19.10.2017
Party’s Sunday best
The Sunday Worker reached a circulation of 100,000. And, far from shunning argument, it encouraged different leftwing viewpoints, says Lawrence Parker
The Sunday Worker was launched in March 1925.1 It was the initiative of the Communist Party of Great Britain and was designed to play a role in the organisation and education of leftwing workers active in a number of labour-movement spheres: in the Labour Party; the trade unions; trades councils; the Independent Labour Party (ILP); cooperative societies; the National Council of Labour Colleges; the Plebs League; the Minority Movement; and the CPGB itself.2
The Sunday Worker’s first editor was CPGB member William Paul - although Andrew Rothstein was responsible for the party’s editorial and political control over Paul’s role. Walter Holmes took over the editorship in 1928. The paper received a subsidy from the Comintern amounting to £20,000.3 There seems to be a general consensus from sources that the circulation of the Sunday Worker was around the 80,000-100,000 mark - giving it an influence way beyond the ranks of the CPGB. Its editorial board did include non-communists, although its key placeholders were CPGB members.
There is also an idea that the Sunday Worker was, in EH Carr’s phrase, “not a party journal”4 or, in the words of one more recent account, a paper with a “broad left outlook and content”,5 which are problematic ideas, given the circumstances. Certainly it was ‘broad’ in terms of its readership, but this whole jargon of ‘broadness’ rests on somewhat sectarian conceptions of what ‘Communist Party’ means. The obverse of defining the paper as ‘broad’ is the idea that the CPGB itself was intended to be narrow and exclusive, a so-called ‘party of a new type’. That should not be surprising, as this bifurcation and flip-flopping around the twin poles of ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ has been a major feature of the Comintern-influenced left in the 20th and 21st century, and is still a major organiser of ideas around its history.
However, it might be useful to pose another idea about the Sunday Worker - that it was a CPGB partyist paper: ie, it was looking to engage with the ideas and personalities informing the mass movement in an attempt to shape them in a communist direction. (I am using partyist in the positive sense of a partisan attempt by a political party to interact with and influence a much broader mass.) In other words, the CPGB had its own designs on becoming ‘broad’ in the sense of building a mass party. How successful it was in this is, of course, a moot point. On the whole, the difficult history of the communist-led organisation that arose from the CPGB’s attempt to organise the left in the Labour Party - the National Left Wing Movement (NLWM) - would tend to suggest that the ultimate outcome was not a happy one. Nevertheless, the beginnings of the Sunday Worker and the NLWM, and the ideas of the CPGB about these forces, cannot be understood without this - relatively healthy - partyist framework.
Stuart King, writing from a Trotskyist perspective, says of the Sunday Worker: “While participation in such a venture would not have been of itself opportunist, had the CP (which had its own independent press as well) put clearly its own positions and its differences and criticisms of the ‘lefts’. This was not to be the case.”6
The historian, Kevin Morgan, largely concurs with this view. He quotes from the CPGB’s editorial guidelines for the Sunday Worker, which suggested that, although the “maximum freedom” was to be accorded to non-communist members of the left wing in writing for the paper, opportunist ideas that were “particularly dangerous” were to be corrected through symposiums, editorial notes and leading articles.7 Morgan argues that Sunday Worker contributors from the wider left “were not in practice subjected to symposia or disclaimers and were not likely to have carried on contributing if they had been”.8
Divisions
The evidence does not sustain these opinions. The paper’s CPGB correspondents were certainly critical of other ‘lefts’ in the pages of the Sunday Worker. This was Harry Pollitt after the Labour Party’s Liverpool conference of October 1925, where it was resolved to exclude communists from individual membership:
The left wing of the Labour Party were scared stiff and allowed [Labour leader Ramsay] MacDonald to ride roughshod over them … Not a single leftwinger in the executive committee dared to burn his boats and warn the ‘hero worshippers’ where MacDonaldism was leading to.9
Pollitt’s article featured alongside a more positive review of the conference by Morgan Jones MP10 and another by George Lansbury MP.11 Lansbury, who had initially welcomed the appearance of the Sunday Worker,12 complained:
The attacks on MacDonald and others produced such a reaction in favour of the executive that even reasonable criticism had no chance. The communists were defeated partly for the above reason, but mainly because of the statements repeatedly made that the British section is disciplined and receives its orders from Moscow.13
Clearly, the Sunday Worker symposium was offering up a debate around the Liverpool conference and illustrating the difference between Pollitt’s militancy and Lansbury’s more cautious approach to the Labour leadership.
After the Liverpool conference, Frank Horrabin of the Plebs League, wrote in to the Sunday Worker to complain that, by daring to remain as members of the Labour Party, the CPGB was compelling its “fellow members of the Labour Party (who also have a party discipline to observe) to expel them, by refusing to give up their membership of the Communist Party”.14 He added: “They have no right to throw the onus on taking action in regard to the expulsion decision on their leftwing comrades inside the Labour Party.”15 Unsurprisingly, Pollitt gave a forthright reply:
[Horrabin] knows (none better) what a dismal failure some of the most vocal of leftwingers made at Liverpool, and he wants to relieve the leftwingers in the local Labour parties - not of voting for the exclusion of their comrades in the Communist Party … but of fighting the reactionary policy of the Labour Party executive committee. I tell comrade Horrabin straight that without the Communist Party there cannot be any organised left wing inside the Labour Party.16
There were also divisions on display when the Sunday Worker inaugurated a meeting at the end of 1925 to discuss the future of leftwing organisation, which proposed a resolution based around a set of five principles for “all who serve the working class in its fight against the capitalist class”.17 The report added:
[Raymond] Postgate18 said he thought it was very unwise to try and pass the resolution, and urged that only a general discussion should take place. He was supported in this by Frank Horrabin and two members of parliament, who argued that a left wing [that] included communists would not be very successful.19
One of these Labour MPs may have been AA Purcell,20 also a TUC general council member and Sunday Worker supporter, who, from an amalgamation of separate accounts from December 1925, was said to have made the “most savage and vindictive attack” on the CPGB. He was reported as stating that “he and [George] Hicks21 could not countenance any split in the Labour Party” and that the “communists could do nothing but disrupt and make trouble”.22
There then followed a fractious dispute with a group that was perceived to be around Lansbury’s Labour Weekly, which was accused of convening its own leftwing meeting “in dead secret, excluding even communists with whom they had worked for two years”.23 In the following month, an article in Lansbury’s Labour Weekly suggested that it saw negotiations with the CPGB over the future organisation of the left wing coming to an end: “It is, then, in our view, quite useless and misguided to base leftwing policy or organisation on the idea of armed revolution, or indeed on any question of method or tactics.”24
Notwithstanding this political spat in late 1925/early 1926, Lansbury received a medal for his work with International Class War Prisoners’ Aid in March 1926 from CPGB member Marjorie Pollitt.25 The MP also remained a prominent supporter of the Soviet Union. The CPGB’s attitude to Lansbury - subject to further criticism in the Sunday Worker after failing to take any place in the fledgling NLWM to fight the expulsion of communists26 - seems principled enough in this instance.
Therefore, Trotskyists and academics are hampered by a severe lack of imagination on the issue of opportunism towards the broader left wing. One suspects that they genuinely cannot see any other alternative to either a CPGB frantically bowing and scraping before Labour left luminaries; or pedantically going through and adding editorial rejoinders to every single ‘false’ leftwing idea that appeared in the Sunday Worker. This says everything about the historical experience of the British (and international) workers’ movement, which has often been unable to offer any alternative to an endless dichotomy of ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’, and almost nothing about the Sunday Worker.
Opportunism
However, there was certainly a movement into some bouts of opportunism by the Sunday Worker in its early years. After the public falling-out with Lansbury and company, it was becoming clear that a future Labour left organisation with CPGB involvement would exclude some of the self-defined Labour left, who were unwilling to stand against the expulsion of communists and uphold basic revolutionary demands, such as the arming of the working class. There was a palpable sense of disappointment among some of the paper’s readers.
Thus Robert Moores, secretary of the Manchester Plebs League, wrote: “The active rank and filers, who, after all, are the left wing, are becoming more and more confused by the wrangling of those who ought to be the most united in the struggle.”27 WM Crick, president of Rusholme Labour Party, said:
It is only a few months since Lansbury and William Paul spoke together here … and we all looked forward to these two comrades standing side by side in a joint struggle to help to save the Labour Party from the liberal virus [that] was so plainly revealed at Liverpool.28
This type of thinking was abroad in the labour movement in 1925. In November, Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson said: “Just think of the effect if the whole Labour Party machine and press, reinforced by the ILP and the New Leader, Lansbury’s Weekly and the Sunday Worker … could all join in one campaign for ‘socialism in our time. Down with reaction. End the capitalist system’.”29
The Sunday Worker, in contradiction to the overall refusal of the CPGB to back down on issues of principle with other leftwingers, began to emote some of this opportunist sentiment:
The Sunday Worker does not voice the views of any political organisation. It stands above cliques. It seeks to serve the thousands in our movement, to be found in nearly every Labour organisation, who are eager to fight capitalism and its lackeys.30
But it would have been intensely difficult to stand above cliques, when some left cliques were effectively threatening the future existence of the CPGB in the Labour Party by refusing to actively stay the expulsions initiated by the Labour leadership in 1925. The article added: “… we emphatically declare that [the left] cannot hope to have a real discussion by representative leftwing leaders by excluding communists and such important militants as AJ Cook and company.”31
But then the obverse was also true. It would have been very difficult for the CPGB to have meaningful discussions with those willing to countenance the expulsion of communists from the Labour Party. Discussing the debate with Horrabin mentioned earlier, the article continued:
… cannot Frank Horrabin find something better to do with his sword than to turn it against those who are near to him in the movement? … While the enemy is pressing hard and threatens to engulf us all, he chooses that moment to force forward a quarrel with those who are his own comrades.32
This has the implication that the CPGB should have dropped its differences with Horrabin in the cause of unity, which, in the circumstances of Horrabin being unwilling to help its members against a witch-hunt, would have seemed an unlikely outcome. With the benefit of hindsight, this period was signalling that what was to become the NLWM was going to be a relatively narrower body, as against the ‘all-inclusive’ rhetoric on display here. But, importantly, this sentiment was a partial result of a process of debate and clarification around whether the Labour left should be passive or combative in relation to the bureaucracy’s offensive.
Not that this ‘all-inclusive’ line was preserved in isolation. In the same period, Paul was outlining a much tougher line on elements of the left wing and a more plausible account of the process the CPGB and the Sunday Worker had just gone through with the Labour left. In a Labour Monthly article from February 1926 he argued:
… the propertied interests always demand good value for their money. They knew that a leftwing movement was bound to come into existence and they were determined to kill it at birth by smothering it as a ‘red’ menace. So successful were they in creating this psychological atmosphere that when attempts were made, last year, to build up an organised militant movement, many leaders who thought themselves leftwingers got cold feet and ran away from it as something that had been specially concocted by the communists.33
In terms of Labour leftwing MPs, Paul continued:
The leftwing parliamentarians are not afraid to use bold phrases in the constituencies when they are amongst the rank and file. But they are not prepared to organise the rank and filers and give them a socialist policy.34
He concluded that an organised leftwing movement could “expect little help from the ‘ginger group’ in the House of Commons”.35 Rather, it was deemed that the “only organised group” that opposed MacDonaldism in 1924-25 was a “small band of communists, who fought very bravely to bring the Labour Party back to its Labour principles”.36 Paul had reached a sobering set of conclusions regarding the emerging NLWM. The CPGB had not united the whole of the self-defined left wing in the labour movement; nor did it look likely to. There is little sense here of ‘left’ Labour MPs and trade union leaders needing to be gently coaxed back onto the path of righteousness.
Clear conception
We have knocked down the idea that the CPGB controllers of the Sunday Worker did not criticise its contributors and combat ideas that it felt were particularly harmful to the leftwing movement as a whole. But it is true that the CPGB did offer a space for the views of other leftwing figures beyond its ranks and did not feel the need to constantly add editorial rejoinders on every single article. Leaving aside the fact that this would have been a perfectly ridiculous and untenable publishing operation, and that it had been a conscious decision to offer ‘maximum freedom’ to non-CPGB leftwingers, the publishers of the Sunday Worker had a relatively clear conception of what the paper was trying to achieve from the outset.
First, it set out a path of travel:
The Sunday Worker will be (if it realises its ambition) an organ of the left wing of the labour movement. [The left wing] is not an organisation. It has, at present, neither programme nor clear objective.37
This sense of transition is important to understanding how the paper intended to treat its intakes from across the left wing:
The Sunday Worker aims at presenting the varied data of the workers’ struggle so fully and clearly (circumstances considered) that we not only express the left wing, but aid it to consolidate itself - and in so doing the workers’ struggle as a whole.38
This process of clarification would then “aid in the formulation of a programme and a policy, upon which the left wing can concentrate and unite”.39 This sheds a rather different light on the Sunday Worker’s willingness to publish intakes from across the left wing, even from those to its political right, this being, as stated above, “the varied data of the workers’ struggle” that needed expressing “fully and clearly”.40 However, this was not treated as the end of a process, but as the start of one.
This political approach from the Sunday Worker team was not an aberration on its part. Other CPGB writers of the same period showed this same commitment to the notion of a process of clarification and strengthening in regards to the left wing. For example, ‘Vanguard’ wrote in Communist Review in December 1925:
We have learned to smile a little cynically at the person who says, ‘I am just a leftwinger’, because too often we have found that to be a cloak for indefiniteness, for opportunism, if not for sheer cowardice. The term ‘left wing’, as we are to understand it in the future, must admit of no vagueness in its meaning. It must stand for clearly stated aims and for organisation to secure those aims.41
Neither was the editorial approach of the Sunday Worker necessarily at odds with that of other papers across the British labour movement. Lansbury’s Labour Weekly was launched in the same period as the Sunday Worker. In the first issue, Lansbury himself set out its editorial policy: a mixture of unsigned articles, for which Lansbury would deem himself responsible; and signed articles from various writers, “for which they alone will be responsible”.42 He added: “Within very wide limits we shall endeavour to give all sides a show.”43 This reads like an echo of the Sunday Worker’s editorial stance - albeit one strung around a vague notion of fair play rather than any particular project of political clarification.
Nevertheless, this relative openness was carried through into future editions, with a number of CPGB members writing for the journal and advertisements for communist publications, as well as portraits of Russian revolutionary leaders, appearing fairly liberally. Postgate repeated the complaints that Lansbury had made over the CPGB’s ‘conduct’ at the 1925 Liverpool Labour conference, stating that the “communist method … scared off and angered the delegates”.44 However, there was no editorial attempt to make it appear that the CPGB was ‘beyond the pale’ in terms of the labour movement. A week after Postgate’s intervention, an editorial in Lansbury’s Labour Weekly read: “At the present moment the Communist Party is the butt of police attention, and internal disagreements must wait. The need for a common working class front comes first.”45
Hamilton Fyfe, then editor of the Daily Herald (a paper previously associated with Lansbury, but in 1925 under the auspices of the TUC), offered up a critique of a homogenous political culture in an interview with the fledgling Sunday Worker (albeit with what one suspects as a none-too-subtle dig at the CPGB):
It is true that you can always find a public for a journal filled with a pure gospel. Flat-earthers, Seventh-Day Adventists, British Israelites and so on exist who delight to read week after week just what they believed before, without stint or stay, modification or subtraction.46
The attempt by the CPGB to use the Sunday Worker in the partyist manner that we have sketched out above, to promote open debate and clarification in the cause of ideologically arming a broader mass of leftwing workers, was a fragile exercise. We have already seen how his process was not a fixed one and drifted briefly rightwards under the pressure from leftwing workers in the Labour Party for a more broad-based unity than the CPGB was ultimately able to offer. However, to reduce this (and the opportunism that the CPGB exhibited in the 1926 General Strike) to a generalised ‘right opportunism’, for example, is to concentrate on appearance and to neglect essence.
Comintern
The main root for the CPGB’s oscillation between ‘right’ and ‘left’ was the hyper-centralised conception of the party regime in the infamous ‘21 conditions’ agreed at the Comintern’s Second Congress in 1920, which meant that the early CPGB eschewed positive conceptions of factionalism and was unable to formally concede notions of ‘unity in diversity’. When it took this culture into the broader labour movement, opportunist adaptations and subsequent tacking to the left blighted the work of CPGB members. In other words, organisations that could not maintain ‘unity in diversity’ internally were very unlikely to be able to maintain it externally in the form of united fronts and vice versa.
With this in mind and considering the further regimentation that the process of so-called ‘Bolshevisation’ involved in the mid-1920s, it would seem counter-intuitive to suggest, as I am doing here, that ‘unity in diversity’ in a public form had been, to some extent, accomplished by the CPGB in the form of the Sunday Worker. However, such contradictions are the outward forms of a lacuna in Bolshevisation itself.
The fifth plenum of the enlarged executive committee of the Communist International in March-April 1925 produced a set of theses on the issue of Bolshevisation that significantly amplified the terms of the 21 conditions:
Bolsheviks … must realise that the civil war cannot be fought, political power conquered, or the proletarian dictatorship maintained and strengthened, without the strictest internal discipline founded on ideological unanimity; without this the civil war is doomed in advance to failure.47
It was this aspiration to “unanimity” that the CPGB took into elements of its work in the NLWM. The CPGB’s fraction working in the Holborn (London) Labour Party recorded the following in early 1926:
Arising from the reports of January meetings, at one of which a comrade disregarded the lead of the steering committee, and at another of which CPers opposed the view put forward by a CP spokesman on the Peace Letter campaign, the following resolution was agreed to:‘Each member of the communist fraction in the HLP must consider it a part of party discipline to keep a united front in the discussion arising at a mixed meeting of the HLP. If an individual member of the communist fraction differs in any point on matters of policy, that member should not split the communist front at the mixed meeting, but should reserve the difference for discussion at the next fraction meeting.’48
This seems a long way from the “iron discipline” of Bolshevisation, but does suggest the CPGB’s intentions towards its work in the movement. This tendency to close party ranks even in discussions is only too likely to spread into opportunistically closing ranks with those in the wider movement, in turn spawning sectarian responses from others in the party. Such happenings are part of the essential ‘laws of motion’ of the Comintern-inspired left.
The “ideological unanimity” that was presumably the aim of the CPGB’s involvement in episodes such as the campaign against ‘Trotskyism’ was thus being offset in more practical arenas. However, this longing was partly undercut in the very same April 1925 Comintern resolution on Bolshevisation:
The forms of internal party organisation are subordinate to the overriding interests of the struggle for the proletarian dictatorship. But in all circumstances the Communist Party must preserve a certain freedom of criticism within the party, a spirit of equality among the party members …49
This “certain freedom of criticism” was clearly present in the CPGB of the 1920s, where you could often read about the CPGB’s internal differences in its various open journals and, although this was less present in weekly papers such as Workers’ Weekly and Workers’ Life, you can occasionally see reports there of inner-party meetings and political differences being referred to. There was then a degree of ‘unity in diversity’ inside the CPGB that was communicated in a relatively open fashion, and that probably translated into the pages of the Sunday Worker and the interaction with the left of the Labour Party.
Contradiction
However, there was a bigger contradiction lurking in Bolshevisation than we have uncovered thus far. To even consider ideological unanimity is the hallmark of a sect, but Bolshevisation did not have a set of communist sects as its aim:
A Bolshevik is, above all, a man of the masses. The slogan of the third world [Comintern] congress [1921], ‘to the masses’, remains in full force. Far from removing this slogan from the order of the day, the fifth world congress [1924] gave it a deeper and broader meaning.50
Even with the judgement that the turn to ‘socialism in one country’ had started to pull the Comintern away from its original revolutionary aims in favour of being a diplomatic adjunct of the Soviet Union, there would have been little point in establishing small sects. As Carr put it, “… when the policy [in 1925] of Comintern was at all costs not to lose touch with the masses … the policy of the Soviet government demanded the support of a maximum number of sympathisers in important capitalist countries.”51
However, Carr, I think, is mistaken when he suggested that following this line of reasoning had the result that:
… these policies could be effective only if a certain appeasement of the right was practised in the communist parties concerned. This in turn provoked uneasiness and dissent on the left wing of the party, resulting in the phenomenon of ultra-left deviations …52
But this phenomenon, which Carr has correctly sketched in appearance, was not at all episodical, as far as the Comintern was concerned. Rather it was cast into its fundamental precepts, as we have argued above.
Similarly, the debate inside the CPGB that attended the aftermath of the first Labour government was shot through with the idea of mass politics. In a riposte to Rajani Palme Dutt, JT Murphy argued:
Comrade Dutt sees the Labour Party from the newspapers as one reading from afar and impatiently dismisses the Labour Party as finished and calls up the only hope - a mass Communist Party; forgetting entirely that the Labour Party is a mass movement of which we are a part, in spite of the efforts to crush us as a party.53
What Murphy is describing here is precisely a situation of ‘unity in diversity’ and this, in fact, was the only real way to conceive of a genuine attempt at a mass CPGB, as opposed to “ideological unanimity” and militarised “iron discipline” - the flip-side of the Bolshevisation coin. Therefore, when we look back on the early days of the Sunday Worker - as the CPGB sought to start organising the left wing of the Labour Party, and to politically and programmatically clarify it after a process of open debate - this was not a mere aberration. It was in tune with the CPGB’s political conceptions; it reflected the practice of other constituent parts of the British labour movement’s press; it fed off the relative political openness shown in the rest of the CPGB’s publications; and it drew upon some of the contradictions inherent in Bolshevisation: notably its aspiration to mass parties and mass politics.
It certainly was an episodical occurrence, cutting against the grain of the CPGB’s more generalised oscillation between right opportunism and left sectarianism. However, the appearance of the Sunday Worker was a relatively healthy episode in the tortured history of communist politics in Britain and its attempts to relate to the mass labour movement.
Notes
1. A version of this paper was given at the CPGB’s 2017 Communist University.
2.‘The “left wing” and the Sunday Worker’ - Sunday Worker March 15 1925.
3.K Morgan Labour legends and Russian gold: Bolshevism and the British left part one, London 2006, p117.
4. EH Carr Socialism in one country 1924-1926 Vol 3 Harmondsworth 1972, p354.
5. R Griffiths and B Stevenson The Communist Party 1920-2010: 90 years of struggle for the working class and humanity Croydon 2010, p5.
6. Retrieved from www.fifthinternational.org/content/communists-and-labour-party-expelling-left-wing-%E2%80%93-lessons-1920s.
7. K Morgan op cit p117.
8. Ibid p118.
9. H Pollitt, ‘“Liberal” conference’ Sunday Worker October 4 1925.
10. Jones (1885-1939) was Labour MP for Caerphilly, 1921-39.
11. Lansbury had been Labour mayor of Poplar from 1921 and was imprisoned for contempt of court along with 29 other councillors in the Poplar ‘rates revolt’. He became Labour MP for Bow and Bromley, 1922-40. Lansbury also served as the leader of the Labour Party, 1932-35.
12. ‘Greetings from George Lansbury’ Sunday Worker March 15 1925.
13. ‘What Liverpool means’ Sunday Worker October 4 1925.
14. Sunday Worker October 18 1925.
15. Ibid.
16; H Pollitt, ‘After Liverpool’ Sunday Worker October 25 1925.
17. ‘Our left wing meeting’Sunday Worker December 20 1925.
18. Postgate (1896-1971) was then on the staff of Lansbury’s Labour Weekly.
19. ‘Our left wing meeting’ Sunday Worker December 20 1925.
20. Purcell (1872-1935) became president of the TUC in 1924.
21. Hicks (1879-1954) was general secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers, 1921-41; TUC president, 1927-28; and Labour MP for Woolwich East, 1931-50. He was an early supporter of the Sunday Worker.
22. Cited in K Morgan Bolshevism, syndicalism and the general strike: the lost internationalist world of AA Purcell London 2013, p72.
23. ‘Left wing problems’ Sunday Worker December 20 1925.
24. ‘What is the left wing?’ Lansbury’s Labour Weekly January 9 1926.
25. R Postgate, ‘At the Albert Hall’ Lansbury’s Labour Weekly March 13 1926.
26. See ‘Towards a fighting left wing’ Sunday Worker June 27 1926.
27. Sunday Worker January 17 1926.
28. Sunday Worker December 27 1925.
29. E Wilkinson, ‘The left wing group’ Lansbury’s Labour Weekly November 28 1925.
30. ‘We stand for an all-inclusive left wing’ Sunday Worker January 10 1926.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. William Paul, ‘The left wing’ Labour Monthly February 1926.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. ‘The “left wing” and the Sunday Worker’ - Sunday Worker March 15 1925.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. ‘And now to action a leftwing policy’ Communist Review December 1925 (my emphasis).
42. G Lansbury. ‘What we stand for’ Lansbury’s Labour Weekly February 28 1925.
43. Ibid.
44. R Postgate, ‘Left-wing “unity”’ Lansbury’s Labour Weekly October 17 1925.
45. Lansbury’s Labour Weekly October 24 1925.
46. Sunday Worker May 3 1925.
47. ‘Extracts from the theses on the Bolshevisation of communist parties adopted at the fifth ECCI plenum’ in J Degras (ed)The Communist International 1919-1943 documents Vol 2 (1923-28), Oxford 1956, p198.
48. Minutes of CPGB Holborn Labour Party fraction, February 3 1926, Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library.
49. J Degras (ed) op cit p198.
50. Ibid p192.
51; EH Carr op cit p317.
52. Ibid.
53. JT Murphy, ‘How a mass Communist Party will come in Britain’ The Communist International (no date, but probably March 1925). Original emphasis.