MR MURPHY 'PREPARES FOR POWER

•Preparing for Power: A Critical Study of the History of the British Working-Class Movement'. By J. T. Murphy. With a new introduction by James Hinton. Pluto Press. Price £1.00 paperback, £3.00 hardback.

There is no clearer indication of the politics of the state capitalist 'International Socialism' (the anti-Trotskyist group which falsely declares that the Soviet Union is a capitalist régime) than the fact that they feel obliged to re-issue this work by J. T. Murphy.

For far from being 'a superb history' , as James Hinton's introduction describes it, it is the work of a centrist who was moving rapidly to the right and away from any connection with Marxism. First published shortly after Murphy's break from the British Communist Party in 1932, it contains a whole series of distortions about the real historical experiences of the British working class.

But above all, it is a work which utterly mis-represents the impact of Stalinism on the British working class. Presented as a plea against 'sectarianism' Murphy's work is, in fact, an open attack upon the conception of the revolutionary party as an instrument necessary lead the working class power. anti-Marxism As such is fits perfectly the group. For the politics of state capitalism have always been characterized by a worship of spontaneity and a hatred of Bolshevism.

John Thomas Murphy was born in 1888, the son of a blacksmith's striker. At the age of 13 he went to work at Vickers' Brightside works in Sheffield, where he remained until 1918.

It was here that he became a leading shop steward, first in Sheffield and later nationally.

He thus represents that important layer in the working class, concentrated in Sheffield, the Clydeside and South Wales, whose experiences in World War 1, combined with the impact of the Russian Revolution, took them in the direction of communism.

It was as a representative of the Shop Stewards' Movement that Murphy attended the deliberations of the Communist International in 1920. A foundation member of the Comunist Party of Great Britain, he remained in its leadership until 1932, when he was expelled, formally on the grounds that he supported the granting of credits for AngloSoviet trade, a policy which the Stalinists at that time opposed.

'Preparing for Power' is an attempt to reassess these experiences in the light of the history of the British working-class movement, a re-assessment which led him to join the Labour Party and become closely associated with Sir Stafford Cripps in the Socialist League.

Murphy's move to the right continued; after the war he acted as adviser to the Foreign Office, during the years of the Labour government, on Balkan affairs. He died in 1966, aged 77.

Murphy's decision to break with the Communist was, he tells us, the result of its isolation from the working class, exemplified in its disastrous performance in the 1931 election campaign. This isolation, it is suggested throughout the book, is the product of the long history of sectarianism which had characterized the work of Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation and later the British Socialist Party and the Socialist Labour Party (of which Murphy had been a member before joining the CPGB). Period' line which was imposed upon the International by Stalinism in the years after 1928.

This was the line which preached the imminent collapse of capitalism and denounced the Labour and trade union leaders as 'social fascists' enemies more dangerous to the working class than the fascists themselves.

It was this line which was responsible not only for the total isolation of the British Communist Party from the mass of workers who continued to support the Labour Party; much more serious, it was the line which split so tragically the German working class and paved the way for the seizure of power by Hitler and the Nazis.

Nothing of this is even hinted at in Murphy's account. And yet he was fully cognizant with all the facts.

He was fully aware of all these questions because as a leader of the EC of the Communist International for much of the 1920s he had fought shoulder to shoulder with Stalin for this policy against Trotsky and the Left Opposition.

Murphy spent considerable periods of time in Moscow in the crucial decade after 1920 and was fully aware of the enormous struggle which was taking place inside both the Russian Party and the International. half-truths and slanders written by Stalin, Kuusinen and others and published in May 1925. It was here that Murphy 'rebutted' the charge by Trotsky's supporters that 'the present leaders were and are opposed to party democracy when such was and is not the case' And when he returned to permanent residence in England in 1928 he became one of the most vociferous exponents of the 'New Line' before finally becoming disillusioned with it.

It is clear that Murphy's objection was never to Stalinism, but only to its 'left phase' from 1928-1934. When Stalin's line once more swung violently to the right after the catastrophe in Germany and the British Party became the leaders of the Popular Front and craven supporters of bourgeois democracy, Murphy was only too willing to join them in these counter-revolutionary activities, activities which enabled the capitalists to prepare for and unleash World War II in 1939.

This is clear from his account of the 1926 General Strike. He endorses fully the right-wing line which the Party took during the strike, excusing their lack of impact on the smallness of the forces controlled by the Party and the Minority Movement.

He ends his treatment of the strike by observing: "The left forces among the trade union leaders had capitulated completely to the right.' Here again Murphy knew full well that the entire policy of the Communist Party immediately prior to and during the strike was dominated by support for these lefts (Purcell,_Swales, Hicks etc.), on the TUC General Council.

And once more Murphy knew that this policy was one imposed by Stalin and Tomsky on the British Party leadership. Support for the Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Committee was considered by Stalin as much more important than the estab-