“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
-Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852
Introduction
In our current times of communist disunity and growing calls for regroupment, the investigation of the history of the communist movement is crucial; we can neither afford to keep “reinventing” communist strategy and tactics nor dismiss the comrades who make up our Marxist tradition as irrelevant relics. Our burden as communists is to carry our past comrades’ legacies, good and bad, and pass them over to our comrades yet to come. In any coming revolutionary crisis, we have to fight for a communist future armed with their experiences.
With that in mind, Tony Collins’ recently published book Raising the Red Flag: Marxism, Labourism, and the Roots of British Communism, 1884–1921, proves to be an unmissable resource for British Marxists. Collins provides a guided tour of the chaotic journey of the British far left from the founding of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1884 through World War One up to the foundation of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920.
Before the Great War
The first three chapters of the book deal with the early history of the British far left, the birth of the Social Democratic Federation, and the beginning of the never-ending question of what the Labour Party’s role is in the worker movement.
The Early Hyndmanites
The decades after the demise of Chartism saw the rise of craft unions whose base usually supported the Liberal Party. Collins argues this became the basis for a ‘non-political’ leadership of the working class, who believed their role was to maximise the worker’s wages and improve their working conditions with no political challenge to the capitalist system. Unlike continental Europe, which had the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) to draw a political alternative to bourgeois society, the leadership of the British worker movement promoted the idea that only economic issues should concern the workers. According to Collins, this led the British working class to develop a tradition of strong trade unionism that clung to the political leadership of middle-class liberals.
In 1881, the Democratic Federation – renamed to Social Democratic Federation in 1884 – was founded by a meeting called by Henry Hyndman, a middle-class nationalist who Engels called an “arch-conservative and an extremely chauvinistic but not stupid careerist”1. The SDF saw socialist propaganda as nothing more than evangelising to the workers, hoping to simply convert them based on an ethical superiority of socialism. While the SDF denounced working-class activity like strikes and saw trade unions as an obstacle to socialism, they lost no opportunity to advise the British ruling classes on how to defend the British Empire2. In 1884, there was a split from the SDF, with Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling, and William Morris leaving with others to form the Socialist League (SL). The SL would not bear fruit; its leadership avoided debating any other tendency within the left – a staple characteristic of most British groups today – and left the SDF’s chauvinism and anti-trade union politics unchallenged. This led the SDF off the hook and did nothing to differentiate the SL from every other sect in the eyes of the working class.
The primary winner of the SDF’s refusal to engage with the worker movement was the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Formed in 1893, it filled a space of trade union politics the SDF vehemently opposed, and its active links to trade unions and their struggles allowed it to build a base neither the SDF nor SL could. This allowed the reformist ILP to be seen as a supporter of workers’ rights while becoming a party for the growing new unionism. This and the SDF’s indifference threw away the potential for Marxism to become a hegemonic force within the British worker movement.
The Labour Party Question
While many were optimistic about the formation of the ILP, its leadership quickly showed more interest in focusing on electoral victories than the broader militant class struggle. In 1900, the SDF joined the ILP and some trade union leaders to create the Labour Representation Committee (LRC). At the same time, a left-wing oppositionist trend attracted by the ideas of Daniel de Leon and his US Socialist Labor Party (SLP) would consolidate in the SDF due to their opposition to the leadership’s policy of running as an electoral bloc with the ILP. For the left wing of the SDF, the ILP’s reformism tied the working class to capitalist parties like the Liberal Party – effectively undermining the working class’ political independence.
This struggle to preserve the working class’s political independence also led the SDF left to fight against “Millerandism” in the 2nd International. The debate on Millerrand was focused on whether socialists should take ministerial roles in a capitalist government. It dominated the Second International’s Paris Congress, with Hyndman and the SDF leadership taking the side of Millerand, who had taken a position in the 1899 French Government3. The resolution authored by Karl Kautsky, while condemning any socialist participation in capitalist governments, contained a clause allowing for participation under “exceptional circumstances”. While Kautsky intended to defend a revolutionary perspective on parliamentarism, he fumbled the resolution to seek “socialist unity” with the Second International’s right wing4. The SDF left would then vote against the Kautsky resolution and struggle within the SDF against their own “Millerandism”.
By 1902, the Scottish “impossibilists” were openly working with De Leon’s SLP and in 1903, they founded the Socialist Labour Party with James Connolly as its chairman. The second group of SDF oppositionists based in London would also be expelled to form the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) in 1904. The Labour Representation Committee (LRC)—to be renamed the Labour Party in 1906—was soon founded. Far from offering political independence to the working class, it was used as a bargaining tool by the ILP to influence the Liberal Party, which attracted the interests of the trade union leadership.
Kautsky vs Radek
Regardless, the International Socialist Bureau (ISB), the permanent body of the Second International, would approve the Labour Party’s membership in the Second International in 1908. This would lead to renewed discussion about whether the SDF should join the Labour Party and a debate between Karl Radel and Karl Kautsky. Radek would criticise the call for the SDF to join the Labour Party, arguing that it was not a politically independent organisation and that joining it would mean a compromise between Marxist politics and Labour’s programme.
Kautsky would trace the development of socialism and trade unions in Germany and England, arguing that trade unions in England lost their ability to become a working-class party like the SPD. They formed a labour aristocracy and “have always shown a tendency to political dependence on the bourgeois parties, by whom the unions and, to even a greater extent, their leaders, have been bought and duped by concessions.” Kautsky argued that the SDF’s sectarian character toward the trade unions made it impossible to create any working-class party. Without their support as “schools of socialism,” any socialist party in England was doomed to be either a small propaganda circle or a sect. As we’ve sadly seen, this was a correct assessment. According to him, only when the LRC was formed did a mass party arise that could lead to the organisation of the proletariat as a class. Kautsky argued that the organisation of an independent mass and class party is insufficient, and raising the workers’ awareness using Marxist theory was also important. Kautsky made the very “Leninist” case that the conditions in England made it necessary for Marxists to form a separate, solidly Marxist organisation. It is unavoidable “in a country where the trade unions form the Labour Party, at least so long as this party does not accept a Social-Democratic programme and has not yet developed a permanent Social-Democratic policy” to merge into a single organisation.
Collins argues that Kautsky blurred the political differences between Marxism and the Labour Party by asserting they were complementary organs. I believe Collins is misreading Kautsky’s argument. Kautsky was correct that merging Marxist theory with a mass working-class party is necessary. In principle, Kautsky’s right, but as Collins points out, the Labour Party in 1908 had no organised branch structure, individual membership, or any control over its elected officials. It was not, as Kautsky thought, an independent mass party; it was, as Collins concludes, an “undemocratic bloc between the ILP, the Fabians and the trade union bureaucracy”5.
The Great Labour Unrest
These were the years of waves of industrial disputes with Britain on the verge of a general strike. But the labour movement bureaucracy again failed to take up the ruling class by the throat. The 1913 TUC Congress refused to support industrial action in solidarity with striking Dublin workers. Both the TUC leadership and the Labour Party were committed to ensuring the stability of the present capitalist order. Not all would take such an opportunistic stance. The SDF would again call for unity with the ILP and any Fabian committed to industrial action.
In a conference in Salford, they announced the founding of another socialist organisation: the British Socialist Party (BSP). While it aspired to be a competitor to the ILP, it was wrecked by internal disputes around industrial unionism and the usual machinations of Hyndman and his supporters. Its failure would again revive the old question of “socialist unity”, with the leaders of the Second International wanting the BSP to steer towards the Labour Party. A meeting before the December plenary of the ISB decided that the BSP would join the Labour Party and that the BSP, ILP and the Fabians would create their own United Socialist Council.
Not all BSP members agreed with the decision to join, with a number of them splitting and joining the Socialist Labour Party, which saw itself as a committed revolutionary party. The SLP drew a sharp and sometimes sectarian line of separation between themselves, the Labour Party and the trade unions. It did not see the need for an open political struggle, opting to engage in economistic trade unionism and open hostility to every other organisation (a practice now elevated to dogma by most contemporary British socialist groups). The SLP and the sects of its time believed winning the workers to socialism was a matter of being educated about it and then voting for socialism in parliament.
The “Bolshevik” strategy of winning over the working class by merging socialist theory and practice with the worker movement by engaging in social, industrial and electoral struggles as “tribunes of the people” was nowhere to be seen6. Another left current emerged in 1913, with Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) breaking away from the WPSU led by her mother and sister. While the WPSU leadership slowly became hostile to the British labour movement and more sympathetic to middle-class women, the ELFS continued to move leftward under the impact of the great unrest and the rising working-class struggles.
During The Great War
The British declaration of war with Germany was responded to by thousands of socialists and trade union members marching in Trafalgar Square. It would change both the left in Britain and the Second International. Regardless of the motions asserting the anti-militarism of the Second International passed in 1907, 1910 and 1912, the vast majority of the Second International leadership openly scabbed on their members and either voted for or refused to vote against war credits for their respective bourgeois governments. Britain’s anti-war sentiment quickly evaporated into nationalism and jingoism.
Regardless, some sections of the working class refused to kowtow to the rampant nationalism, which gave some socialists a base. While the Parliamentary Labour Party would declare an industrial and electoral truce and support the war effort, the ILP would oppose the war on a pacifist basis and be seen as the only significant party that opposed the war. To no one’s particular surprise, the BSP, under the august leadership of Hyndman, would come in favour of the war. Another victim of the war fever within the socialist left was the SLP. While it would polemicise with the ILP and Labour Party on their inability to prevent the war, it said nothing against it.
The Anti-War Left
This opportunism led to the rise of anti-war socialist currents within and outside the SLP and BSP. An opposition within the BSP led by Fairchild and Fineberg succeeded by 1915 in winning support for the Zimmerwald conference. By 1916, Hyndman and his supporters left the BSP and founded the National Socialist Party. Meanwhile, Sylvia Pankhursts’ East London Federation of Suffragettes took a centrist position by opposing the war. Instead of capitalising on the situation from an anti-war perspective, they focused on improving the working class’ living conditions in Britain during the war.
Collins argues that only two faces of the left in Britain would consistently oppose the war: James Connolly and John Maclean. By the end of 1914, Connolly would turn his Marxist politics towards Irish socialist republicanism, and Maclean would take his anti-war socialist stance to his hometown of Glasgow. Maclean would win most of the Glasgow branch of the BSP against the war and launch Vanguard, an anti-war newspaper that would remain consistently internationalist. John Maclean’s firebrand anti-war stance would not go unnoticed by the claws of the British state. Vanguard would be banned alongside other socialist publications critical of the war, and Maclean would be arrested and condemned to three years of penal servitude.
The Easter Rising
The Easter Rising in Ireland would again showcase the clashing perspectives of the left in Britain. The failure of the left in Britain to oppose their government in 1914 was repeated in their response to the Easter Rising. The ILP and BSP would condemn it with the SLP, besides one odd mention in their party organ would make no references to Ireland even after their founder James Connolly was executed. The SLP’s dogmatic insistence on “workplace struggles” would mean it would again take an economistic position. Only Sylvia Pankhurst’s ELFS would openly side with the Rising. It would take pressure from the Comintern in 1920 for the left in Britain to start evaluating its chauvinism and support Irish liberation.
The Russian Revolution and the Left in Britain
An outpouring of support from various sections of the left in Britain would meet the Russian Revolution. For the comrades fighting against the war effort and industrial disputes, the freedoms now gained by the Russian workers were a beacon of inspiration. Combined with the fact that British forces could not make a breakthrough in the war, this led to an increasing lack of confidence in the British Government. Throughout 1917, strikes increased, and with it, the influence of the shop stewards movement also increased.
The Shop Stewards and Workers’ Committee Movement (SWCM) would bring working-class militants such as Arthur MacManus, J.T. Murphy and George Peet, who would later join the CPGB. The prominent leader of the SWCM, J.T. Murphy, would be won to revolutionary syndicalism and publish the famous pamphlet The Workers’ Committee. The pamphlet envisages organisational forms resembling Soviets, except Murphy argues against the committees having any governing power. In the meantime, the growing demand for peace within the British working class would present the revolutionary anti-war left with the chance to win their class to their programme. The SWCM would make no statement on the war—J.T Murphy himself would actively go against any mention in their platform—until 1918. Others on the left in Britain would meet at Leeds in June 1917 to call for peace and, under the United Socialist Council, openly support the Russian Revolution and oppose the war.
While the Leeds Convention would make several resolutions against the war and government repression, even calling delegates to form “Councils of Workmen and Soldier’s Delegates” to coordinate the labour movement, not much would be carried out in practice. The ILP leadership controlled the convention, and their promises quickly evaporated; the convention’s purpose was fulfilled for them, and the rising labour movement again lost its steam.
The Labour Party’s response to the Russian Revolution quickly showed its class character to anyone with functioning eyes. The leadership, fearing a revolution in Britain, reformed the party into a bulwark against any revolutionary influence on the labour movement. The infamous “clause four socialism” of the new constitution was designed to stop the revolutionary spirit of Bolsheviks from reaching the British working class. The party would be restructured as a national membership-based organisation and would quickly attempt to attract more middle-class supporters, especially from the declining Liberal Party.
In contrast with the Labour Party, the organisations to its left would quickly identify with the Russian Revolution. While the SLP would side with the Bolsheviks from the beginning of the revolution, the BSP would support the Mensheviks until it became clear that the Bolsheviks were the hegemonic force in Russia. The Pankhursts’ WSF would follow a similar trajectory to the BSP until they would become stalwart defenders of the Bolsheviks. The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks would become a fundamental division and point of departure between the revolutionaries and reformists of post-war Britain.
Power to the Working Class
By 1918, the German war effort collapsed from the direct impact of the Russian Revolution; the British government was now fearing a “Bolshevik infection”. More strikes would occur that year in Britain than any other year since 1891 except 1913. With the release of the secret treaties of the Allies by the Bolsheviks, the calls for peace became more popular among the working class. For the first time in history, the working class would take political power in a state, exploding all war-time social tensions. Belfast and Glasgow would be engulfed with strikes.
The militancy of the Clyde would not go unnoticed by the British government, who would arrest strike committee members and unleash the police towards demonstrators during what became known as “Black Friday”. The left in Britain also recognised the Clyde militancy, with the BSP trying to funnel the militant industrial energy to “capture” Glasgow’s parliamentary scene. Mutinies in the army would also damage the reputation of the British State and its patriotism.
In January, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) leaders would meet with the government after their conference approved strike action. The government would go so far as to threaten civil war, and in April, the MFGB would accept the government’s pay offer and postpone the strike. This would be one of many attempts of the British state to weaken the strength of any industrial militancy. Alongside strikes within the army and industry, police officers would go on strike for not receiving adequate compensation when they went on strikebreaking. While the general response of the working class was opposition to any support for the police strikes, the BSP would continually support them alongside the WSF, with only the SLP refusing to offer their support to the disaffected arms of the British State.
By 1919, the British State would slowly recover its authority, meaning it would start taking back the concessions of previous years. The WSF would be the only section of the left in Britain which would begin grasping that the role of the trade union leadership and their lack of militant leadership was tied to their class interests. Both the leadership of the Labour Party and the trade unions would prefer demobilising the British workers rather than organising any confrontation with the British state. This struggle to provide a political alternative would continue, and the question of how the left should engage with the Labour Party and the trade unions would be at the heart of the discussion to found the CPGB in the coming year. A large part of the left in Britain would keep an ambiguous position on both Labour and trade unions, which Collins argues would foreshadow the CPGB’s position. It wasn’t just this that the left in Britain would have to struggle with, but the deep racism engrained in British society, which exploded during the war effort. Anti-black racism would dominate discussions on immigration, and attacks on migrant labourers would go unanswered by most of the left, with the notable exception of Claude McKay7.
Neither the stance of most of the left regarding British imperialism & colonialism, especially regarding Ireland, would be less chauvinistic. Collins argues the problem facing the British workers was one of politics, not of organisations “of which there was plenty”. However, there is an argument to be made that the plentiful of small sects could not offer correct politics no matter how they tried. Only by merging into a mass communist formation such as the CPGB would they, to a degree, cast off most of their sectarian and chauvinistic dead-ends.
Building the Communist Party of Great Britain
Within weeks of the October Revolution, sections of the left in Britain formed the People’s Russian Information Bureau to defend Soviet Russia against British intervention. This united group unavoidably raised the question of permanent unity within a mass organisation based on the lessons of the Bolsheviks, with the BSP and ILP reviving the United Socialist Council (USC). The WSF would also be approached while itself would move more and more to the left, with its leader Sylvia Pankhurst becoming resolutely “anti-parliamentarian”. In June 1919, the WSF withdrew all its members from the Labour Party and adopted the name “Communist Party”. Taking the opposite course, the BSP, with its right wing seeing the Labour Party as the vehicle of socialism, would grow closer to it, leading to 13 members running as Labour candidates. The SLP would make some electoral interventions with its leader, J.T. Murphy, trying to investigate the political lessons of the October Revolution and its implications to the traditional strategic conceptions of British Marxists, such as their separation of industrial and political struggles. The SLP would take the initiative to discuss a united party with the BSP and ILP and suspend their constitution to remove any barriers to further unity discussions.
The creation of the Communist International (Comintern) would accelerate the desire to build a new party in Britain. Five groups from Britain were invited to the Comintern’s founding congress, among them BSP and SLP; surprisingly, the WSF was missing. The report from that congress would fundamentally alter British politics. It underlined the need for a united revolutionary party that would break from any social imperialists or centrist supporters of the war. This would lead to the fracturing of the BSP, casting out its reformist members. The path seemed clear: BSP, SLP, and WSF were now committed revolutionary organisations on the path to forming a united communist party. The only obstacles were the questions of electoral activity and Labour Party affiliation. With the WSF, the only group disagreeing with standing in elections, admitting they would not make this issue a barrier to unity, the only question – which would haunt the CPGB – was whether the new party would affiliate with the Labour Party.
The tiny South Wales Socialist Society would also join the unification talks, which unsurprisingly would stall due to the BSP refusing to abandon Labour Party affiliation as a principle. The SLP would also face a major crisis when the negotiating team was denounced for “compromising” with the BSP and undermining the organisation’s principles. The SLP executive would repudiate them and organise a referendum for the membership: are they in favour of forming a united communist party? And if they are, are they in favour of Labour Party affiliation? The membership would vote in favour of unification but against affiliation. From that point onwards, the SLP would withdraw from negotiations. The SLP leadership was determined to unite with the BSP only on its terms. Only a small group of their expelled members, the Communist Unity Group (CUG), would continue the talks based on unification without affiliation.
The convening of the Amsterdam Bureau, composed of parties sympathetic to the Comintern, would cause further problems with the unification. The Bureau released a statement urging no affiliation to the Labour Party and attacked the BSP for their stance. Along with other of its resolutions, it put it at odds with the Comintern leadership, the Bureau being closer to the ultra-leftist Die Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (KAPD) who hold on to sectarian lines regarding both trade union work, electoralism and any united front with the Second International. The Comintern would dissolve the bureau, on the one hand, giving an “endorsement” to the BSP’s stance on affiliation, but on the other, the damage was already done; the Amsterdam bureau’s opposition to Labour Party affiliation gave the appearance of a Comintern stamp of approval to the WSF’s anti-parliamentarism.
It would take direct intervention by the Comintern to persuade the British groups that their differences could be contained with a single Communist Party8. The BSP and GUG would lead a call for a conference, founding this new party in London on 1st August 1920. The WSF, fearing its minority status in the new congress, stalled and announced their “Communist Revolutionary Conference” on 19th June. Primarily unaffiliated communist groups would attend the conference and would see the WSF dubbed itself the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) based on non-affiliation to the Labour Party and anti-parliamentarism.
The Second Congress of the Comintern
The second congress of the Comintern would establish its political principles in an attempt to split politically and organisationally from the scab leadership of the Second International9. Ten British representatives would travel to the congress. While the WSF had already decided to build their British communist party, the BSP would write to Lenin to ask his views on the issues differentiating them from the WSF: participation in elections and Labour Party affiliations. Lenin replied in favour of both, only if (and with the benefit of hindsight, it was a big if) that communists would be “free and independent” within the Labour Party. As a good disciple of Kautsky, Lenin would make the same mistake and completely misunderstand both the structure and purpose of the Labour Party. However, for Lenin, the growth of loyalty by the labour movement to the Labour Party would allow revolutionaries to expose their words compared to their deeds. Instead of the BSP’s attempt to move Labour leftwards, Lenin favoured affiliation only to discredit it.
The congress delegates would, in the end, vote in favour of affiliation. Collins argues that what was missing from the entire discussion was what communists should have done once they joined the Labour Party. The lack of consideration of the practical implications of affiliation allowed the BSP to claim Lenin’s “approval”. While this obscured the difference between Lenin and the BSP, the discussion on British imperialism quickly exposed the BSP’s chauvinism and consistent failure to agitate against the British Empire. Although the Second Congress managed to unite the British groups, Collins argues that the British delegates understood little of the Congress’s implications for their politics.
The Birth of the CPGB
On 31 July, 152 delegates from BSP, CUG, and other smaller organisations met in the largest gathering of communists in Britain. Collins argues that the new CPGB was nothing more than an enlarged BSP from the beginning. The BSP’s newspaper would be renamed The Communist but retain most of its structure, and the Unity Convention’s discussion would also echo the BSP’s conferences with their abstract proceduralism. Both BSP and the CUG favoured standing parliamentary candidates to drive revolutionary politics into the heart of the British state. The debate on parliamentary elections would nevertheless show the gulf between some convention delegates and the Comintern, with some disagreeing that in the case of a Communist candidate winning their election, they would be direct representatives of the CPGB and its mandate and not their constituency.
The discussion on Labour Party affiliation would end after four hours with only a slight majority in favour of affiliation. If the SLP or WSF were present, they could gather a clear majority in the CPGB against affiliation. Some delegates walked away from the discussion because they disagreed with the affiliation, which Collins argues exhibits the unwillingness of the left in Britain to be in a minority position within the Communist Party. The CPGB would start their first political act with a letter requesting affiliation to the Labour Party.
Collins’ most extensive critique was that the CPGB would remain incapable of challenging the Labour Party’s politics. Labour would reject its application for affiliation, setting the CPGB’s stance towards the Labour Party for the rest of the decade. Instead of thoroughly critiquing Labourism, the CPGB would present itself as just a more consistent version of Labour’s politics. The idea that the CPGB was just a more consistent Labour Party rather than an actual political alternative would be a staple of its leadership’s position. This public grovelling over the Labour Party was not the only problem. The decision to affiliate was only achieved by the BSP compromising with the CUG that their application would be sent in a way that ensured its rejection by Labour. This would prefigure a split in the party of a BSP-adjacent wing and a CUG-adjacent wing, both carrying the full-timers of their pre-unity eras, something that would give a material basis to an internal full-timer “Game of Thrones” that would further inhibit the CPGB’s future trajectory.
With the CPGB officially founded, the next step for the Comintern was uniting the other supporters of the Third International within the same party. The Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) passed a resolution urging various communist groups to organise a congress to unite. Pankhurst’s BSTI supported the ECCI resolution, hoping to become a left-wing faction within the CPGB. Soon, the BSTI, alongside the CPGB, the Communist Labour Party and the National Shop Stewards and Workers’ Committee, would meet to start planning the unification congress. In January 1921, they met in Leeds. The congress’s focus was to unify these groups and not to discuss the current worker movement in Britain or any issues of strategy and tactics.
The CPGB in post-war Britain
Soon, the new CPGB would already show fissures and weakness when it had to deal with the ongoing miners’ struggle against government cuts. Collins argues the CPGB’s inability to understand the interests of the labour movement bureaucracy –as with the Labour Party previously– would mean their critique was solely to treat them as well-intentioned but astray. The crucial difference between the CPGB and the Labour Party, which had no aspiration to fight for the conquest of state power by the working class, would not be challenged. The burden of dealing with the CPGB’s failings in the current class struggle in Britain, alongside its fumbles about British Imperialism, fell to the Comintern. Collins argues, contrary to Walter Kendall, that the Comintern was not a malign influence on the young CPGB but a significant influence on correcting the party’s stances on racism and colonialism.
Soon, many founding members would leave the party, allowing middle-class radicals to fill the gap. Pankhurst would be expelled for refusing to relinquish her dictatorial control over the Worker’s Dreadnought and, after an ultra-left turn, fade out of communist politics. Of the BSP members who joined the CPGB central committee, only Albert Inkpin would remain after 1922. This didn’t mean that the BSP’s political influence would wane. With no left-wing presence in the CPGB to oppose the position of the BSP on the Labour Party affiliation meant the continuation of BSP politics by the CPGB. By the Third Congress of the Comintern, this position would be reinforced by the theses on the United Front. This continuation of BSP politics is the main critique Collins levies in this book. The CPGB’s stance on presenting itself as a more consistent version of the trade union leadership and the Labour Party would slowly collapse after the 1926 General Strike and the Comintern’s Third Period.
Nevertheless, the revolutionary left would slowly collapse after the General Strike; no pre-war strategies, or lack thereof, could offer much. The working class could not seize specific industries and take control of the economy, nor could it passively educate itself until it became disillusioned with the Labour Party. For Collins, the 1920s in Europe and Britain show the importance of conquering state power.
Conclusion
Whatever its weaknesses, the CPGB stood alone as a revolutionary organisation that survived the maelstrom of post-war Britain, albeit frail, confused and forever weakened by its inheritance from its BSP parents. (pg. 224)
Tony Collins provided us with a historical overview of the tumultuous history of the left in Britain until the formation of the CPGB, always putting the primacy of politics and the subjective decisions of the participants at the forefront. There is always a lesson to be learned from both the unity talks and the existence of the young CPGB in the 1920s. As Collins stresses, we must avoid fumbling on crucial questions such as the nature of the Labour Party and Labourism. We cannot pose ourselves as acceptable managers of capitalism but as its overthrowers.
This would also require looking without illusions at the history of the international communist movement and asking ourselves what kind of party we’re trying to build. This also means we cannot, like the young CPGB, fumble to address the chauvinism of present British society like the Young Chauvinist League and other sectors of the Left but ruthlessly expose it. It would also mean that the left must realise that today’s isolation is a barrier to unity. We cannot offer a political alternative while fractured into sectarian grouplets like the pre-CPGB era. We can meet our historic tasks only by talking to each other and uniting in a mass communist party with a shared political programme, taking the best and criticising the worst of the CPGB.
The founding of the CPGB was one of the greatest moments in the history of British Communism, with its destruction by its leadership in 1991, something the left in Britain has not recovered from. In its place, there are networks of “organisers” with their own delusions or petty sects ranging from a membership of one to a few thousand. We must do better, heed our past comrades’ calls, and unite if we ever want to salvage what’s left of the worker movement in Britain.
- 1 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_08_30.htm ↩︎
- The SDF’s defence of the Royal Navy, amongst other nationalist domestic policies, seems to repeat itself in a classic first as farce, second as tragedy fashion with the current WPB. ↩︎
- See Mike Taber’s Under the Socialist Banner for the resolutions of the Second International. ↩︎
- See Ben Lewis, ‘Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism’ for a more in-depth analysis of Kautsky’s views on parliamentarism and Millerand. ↩︎
- See the discussion by Eric Blanc: https://johnriddell.com/2016/05/24/party-class-and-marxism-did-kautsky-advocate-leninism/ and the response by Lars T. Lih: https://johnriddell.com/2016/05/28/lars-lih-responds-to-did-kautsky-advocate-leninism/ on Kautky’s “Sects or Class Parties”. ↩︎
- See The Ballot, the Streets—or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution by August H. Nimtz for the Bolshevik’s electoral strategy ↩︎
- See The Collected Articles of Claude McKay, Claude McKay (2022) ↩︎
- This is a lesson contemporary communists would refuse to acknowledge. ↩︎
- As Mike Macnair argues in Revolutionary Strategy, while the split at the time was justified, the Bolsheviks’ theorisation of it as a way to “purify” the communist movement from opportunism would be damaging to the history of the Comintern. ↩︎
