This article is an extended reprise of themes in a recent blog post (‘A short history of British partyism, 1980-2024’) with more historical context in terms of the trajectory of the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB, 1920-91) and the factions that have tried to claim its mantle. These articles start from the assumption that answering a question such as ‘what is a party?’ without a negative critique of predecessors is a) impossible b) foolhardy in the extreme or c) both previous options. I often have to put up with grumbling about such writings being overly pessimistic or negative. These are ideological responses making a cloaked demand that I give positive assent to groupuscules. In reality, everything in ‘positive’ existence that I have ever studied as a historian started as a negation, or mediation of something else. Any new Communist Party that we form in the future risks stupefying itself if it does not set out to be a conscious negation of everything that went before; a ruthless criticism of everything that exists.
The Communist Party of Great Britain
The CPGB formed in 1920 cannot be classed as a party in the sense of the German Social Democratic Party or the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. It did not command the allegiance of millions or come close to leading a British revolution; it was decidedly marginal. Yet, the organisation, right up until the 1980s, always contained an important ‘part’ of the advanced section of the working-class movement. If you travelled up and down Britain, even in the 1970s, you would find CPGB members as shop stewards, convenors, staffing local trades councils, as prominent community activists and, of course, leading trade unions. There was even a remnant of a communist vote in the party’s old heartlands in Scotland and South Wales.
I am not writing a eulogy: most members in the post-1945 period had wretched politics bordering on liquidationist and the CPGB’s actual infrastructure post-1956 was rickety at best (one veteran comrade in Wales described the party bureaucracy to me as turning a handle on a machine and expecting it to turn larger cogs; after a while you realised the handle was only turning fresh air). Nevertheless, the CPGB choked off so-called competitors on the far left. This was observed by many in the Maoist movement, which emerged from rebellions in the CPGB and its Young Communist League in the 1960s. These comrades saw how the CPGB was dug into the labour movement, making their alternative groups and ‘parties’ mere fringes of the fringe (much the same could be said of Trotskyist and Enverist fragments). It is noticeable that none of the far left has even come close to replicating the CPGB’s patchy networks across the British labour movement since the party’s 1991 demise.
The CPGB was a non-sect in the process of becoming part-sect. It could never quite escape the fact that, under the impact of the Russian Revolution and with the help of the Comintern, it represented a process of splits and fusions among the existing organisations of the British far left (not self-proclaiming itself ‘the party’ on the basis of one existing left splinter and a few gurus at the top as has been the case recently with the IMT’s Revolutionary Communist Party). The CPGB was more than a sum of its parts: the British Socialist Party, the Communist Unity Group of the Socialist Labour Party and the South Wales Socialist Society, and other local circles and factions. When the CPGB subsequently self-reflected on that process during various anniversaries, it always had to pay part-obeisance to this early 1920s fusion. While it could not disown this period entirely there were attempts to soften it as an exemplar for the future, reflecting the CPGB’s own decline into part-sect status. There was a general attempt by post-war CPGB ‘house’ historians such as James Klugmann and Noreen Branson to claim the contingent tactics of the 1930s popular front as the ‘real’ foundation period of the CPGB as against the so-called sectarian legacies of the 1920s (sectarian in this instance being code for class-war politics and principled communist unity).
This enterprise echoed what Robin Page Arnot had written of the CPGB foundation era in a Daily Workerseries of 1930, on the party’s 10-year anniversary1. Page Arnot claimed that the new body “was without programme, organisational principles or political line, other than that put forward in the general theses of the second congress of the Communist International”2. In other words, the new party and its federal composition, where comrades worked along the groove of their pre-1920 factional affiliations, was defective. Page Arnot looked instead to an alternative ‘real’ point of foundation: in this case the three-man commission (Harry Inkpin, Rajani Palme Dutt and Harry Pollitt) appointed by the Comintern in 1922 to overhaul the CPGB’s organisational shambles. Page Arnot wrote: “From this moment one can date the beginning of an upward movement of the party.”3 As his Daily Workerseries reached a crescendo it became even clearer that the author was enshrining the rise of the Dutt/Pollitt leadership faction as a critical point of departure: “… the 11th party congress [November 1929] was preceded by the first real discussion that had taken place in the party. But being the first discussion, it contained many defects.”4 Despite the critical attitude being shown, the implication is that the open debate around communist unity at the CPGB’s foundation was secondary.
This method of using imprints of the leadership faction (always bureaucratic-centralist and managerial in operation) and assorted contingencies to filter ideas around the CPGB’s foundation persisted. On the party’s 50-year anniversary while the Daily Workerreferred to the various factions that attended its birth (with a usual preference being shown towards the British Socialist Party element), the CPGB was presented as “Always a champion of the workers”5. (This idea, of the party as a ‘clearing house’ for campaigns and struggles, was also present in communist fiction that members produced in the 1950s and 1960s.) Such a sickly grind was a bolthole for the party’s damaged self-esteem after the crises of 1956 (the exposure of Stalin by Khrushchev; and the Soviet intervention into Hungary) made it clear that the CPGB, as it had developed to that point, was inoperable as a vehicle for proletarian revolution. The party thus needed (in propaganda terms, at least) to partially distance itself from the Soviet Union. In 1970, it wheeled out 93-year-old CPGB foundation member Bob Stewart to explain: “In a sense, the development of the party’s organisation was twofold. Much of it was based on British experience, but – with all of us 100 per cent behind the Russian Revolution – there was a tendency outside the party as well as inside, to follow Russian organisational methods without taking into account the differences in history and organisation between the two countries.”6 It doesn’t take too much to see that this is 1970 talking, not 1920, when it had become necessary for the leadership to conduct shadowy polemics against its pro-Soviet left. This inability to reflect upon the CPGB’s history without considering factional contingencies is the hallmark of a sect.
The CPGB’s trajectory
Up until 1929, the party, with its National Left-Wing Movement working in conjunction with the (relatively) mass circulation Sunday Worker newspaper and a programme under partial Erfurtian inspiration, was making an attempt to activate and process advanced workers in and around the Labour Party towards communism. This practice, which could at least conceptualise the unity in diversity that had attended the CPGB’s foundation, was always under threat and disappeared during the Comintern’s third period. In what became a default setting, pretty much until its liquidation in 1991, the CPGB instead sought to step around the advanced political workers clustered around the Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party and so on in order to appeal to the more immediate demands of the proletariat (or at least those immediate demands that communists imagined workers should make). The Daily Worker, an undoubted achievement of the 1930s, was thus always defective in a political sense. The semi-militarised CPGB, with ‘democratic centralism’ that was in fact an apologia for over-centralism and overseen by the Soviet Union, could never truly pose as a paragon of diversity or democracy in the labour movement; hence the need to bypass this with immediate appeals to the depoliticised mass of the working class. But consistently having to approach workers on the basis of immediacy, sometimes on the shopfloor, sometimes in the wider community, meant that the CPGB risked turning itself into a mere sect, unable to dislodge larger political battalions to its right.
By the 1940s and early 1950s, this immediacy did begin to develop some more sophisticated political trappings in the form of the British road to socialism (BRS) programme, which thrust aside the Erfurtian remnants that haunted the 1939 draft programme in favour of a left-wing ‘Labour government of a new type’ that would enjoy the comradely counsel of CPGB MPs and, in effect, ‘hidden’ communists among the Labour ranks. This summarised a whole period of activity in and around the Labour Party from the mid-1930s. Although the Soviet Union was not remotely interested in the British revolution, having Labour MPs voicing their sympathies towards Soviet foreign policy inside the belly of the beast was of some utility. The BRS, with its ludicrous flattery of British state loyalists inside Labour (left and right) was really a conceptualisation (crafty, within decided limits) of how marginal parties such as the CPGB could at least be of some use. But the foundations of the BRS, partially lodged inside post-1945 experience where there was a couple of open communist MPs, a larger group of ‘hidden’ communist MPs and Labour MPs moderately sympathetic to the Soviet cause in world politics, were destroyed following the 1950 general election after prime minister Clement Attlee had moved against his left and the CPGB was henceforth without any elected representation inside Parliament. The ‘new’ BRS was formally launched in 1951, at which point it was already a dead duck – the CPGB never came remotely close to re-establishing its small parliamentary influence over the labour movement (although it had trade union strength and influence until the 1980s).
The party’s leadership clung onto the BRS as a sect ornament by which it could at least imagine how the party might be useful to the world communist movement in the future, thus preserving its own small power as a miniature bureaucracy. This was offset by the appearance in the post-war period of various left-oppositional factions inside the CPGB. These combined pro-Soviet politics (or pro-China for some in the 1960s) with varying degrees of dissatisfaction with the party’s British strategy; sometimes expressed in forms of workerism and economism; sometimes in more precise revolutionary critiques of the BRS and a ‘parliamentary road’. The leadership faction, as a little Bonaparte, was quite prepared to enlist the support of its left until the late 1950s against right-liquidationist currents (EP Thompson’s Reasoner group, for example). But, by the 1970s, a patchwork of left factions and local groupings had started to develop alternative structures and lines of command. This, and the complete failure of the BRS strategy, pushed the CPGB into overt crisis and the leadership faction into the arms of a small Eurocommunist circle, which took over parts of the bureaucracy, started to expel the left and liquidate any remaining party élan.
The CPGB can thus be seen as the negation of the process of communist unity that birthed it. Rather, its factions, from the late 1920s, focused on particular tactical junctures and sect understandings as the true, innate reflection of partyness rather than the universal march of dissension, discord and unity that the CPGB’s history shows. This took on bizarre forms with the spectacle of post-war inner-party factions denying, in the name of Leninism, that they were factions and decrying factionalism as an unnecessary evil. Trying to avoid a process of political dissent and clarity by a direct appeal to people’s hunger (i.e. immediate demands) was no advance. British workers, in the main, did not vote for communist MPs or prime ministers because the party was seen to be an ally of a ‘foreign’ power. The CPGB’s advance was always mediated by more complex political ideas and the party ducked out of any ‘hearts and minds’ or ‘good news’ dialogue with workers early on because it knew that the appetite for its actual political ideas and anti-democratic practice was minimal. People were more prepared to vote for communists as trade union leaders and, at times, councillors, when the immediacy of bread-and-butter was firmly in play. But even the CPGB’s well-known trade union leaders got nowhere near winning parliamentary contests. They may have been admired on the shopfloor but workers did not trust them as ultimate leaders; precisely because that ‘hearts-and-minds’ dialogue, an outgrowth of diversity generated by critique and a profusion of ideas in the germinal stage of party development (among advanced workers and small circles à la 1920) was abandoned.
The Pretenders
We do not have a Communist Party anymore. There are no true heirs to the empty throne of our dismantled queen but that does not mean her disinherited and deluded successors can simply be ignored. An alternative would be to go direct to the class as a whole: another quick route to sect immolation and amateur micro-groups. To begin with, we have to explore those factions that claim the mantle of the old CPGB. The title ‘Communist Party’ is a claim on a healthier form of class organisation, of incorporating the advanced section of the proletariat, and all such claims need to be judged in the merciless court of reason. As we shall see, the errors of these pretenders are flaws of the deceased party, played out in miniature.
IMT / Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP): playing dress-up
The new RCP has had a brief dalliance with some of the symbols of the old CPGB while explicitly not copying the actual process of communist unity at its 1920 foundation. As time has gone on it has become clear that the old RCP, a useless confessional sect of the 1940s, is the actual source of inspiration. Indeed, the RCP, at leadership level, ignores the rest of the left apart from invective aimed at the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain (CPB), which clearly had some impact on the RCP through the part-successes of the Young Communist League (YCL) a few years ago.
The young rank-and-file comrades of the RCP, which is a student group, are generally comradely to other leftists on an informal basis. But this is the old Ted Grant/Socialist Appeal faction that was turfed out of Militant, wearing new ‘Communist Party’ robes to catch a small tide of activists tuned into Leninism. It is easy to see how the RCP will repeat the problems of the old CPGB at a micro-level; there is no way that a faction that insists on such a particular lineage of history and theory is going to triumph and lead millions towards revolution.
Children who try on their parents’ clothes look ridiculous, as has the RCP at times when it has garlanded itself with majestic ‘Communist Party’ garb. But even as they look ridiculous, projecting yourself into the future and seeing something else in the looking glass has human potential. The medium-term bet is that the RCP will crash badly when it cannot expand beyond the low thousands and any fall-out will not be easy to contain given this sect’s notorious denial of open factions and bureaucratic-centralism.
Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGB-ML): gay abandon
I can understand why comrades may be throwing up their hands in horror at this point. The CPGB-ML (run by the Brar family dynasty on strictly North Korean lines) does claim to be the true inheritor of the old CPGB but does so alongside a set of abhorrent social attitudes: its transphobia is essentially the homophobia of founder members in the Maoist movement of the 1960s, transplanted into the modern era (historian Max Elbaum has also traced the origins of this ‘masculine’ culture in the US New Communist Movement).
However, the CPGB-ML is a fairly bog-standard far-left sect in most respects. It takes a contingent, tactical, point in history – in this case Maoist criticism of Khrushchev and the Chinese regime’s veneration of Stalin in the 1960s – and uses it as the basis of a venomous sect identity to exclude others. This is a normal trajectory on the far left, whether the groups are transphobic or not. Most other communists are denounced by the CPGB-ML as ‘Trotskyites’. It critiques the Morning Star’s CPB, occasionally incorporating ultra-left ideas from the Comintern’s third period (i.e. the CPGB-ML never advocates voting Labour). This period is of course ‘safe’ for the CPGB-ML given that Stalin oversaw it.
The family faction’s channelling of CPGB heritage runs on exactly the same lines as the old party: the history of the CPGB has to be dismembered to forget the process of communist unity in the early 1920s; and anything post-Stalin is similarly burnt in the memory hole. And do not ever mention that the great revolutionary leader Stalin was in fact a notorious revisionist who sponsored the reformist and pro-Labour BRS inside the CPGB – naughty!
The other major factor that the CPGB-ML shares with the old CPGB and other far-left sects is the practice of trying to outmanoeuvre rivals by going straight to the working class with low-level politics – hence its work alongside Galloway to establish the nationalist Workers Party of Britain, which left our erstwhile revolutionaries fronting rightist law-and-order campaigns. The main factor underpinning the apparently wacky pro-Stalin CPGB-ML is a distinct whiff of the mundane.
The Communist Party of Britain (CPB): micro-nostalgia
The CPB faction, alongside its YCL, has recently shown signs of life. Some of this is about the dynamics of a post-Corbyn left where the CPB has picked up young people who, back in 2017, would have been pulled into the Labour Party. Attempts by the YCL to re-adopt a more formal communist identity (the hammer and sickle, using Stalin as a symbol of anti-capitalism and so on) are undoubtedly a crude attempt to critique the innate reformism of the CPB.
However, recent appearances of the YCL on London pro-Palestine demos suggest the comrades have started to become incorporated into the turgid politics of their CPB parents. The more militant communist appearance of the Covid years seems to have been diluted. CPB leaders such as Rob Griffiths (in his recent The gleam of socialism book) insist that there will be no change to the faction’s strategic goal of a ‘Labour government of a new type’ (i.e., a left-wing Labour administration assisted by the CPB). This despite the Corbyn debacle proving that the Labour left has an umbilical cord to the pro-British state Labour right and the CPB’s utterly marginal status – workers do not view it as the CP like they did the old CPGB. It is thus doubtful whether we could even class the CPB as pro-party Menshevik in the sense that it poses no alternative to Labour’s state-loyalism such as that found in the Erfurt-type programmes that even the official CPGB was espousing (in mutilated form) in 1939.
Instead, the CPB is micro-nostalgia for the ‘British road’ era of the CPGB led by John Gollan in the late 1950s and 1960s (which, remember, had strategic goals that were a dead letter as early as 1950). The CPB only makes a set of very incoherent noises about the CPGB in the 1920s and sees the foundation party as sectarian and unfit for purpose. The Morning Star is retained in the limp form that grey expired editor Tony Chater cast in the 1980s when he stole it away from the CPGB: a ‘broad labour movement daily’ that is liquidationist in the very worst sense. The old CPGB left rightly excoriated the party leadership for the ‘revisionist’ name change from Daily Worker to Morning Star in 1966. It is highly instructive that the CPB has never dreamt of changing it back.
The CPB, like the RCP, is very much a disaster waiting to happen given its members have been enthusiastically sold the idea of massive growth and it has some newer cadres who seem to care about the faction in a way that the elderly membership never did in the 1990s. Always a problem when someone cares about you.
The CPGB-PCC: Jack and the mean talk
The youthful Leninist faction of the CPGB (hot-housed under the influence of Rıza Yürükoğlu’s faction in the Communist Party of Turkey) did have the beginnings of a decent strategy in that it took on Lenin’s tactic of appealing to pro-party Mensheviks in the cause of struggling against liquidationist tendencies. Alone among the groups discussed here, The Leninist/CPGB-PCC faction does have a formally enthusiastic attitude to the process of communist unity that attended the old CPGB’s formation. It also argues, on paper at least, for the Communist Party of the future to have the right to form open factions.
Unfortunately, The Leninist had the devil’s own job in the 1980s CPGB to identify precisely whom its pro-party Menshevik constituency might be. Added to this, The Leninist was a miniscule grouplet that often only had single-figure membership; it was unpopular in CPGB circles due to its leaders having split as part of the New Communist Party (NCP) in 1977; and had alienated a key part of its target audience among Morning Star supporters by having voted for Eurocommunists when the struggle for control of the paper was underway. It took the name ‘CPGB’ when the official party was liquidated but little else – the ex-Leninist faction with a slightly broader base of supporters. Although the personnel have changed, the years haven’t been kind and I doubt whether it now has more than 15 paying members.
The decidedly amateur CPGB-PCC has never pretended to be the party but, on the other hand, struggles to identify itself as a faction. “Proto-party” (proto in the Greek sense of first, foremost) is its latest sectarian formulation that speaks to its sense of entitlement among other communists, where unity amounts to ‘join us then’. (In fact, there has been some realisation inside the faction recently that this wheeze has left it isolated among pro-party comrades. Some of its rank-and-file members have been openly critical of the blunt methods the leadership has used to engage other forces.)
Despite having moved on from the old CPGB in some of its ideas, much of the sectarian/managerialist crap has survived and prospered. Jack Conrad has been the general secretary of the group and the de facto editor of its various journals for around 44 years without rotation, let or hindrance. He learnt his trade inside the old CPGB, the NCP and under Yürükoğlu (a domineering and difficult comrade who could not cope with any independence shown by The Leninist). The Weekly Workerand faction statements are generally treated in a proprietary manner by Conrad who finds it difficult to accept internal criticism from his own members. This leadership style was learnt in the 1960s and 1970s and, despite formal freedoms inside the CPGB-PCC, people who fall out with the comrade, personally or politically, are marginalised or pushed out. Conrad abuses a recommended list for the leadership to ensure it remains a body with which he is entirely comfortable7. When I was a supporter I queried why an undynamic comrade who continually slept through meetings was on the recommended list – “because he’s the comrade that’s closest to Conrad” was the answer that came back.
The CPGB-PCC was launched in the early 1990s accompanied by Leninist ideas around a vanguard of professional revolutionaries (misinterpreted from Lenin’s original understanding of revolutionaries skilled at their work) and the combat party. It is unclear how far these ideas have been eroded given that the idea of the combat party still exists in Conrad’s draft programme. What we are left with is a transient and unstable mixture where many of these ideas have been heavily debunked in articles by Mike Macnair and Lars T Lih; the faction has gone through deadening spells of non-combat; but yet, Conrad, the unprofessional ‘professional revolutionary’ par excellence has more control than ever. But a state of suspended animation, as existed in the old CPGB with its rotating handle often turning air, can be just as useful as hyper-activity to innate managerialism.
The Weekly Worker faction also shares a vice with the old CPGB and others in periodically trying to bypass far-left rivals. It tried it in 1992-93 when it attempted to target what it called “advanced workers” during the fall-out from the Major government’s decision to close mines. There was a sectarian attempt to project itself as a national party and, if you read carefully, a certain rhetorical slippage into calling itself the party and the CPGB (which exists to this day; members often refer to themselves in shorthand as “CPGB”). The faction got extraordinarily little from this gambit apart from blisters. Similarly, during the Corbyn era in the Labour Party, the CPGB-PCC ran its own cloistered and sectarian front, Labour Party Marxists (formally in existence since late 2011 but you could not join unless you were a CPGB-PCC member; even close sympathisers were excluded). Other Marxists inside the Labour Party were bypassed as the faction attempted to take a shortcut to the Corbynistas. Again, the CPGB-PCC got precious close to zero from this venture bar an internal conflict that rumbles on to this day. Such escapades are the classic hallmark of a sect – and the Weekly Worker faction is exactly that. Needless to say, any attempt to critique the internal culture of the group is arrogantly classed by faction leaders as sub-political, as if it had no relevance to the wider world. Who would ever dream that organisational matters have something to do with politics?
Down with factional patriotism!
The eternal symmetry of inner-factional heteronomy bleeding into feeble sect plans for outer conquest relies upon a certain acquiescence of an endlessly put-upon membership. Comrades who doze in meetings do have a certain utility. Bureaucratic centralism happens because those led let it happen. There are material factors at play. Most comrades on the left have to rely on wage labour under capitalism to survive. Full-time work on the far left is not viewed positively by prospective bourgeois employers. Factions have to rely upon a small caste of bureaucrats to ensure the most basic of tasks are conducted. Over time, say 44 years, those leaders begin to look upon the faction as private property. Even in the face of widespread evidence that such sects are undemocratic, the membership tends to turn a blind eye. This is fake-picture syndrome. The more you invest in a dodgy Rembrandt the less likely you are to question its provenance or authenticity. Comrades who invest large parts of their lives in far-left groups are similarly disinclined to ask questions. The solution is not ‘everyone leave your faction now’. Rather, the phenomenon of sect patriotism needs to be torn out at the roots; the whole grim parlance of ‘my sect is less flawed than yours’. When comrades begin to look on all that surrounds them with a thoroughly disenchanted eye, the real work can begin.
References
- The series appeared between 6-12 August 1930. ↩︎
- Daily Worker 7 August 1930. ↩︎
- ibid ↩︎
- Daily Worker 12 August 1930. Pollitt became CPGB general secretary in 1929; he relied heavily on Palme Dutt and Salme Pekkala-Dutt for political guidance in the 1920s and 1930s. ↩︎
- Daily Worker 1 August 1970. ↩︎
- ibid ↩︎
- I am not against recommended lists in principle. ↩︎
