30.08.2006
Popular nails in the 'official' coffin
Lawrence Parker reviews Kevin Morgan's Bolshevism and the British left part 1: 'Labour legends and Russian gold', Lawrence and Wishart, 2006, pp320, £18.99
Rob Griffiths, general secretary of the slumbering Communist Party of Britain, treated us to a review of the above book some time ago in the pages of the Morning Star (May 8). It seems as if Griffiths is not that happy with its contents - presumably the best publicity Lawrence and Wishart could have hoped for.
After helpfully informing readers that the CPGB featured in the book should not be confused "with 27 or so ultra-leftists and a gossip sheet today" (Rob, we didn't know you cared), it soon becomes clear why Griffiths should find Morgan's by and large interesting study so objectionable: "Like so many academic historians who pride themselves on their prolific production of anti-communist history, Morgan concentrates on the party's failings and internal dissensions to the exclusion of its efforts and achievements." You see, when comrade Griffiths climbs beneath the sheets after a hard evening's factionalising in the war-torn CPB, the last thing he wants is to be reminded that communist politics has always been a question of factions and differences. Rather he would prefer a history bleached white and cleansed of contradictions - a soothing litany of battle stories and heroism.
The CPB consistently hides behind a fake show of 'unity'. Differences between members are to be kept 'secret' from the working class. The reality is that Rob Griffiths's career in the communist movement is the product of a series of factional wars down the years. In other words, any "efforts and achievements" of an organisation or class have a relationship to its "failings and internal dissensions". Unfortunately, some people would rather pretend that such divisions or failures never occur - they tell lies, in other words. In that sense, anyone wanting to seriously investigate the history of the workers' movement becomes a problem for the likes of the CPB. Therefore, if I stand up to recount the failed 1905 revolution in Russia, Griffiths and company would presumably denounce me for a concentration on failure. This is treating history as consolation, not as the repository of any kind of serious lessons.
In this light it is impossible not to be sceptical as to the CPB's intentions in launching its own history group. The blurb on its website announces: "An urgent need is for communists, and their sympathetic close allies, to rescue party history from this 'commodification' [in the academic sub-discipline of 'CPGB history'] and subject it to the sometimes critical but always perceptive perspective of contemporary Marxism" (www.communist-party.org.uk/index.php?file=history).
This sounds reasonable enough. However, if this work follows the grisly parameters of comrade Griffiths's musings it will turn such worthy aims into their opposite by involving 'CPB historians' in a police operation to expunge conflict and failure from our party's history. It is not hard to see where this could lead. People seriously interested in the history of the CPGB will not go to communists for the truth: rather they will stick with the 'commodified' products of the academy (if indeed they ever bothered looking to the likes of the CPB in the first place).
Moving on to the book proper, this review will concentrate on the experience of the CPGB. I fear Griffiths may be on firmer ground when he implies that the title may be misleading as to its contents. It is the experience of the CPGB that is the spine of the book, with Morgan's narrative on topics such as George Lansbury's Daily Herald (which also received Russian assistance) feeling somewhat incidental.
The CPGB received substantial Comintern/Soviet financial support throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. This declined in the late 30s and largely ceased during World War II. More modest funding of the CPGB recommenced after 1956, when the Soviet Union was asked to cover funding shortfalls (following a major exodus of members after the invasion of Hungary). Morgan suggests that recognition of this "Moscow gold" has lent itself to "oversimplified and even conspirationalist interpretations of the Comintern" (p25). He notes that by the end of 1921, the Comintern had provided the fledgling CPGB with around £55,000 (£2-2.5 million at today's value - p36). It appears that some of the motivation behind such funds was to allow the party to cut a dash on the national scene in ways in which its rudimentary structures and membership would not allow. Walton Newbold, the CPGB's first MP, asserted: ""¦ if you represented the party as a big party it would become automatically a big party" (p37).
While the CPGB correctly had no ethical dilemmas about accepting money from the Comintern or the Soviet Union (although its inability to theorise the development of Stalinism and 'socialism in one country' meant it had no political yardstick in the Comintern), such funding quickly became the source of debate inside the party, albeit on the level of organisational effectiveness. This came to light after Harry Pollitt and Rajani Palme Dutt (supported by William Gallacher) conducted an investigation into the CPGB's finances and organisation in 1922. According to Morgan, "what principally gave rise to criticism of the subsidies were three distinct but interrelated problems seen as their by-products: adventurism, demoralisation and bureaucratisation" (p43).
In terms of adventurism, Andrew Rothstein wrote to Karl Radek to complain of the party's first 18 months, "partly owing to the talk of illegal work "¦ but mainly owing to excess of money in the party, a great deal of time and money were spent on 'illegal work' and organising a 'Red Army', both of which came to nothing (and at a time when the party was not even bothering about a single factory group)" (p45). The charge of demoralisation seemed to ambiguously centre on the figure of CPGB chairman Arthur MacManus, who died in Moscow in 1927. However, Gallacher talked of "a general demoralisation in the party" that was linked to criticism of the party's vastly inflated bureaucratic structures and a removal of militants from mass struggles into party offices (p48).
The picture this paints is of the early CPGB being partially distorted by the rather more abstract contours of financial subsidies. On becoming general secretary of the party, Pollitt put it this way to the 1929 congress: "The districts write to the centre, 'We can do this if you will give us that.' The locals write to the districts, 'We can do this if you will give us that' "¦ We have failed to awaken the spirit of self-sacrifice throughout the masses who are close to us "¦ We believe that there is a necessity for party locals to meet their obligations to the districts and the centre because of the idea that plenty of money can be found whenever it is wanted" (p255).
Of course, no one is suggesting that money is not necessary for an organisation functioning inside capitalist society, but it does hold dangers. First, in giving financial incentives (not necessarily for self-gain) for the perpetuation of a bureaucracy and, second, in following the circuit of money, a party runs the risk of displacing the qualitative human relations of the revolution. For example, how would one fit gains in class-consciousness and solidarity on a profit-and-loss sheet? Finance, in terms of money, should be subordinated to a party's goals and needs.
The role of Comintern finance in sustaining the CPGB through the 1920s and early 1930s is of course an important thread in understanding the Stalinisation of the party. But in some cases its explanatory power is noticeably weak. In this regard Morgan makes a pertinent observation: "Finance was only ever one of the factors involved in the making of communist politics, and 'political-ideological' bonds were not automatically weakened because 'structural-organisational' ones were" (p250). This is undoubtedly true of the late 1930s (which we will come onto shortly). But we can also make a case based on an episode outside the scope of Morgan's book: the structural financial pulse between the Soviet Union and the CPGB after 1956 was not enough to secure its 'political-ideological' acquiescence to the former's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. To some extent this reflected the party's emotional and ideological ties to the Czechoslovakian reformers. However, the limits of this opposition (the CPGB called the Soviet Union's action an "intervention", not an 'invasion') and the fact that party leaders indulged in a certain amount of fence-building in Moscow in subsequent years make it clear that Soviet influence was still there. Even here it is somewhat difficult to unpick a financial imperative from broader ideological ties.
Much as I found Morgan's book interesting and useful, I would have to make a fairly standard 'left' criticism of such passages as 'The CPGB and Stalinisation' (pp239-43). Here, Morgan considers a broader issue of 'control' and the status of the "Stalinisation model" (p242). Fascinating though such narratives can be, they sometimes strike me as rather bland and neutral in tone. For those of us interested in actively engaging in such issues as the locus of a more contemporary identity, it is important to draw out some kind of political assessment. An important factor in considering external financing and control of the CPGB is that its political nature changed with the ideological onset of 'socialism in one country' in the mid-1920s. Whereas early funding of the CPGB had as its overriding aim the facilitation of the British revolution, increasingly 'Comintern control' facilitated the party acting as a diplomatic adjunct of the Soviet 'revolutionary hub'.
This does not mean that Morgan does not make any qualitative political judgement on the CPGB in the 1920s and 30s. In relation to the 1930s, the author quotes Dmitri Volkogonov (who had had access to otherwise closed archives) to suggest the budget for 'foreign' communist parties by 1938 was a 100th of the figure for 1924 (p243). During the 'third period', the CPGB was largely subsidised by the Comintern, but, as the party moved into the popular front of the mid-1930s, there was a fall in the proportion of funding deriving from Moscow. Unsurprisingly, the CPGB found it much easier to raise money with a set of largely uncontroversial, reformist politics in place, although the reorganisation of party finances began as early as 1929 (p255). One would not want to be overly negative about the CPGB's financial efforts in these years (with excellent orators such as Pollitt well able to loosen purse strings), as raising your own finance is a much better means of self-activation than mere dependency.
But Morgan uses this to make a political judgement about popular frontism itself. First, he uncritically reproduces an orthodoxy that in fact originates in the 'official' CPGB and the likes of Rob Griffiths's CPB: "Far from the CPGB's historians adopting Carr's twilight metaphor, Geoff Eley has commented on their tendency to regard the decade or so from the mid-1930s as the most successful in the party's history" (p244). But instead of using such partial views as a foil for debate, Morgan adds his own flourish: "With the rekindling of progressive concerns with the international agendas of the 1930s, along with the CPGB's adoption of a popular-front style of politics and the wider prestige of Soviet communism, communists in Britain exploited the opportunity to make these interventions with considerable skill" (p288).
Reading between the lines, the author is clearly more comfortable with the 'progressive', 'popular' politics of these years. And there are indeed many positive lessons from this history. Unfortunately for those activists and academics who get all sentimental about the "rekindling of progressive concerns with the international agendas of the 1930s" there is a darker side to this. Namely an organisation - the CPGB - which was generally prepared to support and excuse (in other words lie about) horrific crimes against the working class movement (the Soviet purges, the crushing of the Spanish revolution and so on). Morgan's argument about 'political-ideological' bonds not necessarily being unravelled along with 'structural-organisational' ones is, in this example, all too true.
Also, how 'successful' was popular frontism in defeating fascism and war? 'Not very' is a charitable judgement. But this was the policy that became the keynote, in one form of the other, of all sections of the CPGB in the post-war period. The majority of its major factions all paid homage to this largely inglorious period and all, in turn, played some role in the official party's demise. Rob Griffiths, despite his surface bluster, seizes on Morgan's argument: "Indeed, the party's most dynamic and successful periods, including those when its 'Bolshevisation' and 'Stalinisation' occurred in practice, coincided with downturns in the proportion of financial aid from the Soviet republic." (Of course, this would also tie in with the CPB's 'British' road to socialism, which presumably doesn't need any help from bloody foreigners, thank you very much.)
Such 'cross-party' orthodoxy really ought to be ditched. Popular frontism, along with its twin, trade union economism, essentially made the CPGB prey to a class-collaborationist outlook that blurred its own identity and ultimately reduced it to a ginger group on the fringes of the labour movement (a movement currently being re-enacted in microcosm by the CPB). In that light, the popular front was a huge nail in the 'official' party's coffin.
Kevin Morgan has produced another worthy addition to the literature on the CPGB. It is a shame that a historian such as he, who is obviously adept at questioning orthodoxies in other spheres, should occasionally choose to trot out such hoary old 'official communist' anthems.