BOOK REVIEW.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BRITISH COMMUNIST PARTY.

FRANCIS BECKETT.

Reviewed by T. Clark.

THIS work by Francis Beckett traces the rise, decline and fall of the former British Communist Party, which was known as the Communist Party of Great Britain, or CPGB for short. Since the dissolution of the party, a group sympathetic to some of Trotsky’s ideas have taken over this name, so readers should be careful not to confuse the two.

When Beckett’s book was first published it met with opposing responses from the former two main revisionist protagonists of the party, respectively the grouping around Tony Chater, and Mick Costello which had the Morning Star newspaper as its base, and the eurocommunists around Martin Jacques and Nina Temple. The Chaterites would have preferred Beckett to have been more sympathetic to the struggle waged against the euros, while, on the other hand, the euros, for their part, questioned Beckett’s motives for writing this work in the first place. Thus, the eurocommunist faction remarked

‘We are left with the question of Beckett’s motives. His publishers were evidently motivated by profits. His praise and approval are confined to the wing of the party most intimately associated with the Soviet Communist Party’. (New Times. Quoted by Beckett: Enemy Within; p.230)

The liquidation of the Communist Party of Great Britain signalled that Britain’s leading revisionists, Martin Jacques and Nina Temple had ‘won’ the factional struggle within the former Communist Party. To the euros, now styling themselves the Democratic Left (DL), Beckett’s book seemed to sanction the struggle of the opposing revisionist faction around Chater and Costello, against the more '‘enlightened’ elements within the old party.

The book opens with the dissolution of the former Communist Party of Great Britain by the dominant revisionist leadership, headed by Martin Jacques and fronted by Gordon McLennon. The final meeting of the party, the dissolution meeting was held at the TUC central London headquarters in November 1991. Beckett mournfully informs his readers that

‘They were there to wind up their party after seventy-one years and create a new organisation which rejected most traditional communist beliefs and working. And they were doing it just fifty yards down the road from the British Museum where, more than a century before, Karl Marx had worked out the communist philosophy’. (p.1)

Thus, the open revisionist agents of the liberal bourgeoisie had finally succeeded in destroying the Communist Party, and in remarkable synchronicity with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the hand of the Soviet revisionists.

The Liquidation of Britain's first Communist Party by the representatives of liberal capitalism, the eurocommunists, or more correctly, the euro-revisionists was the culmination of years of struggle between the two main revisionist factions within the party. Beckett does well in covering the period from the birth of the party to its liquidation, although the work is light history and written in semi-anecdotal style. This work is not an ideological history of the party, but more about the personalities which went into forming the party or who had some impact on it. All the leading actors in communist and Labour and left politics make their appearances across the pages of this work.

Beckett shows the vital role played by Lenin in getting the various left groups sympathetic to the October [November] Russian revolution of 1917 to not let their differences stand in the way of creating a single Communist Party. ‘…Lenin himself had called on the socialist groups to sink their differences and form a Communist Party’. (p.10)

Several groups responded to Lenin’s admonition. The Communist Party was eventually formed in 1921. The main participant organisations were the following: there was the British Socialist Party with around 5000 members and the Socialist Labour Party with about 1000 strong. There was the London based organisation, the Workers Socialist Federation, led by Sylvia Pankhurst. Also included were the South Wales Socialist Society and some other smaller groups.

All these groups had welcomed the Russian socialist revolution and they had organised the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign, which opposed the British government sending troops to fight the Bolsheviks.

Beckett shows how with the formation of the party British communists looked forward to a rosy future. The Russian Bolshevik revolution had started a new dawn, igniting great hope in the downtrodden classes all over the world about the future. In the meantime, and rightly so, the immediate task of the new party was to defend the Russian revolution from the machinations of the imperialists who viewed the revolution with great hostility.

Once the Communist Party was formed, Beckett explains that it was not long before the issue of the party’s relationship to the Labour Party came to the fore. Lenin had argued for the British Communist Party to seek affiliation to Labour Party. However, most of the leading British communists were against affiliation. These included such eminent names as Willie Gallacher and Sylvia Pankhurst. The Communist International, organised in 1919 was clear on the treacherous role of reformism in the working class. Therefore, communists had no illusions about Social Democracy, which would never support the struggle of revolutionary workers. Comintern theses had regarded the situation in Britain as an exception, in that the Labour Party was regarded as a kind of general workers organisation, which other workers organisations could affiliate to. In other words, for British communists, the workers’ united-front could take the form of affiliation to the LP. The Labour Party leadership would have none of this, which added grist to the mill of the arguments of people like Pankhurst and Gallacher on this particular question. The British Labour Party proved not to be an exception after all. It was too tied to defending the interest of British imperialism to allow communists in its ranks.

History has shown that the Comintern and Lenin were wrong on the question of communists seeking affiliation to Labour. Every attempt by communists to affiliate has been voted down by Labour Party Conferences. In any case, for Lenin and the Comintern, affiliation was a question of the united front and affiliation was a form of the united front thought at the time possible for Britain. To make a fetish of this form, which in Britain was regarded as an exception, would be against the spirit of the Comintern and Marxism-Leninism.

It was obvious that the Labour leadership feared communist affiliation, and Beckett shows that at the Labour Party Conference in June 1921, Labour left-winger, Frank Hodges, described communists as ‘the intellectual slaves of Moscow taking orders from the Asiatic mind’. Racism was rife in the Labour Party.

Nevertheless, Beckett is able to celebrate the fact that a few communists managed to land seats in Parliament, standing as Labour Party candidates. The most famous of these in the world of British communist politics was Saklatvala, who won Battersea North for Labour, although standing as an open communist, in the general election of November 1922.

However, in 1926 the Communist Party was thrown into the turmoil of the general strike to defend the miners. The Government had taken the precaution of arresting the communist leaders. This was a Government that had come to power on the basis of the fake Zinoviev letter scare, which was published by the Daily Mail, and purported to show that Zinoviev, at the time Comintern Chief, was directing the activities of communists in Britain.

There was not a great deal that the tiny British Communist Party could do without its leaders. The weakness of their position was perhaps underlined by the slogan during the strike ‘All Power to the General Council’. It seemed that the communists believed that the general council of the trade union movement could lead a revolution against the capitalist ruling class. Beckett, however, fails to discuss this point.

Soon 1926 was behind them and British communists moved forward in tandem with the world communist movement. This, of course, was the time of the great struggles in the Soviet Communist Party against ultra-left elements who had gathered around Trotsky, who was joined in 1926 by the Zinoviev faction. These struggles found their expression in the British party and other Communist Parties. The world of communist politics was heading for a new turn and would soon be seized by a sectarian mania, which of course found its reflection in the British party as well. In 1928, communists were ordered to break off relations with socialists. The period of consorting with social democrats was to be put behind them. The Comintern had entered what it called the ‘Third Period’. This period had followed the two previous periods, namely, the rise of capitalism up to the First World War, the period of stabilisation following the war, and then the third, supposedly final period of the collapse of capitalism. Capitalism did collapse in 1929, following the Wall Street stock market crash. However, without revolution, there is no such thing as the final crisis of capitalism although the Comintern had predicted the collapse of the system.

The ‘Third Period’ according to the leadership of the Comintern was to be a period of ‘class against class’. Communists were barred from seeking united fronts with the social democracy, who were know denounced as social fascists. Beckett shows how this put paid to all attempts at affiliation with the Labour Party. Affiliation was certainly not a necessary way forward for the Communist Party as Lenin had supposed, but third period politics of class against class simply reduced the already small British Communist Party to an even smaller impotent sect.

Between 1928 and 1933 the 'class against class' policy was maintained by the Comintern. This review is not the place to examine how this line arose and who was responsible for it, but it must be noted that this Left-sectarian policy reduced communism to a sectarian movement, and in Germany had the disastrous consequence of contributing to the defeat of the working class by fascism.

Beckett shows that it was only after dropping the sectarian policy of class against class, which shaped the politics of the third period, that the real struggle against fascism could begin. Beckett celebrates the leading role played by the Communist Party in Britain in fighting British fascism, led by the odious Oswald Mosley, who, in fact, had been one of the top people in the Labour Party. Beckett reminds his readers that the British communist movement also made a significant contribution to the republican side in the Spanish civil war of 1936-1939.

This war displayed the nefarious influence of Trotskyism and other forms of ultra-leftism. The main question in the Spanish civil war was to unite the anti-fascist camp against Franco and the fascists. But the Trotskyists wanted to push for ‘socialist revolution’ immediately. This policy was similar to the one they had argued for in Russia, and which Lenin had condemned.

Trotskyism and other forms of sectarianism are based on the notion that communists, in all cases, must be opposed to cross class alliances. In his writings on the permanent revolution theory in regard to Russia, Trotsky once argued that the proletariat was the only revolutionary class. In fact, the first phase of the Russian revolution consisted of an alliance between the workers and all the peasant strata against Tsarism.

Unlike the sectarianism of the ‘third period’, the communists had learned their lesson. They now realised that where fascism becomes the immediate danger, Marxist-Leninists must seek unity in the anti-fascist camp. The anti-fascist camp is not only restricted to communists, and workers, but is rather made up of all organisations and individuals who oppose fascism and want to fight against it. Trotskyism in Spain wanted to undermine anti-fascist unity. It was ‘third period’ class against class politics again, which had helped deliver the German working class to fascism, as Hitler said, ‘without a shot being fired’. However, this time it took a Trotskyist guise.

The root of these sectarian mistakes goes back to some of the theses in early Comintern Congresses. Mistakes that later were corrected by Dimitrov. This however is another story.

The period of the ‘popular front’, formally inaugurated in 1935, broke with ‘third period’ sectarianism. The lessons of the defeat in Germany had been digested. Dimitrov had turned the Comintern around, and made fascism the immediate main enemy. Dimitrov saw the importance of uniting the anti-fascist camp. It was not long before Trotsky was making disparaging reference to Dimitrov.

What Beckett shows is that contrary to the views of some of their left and right critics, the British communist leadership was not made up of people who were simply the ‘intellectual slaves of Moscow’. Of course, there were such elements around. Without painting a picture of a robustly independent leadership, the picture that emerges from Beckett's account is one of a leadership that did not simply accept the Moscow line, but actually debated it, even if there was a strong predisposition to accept it in some quarters. There were differences in the leadership over all the vital questions. Moscow’s views were certainly held with high respect but were subjected to debate. Beckett shows that even Palme Dutt, a leading communist party theoretician at the time, who defended the Moscow line, seemed to have done show out of genuine conviction.

Beckett throws light on the contrast between the two most prominent British communists, Harry Pollitt and Palme Dutt. Pollitt was born in 1890. His mother Louise Pollitt had been a founding member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and joined the Communist Party when it was founded in 1920. The oppression, which his family experienced under capitalism when he was a young boy and the event of the Russian revolution, propelled Harry Pollitt in the direction of communism. In Beckett’s account of the rise and fall of the British Communist Party, Pollitt emerges as the foremost British communist together with Palme Dutt, born in 1896. These two people contrasted psychologically and socially, yet they seemed to have worked together fairly well.

Beckett leaves the reader with the impression that Pollitt, although not a theoretician, was nevertheless far more introspectively independent than Dutt. According to Beckett, for Palme Dutt, the Comintern and Moscow always knew best, or could do no wrong. This seemed to have been something that Dutt was deeply convinced of, rather than adopted for opportunist considerations. Dutt's loyalty to the Soviet Union and Stalin was absolute.

The period following the death of Lenin in 1924 was a period of intense factional struggles in the Soviet Communist Party. The struggle for power was combined with differences over which direction the country should take and at what tempo. Stalin and his supporters eventually came out on top. These events all found an echo in the British party. The life of the party followed the twist and turns of the Comintern. By the 1930s, German fascism was preparing for world domination. The immediate obstacles to Hitler’s ambition were Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The Second World War was looming. The western imperialists had encouraged Hitler to look east and had facilitated his moves in this direction.

Stalin had tried to delay the attack on the Soviet Union with the Molotov – Ribbentrop pack.

The ultra-left denounced Stalin, with imperialist circles in Britain and France feigning moral indignation. But Stalin had temporarily pulled the rug from under the feet of these imperialist elements who had hoped that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union first. Stalin’s move also threw the world communist movement into turmoil. Beckett shows that after class against class had been jettisoned as the guiding principle of the Comintern, fascism was portrayed as the main enemy, and rightly so. Now the Soviet Union was in a pact with Nazi Germany. But those on the left who criticise Stalin from an ultra-left viewpoint, conveniently forget that Stalin was forced into this by the western powers, which had turned down his repeated proposals for collective security, thus signalling to Hitler that it was fine to attack the Soviet Union. The view in bourgeois or Trotskyist circles that by signing this pack Stalin unleashed the Second World War is pure drivel, which cannot be taken seriously by politically intelligent people. The question is not whether the war would come but who would receive the first blow.

Although the ultra-left had a field day in their attempts to discredit Stalin, Beckett writes that when the Central Committee of the British Communist Party met on the 2-3 October 1939,

‘….most of its members had more or less reluctantly convinced themselves that the Comintern, Dimitrov, Stalin and the Soviet Union could not all be wrong, and that their duty was to support the international line’. Dutt had demanded acceptance of the new line by the Central Committee based on conviction. Pollitt, who was less enthusiastic about the new line, stepped down as general secretary.

When Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union on the 22 June 1941, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, said ‘We shall give whatever we can to Russia’. Had Hitler attacked the Soviet Union first, the latter would have stood alone. Churchill’s statement underlines the correctness of Stalin’s policy. Now the British Communist Party could back the war effort and Harry Pollitt was brought back as the general secretary.

The Trotskyists failed to see that the attack on the Soviet Union had transformed the nature of the war. Previously it was an imperialist war. Now, however, the imperialist nature of the war was subordinated to the war of national liberation. Thus, Trotskyism’s attack on the British communists for supporting the war effort and their attempts to disrupt this effort could only serve the interest of fascism.

To the extent that they refused to support the war effort in Britain after the 22 June 1941, Trotskyism had become an agent of fascism.

Throughout the duration of the war, the British Communist Party had become popular and respectable. Party membership climbed from 15, 570 in 1938 to 56,000 in 1942, its all-time peak. This also meant that opportunism was able to gain a decisive foothold in the party. As Beckett writes ‘Communists were able to wave the Union Jack with the best of them. Party leaders appeared on platforms with the great and the good’. By the end of the war perceptions of the Soviet Union had changed, and Beckett writes that

‘The Soviet Union was popular in Britain in 1945’. (p.104)

British communist therefore looked forward to the post-war period. They had thought that ‘The end of the Second World War was the moment when Britain’s Communist Party was to enter its inheritance’. (ibid.)

After the defeat of fascism, the Labour Party won the 1945 general election. Labour had its biggest majority in parliament. The parliamentary Labour Party was the most left wing there had ever been. There were 393 Labour MPs. Beckett informs us that at least a dozen of these were either secret CP members or close to the party. But again the 1945 Labour Conference had turned down the CP’s application for affiliation, this time by the ‘narrowest possible margin’. (p.108)

The Communist Party, nevertheless, had developed some influence in the trade unions. The TUC withdrew its ‘black circular’, promulgated in 1934 to stop communists being elected to union positions. The TUC’s general council got use to its first ever communist member, Bert Papworth, who came from the Transport and General Workers Union. Four communists sat on the thirty four-member executive council of the TGWU. The Fire Brigade Union, the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the Foundry Workers and the Electrical Union, were unions in which communists influence was strongest.

The power of the post-war communist party in industry was a force to be reckoned with. But post-war communism in Britain was not to realise its ambitions, and was certainly never in a position to replace the Labour Party as the leadership of the working class in the way that the French and Italian communism had come close to replacing the socialists. Unlike the unstable Weimar Republic in the period after the First World War, in Britain, following the second, it was never a question of fascism from the right or communism from the left, fascism had been discredited, and the conditions existed for the social democratic middle-way and the establishment of a consensus which was to mark the entire of the post-war boom. Middle-way politicians and politics dominated the whole post-war period.

Although Beckett shows that the position of international communism after 1945 could not be described as bleak – on the contrary, the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Stalin, had emerged from its grave trials a victorious power, and between 1945 and 1948 Eastern Europe came under the leadership of pro-Soviet communists – it was nevertheless a period which witnessed the gradual erosion of communist influence in the western countries.

By 1948 a new crisis had broke out in the world communist movement and political attention was now directed to the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute. The Yugoslav communists, under the leadership of Tito, Kardelj, and Rankovich, had taken a revisionist course. Stalin had viewed this as a threat to the unity of the socialist camp, but could do nothing to remove the Titoite revisionists, who after purging the Marxist-Leninists from the party maintained a firm grip on state power. Consequently, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform in 1948.

These events had their repercussions in Britain’s then Communist Party. Beckett relates how James Klugmann, a leading communist who knew Yugoslavia well and entertained high personal regards for Tito, had to change his tune because of the Stalin-Tito split. Klugmann is described as a distinguish writer and academic, who was a natural choice to write an anti-Tito work, which he did. Klugmann wrote ‘From Trotsky to Tito’. This work was to fall into disuse, or discredit, when Khrushchev started his mission to mend relations with Tito.

However, revisionism was far from an affair that concerned Yugoslavia alone. In 1951, the Communist Party of Great Britain published its new programme, called The British Road to Socialism, and claiming the authority of Stalin for its fundamental premise. Beckett echoes this claim also, but he fails to provide any documentary evidence for this rumour, and Stalin’s recent, determined opposition to Titoite revisionism far from fits in with the contentious argument that he had sanctioned the British Road.

As someone in the revisionist camp, Beckett makes a number of unsubstantiated claims against Stalin, which we cannot go into here. To blame Stalin for the crimes of imperialism is the hallmark of modern revisionism.

The death of Stalin in 1953 had brought the revisionists to power in the Soviet Union, and the world communist movement was plunged into another crisis when Khrushchev launched an attack on Stalin in a ‘secret speech’ at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956. This denunciation of Stalin was part of Khrushchev’s ploy to win over Tito. There is evidence to suggest that Tito demanded this attack as a condition for his return to the fold. This underlined the extent to which Yugoslav, Titoite revisionism had penetrated the Soviet Union. Soviet, Khrushchevite revisionism became a modified version of Titoite revisionism.

The condemnation of Stalin divided the world communist movement. It was never to be the same again, and Beckett writes that

‘For months the British communist leaders claimed to know nothing about the secret speech’. (p.130)

Tito was now being rehabilitated by the Soviet revisionist Khrushchev group. The attacks on Stalin had unforeseen results for the revisionists. The Hungarian uprising, sponsored by western intelligence services, was facilitated by the attacks on Stalin. The denunciation of Stalin and the Hungarian uprising led to some communists from the intelligentsia leaving the British communist party. Some of the most talented of these, like Tom Kemp, went over to Trotskyism.

What is surprising though is that these elements did not see fit to rebel and leave the party in 1951 when it had adopted the revisionist document, ‘The British Road to Socialism’ as a programme. Here is displayed the familiar combination of toleration for revisionism and opposition to Stalin.

By the 1950s, the Communist Party of Great Britain was firmly in the revisionist camp, and with a declining membership. The post-war world ushered in a new era, not only politically but culturally as well, and the cold war, which was to last until the collapse of the Soviet Union, was in full swing.

Pollitt gave way to John Gollan as the party’s general secretary. The latter took up his post in 1956, at the age of 45. Certainly Pollitt, in spite of his other weaknesses, was pro-Stalin, and no longer fitted in with the new furniture. A new theoretical journal was launched in 1957 to replace the old Labour Monthly, it was called Marxism Today, and had James Klugmann as editor. Later it was around this journal, with another editor, Martin Jacques, that the eurocommunist revisionist ideas were circulated. These developments had roughly coincided with the rise of the ‘New Left’.

The end of the 1950s and the beginning of the ‘60s saw the struggle against Khrushchevite revisionism waged by China and Albania. Beckett writes that ‘When the two great communist powers, China and the Soviet Union, fell out, the CP started to tear itself to pieces over the rights and wrongs of the argument’. (p.160)

Many people left or were expelled from the CPGB for siding with China and Albania. Some were led by Reg Birch, a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. The Sino-Soviet split further undermined the unity of the world communist movement. In many countries, small pro-Mao parties were created which were opposed to the pro-Khrushchev revisionist parties. When relations between China and Albania turned sour, new groups were formed which were pro-Albania, with Enver Hoxha isolated but continuing the opposition to revisionism. The fragmentation of the communist movement along revisionist and anti-revisionist lines continued.

Beckett shows that the post war British Communist party had problems relating to the new youth culture of the 60s. However, at the 1967 Congress of the party, Martin Jacques, then 22, was brought into he leadership of the party. Beckett describes this as the recognition of the importance of the intellectual lobby.

The emergence of eurocommunism began around this time. The old revisionism of the party was being challenged by the new more trendy form of revisionism in keeping with the new cultural trends in society. This new revisionism rejected Marxism-Leninism openly and totally. This was unlike the old pro-Khrushchevite revisionism, which still pretended to be in favour of Marxism-Leninism to deceive communists, while rejecting it in reality.

Revisionism is a process whereby a party or individual changes sides in the class struggle. From objectively defending the working class such parties and individuals switch sides and defend the interests of the bourgeoisie. This is usually signalled by the rejection of certain essential principles of Marxism-Leninism, for instance the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin wrote that a Marxist is someone who recognises that the class struggle leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Parties which claim to defend the interest of the workers, but do not make the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat their foundation and starting point are outright revisionist parties, as far as Marxist-Leninist are concerned. In the Soviet Union, the Khrushchevites had claimed that the dictatorship of the proletariat no longer existed, and that it was replaced by the state of the whole people. Those who went along with this line supported revisionism, and therefore were revisionists themselves.

The struggle between the pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet elements in the old Communist Party of Great Britain was not about being for or against revisionism, but was rather about the differences between old-style and new style revisionism. Beckett remarks that the strongest support for the Soviet Khrushchevite revisionists

‘…came from the Party’s Surrey district committee and its full-time official, Sid French, who had been unhappy for some time at the growing tendency to distance the party from Moscow’. (p.166)

When in 1977, Sid French led the Surrey district breakaway of about 700 from the CPGB, this naturally strengthened the eurocommunist brand of revisionism in the old CP. The difference between the pro-Khrushchevite revisionist factions in the old Communist Party were rather to do more with tactics about how best to fight the new style revisionists represented by Martin Jacques and Nina Temple. The departure of Sid French’s group and then the declaration of independence by the Morning Star pointed to the formation of another party. Tactically this was all opposed by the straight-Left tendency, which wanted to remain in the party and fight the new style euro-revisionists.

In the struggle between the revisionist factions in the old British Communist Party, the euro-revisionists held on to power by largely administrative means. Sensing their eventual defeat was one of the reasons, which led them to liquidate the old Communist Party. The social-class basis of the difference between the old and new style euro-revisionists in Britain was that old revisionism was based on and tailored to the traditional labour aristocracy, which it sought to win over, and still does. New style euro-revisionism had no base in the working class, but was merely a petty-bourgeois ideological trend representing liberal capitalism in the Communist Party.

There is nothing in Beckett’s work, which suggests he knows that capitalism needs the formation of revisionist parties which, while claiming to represent the interests of the working class, actually serve the interest of capital. Such parties have no principled adherence to the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which they view as alienating the audience that they seek to address among the social democracy and the public opinion of liberal capitalism.

Beckett’s ‘Enemy Within – the rise and fall of the British Communist Party’ is not a Marxist-Leninist work and does not throw any real light on the meaning of the struggles in the old Communist Party of Great Britain. It is a revisionist work, which contains interesting references to the leading personalities of the Communist and Labour movement, some of whom are still alive.

T. Clark