04.07.1996

Habits of thought

From the Workers’ Weekly, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, June 25 1926

“The Russians who direct the Communist International are grotesquely ignorant of British habits of thought ... The communist organisations in this country draw their ideas as well as most of their funds from Russia ... merely mouthpieces of other people’s views... We shall work out our own evolution in our own way.”

The above quotations contain the Daily Herald’s attempt to draw conclusions from the Communist papers issued by the government. “British habits of thought.” Two generations ago the prevailing habit of thought amongst the British workers was that socialism was a new form of lunacy, that trade unions were all right for skilled workers, but a Labour Party was quite unnecessary, as the Liberal Party could do all that was required.

Now we have a mass Labour Party and trade union movement and have just had a great General Strike which would have been held to be impossible a few years ago.

The British habits of thought are changing with the class struggle. They are changing in a communist direction, but the poor Herald, like the Liberal-Labour trade unionists of the 80s and 90s of last century, imagines that its ephemeral prejudices are permanent “British habits of thought”.

True - the Communist Party has taken ideas from the Communist International. We have also given ideas to it, and our ideas are based upon developing British conditions.

“More power to the General Council”, the Workers’ Alliance, factory committees, a workers’ defence corps, the propaganda of the General Strike. These are ideas of value to the workers in their struggle in Great Britain. Are they opposed to “British habits of thought”? And is the rightwing harmony between capital and labour and a Liberal-Labour alliance a “British habit of though”?

We won’t work out our evolution in our own way. We can’t. We can only work it out in accordance with the developing class struggle. If in that struggle the capitalists use force, then the workers will either have to use force or submit.

We believe that they will have learned sufficient in the struggle beforehand (we hope to help them to do so) to ignore [Daily Herald editor] Mr Hamilton Fyfe’s British habits of thought and adopt, say, the late Mr Cromwell’s “British habit of action”.