29.03.2000

Debating CPGB history

Phil Watson calls for a dialectical approach in assessing the Party's relationship with the USSR

The history of the Communist Party of Great Britain has over recent years become distinctly fashionable. This is partly a reflection of the fact that the Communist Party's archive is now housed at the National Museum of Labour History in Manchester, being freely available to the general public. Some researchers have also been able to gain access to Comintern archives in the Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of the Documents of Contemporary History following the collapse of the USSR in 1991 (although their current availability is restricted due to financial and political strains). The materials have thus become obtainable for a fundamental reconstruction of the CPGB's pre-1991 existence which has of course led to a distinct momentum in terms of research proposals and the scholarships available to fund such study.

Once bourgeois thinkers were more or less obliged to provide spine-chilling tales of cold war dread (Henry Pelling's 1958 The British Communist Party: a historical profile being a pertinent originator). Nowadays, as far as the bourgeoisie are concerned, communism in the British Isles is a dead duck, and by that token a reasonably safe topic for honest investigation. The obvious lack of live engagement with the subject matter can be the source of oddly stilted accounts of Party life (Phil Cohen's Children of the revolution for example - see my review in Weekly Worker May 7 1998). So our current societal impasse allows intellectuals to engage in a much more objective dialogue with the empirical evidence.

The question I have posed in the past relates to the theoretical direction of this output. It perhaps goes without saying that we are still waiting for a credible Marxist intervention. In the past the CPGB had been crudely portrayed as a mere slave of Moscow, helpless in the face of Comintern manipulation (ultimately stemming from the artful dodger himself, Joseph Stalin). The reaction to this started in the 1960s and in many ways still continues, as historians have sought to "delve into the communities and workshops in which communists endeavoured to serve 'the cause'" (M Worley 'Histories of the CPGB' Historical Materialism No4, p256). What has emerged is a much more sophisticated picture of the Party, as scholars have considered how the international loyalties of the CPGB were refracted through the realities of the British class struggle (excellent examples of this approach can be read in Kevin Morgan's Harry Pollitt and Nina Fishman's The British Communist Party and the trade unions, 1933-45).

Trotskyite accounts have in the past merely tended to buttress the extremes of cold war ideology (CPGB= Moscow=Stalin). Therefore we can concur with Matthew Worley's argument that such works have "generally sought political advantage rather than historical integrity, and suffered as a consequence". With this in mind we can consider the Trotskyite journal Revolutionary History which in general has built itself a deserved reputation for historical scholarship. When, however, the various contributors turn their attention to the CPGB, the lumbering beast of dogma emerges in all its not-so-intricate glory. These strands were memorably condensed in Al Richardson's suggestion that the Communist Party had a record of "standing to attention every time someone broke wind in the Kremlin" (Revolutionary History Vol 5, No2, p151). I can only wonder why portraits of Harry Pollitt fail to feature the huge wad of nasal hair that obviously eroded his sense of smell after the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in 1939.

But even Revolutionary History cannot remain unaffected by the sheer weight of historical evidence whirling around its collective head. Hats off then to the SWP's Ian Birchall, who correctly notes in a review of Pierre Broué's recent Histoire de l'Internationale Communiste that "the various Stalinist parties retained sufficient roots in their national labour movements for them subsequently to develop into variants of social democracy" (Revolutionary History Vol 7, No2, p266). Not that Birchall's more qualified observations have become anything like the norm in the Revolutionary History universe. The same issue of the journal features reviews by Paul Flewers (on Noreen Branson's History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1941-51) and Ron Heisler (on Alison Macleod's The death of Uncle Joe) which offer the reader a rather more familiar spin of point scoring and vindictiveness.

One would not wish to suggest that Trotskyite 'histories' of the CPGB largely fall down just because of their never ending inability to engage empirical evidence. The problems go rather deeper: into a thoroughly defective use of Marxism in appropriating the world. It will be remembered that in Capital Marx shows how the money form establishes its abstract universality over society, gutting the sensuous processes of work and production of their humanity. I would contend that Trotskyite and bourgeois historians extend this alienation into their own intellectual formations by their pig-headed insistence that because the CPGB and other national parties were dominated by Moscow, that is all we really need to know about them (one sometimes wonders why such writers don't just offer up the Short course as the definitive work on the Comintern). In reality all that is being set up is another abstract universal. If the working class merely limits its horizons to the distribution of the money form, its understanding of capitalism becomes thoroughly shallow and disorientated. The same thing happens when this method is transposed onto our understanding of the international communist movement. Such an epistemology can only do justice to the reality of the CPGB in the most alienated of senses.

Why this is so can be illustrated using historical examples. Take the 'third period'. In Al Richardson's review of Willie Thompson's The good old cause, its author is criticised for arguing that Wal Hannington, then leader of the National Unemployed Workers Movement, survived a leadership purge at the CPGB's 1929 congress due to his popularity. Richardson preferred the contention that, "It was a recognised tactic of the Comintern during the 'third period' to use the unemployed to attack the trade unions" (Richardson op cit p150). Now in a partial sense Richardson is of course correct. However, by denying Hannington's undoubted status as the organic, militant leader of a dynamic class movement in the cause of making the NUWM the mere crutch of Soviet diplomacy, Richardson simply cannot account for its impact in an era of mass unemployment. Clearly, the British state wasted its time regularly whacking Hannington and thousands of other unemployed workers around the head with police truncheons.

Another foundation of the 'orthodox' view on the CPGB concerns its shift from the 'third period' to the popular front in the mid-1930s, this being seen as a fairly classic case of the subordination of the Party to the diplomatic needs of 'socialism in one country'. Leaving aside for one moment the fact that the pressure for a moderated perspective did not just emanate from the ranks of the Comintern and Soviet leadership, we can certainly agree, but again only in a limited sense. If the intellectual dynamics of popular frontism are investigated concretely we can see that it actually opened up space for a partial critique of Soviet-inspired dogma. This was of course an unintended consequence, but then history very rarely works itself along the smooth linearity of Trotskyite lore.

To understand this a little better we have to comprehend the nature of the evolving Stalinist regime in the 1930s. The introduction of the five-year plans had led the Soviet economy into a voluntaristic cul-de-sac whereby the democratic input of the working class was circumvented in favour of the arbitrary impulses of the bureaucracy. Use values became subordinated to plan values, the objective problems of the economy becoming increasingly exacerbated in the process. This extreme voluntarism was codified into the intellectual spheres, the natural sciences and art becoming prey to the whims of official propaganda. Despite its opportunistic direction, popular frontism represented a partial pull in the opposite direction, in that parties such as the CPGB were forced to engage with British political and social realities in the cause of forming broad alliances against 'reactionary monopoly capitalism'.

How then has the 'revisionist' viewpoint shaped up in offering us a rounded picture of the CPGB? Just like the hapless Trotskyite/cold war caricature that proceeded it, the emphasis on 'what the comrades did on the ground' has given way to a further reaction, or what Andrew Thorpe has termed the 'post-revisionist' school: "This approach rejects the view that communists were marionettes being manipulated by a Kremlin puppet-master, but argues that it is equally unrealistic to see communists as acting totally within the context of their own labour movements, utterly unaffected by the Comintern and the leaders of their national parties" (A Thorpe, 'Comintern "control" of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920-43' English Historical Review June 1998, pp638-639).

Disappointing then that Matthew Worley in a recent overview of contemporary CPGB research and literature in Historical Materialism proves to be so uncritical of the 'revisionist' school. This is partly a reflection of the parameters Worley sets himself. After noting the concerns raised by Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson in 1969 and 1981 respectively, that previous research on the CPGB had been from an unduly 'top-down' perspective, Worley stresses that his article "is an attempt to assess whether more recent investigations into the myriad totality of British communism appease the very cogent concerns raised by Hobsbawm and Anderson, and whether our understanding of communism in Britain has been extended as a result" (Worley op cit p243). There is a definite problem here, in that a critical mind would certainly see the arguments of Hobsbawm and Anderson as worthy of exploration and therefore welcome the growth of a broader scholarship on the CPGB. Whether we would wish to simply "appease" that standpoint by accepting it as a boundary on debate is another matter entirely. Rather a Marxist would seek to interrogate the intellectual foundations of the 'revisionist' school and judge whether they are "cogent concerns" or not.

This then is the background to 'local' studies of the CPGB in the recent period and as such is not one that Marxists can afford to be neutral towards. Just as the Trotskyites present their own one-sided, alienated picture of national communist parties, so it is that purely regionalised narratives represent the same problem of disembodiment, but from a different angle, as indeed (non-Marxist) historians such as Andrew Thorpe have recognised.

It is also necessary to remark that nowhere in Worley's essay does he give us any materials for judging the qualitative direction of the CPGB's politics (a similar criticism could be made of Thorpe) in the inter-war period. Worley gives us a fairly good idea of why he should seek to avoid this when he reasons that recent additions to CPGB historiography have allowed the Party "to at last gain the historical recognition that its dedicated membership struggled so hard to deserve" (Worley op cit p244). Unfortunately such an approach leads its author into a partial hagiography of the Party. Certainly we should be wary of feeble Trotskyite attempts to damn with hellfire everything and anything the CPGB sought to achieve in the British labour movement. But on the other hand we cannot avoid making judgements on the Party's past.

After all, the CPGB was founded to further the cause of working class revolution, but by 1951 was espousing an openly reformist, social democratic programme, The British road to socialism. Any serious history of the CPGB in this period should attempt to trace this development, seeing how the international tactics of the Comintern interacted with the concrete practice of Party militants. If this is ignored then we either attempt to treat the history of the CPGB as one big ahistorical lump, or we are simply unable to explain why the Comintern was liquidated in 1943 or why the Party became transformed into a pro-Labour ginger-group after World War II. Unfortunately, much of the newer historiography is uninterested in tracing the nature of these qualitative shifts, so Worley's 'critical' survey is not much help in this regard.

These impressions become further concretised when we read Worley skidding disastrously down the 'revisionist', localist school in the context of venturing an opinion of the work of Andrew Thorpe. Worley sees Thorpe concluding that "while the CPGB saw itself as a loyal section of the Comintern, it was largely master of its own fate" (ibid p249). Now, as we have seen above, Thorpe is a little more circumspect in steering a course through the Trotskyite/revisionist polarity, but even so he does perhaps provide a few bullets for the likes of Worley when he argues of Comintern 'control' that "Democratic centralism became weaker the further it had to stretch ..." (Thorpe op cit p662).

Thorpe also leaves the door ajar for such perceptions by nature of a rather stodgy ending to his piece when he notes that the "Comintern was clearly not irrelevant to the British Communist Party", whilst stressing the limited nature of this 'control' and the importance of other lines of command between the CPGB's leadership and the militants on the ground (ibid). Now all of these conclusions are quite worthy ones for a historian to be making. The problem is that they are presented in a relatively disconnected manner, something which allows the likes of Worley to stroll along and pick out the 'localist' bits they find most appealing.

The alternative is to present the interaction of the Comintern and the CPGB in a dialectical sense, whereby the power of the CPSU is simultaneously transcended and preserved in the application of tactics to the British class struggle. Such a methodological tool can be used by the historian to circumvent the sterile antinomies that pervade the debate between the Trotskyites and the 'revisionists'. This is not merely an abstract philosophical point: it can be illustrated by making reference to the practice of the CPGB inside the trade union movement, which offers us a concrete case with which to examine the mediation of the Comintern's developing centrism.

The reality of the CPGB's history is that it had a syndicalist/economist trend present from 1920 onwards, Comintern/CPSU shifts notwithstanding. This was particularly apparent in south Wales. Arthur Horner stubbornly recounted in 1960 that "my political philosophy has always been based on the power of organised workers at the point of production. It still is" (my emphasis, A Horner Incorrigible rebel London 1960, p45). Therefore the early work of the CPGB in heartland areas such as south Wales was predominantly concerned with the building up the strength of the South Wales Miners Federation (and its concurrent unofficial movement) so that the power of the owners could be steadily eroded. Mike Woodhouse - one of few Trotskyite authors worth reading on the subject - argued that in "this context the need for a strongly centralised unofficial movement, closely linked to the overall political strategy of the CPGB, seemed very remote" (M Woodhouse and B Pearce A history of communism in Britain London 1995, p69).

This was the situation that Comintern emissaries such as Borodin found in the early 1920s. The foundation of the National Minority Movement in 1923-24 can be seen therefore as an attempt to root out such syndicalism, by linking such rank and file bodies to the political strategy and growth of the fledgling CPGB. What can be concluded is that Comintern and the CPGB never succeeded in breaking the grip of economism amongst the Party's trade union militants.

Indeed it was Harry Pollitt who chose to lean on this 'workerist' core (which broadly included Johnny Campbell, Wal Hannington, Arthur Horner, alongside Pollitt himself), when steering the CPGB away from the sectarian excesses of 'third period' in 1930-32 (incurring the wrath of the Comintern in the process), by insisting that communists should engage the reformist trade unions, as opposed to building pure 'red' workplace organisations.