WeeklyWorker

04.08.2010

Coal and Clausewitz

Lawrence Parker reviews Nina Fishman's 'Arthur Horner: a political biography' (Vol 1 1894-1944; Vol 2 1944-68), Lawrence and Wishart, 2010, pp608, £22.50 each

While writing this review, my attention was drawn to a Doncaster Socialist Workers Party resignation letter that has recently been circulating on the internet. In the letter, the branch draws attention to a conflict between an SWP member who was a full-time Unison branch secretary and the rest of his SWP branch: “In a general sense, he has not developed the combativity and self-activity of the working class. Furthermore, he does not relate to the most advanced workers. He neither distributes party leaflets nor sells Socialist Worker. This is not to castigate, but to recognise that he been floundering for some time. We find it reprehensible that when we contacted the centre to warn about his behaviour, our concerns were not taken seriously.”[1]

Of course, it is common in opportunistic circles to put such occurrences down to personal antagonisms, foibles and so on, or, even worse, to suggest that trade union leaders will inevitably sell out their principles, as they climb the greasy pole of officialdom (the SWP once banned its comrades from taking full-time union posts). A more plausible explanation is that trade unions have a structural position in capitalist society in relation to wage labour and can thus exert a more powerful pull than a tiny political sect. But such reports also point to something else: namely a deep-seated failure of political culture primarily lodged in the experience of 20th century ‘official’ communism.

One can find very similar sentiments about communist trade union officials expressed scores of times in the archives, records and publications of the ‘official’ CPGB. Yet such recognition is unfamiliar territory for comrades from Trotskyist backgrounds, raised on the idea that the main contradiction of the ‘official’ CPGB arose from its fealty to Moscow. Now, this is a very large part of the truth but, in organisations such as the SWP in particular, it means that the domestic actions (and actions is the operative word for these excitable comrades, considering the mass nature of much CPGB activity down the years) escape closer scrutiny.[2]

The career of Arthur Horner (1894-1968), foundation member of the CPGB, later the first general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and significant public figure in post-World War II Britain, is one of the biggest keys that allow us to unlock this decayed political culture in communist organisations.

The author of this empathetic two-volume biography, Nina Fishman, unfortunately passed away in December 2009. Although I have some big differences with Fishman over her political interpretation of Horner and the CPGB’s history, it is fair to say that this is a magnificent piece of research and one that will be used by historians for many years to come. Politically, Fishman had ended up with the Democratic Left (DL), the organisation set up by members of the CPGB’s Eurocommunist faction that attempted to liquidate the party, while clinging on to its host body’s substantial financial assets. (Fishman’s father had been a member of the Communist Party of the USA and she had been a member in the UK of the rather odd British and Irish Communist Organisation - which now operates under a variety of other organisational non de plumes). Theoretically, Fishman had unconvincingly defended what she called a ‘realist’ perspective, where communist activists were understood in light of the ‘real’ (usually British) events and personalities that shaped them, as opposed to (an apparently ‘unreal’) ‘essentialist’ perspective that looked to the impact of the emergence and consolidation of Stalinism to explain the CPGB.

Straw men

In fact, setting up the debate in these ‘straw men’ terms was nonsense. Serious historians would look to map out precisely how Stalinism impacted on the CPGB through its personalities, activity, oppositions and so on. To take an example from my own experience of researching the ‘anti-revisionist’ CPGB oppositions of the 1960s, it was clear that the fault lines between China and the Soviet Union created an opening for revolutionary oppositions in the ‘official’ communist movement; and the Chinese ideological stance set a certain sectarian template for future developments. But that macro perspective needs setting against more micro events and personalities before it can tell us what actually happened.

It is clear that Fishman’s time in the DL marked her writings on the CPGB. This ‘realist’ vein tended to gently prise the CPGB away from the world communist movement in the form of the Soviet Union and other regimes, which had become distasteful for the Eurocommunist luminaries of the DL, despite the gestation of their ideology in the unpopular popular fronts of the 1930s.

The amorphous, fluffy political boundaries of the DL also impacted on what Fishman marked out as a research agenda for the CPGB: “Further research is likely to show that, at the municipal and community level, party activists continued to make positive contributions: a radical, progressive, democratic aspect of CPGB life which has been insufficiently emphasised by historians. Particularly in the new towns and suburbs of south-east England, these activists played important roles in politicising, greening and socialising new working class communities. In the same way, communist union activists continued to play a vital part in the definition of trade union culture and politics - not just in the suburban-industrial girdle around London, but in the Midlands, the west of England, the south coast, Yorkshire and Lancashire. These aspects of the CPGB’s history remain palpably under-researched and largely unacknowledged.”[3]

By implementing this ‘positive’ agenda, the CPGB would appear in history books as a benign forerunner of the Eurocommunists and DL, rather than what it was - a revolutionary organisation and a component of a world movement that had been slowly strangled by Stalinism.

Unsurprisingly, Fishman looked askance on such judgements: “To argue that the CPGB did not concentrate on revolutionary aims and did not seek to organise politically, qua party, at the workplace seems to me irrelevant, because at least since 1926 the CPGB had never seriously attempted to do either of these things.”[4] So it is pointless to make these qualitative judgements on the CPGB as to its lack of revolutionary credentials, because the CPGB did not concentrate on revolutionary aims.

This circular argument only reduces things to what was and thus leaves the historian as the prisoner of a set of ‘official’ communist myths. I am not complaining about this partiality (although it is not to my political taste), but arguing that Nina Fishman had a perspective that was intensely political in its outcome, even though it appeared under the fluffy guise of ‘getting a fuller picture’ of the CPGB.

Fishman’s position also leaves one with the thorny question of why the CPGB continued to produce revolutionaries from an undoubtedly toxic environment. Why, for example, did the issue of ‘revisionism’ raise its head at the party’s immediate post-war congress in 1945, as sections of the CPGB attempted to wrestle with a leadership that had yanked the organisation, disastrously, and at times absurdly, to the right (hailing the Yalta agreement as a signal of world peace and arguing for a continuation of the wartime national government were two of the more grotesque examples)? Thus, with gentle prodding, Fishman’s empty schema can only be maintained by ‘official’ communist mythology.

‘Responsibility’

Moving back to Arthur Horner, it is clear that Fishman’s vacuous ‘positive’ research agenda for the CPGB has left its mark on her analytical approach.

Thus, the first words of her introduction read: “Arthur Horner was the British communist who exerted the greatest influence on the course of British history. As vice-chairman of the Mardy lodge and member of the South Wales Miner’s Federation executive, he achieved fame across the British coalfields during the eight-months-long miners’ lock-out in 1926. Elected president of the SWMF in 1936, from then on he took a leading role nationally in the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. After playing an outstanding role during the Second World War in ensuring the maintenance of coal supplies, while at the same time defending miners’ working conditions and pay, in 1946 Horner was elected general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, the successor organisation to the MFGB. After the coal industry was nationalised in 1947, Horner took the lead in ensuring that the new National Coal Board was a success: his sense of social democratic responsibility meant the he was always concerned about producing enough coal for the nation as well as the interests of union members” (Vol 1, p19). It is this patriotic social democrat whom Fishman appears to revere (the nauseating phrase “social democratic responsibility” recurs throughout the second volume of the biography).

The CPGB, by contrast, is often depicted as an interloper or antagonist to a man who wanted to do his patriotic duty by ensuring the nation had its coal in war and peace. She writes: “Despite his profound attractiveness as a human being and his unquestionably impressive achievements, Horner had one significant failure as a man of action. From 1947, at the age of 53, he declined to resolve the contradiction between his social democratic behaviour as a trade union leader and his continuing membership of the British communist party” (Vol 2, p965).

There is a reason why Horner stayed with the CPGB (beyond Horner’s close personal relationship with Harry Pollitt and his family’s ties to the party) that Fishman seems oblivious to. Put simply, the rightward trajectory of Horner was the rightward trajectory of the CPGB’s leadership and the world ‘official’ communist movement. Yes, there were tensions, but ultimately these proved to be tensions over nuances, not fundamental differences of strategy.

Of course, such judgements will not be contentious for most readers, who probably have some kind of ‘macro’ perspective on the shift of the CPGB away from the revolutionary politics of its foundation. But it would be double Dutch for the likes of Fishman, hobbled by a ‘micro’ ‘realist’ perspective and concerned to flesh out the ‘positive’ contribution that CPGB members made to the life of the nation. So all we are left with once more is the tired mythologies that the ‘official’ CPGB itself trotted out year upon year.

To flesh out this point, let us consider the period after 1951, when a Conservative government came to power. From 1947 the impetus of the cold war pushed the CPGB into a more critical stance toward the Labour government, although Horner had retained the party’s earlier emphasis of ‘produce or perish’ and its attendant hostility to militant trade union action. As Fishman outlines, Horner wanted to carry on this “social democratic responsibility” by safeguarding cooperation between the NCB and NUM under a Conservative government not intent on wholesale reversal of Labour’s nationalisation programme. Other party and leftwing mining activists, with the encouragement of the CPGB’s leadership, were championing wage militancy and expecting the King Street HQ to pull Horner into line.

This scenario eventually led to bitter conflicts in the South Wales area of the CPGB, as well as in the NUM. Throughout this period, CPGB leaders such as Pollitt and JR Campbell were grappling with the almost impossible task of keeping their organisation together (so that CPGB militants stopped coming to blows with ‘responsible’ CPGB miners’ leaders opposed to unofficial militancy such as Horner, Will Paynter and Alf Davies) and making sure that party agitation for militancy in the coalfields stayed on track. In practice, Pollitt and Campbell (along with leading party figures working in south Wales such as Idris Cox) avoided open conflict with Horner because, according to Fishman, they were wary of being pulled even further leftwards by having to denounce Horner’s ‘rightism’ (Vol 2, pp802-68).

Now all of this is very interesting and it put Horner, increasingly reliant on alcohol at this stage in his career, under intense personal pressure, as he tried to juggle with his twin commitments to the NUM and the CPGB - usually resolving such issues, it has to be said, by keeping the party at arm’s length. These conflicts are important to Fishman because they allow her to illustrate her thesis of patriotic responsibility (Horner) versus unpatriotic irresponsibility (coalfield militants). In fact, thinking about this problem in a ‘macro’ fashion, the various constituent actors in these political rows had little dividing them strategically.

It is rather telling that Fishman makes only a few passing references to the adoption of The British road to socialism. When she does, she downplays its significance and paints Horner at a distance: “Horner’s tentative rapprochement with the CPGB since the Conservatives’ election had been evidently ruptured by his high-profile argument in favour of social democratic responsibility on March 14 1952. There is no evidence that he attended the 22nd party Congress in mid-April 1952. Along with five other veterans, including Joe Scott, Cox and Tamara Rust, he was not on the recommended list for election to the CPGB executive committee ... The political content of the congress bordered on the mundane. Although delegates formally approved The British road to socialism, they did so without enthusiasm. Evidently, few delegates viewed the new programme as the answer to the party’s increasing political marginalisation” (Vol 2, p838).

Such passages are perhaps the ultimate indictment of Fishman’s analytical method and its inability to draw broad relationships. The BRS, with its emphasis on CPGB cooperation with the Labour left by ‘legislating’ socialism through parliament, was, in fact, the strategic document par excellence of “social democratic responsibility”. It was the theoretical codification of the practice of the likes of Horner and Pollitt in World War II and the post-war Labour government. The only thing that had been lacking was a couple of thousand more Arthur Horners.

The fact that Horner did not attend a rubber-stamping party congress is neither here nor there in the bigger scheme of things. The parameters of the BRS could contain advocates of unofficial action just as it could contain Horner’s emphasis on production drives. None of the participants in the CPGB squabbles over unofficial militancy in 1952-53, did, to the best of my knowledge, step outside the parameters of the BRS. In fact, the various critiques of the CPGB’s reformist strategy were largely being produced by residential and not workplace branches in the post-war period.

‘Third period’

What Pollitt, Campbell and Dutt did for the CPGB’s overall reformist political trajectory Horner matched in relation to his reformist ideas for the trade union movement. In doing so, Horner was undoubtedly helped by the crass way in which sections of the CPGB (leadership figures such as Pollitt ducked and dived) applied ‘third period’ politics to the British trade unions.

The ‘third period’ relates to the policies of the parties of the Comintern during 1928 and 1935, and relied on an objectivist schema to suggest that the proletariat would be pushed toward revolutionary politics by worsening conditions under capitalism. The job of organisations such as the CPGB was to denounce the existing organisations of the labour movement and, in some cases, split from them and form new unions free of reformist taint.[5] This international shift matched the Soviet Union’s move away from the ‘new economic policy’ to the more aggressive policies of industrialisation and collectivisation.

In terms of British politics, the illiterate theoretical framework of the ‘third period’ has had the unfortunate effect in the ‘official’ communist movement and its various Trotskyist shadows of a number of babies being thrown out with the dirty bathwater, and not always for the most scrupulous of reasons (please note that I am not a follower of the likes of Mike Squires and Matthew Worley, who have attempted to rehabilitate the legacy of the CPGB during these years).

In relation to the trade movement, for example, one of the attacks made on figures such as Horner was on the basis of his ‘right legalism’: ie, a commitment to the existing bureaucracy of the labour movement as against ‘unofficial’ rank-and-file movements.[6] In some circumstances, and certainly in relation to Horner’s development as a trade union leader, this would be an entirely legitimate criticism to make, given that trade unions are bourgeois institutions, albeit ones based on the working class, whose job, ultimately is to regulate class struggles and thus discipline the working class inside the boundaries of wage labour.

A big problem with the ‘third period’ was the berserk, sectarian manner in which this was applied, whereby the CPGB often tried to rhetorically swerve the existing labour movement, with predictably disastrous results. But it was these results that informed the subsequent intellectual climate inside the ‘official’ communist movement. Thus we had the bizarre formation in the 1980s of an opposition faction inside the CPGB which coalesced around the Morning Star and the idea that it was the job of communists to defend everything that trade unions and trade unionists did.[7] And this idea is still a dominant one among most shades of today’s revolutionary left.

As detailed by Fishman, Horner had a miserable time of it during the ‘third period’, after stubbornly - and correctly - opposing the new line in relation to the Labour Party and the trade unions. Horner, the CPGB’s leading miner, was actually expelled by the organisation’s politburo for his opposition in February 1930 before the Communist International political secretariat ordered the CPGB to desist. As Fishman notes, “Given Horner’s high public profile, the Comintern’s directive was expeditious and prudent” (Vol 1, p215).

Toxic reformism

By February 1932, as the debate around ‘right legalism’ rumbled on inside the CPGB, Horner was himself in jail for obstructing bailiffs with other unemployed miners in Mardy. Horner used his time inside to conduct a forensic analysis of his time in the workers’ movement. Along with Volume I of Capital, Horner also came under the influence of Karl von Clausewitz’s On war.

Fishman writes: “Incorrigible rebel [Horner’s autobiography] recorded three examples of Clausewitz’s impact on Horner. First: ‘I read it [On war] with very great interest … Clausewitz taught that if you enter into active struggle you can succeed only if you adopt the principle of inflicting the greatest degree of damage on your opponents, with the least possible hurt to your own forces … Sometimes it would be necessary to fight a defensive battle … But when it came to fighting back we had to be sure that if we attacked we were in a position to win.’ The second reference was in his description of a dispute that he had conducted as Federation agent in the Anthracite, culminating in a substantial wage increase without a strike, ‘my first application of the Clausewitz principle … ’” (Vol 1, p241).

Thus Horner adopted Clausewitz as part of what he saw as a more scientific practice of trade union politics, as opposed to the failures of the 1920s: “He recognised that the approach of his militant mentors, fighting every industrial conflict at maximum strength to inflict maximum damage, had not yielded the results he had expected. During the British mining conflicts of the 1920s, inspired by the Russian Revolution, he had refined this strategy into a total war doctrine, which stressed the importance of vigilant organisation and total mobilisation. He argued persuasively that the unions’ defeats, including the 1926 miners’ lock-out, were due to their failure to marshal sufficient force with sufficient energy and commitment. Intellectual honesty had compelled him to acknowledge that this approach had produced a succession of failures and defeats.”

But what Horner had actually produced was a science of bourgeois trade unionism and not a science of communist organisation and trade unions. It is clear that the trade union has displaced the CPGB as the strategic point of his analysis and Horner made no attempt to ask what a trade union actually was and what role it played in capitalist society. Seen through this prism, Horner’s emphasis on keeping the resources and strength of the trade union together at all costs blunted his horizons and turned him not just into a ‘right legalist’ enemy of unofficial strikes and rank and filism, but a seeker of deals with ‘progressive’ forces from among the capitalist political classes who could aid him - and who had a vested interest - in keeping his ‘own’ bourgeois institution intact.

In short, Horner developed a toxic reformist perspective that was the natural ‘trade union’ adjunct of what became the BRS, with its disregard of the leading role of the CPGB in favour of a reliance on the Labour Party to deliver socialism. Despite tensions down the years it was this ideology of bourgeois trade unionism that sustained scores of CPGB members working in trade unions throughout the post-war period and helped blind them to the dead-end reformist strategy of the party.

Decaying

In contrast to Fishman’s positive assessment, we can lament Horner’s development for what it was - decayed politics inside a decaying CPGB - but we should also be clear that probably only a communist could produce and sustain this kind of strategic and, within its own limited terms of reference, intellectual approach to the trade union movement. The CPGB was not a political sect (although paradoxically it was woven around sect shibboleths) as we might understand the phrase today, but, although limited geographically and sectionally, the most important section of the advanced part of the British working class.

Fatally and, sometimes, opportunistically, most of the contemporary left fails to understand the BRS for what it was: ie, the CPGB doing what the Labour left would have been incapable of doing and writing a rounded and strategic programme for the practice of parliamentary reformist socialism. The likes of Horner and other CPGB miners and trade unionist leaders also set out their practice inside a conservative reformist perspective of maintaining and defending trade unions from left and right that their non-communist counterparts would come to rely on.

This how Vic Allen described Will Paynter, Horner’s successor as general secretary of the NUM: “He was a communist, but he gave high priority to his union. His job was to present union policy, to act as the servant of the NEC, and this he did meticulously, even though, in many instances, the views he presented were contrary to his own. Inadvertently, but unavoidably, the brilliance of Will Paynter served to consolidate the power positions of those who comprised the majority of the NEC who were contemptuous of his politics and who opposed and contained him by their majority position. He did for them what they were incompetent at doing for themselves.”[8]

Fishman paints a similar picture of Horner, although in even more gushy excitable prose: “His public role was to act as an outstanding spokesperson for the union, never evading unpalatable facts or trying to deny NUM members’ responsibilities and duties to the wider community. In broadcasts, interviews and meetings, he transmitted his supreme confidence that his members were committed to producing as much coal as they were able; his audiences - politicians and the wider public - believed him. People were reassured by his persuasive rhetoric, even though they continued to endure the domestic discomfort and economic dislocation which coal shortages continued to cause.

“Horner had achieved celebrity status as the miners’ spokesperson during the war and he continued to attract media attention in the post-war period. His convincing performances and well-constructed arguments ensured that the Conservative opposition and successive Conservative governments continued to treat the NCB as a successful nationalised industry, and did not try to make either coal or the NUM a political football” (Vol 2, p962). Thus, Horner has become the outstanding spokesperson and leader of the NUM bureaucracy, doing for them what they were incompetent at doing for themselves.

After Horner had become embroiled in a dispute with NUM president Will Lawther in 1948 over the strike of French miners (Lawther had made a statement opposing the strikes; Horner told a CGT conference that Lawther had no authority to speak on such matters and suggested British miners would support it), Horner was reprimanded over this sensitive issue in the light of a burgeoning cold war.

However, the leadership of the NUM did not ultimately make Horner chose between his union and the CPGB, partly because in practical, if not in emotional, terms, he had already chosen the NUM, but also because the leadership needed his practical and intellectual abilities. Fishman writes: “Although the [NUM’s] Watson subcommittee report flatly rejected Horner’s insistence that he had made a unique contribution to the union, [Sam] Watson knew that Horner’s assessment of his significance was accurate. He apparently used his influence to ensure that there was no anti-communist crusade inside the NUM. The subcommittee report was duly circulated to area executives, but there is no evidence that any of them took any action as a result. The South Wales area executive did not discuss it - evidence of a de facto consensus between left and right to put the incident behind them and pre-empt any local outbreaks of internecine political conflict” (Vol 2, p775).

Nina Fishman, of course, views what Arthur Horner became in largely positive terms. Unfortunately, her ‘micro’ perspective precludes her from seeing the broader contradiction. By distancing himself from the CPGB and avoiding its disciplines, Horner was, ironically, at one with the reformist trajectory of the organisation and played a leading role in mapping the boundaries of this perspective in relation to the trade unions.

Nevertheless, this is a fine labour of research, marred by an analytical framework that is shallow and, at times, banal.

Notes

  1. See averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2010/07/doncaster-swp-why-we-resigned.html
  2. Consider Chris Bambery’s largely sympathetic account of the CPGB’s domestic activity in this book review from 1995: pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr187/bambery.htm
  3. N Fishman, ‘Essentials and realists: reflections on the historiography of the CPGB’: www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/chnn/CHNN11ERF.html
  4. Ibid.
  5. Two such ‘red’ unions were formed in 1929: The United Mineworkers of Scotland and The United Clothing Workers.
  6. This ‘right legalism’ came to be referred to as ‘Hornerism’ inside the CPGB.
  7. This faction was the forerunner of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain.
  8. VL Allen The militancy of British miners Shipley 1981, p121.