WeeklyWorker

18.11.2010

Reliable, rigid, straight, and determined

Arthur MacManus's opening address at the first CPGB congress

The Russian Revolution and the direct intervention of the Bolsheviks had a pivotal influence in bringing Marxists in Britain together in the Communist Party’s first congress, over the weekend of July 31-August 1 1920. However, in many ways - despite the charges of some of its more jaundiced critics - the new organisation was a very British sort of outfit.

For instance, the comrades’ notion of security was pretty laughable. Not only did the official report list every delegate by name and organisation, but it also featured the addresses of the members of the expanded Provisional leadership - just in case the secret service had been busy that weekend. Five years later, the young party was decapitated on the eve of the General Strike when a swathe of its leaders was effortlessly arrested.[1]

The first day of congress, July 31, was the anniversary of the death of Jean Jaurès, and the delegates rose and stood in silence as a mark of respect and esteem for him and all others who had fallen in the revolutionary cause.[2] Albert Inkpin opened the proceedings by proposing that Arthur MacManus, chairman of the Provisional Committee, be invited to preside.[3] This was unanimously agreed and, the official report tells us, MacManus delivered his opening address.

Chairman’s address

He said it was a sad experience that it had taken three years of Russia in revolution, and two years of actual negotiating and deliberating, to bring into being a conference of this description.

There were still people calling themselves communists who were not represented at the convention[4], and this fact indicated the nature of the obstacles and difficulties that had to be overcome.[5] He hoped that no word at that conference - and he was sure this was the feeling of those assembled at it - would be regarded as in any way calculated to widen the breach at present existing between those who were represented and those who were not. He hoped also - and here again he thought the conference would concur - that in the near future pressure of circumstances might have power to persuade people outside that it was their duty to come in.

He thought the convention itself justified the most optimistic outlook of those who thought there was a need of a Communist Party in this country. The agenda before them contained items that would call for serious deliberations and might possibly call for animated contention; but if the convention was taken in the spirit in which the invitations had been sent out, then, whatever else might also happen at it, after today there would at least exist in Great Britain one reliable, rigid, straight and determined Communist Party. Given a Communist Party, he thought its membership could very well be trusted, and certainly had every claim to be responsible for deciding what attitude the party should adopt on different occasions.

He wanted to make one or two general observations with regard to the effect of the birth of the Communist Party. The present convention was a more effective reply to the solicitations of Russia than anything else that had emanated from this country since the Russian Revolution up to the present time. In the past we had been content to respond to Russia with magnanimous resolutions and expressions of sympathy, but, except for one or two very small attempts, we had never yet, as an organised movement, responded to those appeals in the way that a communist or revolutionary socialist should be responded to.

It was a curious coincidence that the sitting of the convention synchronised with the arrival of the Russian commissars, who had now for the first time been openly invited by the British government. Kamenoff and his comrades were expected that evening; it was humiliating to think that, having triumphed in their own country, the Russian delegation would have to submit to the arrogance and vainglory of the capitalist politicians here.[6] Why should it be at this late date in revolutionary thought and action that, instead of the Russians being met with sympathetic kinship and comradeship, it should be left to Lloyd George, Churchill and the rest of the gang to be there with their hypocrisies and huckstering? There was something in that to regret. We ought by now to have made it so uncomfortable for these people that, instead of standing on a pedestal and dictating to the rest of the world as to how it should conduct itself, they would have enough to do looking after us here to prevent them having any time to worry about other countries. If the Communist Party did not fit that bill it would fail to respond to the spirit that had called it into being.

He would ask the delegates to devote themselves to getting through the agenda and doing what the joint committee had felt themselves incapable of doing - the committee could not arrive at a decision in connection with the tactical policy of the Communist Party. The discussion of fundamental principles had been the least difficult task that had been set the joint committee during the last two years; at a very early stage there had been general agreement that communism was accepted as the objective and that the soviet regime and dictatorship of the proletariat were indispensable precautions against counterrevolution. The dictatorship of the proletariat was the principle on which we should have to meet most opposition, for we had to meet something that possibly did not exist to the same extent in any other country in the world.

When there was a question of a thing being done, if the process of doing it was likely to soil the coat or skirt of those participating, the non-conformist conscience demanded that the thing be dropped, however desirable it might be in itself. He hoped the spirit of the convention would be in opposition to that. We believed that a social revolution was absolutely essential, and that it was our duty to get it, however much we might be soiled in the process. Even if there arose a necessity for bloodshed, we could always remember that the lesson of history was that it was never the revolutionary who was responsible for the shedding of blood; it was invariably the counterrevolutionary. There was no subterfuge or intrigue that our capitalist class had not been willing to resort to rather than allow Russia to stand open to the world, justifying communism as a social constructive force, and the fact that we saw them doing this with Russia at such a remote distance was an indication of what they would do to us.

The chairman concluded by appealing to the delegates to subordinate themselves to the work they had in hand. If the results he anticipated were achieved, any self-effacement would justify itself. If they rose to the standard of responsibility he was setting before them, this would turn out to be the most profitable weekend that the revolutionary movement had ever had in this country.

Notes

  1. “On Wednesday October 14 1925, some 30 or so detectives raided both the national and London offices of the Communist Party, the Young Communist League, the National Minority Movement and rooms used by the staff of the Workers’ Weekly ... Eight leading communists were arrested ... Some days later the arrests were extended to four further communist leaders ... Almost the whole political bureau was thus arrested (eight out of 10)” - J Klugman History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: the General Strike 1925-26 London 1969, pp67-68.
  2. Jean Léon Jaurès (1859-1914) was a French socialist who became the leader, in 1902, of the French Socialist Party. This merged with the Socialist Party of France in 1905 to become the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO). On July 31 1914, Jaurès was assassinated in a Parisian café by a French nationalist.
  3. MacManus was a leading Clyde shop steward and member of the Communist Unity Group. He died in Moscow in 1927 and his ashes were interred in the Kremlin wall.
  4. The first congress of the party was known as the Communist Unity Convention.
  5. Most notably the Socialist Labour Party and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation, now illegitimately renamed the ‘Communist Party - British Section of the Third International’.
  6. Lev Borisovich Kamenev (1883-1936) was a leading Bolshevik. He was nominal head of the Soviet state in 1917, a founding member in 1919 and later chairman (1923-24) of the politburo. After a brief period of opposition to Stalin in the mid-1920s, Kamenev spent the rest of his life in a macabre round of expulsions from the party, followed by humiliating capitulations and self-criticism as a price for readmission. In August 1936, Kamenev, Zinoviev and 14 others were accused of forming a terrorist opposition in the first Moscow show trial. Kamenev was found guilty and shot on August 25 1936.