Constant Reader Point of Production

,OUR History’ is the general title of the series of quarterly pamphlets on questions of British working-class history published by the History Group of the Communist Party. The latest in the series—No. 18, ‘Sheffield Shop Stewards, 1916-1918’, price 1s. 6dcontains much informatin about. an important episode in the crisis in the British labour movement out of which the Communist Party itself emerged. District and branch minute books, a rank-and-file paper and the memories of old-timers have been drawn upon to good purpose.

What struck me as particularly significant when I read this pamphlet was the role played by political factors in the broader sense, as against ‘purely economic’, point-of-production questions, in the great movement it describes. In the first place, it was the political commitment of the official trade union leadership to the prosecution of the war that prevented them from manoeuvring as they were able to do after 1918, in such a way as to keep the confidence of big sections of the working class (remember the rise in the postwar period of Ernie Bevin, ‘the dockers’ KC’). This politically-conditioned vacuum was filled by the shop stewards.

Secondly, it was attempts to conscript engineering workers for front-line army service that produced the big response, in the country-wide threat to strike in October-November, 1916, which forced the Government to release the Halifax fitter Leonard Hargreaves from the army. And behind the

‘feeling on this matter lay a long period of propaganda against the war carried on by politically-conscious elements. The pamphlet quotes a resolution of the Sheffield District Committee of the ASE passed as early as August, 1915, which called for the quashing of a prison sentence on a _ local Labour Party activist ‘arising out of conversations with wounded soldiers’ in a military hospital. And three days ~ before the Hargreaves’ case broke, Sheffield ASE No. 12 branch resolved in favour of steps to secure ‘a just and lasting peace’.

The February, 1917, revolution in Russia had a deep effect on the Sheffield workers, even before the famous convention held at Leeds in June (to which No. 12 Branch sent two delegates) for the purpose of forming ‘workers’ and soldiers’ councils’. During the strike against dilution, in the spring of 1917, the Sheffield Telegraph commented: ‘The Russian revolution has for the moment upset the mental balance of some of these youthful social and industrial reconstructors. . . .’

The history of the Sheffield movement, like that of the earlier movement on the Clyde, deserves careful study by today’s militants, for the examples provided of the interweaving of economic, social and political issues—and above all for the tragic demonstration of how the degree of actual achievement of a rank-and-file industrial movement depends on the role played in it by a well-organized political vanguard, free from both opportunism and sectarianism. A good book to start with is J. T. Murphy’s ‘Preparing for Power’ (1934).

Operation rewrite Alas, when Communist Party spokesmen deal with- the period of ‘our history’ subsequent to about 1925 they lose respect both for truth and for their readers. There is a Jjresh instance of this in R. P. -Dutt’s ‘notes of the month’ in the June issue of Labour Monthly. ‘British Labour’, he writes, ‘once advocated a positive policy for peace, expressed by none more ably than the late Arthur Henderson, but now forgotten. That policy was collective security.’

Now, the policy of ‘collective security’ (that is, of support for alliances of certain imperialist states against others, allegedly ‘in defence of peace’) was put over on the Labour Party in a bitter struggle during 1933 and 1934, and in those days the attitude taken up by the Communists was very different. from ‘what Dutt’s present reference would suggest to the innocent reader. In the Labour Monthly for September, 1934, Dutt himself congratulated the London Labour League of Youth for rejecting the ‘collective security’ policy. In the ' November issue ‘R. F. Andrews’ (Andrew Rothstein) wrote that the triumph of Henderson's line at the Southport conference ‘placed the Labour Party machine at the disposal of the British Government when next it engages in a world war’ and called on socialists to ‘oppose the Labour Party’s conception of the League as a “collective peace system”.’

In May, 1935, the Soviet Government’s alliance with France —or rather the ‘Stalin-Laval communiqué’ which accompanied it, calling on French workers to stop fighting French militarism—introduced confusion into Communist thinking on the war question, and rendered powerful aid to the Rightwing in the Labour Party. A certain Hugh Gaitskell was able to write in Plebs for July of that year that the Soviet Government were now ‘supporting . . . the Labour Party’s proposals’. Nevertheless, Dutt’s book ‘Fascism and Social Revolution’ came, out in a second edition in June, 1935, with this passage unchanged: ‘Bourgeois pacifism, preaching the conception of “collective security” within imperialism, and in the name of this conception proclaiming support of the warpreparations and war-measures of the various imperialist states, becomes an indispensable part of the war-preparations of imperialism. The success of the fight against war depends on the strength of the mass struggle, and cannot be separated from the fight against imperialism, against modern capitalism.’

- From Lenin to Henderson “The change in Communist Party policy took place quite sharply at a Central Committee meeting at the beginning of August, 1935, and the sharpness of the turn can be shown by means of two quotations from the same writer, Reg Bishop, in the same paper, International Press Conference (predecessor of today’s World News). In the issue of June 22 Bishop criticized a memorandum issued by the London Trades Council for its support of ‘the so-called “collective peace system”.’ (‘There is nothing here of the working-class fight against war.’) In the issue of August 31, Bishop announced that ‘the demand of the British workers, as voiced by the Communist Party, is that the British Government immediately associate itself with the collective peace system’.

There is no. disgrace in the mere fact of changing one’s policy—but one ought not to conceal the fact that there has been a change, and indeed one ought to explain why. This the Communist Party seems now quite incapable of doing, which is of course, why it cannot write its own history. And, if Khrushchev gets really serious about the war of 1914-18 having been a war ‘against German militarism’, I wonder how long British Communists will be allowed to publish honest accounts even of the anti-war struggles in the Allied camp in that period, such as the pamphlet discussed at the beginning of this column?

P.S.: Have I missed something, or is Dutt not a pioneer in Stalinist circles in thus openly ‘rehabilitating’ Henderson? In Volume 10 of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia, second edition, published in 1952, the article on Henderson, though giving no details of him between his ceasing in 1933 to be president of the world disarmament conference and his death in 1935, says: ‘Henderson’s entire activity marks him as an agent of the bourgeoisie in the workers’ movement, a betrayer of the working: class and an enemy of the USSR.’

BRIAN PEARCE.