and-file level for furthering the revolutionary role of the party. The nearest the conference came to this was in the resolution on ‘The Capitalist Offensive’, moved by Horner, in which delegates were urged ‘to go back to their branches and not only report but gather round them the active membership and force their unions to inaugurate a militant policy in spite of the leaders .. .”* But the suggestion was left in mid- air; no concrete proposals for action to rally the rank and file flowed from it and had they done so there would have been signs of a drive by the party and the NMM to implement them. As it was, the party leadership seemed utterly complacent about the coming struggle, confident that the TUC must continue to support the miners and anxious mainly to avoid ‘sectarian’ action by the NMM and party activists in the unions which would separate the party from the official union apparatus. The point was underlined by George Hardy, acting general secretary of the NMM, who when inter- viewed after the March conference of the NMM, had nothing at all to say about any campaign to rally the rank and file behind the lead of the party and was content merely to talk complacently about a summer campaign of outdoor meetings as though the General Strike was an issue of no great importance.* In fact, for Hardy, as for the party leadership as a whole, the coming strike was now seen as a purely industrial issue in relation to which the role of the party was not that of fighting for a revolutionary lead but rather of en- suring the maximum of trade union solidarity at local level wholly within the context of the official union apparatus and under the established union leadership. Hardy was thus acting quite logically when he ordered the NMM to subordinate itself entirely to the TUC and its local affiliates on the eve of the General Strike: ... We sent out from Minority Movement head- quarters instructions to our members to work for the establishment of Councils of Action in every area. We warned, however, that the Councils of Action were under no circumstances to take over the work of the trade unions . .. The Councils of Action were to see that all the decisions of the 42 The Worker, March 27, 1926. 43, Workers’ Weekly, April 9, 1926. 36 General Council and the union executives were carried out .. . Given these trends in the party leadership it was highly probable that the lessons of the preparation for struggle gained by the party membership in the period before ‘Red Friday’ were undermined and destroyed and that in place of the emphasis then placed on seizing the revolutionary initiative the party activists in the unions were allowed to fall - back into the type of ‘rank and filism’ which had characterized the CPGB’s unofficial trade union movements in the early 1920s. The point was, of course, that the whole trend of party policy to- wards the TUC between July 1925 and May 1926 meant that that work of the NMM had to be orientated increasingly towards the pressurizing of the existing union leadership and not to the de- velopment of an alternative revolutionary leader- ship prepared for the betrayals to which orthodox trade unionism, however militant, must lead in a political confrontation of the type witnessed in the General Strike. In other words, the party membership was not being trained for the task of revolutionary leadership across the nine months; it was, by contrast, being encouraged to lapse into the ‘ginger group’ operation of the old type with the result that in the objectively revolutionary circumstances of the strike it was unable to see any way of transcending the methods of orthodox, militant trade unionism. The Party caught in a contradiction In circumstances where working-class con- sciousness developed very rapidly and where the task of the party was to provide concrete leader- ship to give this radicalization a revolutionary means of expression, the party inevitably lagged behind the developments among the working class; it was theoretically unprepared for them, un- prepared for the treacherous role of the official left wing and unprepared for the movement of the General Strike towards a necessarily revolutionary challenge to the state. The result of this for the party’s role in the strike was that it was unable to mobilize to the full the combativeness of the rank and file, unable effectively to develop the great ° potential for leadership which had been building up through its work in the unions since 1924. Looking back on the situation, George Hardy later admitted to the great theoretical confusion with which the party entered the strike: Although we knew of what treachery the Right 44 G. Hardy, Those Stormy Years, p. 185. My emphasis. Fourth International, Summer 1969

[p043] Wing leaders were capable, we did not clearly understand the part played by the so-called ‘left’ in the union leadership. In the main they turned out to be windbags and capitulated to the Right Wing. We were taught a major lesson; that while developing a move to the left officially, the main point in preparing for action must always be to develop a class-conscious leadership among the rank and file.” The tragedy of the CPGB in 1926 was that it was precisely with this theoretical concept of the role of the party that the NMM had been launched in 1924 and had operated in the first part of 1925. Now it was caught in the contradiction of the policy emanating from the CI and its own inability to fight the implications of this. The outcome, as was later implied by the party itself, was a com- plete antithesis between the party’s call for ‘pre- paredness’ on the eve of the General Strike and its subordination in practice to the leadership of the TUC: In this, however, it [the CP] displayed a certain inconsistency, for while in itself it [the call for preparedness] was an organized protest against the defeatist policy of the General Council and was one of the principal instruments for exposing ' this policy, it nevertheless issued the slogan of concentrating the leadership of all the unions in the General Council. . . Tail-ending the working class The contradictory position of the CPGB did much to prevent it maximizing its influence during the General Strike. The previous growth of the NMM and the propaganda for ‘preparedness’ had indeed done much to make it impossible for the TUC to back down from supporting the miners, but when the conflict had begun the fact that the CPGB had approached it in a purely trade union sense did much to neutralize its potential effectiveness. The clearest indication of this was the fact that from the start the party leadership was virtually paralysed, for while the party might not have seen the strike as a potentially revolu- tionary struggle, the government was acutely aware of its implications with the result. that the party bore the brunt of government repressive actions and its leadership was consequently able to func- tion in only the most limited way. The Central Committee’s Report to the Eighth Congress later admitted that: Communications were a problem at the outset, as it became clear that we had not sufficiently 45 Hardy, op. cit., p. 188. 46 The Communist International Between the 5th and 6th World Congresses. CPGB, July 1928. Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part IV) mobilized even the very scanty resources at our disposal and the question was complicated by the fact that, on top of the General Strike, the Party Centre after the first day or two was semi- illegal... The point was that the leadership was paralysed not, as Stalinists suggest, because prominent party leaders had been imprisoned in October 1925 (six were released on the eve of the strike and the party had set up an alternative leadership) but because the CPGB had failed to understand the revolutionary implications of the strike or pre- pared accordingly. Moreover, party policy during the strike indicated the way the party lagged be- hind developments, tail-ending the working class and subordinating itself essentially. to spontaneity, both phenomena being products of its own theo- retical backwardness. As the Report to the Eighth Congress indicated: The Party entered the General Strike with political and organizational slogans that were inevitably defensive in character ... once the masses were on the streets the business of the Central Com- mittee was to extend these slogans, at the same time making them more aggressive in character. What this meant in practice was the advancing of the demand for the resignation of the Baldwin government, its replacement by a Labour govern- ment and the nationalization of the mines; but besides the anachronistic character of these slogans at a time when the strike was developing into the initial stages of a situation of dual power and the urgent need was to extend and link up the Councils of Action, the fact was that they were political demands and completely contradicted the party’s previous assertion as to the purely economic character of the struggle. The slogans were, in fact, purely spontaneous reactions to events; they were unrelated to any previous poli- tical preparation of the party membership and had no effect on the course of the strike. CP opportunism assists TUC treachery The considerable potential which the CPGB possessed for playing the leading role in the strike was therefore largely unrealized. There is no questioning the party’s great local influence—its members were active in leading positions on the great majority of Councils of Action—but the crucial issue was how this potential was to be realized when, until the very end of the strike, the party was subordinating its activity to that of the General Council. The party could, then, do no more than play a militant but essentially limited part during the strike and the influence which it was able to exert over the rank and file was of a 37

[p044] basically syndicalist rather than revolutionary kind. As a result, the CPGB was quite unready to mobilize the rank and file against the action of the TUC in calling off the strike at the very moment when later reports showed that it was just reaching the peak of its effectiveness. In fact, the party completely shared the astonishment and bewilderment of the rank and file, the Workers’ Weekly commenting in a tone of aggrieved surprise: We warned our readers of the weakness and worse of the Right Wing on the General Council—but here we confess that reality has far exceeded our worst forebodings . . . The CP had in fact con- sistently warned the workers that such was likely to happen, but even the CP can be forgiven for not believing it to be possible that once the struggle had begun these leaders should have proved themselves such pitiful poltroons as to surrender at the very moment of victory.“ In fact, the CPGB had no reason for sharing in the rank and file’s bewilderment. The betrayal of the General Strike was essentially bound up with the movement of the party into an oppor- tunistic relationship with the TUC left wing and the fact that it had lent itself to the task of creating illusions about the character of the strike and the role of the TUC among the rank and file which had objectively assisted the General Council in its treacherous role. This may seem a harsh judgement; certainly it is in conflict with Macfarlane, who considers that the party’s line was the only one ‘practicable’ under the circum- stances. The point is, however, that a revolutionary situation places on the revolutionary party the responsibility for absolute theoretical clarity and complete firmness in carrying into practice the practical work which flows from this understanding The CPGB failed in its first, and, as it proved, only decisive test as a revolutionary party precisely be- cause of its inability to deepen theoretically its necessarily formal understanding of Bolshevik methods of work in the period when it began to emerge as a decisive force among the working 47 Workers’ Weekly, May 21, 1926. 38 class. It was only through a ruthless critique of centrist politics and the opportunistic relationship to these of the line of the CI that the CPGB could have prepared for the General Strike and educated its membership for the revolutionary possibilities inherent in the situation. Without this the CPGB necessarily became involved in the confused centrist tendencies which were so pronounced in — the labour movement in the mid-1920s and which rested on a certain opportunism in the working class which it should have been the work of the party to counteract, not appease. Conclusion It can be suggested, then, that the significance of the study of the origins and early history of the CPGB derives from the necessity for Marxists to make more concrete their understanding of the crucial role of revolutionary theory in relation to political practice in a period of acute class conflict. It is for the elucidation of this question that Marxists look to Macfarlane’s work, but while they will find information of considerable value there hitherto unavailable for the study of the CPGB they will find no explanation of why the CPGB failed as a revolutionary party. Indeed, by implicitly lending support to the Stalinist line of the mid-1920s, Macfarlane helps perpetuate the myths propagated by the CPGB about its role in the General Strike ever since 1926. This is why his book (certainly the section up to 1926) is quite acceptable to his Stalinist reviewer, Monty Johnstone.“ The aim of this set of articles, based partly on the material in Macfarlane’s book, partly on new research, has been to indicate the main tendencies which went to make the CPGB, which- shaped its empirical, syndicalist character in the 1920s, and made for its weakness as a revolu- tionary organization. Above all, the aim has not been simply to indicate the historiographical aber- rations of Marcfarlane but to suggest to Marxists who read his book the parallels which can usefully be made between the work of the CPGB in the 1920s and the present problems associated with the construction of the revolutionary party in Britain. 48 New Left Review, Fourth International, Summer 1969

[p045] Stalin and Bukharin 39

[p046] Stalin and Bukharin 39

[p047] The Stalinist leadership of the Comintern. Back row: Kuusinen, Gottwald, Pieck, Manuilsky. a Seated extreme left: Dimitrov, 2nd from left : & Togliatti Saas REPORTING ON THE results of the Sixth Congress of the Communist International to the Leningrad party organization, Molotov declared that ‘The Cominterh has achieved unity on the basis of overcoming Trotskyism’. It was a_ premature assessment in both its parts. Before long Bukharin, the main figure at the Congress, was in disgrace, and the Stalinists initiated a bitter struggle against the Right Wing of which he was the spokesman. As for Trotskyism, it was for some time to come to be presented as a grave danger, as the purges of the 1930s were to show. From the Sixth Congress, however, differences were settled more and more in the shadows rather than in public discussion and debate. This applied both in the Russian party and in the foreign sections. In a number of the latter a clean sweep was made of leading officials and a hew cadre, trained in the Comintern’s Lenin School, or whose docility could be counted upon, was installed. If these methods caused disquiet even to the new layer of leaders, such as Togliatti and Thorez, they suppressed their scruples and fell into rank as Joyal supporters of every change in the line. In the period from 1928 the character of the Comintern continued to change. Even Togliatti, later to become prominent under the name of Ercoli as a spokesman for Stalin, voiced his fears, When the Sixth Congress met in July 1928 a number of its most important national sections had suffered severe defeats or were still para- lysed by internal crisés. Only three parties, those of Germany, Czechoslovakia and France, could 40 1 in a private letter to Trotsky, that the Comintern had become a burden to the Russian leadership. It was continued as a political machine which in practice was no more than an arm of the bureau- cracy staffed by obedient functionaries with no will of their own. It went through the motions of being an international revolutionary organization until the events in Germany made necessary a sharp swing to the right; and even after 1933 it continued to preserve some of the old forms associated with the Comintern in its earlier years. But it is probable that Stalin found the Comintern increasingly an embarrassment even at this stage, as Togliatti and others sensed, but could not destroy it because of the opportunity this would have offered to the Left Opposition to extend its influence among Communist workers. Even so, seven years, instead of the statutory four, were allowed to lapse between the Sixth and the Seventh Congress, which was to be the last. And it is obvious that this Congress, which laid the theore- tical groundwork for the turn to the Popular Front, had nothing in common with the Congresses of the early years. It remains, of course, to explain why men like Thorez and Togliatti, who had set out to be revolutionaries and for a time displayed some sympathy with the Left Opposition, should have become the docile spokesmen of the Stalin- ized Comintern. claim a mass following. A number of parties in Eastern Europe, as well as the important Italian party, had been driven underground. In Britain, Scandinavia and North America the Communist Parties had established only a precarious toe- Fourth International, Summer 1969

[p048] V. M. Molotov : The Comintern had achieved unity on the basis of overcoming Trotskyism hold in the working class and were scarcely more than sects. Apart from China, where the party was still suffering from the defeat of the Second Revolution of 1926-1927, the International could only count upon small and poorly organized sections in most of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. In short, the balance-sheet was far from satisfactory. The tactical line laid down by the Sixth Con- gress, nominally continuing the ‘Bolshevization’ of previous years, set the Communist Parties on a sectarian course which confirmed their isolation from the mass of the working class or, where they enjoyed working-class support, precluded the formation of an effective united front against fas- cism. This tactic was based upon a scholastic division of post-war development into numbered periods, the third of which was supposed to be currently under way. This so-called ‘third period’ was, in any case, broadly defined to include rapid technical development, growing contradictions be- The responsibility of the Communist Inter- national for the catastrophic defeat of the German working class in 1933 was extremely heavy. The German party was by far the largest outside the Soviet Union and had the most experience—tragic as it was—in revolutionary struggle. Moreover, Germany occupied a key position in post-war Europe. The onset of the world economic depres- sion in 1929-1930 brought the crisis of capitalism to a new and frenzied phase. All countries were swept by political convulsions in the wake of the violent economic blizzard which began in the USA and rapidly swept across Europe. Germany was the most vulnerable because the precarious recovery from the disaster of the First World War and the prosperity of the late 1920s had been made possible largely on the basis of an inflow of American capital, especially