09.12.2010

Their finest hour?

The end of World War II saw an angry rebellion developing among the 'official' Communist Party's rank and file, writes Lawrence Parker

This two-part article is an attempt to record the rebellion inside the Communist Party of Great Britain around its November 1945 congress. It is often assumed that this was a high point for the organisation in terms of membership and influence, despite the lack of a concerted political breakthrough (for example, the CPGB could only muster two MPs in the 1945 general election). However, as will be made clear, for a section of its membership ‘swimming with the tide’ in concert with British imperialism during the latter part of World War II had been a thoroughly traumatic experience, both as activists and as observers of a leadership that had raced to the right. This anger was only compounded as the leadership sought to project the cross-class politics of ‘winning the war’ into ‘winning the peace’.

This article will eventually form part of a revised edition of The kick inside: revolutionary opposition in the CPGB, 1960-1991 (2007). In that pamphlet, I treated pre-1960 oppositions in a very cursory manner and I was prodded to amend this by Paul Flewers, among others. I am also indebted to Kevin Morgan’s Harry Pollitt, which essentially gave me the investigative leads for tracing the rebellion at the 1945 congress.^[1] However, I have treated the opposition in what I hope is a more comprehensive manner and placed it in a different intellectual framework: namely the developing struggle against opportunism inside the CPGB. Actually, Morgan does have a slightly better grasp than some (such as the late Nina Fishman, for example) that the party was affected by ‘revisionism’ and that general secretary Harry Pollitt, for example, was a significant carrier of this infection. But, perhaps inevitably in a biography, the 1945 rebellion is used to shine a light on Pollitt, whereas I have attempted to use the rebels to shine a light on the CPGB and the impact of World War II on the party.

More broadly, the original pamphlet and this article are an assault on the idea (largely Trotskyist in inspiration) that beyond 1933 or thereabouts the CPGB was somehow dead as an arena for principled revolutionary politics.^[2] This is not to argue that an undemocratic and often viciously hostile opportunist organisation was some kind of haven for revolutionaries: far from it (although - sad, but true - the CPGB regime offered more public space to dissidents than some modern-day Trotskyist sects). Nevertheless, for reasons I will return to in the second part of this article, the CPGB consistently produced revolutionary oppositions (albeit in much smaller numbers than the wide range of dissident individuals and branches who appear in this article) through to the 1980s.^[3] This needs some kind of serious explanation.

Twists and turns

The politics of the CPGB during World War II were subject to a set of bewildering twists and turns, particularly during the early years of the conflict. When war was declared in September 1939, the party initially supported it in line with the ‘anti-fascist’ politics of the popular front, calling for the replacement of the Chamberlain government.

However, the Comintern then intervened to enforce a change in line with the freshly signed Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, declaring the war to be imperialist and thus unsupportable. The CPGB shifted around to support this policy, with a minority of its leadership - general secretary Pollitt, MP William Gallacher and Daily Worker editor JR Campbell - in opposition. Pollitt and Campbell were removed from their posts.^[4] Despite this shift to opposing the war, the CPGB still continued to couch its politics in the cross-class rhetoric of popular frontism, campaigning for a ‘people’s peace’ and initiating the (undoubtedly successful) People’s Convention.

The invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in June 1941 saw the party swing behind the war effort once more. Pollitt was restored to the post of general secretary and the CPGB began to campaign for a second front in Europe. The party also instructed its many trade union militants to adhere to and proselytise for a rigid no-strikes policy on the shop floor, which, as we shall see, became ever more problematic for the CPGB, as the war continued.

Judging by what has been written by the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, the largest remnant of the CPGB’s factional struggles of the 1980s, the period after June 1941 was a high point in the ‘official’ party’s history: “The Communist Party’s impressive campaigning in the factories, localities and labour movement inspired masses of workers with the conviction that the war could be won, the reactionaries decisively weakened and a Labour government elected to bring about great changes after the war. The party’s membership more than doubled during the war; from 20,000 in September 1939 to 45,435 in March 1945. Its clear-sighted leadership and heroic struggles had been a major factor in building the labour movement’s strength and advance to the crest of the wave in 1945.”^[5]

So the CPGB was apparently at the very crest of this glorious patriotic wave. We will deal with some of the omissions and misleading statements in this ‘analysis’ below, but it would no doubt have been seriously bizarre news to a section of the party’s membership who, before and during the congress of November 1945, were in angry rebellion against the leadership and, testimony to the pressure being felt by the likes of Pollitt, were accorded a considerable platform in the open publications of the party to make their case. Many branches also submitted resolutions that were critical of the leadership.^[6] As Pollitt put it to the congress, “We deliberately kept out of [CPGB weekly] World News and Views for six weeks any contributions by executive committee members, because we did not want to give any appearance of attempting to damp down the discussion, or, to use that much abused word in our party circles, ‘give comrades a bashing’.”^[7] To those comrades who had argued bitterly against Pollitt and company, the CPB idea of “clear-sighted leadership” would have been absolutely laughable.

Growing pains

It is true, as the CPB argues, that the CPGB’s membership more than doubled during wartime but this conceals a deeper problem. In 1939 the organisation had 17,756 members; by December 1941 it had 22,738; at the end of 1942 it claimed 56,000; but by March 1945 this had fallen to 45,435.^[8] So, the overall growth masks a slump of 10,000 or so. But there was also a broader cultural issue at stake. Thompson argues the CPGB had a “problem in that its swift growth had outrun its organisational ability to absorb its new members and integrate them into the party’s culture and practices”.^[9] Croucher records a lack of activity in CPGB factory groups, generally characterised by a rapid turnover and only a small minority of party members being active.^[10] Harry McShane argues of Glasgow during World War II: “A lot of new members were recruited, but they had no education in Marxism and the whole character of the party changed. For the first time we had a predominantly paper membership. Hundreds of people filled in membership forms during the huge second front meetings ... but only about a third of them ever turned up to branch meetings.”^[11]

These retrospective judgements are borne out in more forceful language by comrades in the run-up to the 1945 congress. James Wilson, also a CPGB member in Glasgow, argued: “In the past we in our party have tended to take into our ranks every Tom, Dick and Harry, Mary, Jane and Flo, who had been coaxed, cajoled or forced into signing a membership form. The result has been that our most militant and active comrades have been forced into a position of working inwards on party work, trying to get members to pay dues, come to meetings ... that they have almost forgotten how to work outwards and get real contact with the masses ...”^[12] RB Burrows stated that in many branches “activity depends on a handful of comrades”.^[13]

There was a clear understanding that recruiting in such a low-level fashion had not just shifted the character of the party and created a huge paper membership that acted as a dead weight upon party militants, but was something that had impacted directly on the political deterioration of the CPGB. A comrade listed as ‘Sgt Brown, RAF’ noted the “apparently low degree of political understanding of so many of our members”, adding: “I have read letters from comrades at home and have been horrified at their political backwardness”.^[14] A number of other correspondents to World News and Views noted lapses in party education during this period. JAS Robinson of Bury branch said: “Experience inside local branches shows [a] need for instruction in Marxist-Leninist theory to be our most urgent need. Tailism, too, is a danger that can arise as the result of a membership that is not able to critically analyse day-to-day events and the lines given by party leaders.”^[15]

A number of branch resolutions for the 1945 congress took up the issue of education, sometimes directly linking it to the issue of political decay and bureaucratic tendencies. Wimbledon branch called “for a big drive to increase the knowledge and understanding of Marxism among party members and the labour movement more generally”.^[16] A Westminster City aggregate (London) recognised “the new problems created by the growth of a mass Communist Party”, a “considerable gap” between the training given to new members and leading members, and called for “more schools and classes for developing cadres”.^[17] West Bromwich branch proposed: “This congress feels that more intensive education is required to combat certain confusion amongst certain sections of the party.”^[18] Aston (Birmingham) branch pointed to a tendency for “the rank-and-file membership automatically to accept the directives given from a leadership which, however capable, is nevertheless not infallible” and called for the building of a membership that was “capable of independent reasoning”.^[19]

Bob McIlhone, Glasgow secretary and a member of the CPGB’s Scottish committee, linked this problem of dilution directly to the opportunism engulfing all levels of the organisation. He argued for the party “to become more compact, more united as an active campaigning force and this can only be done to the degree that we develop our fight for the principles of Marx and Lenin and take the extraordinary measures that are called for to raise the political level of the whole party”.^[20] This is not directly spelt out by McIlhone, only hinted at, but this dead weight of politically unsophisticated paper members was a contributing factor in the leadership’s gallop to the right during World War II.

Harry Pollitt, replying to discussion at the congress, dismissed these criticisms outright, and, in doing so, implied the leadership’s practical reliance on the dilution of its militant old guard to support its rightist political objectives: “The party wants to be a narrow party, it wants to be a party of exclusive Marxists. It resents hundreds and thousands of new members coming into the party. Yes, I apply this test to all of you. It is not how many members the other fellow makes for the party: it is how many members you personally are making, all of us here. It is the welcome we extend to the comrades when they are in our ranks.”^[21]

Of course, the impact of this dead weight could only but exacerbate the CPGB’s bureaucratic centralism. Bessie Leith of Marylebone (London) branch wrote: “The branch [feels] that we still have not overcome the tendency to bureaucracy which [it] attempted to bring out at the last London district congress, which expresses itself in instructions to branches (thus stifling the political life of the branches) instead of giving leadership and inspiration.”^[22] W Zak, also from London, wrote: “Of democratic centralism practically everything has been liquidated, to leave us with the stifling and stultifying so-called democracy of social democracy, in which the leadership is practically immutable and the membership expected to do as they are told.”^[23]

A Lambeth borough aggregate resolution proposed: “That this national congress recognises that there has taken place in recent years a certain decay of inner-party democracy. This has been caused: (1) By the fact that rapid changes in the situation have required action by the centre without there being time for consultation of the rank and file. (2) By the fact that many of our old and tried comrades have been lost into the army. This has meant, firstly, that there have been fewer people in the groups capable of criticising the party line, as decided upon by the centre or district, and, secondly, that positions of leadership have been filled with comrades less experienced in leadership and therefore more prone to bureaucracy.” The resolution saw this decay as a “trend” and not “permanent”, but argued that the “complete recovery of party democracy will not, however, be automatic”.^[24]

Pollitt replied to these critics at the congress thus: “Something has been said here, both in the contributions and the amendments, about more democratic methods of procedure. Due note will be taken of that fact; but this congress is being publicly reported, and I state the claim right now that the Communist Party is the most democratically run political organisation in the world.”^[25] This, of course, must have been tremendously comforting for all concerned.

On the shop floor

As noted above, the CPGB shifted around to supporting the war in June 1941, arguing that the best means of defending the Soviet Union was a vigorous prosecution of the war.

This did not make the party’s policies completely supine (it distrusted the anti-fascist credentials of Britain’s industrialists and pushed for the democratic integration of the workers into the production processes through joint production committees); nevertheless it posed particular problems for CPGB militants: “The new industrial policy had implications which could put communists and fellow-travellers in novel and occasionally difficult positions. Arguing in favour of intensified work, enlisting the help of the foreman in the production drive, working against strikes and so on was not always popular on the shop floor when local grievances had accumulated to the point where workers contemplated a stoppage. Stakhanovism did not export well to the British shop floor. Nor, indeed, was the communist accustomed to playing such a role.”^[26]

Croucher records a number of episodes in the engineering sector where CPGB union activists, well embedded in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), were given a tough time over their attitude to stoppages, despite the fact that the notion of World War II as an ‘anti-fascist’ war dovetailed with the ideas of most advanced workers. For example, during the dispute at the Vickers shipyard in Barrow in autumn 1943, the party had two of its members expelled from the strike committee for trying to make the strike a political issue (of course, in hindsight, it could be argued that the CPGB was perfectly principled in introducing ‘political’ argument into a dispute: the problem was the toxic nature of those politics). George Crane, CPGB national organiser for the AEU, claimed he was only given three minutes to speak to the strike committee in September 1943, and that participants threatened to throw him down the stairs.^[27] After the dispute, the Barrow shop stewards produced a leaflet entitled ‘Facts v filth’ that ended: “Fellow members - where are we going? ... if we allow the present lack-a-daisical methods of our EC to continue, of whom is our EC the servants? Ours if we fight and deserve it, the Communist’s Party [sic] if we do not.”^[28]

In an earlier conflict, the ‘total time’ strike on Tyneside in October 1942, the CPGB had also faced difficulties, which were compounded by the party’s leadership not being content with its members merely arguing against the strike. The Daily Worker denounced the strike and party shop stewards who had scabbed on were subsequently voted out.^[29] Indeed, the CPGB leadership had some internal issues with its activists and Pollitt was despatched to stiffen their resolve.

Malcolm MacEwen, then local organiser on Tyneside, records the impact of the party’s intervention: “Our members spoke and voted against the strikes ... but we would have advised them to come out with the strikers if they lost the vote, had Harry Pollitt not come up and instructed them to go to work. I did not quarrel with his decision, but it was an emotional, not a political one. The party shop stewards who worked through the strike were isolated and instantly deprived of their positions, yet the workers would have been willing to listen to them had they not blacklegged ... Few of the party stewards were reinstated after the strike and the party never regained the influence it had previously exercised on the Tyne.”^[30] Pollitt, on the other hand, applauded those who had scabbed, claiming it required a “sacred spirit of real class-consciousness” from those CPGB members who had carried on with their job.^[31]

For a party that set so much store by organising at the point of production and had recruited thousands of militants throughout the 1930s on that basis, often to the exclusion of more ‘political’ CPGB work, this was obviously a traumatic time and it seems that many CPGB militants turned a deaf ear to King Street’s extreme anti-strike rhetoric. In relation to the party’s engineers, Croucher writes: “... the CP shop stewards do not always appear to have put political priorities before industrial grievances. The prolonged go-slow conducted by a north-western aircraft factory after a ‘production week’, the threatened district-wide stoppages in Coventry and Manchester in 1943, the collections held through the Clyde factories in support of both the women and apprentice strikers of 1943-44 - all these instances prompt us to ask whether the CP shop stewards disassociated themselves from these actions. Given the communist pre-eminence in the areas concerned, such instances seem to point inevitably to only one possible answer. Many CP stewards, it would appear, preferred not to lose their steward’s cards, as some of their comrades had done, and, faced with the uncomfortable choice between their political and industrial loyalties, adopted positions of varying degrees of ambiguity.”^[32]

Produce or perish

Presumably such comrades had reacted with relief when World War II ended. They might have swallowed ditching strikes in the cause of saving the socialist motherland, but now, surely, was the time for ‘business as usual’?

As it turned out, the CPGB leadership had roughly the same attitude to Clement Attlee’s government as it had had to Winston Churchill’s, replete with the same ‘produce or perish’ attitude to peace on the industrial front (this tailing of the new Labour government was criticised by many in the CPGB - which will be covered in the second part of this article). Clearly, the experience of ‘swimming with the tide’ had been an intoxicating one (in the negative sense) for the CPGB’s leadership. As Pollitt put it to the November 1945 congress, “Are we never going to learn? I have been in too many campaigns which had as their main motive against, and not sufficient with the main motive for, and comrades, especially the younger comrades, in this congress would be well advised to assimilate that experience too.”^[33]

The leadership faced a number of critical resolutions on the subject of strikes at the congress. A Woolwich borough aggregate urged “a positive policy relating our leadership to strikes”,^[34] while Aylesbury branch proposed: “That this congress is of the opinion that it may be necessary to support strike action in existing circumstances, and that the whole question of our attitude to strikes should be reviewed through the party.”^[35] In relation to the 1945 dock workers’ walkout, which the CPGB had condemned in line with its support for the Labour government, Banstead branch proposed: “That this congress supports the fight of the dock workers to improve their wages and conditions. It deplores the lack of action taken by the party and the lack of support given by the Daily Worker to this fight.”^[36] Epsom branch was critical of the “the recent failure of the party to give a clear lead in the dock dispute ...”.^[37]

This issue had clearly been debated from the floor of congress and Pollitt had attempted to face down these critics. He criticised those “who so light-heartedly talk about strikes” as presenting a threat to the idea of “winning the peace”. On the issue of the dock workers’ strike, Pollitt made it crystal clear that the CPGB was continuing the industrial practices it had elaborated after June 1941 and that the militants caught in the crossfire between the party line and their fellow workers had to carry on taking the flak:

“On the dock strike, I took the view that if our party had been compelled to stick its head out in difficult situations in the war and compel our comrades to be stigmatised as strikebreakers, we are not called upon to repeat that in the days of peace, but we would examine every dispute on its merits. The Daily Worker reported the facts. It is true we gave no lead for 10 days, but that is no crime, because we considered that strike ill-advised ... If some of our comrades were in difficulties on the docksides, well communists are always in difficulties and we have to be prepared to face them and to stand up against them.”^[38]

Another controversial step taken by the CPGB’s leadership (and one that it came to deeply regret) was the dissolving of its factory branches and replacing them with factory committees, while industrial members were redistributed among residential branches, partly as a means of coping with mass redundancies at the end of World War II.^[39]

The loss of these assets caused some dissent among party members. In the run-up to the November 1945 congress, Bessie Leith of Marylebone (London) wrote on behalf of her branch: “The present form of organisation on a residential basis has not provided the party with the closest possible links with the people. The abandoning of factory groups has not strengthened the party amongst the industrial workers. The social composition of the party is unsatisfactory when a large proportion of the members are non-trade unionists.”^[40] W Zak wrote of the decision on factory branches that “the communist basis of organisation had ... been liquidated and replaced by the social democratic basis of area electoral branch organisation”.^[41]

These criticisms need to be handled with some care. First, while it was quite correct for the CPGB to build and maintain factory branches up to 1945, and mistaken to dissolve them, the workplace is not the special repository of communist consciousness that the comrades above appear to be suggesting. In fact, the increasing tendency throughout the 1930s and beyond was for CPGB trade militants to practically and ideologically become the carriers of bourgeois trade unionism: ie, defending and extending organisations whose primary aim was the regulation of labour-power under capitalism.^[42]

The CPGB leadership’s action in dissolving the factory branches certainly heightened this developmental train. Ultimately, the party’s trade unionists, in general, became another source of its growing opportunism in the post-war period and it was generally among residential branches that healthier oppositional elements were found (in admittedly tiny numbers).^[43] Also, the theory behind factory branches was always somewhat brighter than the reality. Croucher considers evidence during World War II that the CPGB’s engineering factory groups were often semi-active, suffered rapid turnovers in membership, with the majority of work falling on the shoulders of a few individuals.^[44]

Notes

1. K Morgan Harry Pollitt London 1993, pp145-50.
2. Some of this righteous Trotskyist (or ex-Trotskyist in this case) indignation can be found in Dave Osler’s rambling review of this writer’s The kick inside (www.davidosler.com/the_left). “Unlike the author, I don’t see any of the ‘hard Stalinist’ tendencies of the 1960s and 1970s as in any way saving graces. It is questionable even whether they could even [sic] objectively be described as ‘revolutionary’.” Osler does not actually explain why these ‘hard Stalinist’ (a thoroughly obfuscatory phrase that I had not used) groups were not revolutionary, whereas I had explained why I judged various Maoist and pro-Soviet oppositions as being ‘revolutionary’ in a limited sense in relation to the CPGB context they had emerged from.
3. Even a Eurocommunist historian of the party, Willie Thompson, admits that after the emergence of the CPGB’s Maoist opposition in 1962-63, “deficiencies [as judged by the oppositionists] were to prove a recurrent theme advanced from a variety of angles in subsequent decades” (W Thompson The good old cause: British communism 1920-1991 London 1992, p131).
4. The CPGB’s leadership subsequently found this phase to be highly embarrassing. A resolution from Cambridge branch to the November 1945 congress proposed: “... we feel that there is need for some discussion and analysis of the party’s attitude to the war in the period between the fall of France and the entry of the Soviet Union into the war. Statements are constantly appearing in party publications which seem to imply that the party supported the war against Germany during that period. The latest example of this has been in the letter on the 25th birthday of the party. We believe that this is a form of political dishonesty which will only confuse our members and ultimately harm the party. If our attitude in this period was wrong the party must face the issue squarely even at this late hour” (Branch resolutions, CPGB archive: CP/CENT/CONG/05/01).
5. communist-party.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=263:1936-qthey-shall-not-passq-&catid=13:short-history-of-the-communist-party-&Itemid=26. This statement has been used not because it is particularly exemplary or well argued, but rather because it is a thoroughly standard ‘official communist’ summary of the CPGB and World War II.
6. If not referred to in the body text, I have made a note of these resolutions in the footnotes in relation to the points of controversy brought up in the text.
7. ‘Reply to discussion by Harry Pollitt’: CP/CENT/CONG/05/02.
8. W Thompson op cit p218; and R Croucher Engineers at war 1939-1945 London 1982, p320.
9. W Thompson op cit p73.
10. R Croucher op cit pp320-22.
11. H McShane No mean fighter London 1978, p235.
12. World News and Views Vol 25, No44, November 10 1945.
13. World News and Views Vol 25, No38, September 29 1945.
14. Ibid.
15. World News and Views Vol 25, No45, November 17 1945.
16. Branch resolutions: CP/CENT/CONG/05/01.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. World News and Views Vol 25, No44, November 10 1945 - original emphasis unless stated. Harry McShane offers a somewhat jaundiced view of McIlhone, stating: “He was a bureaucrat, but completely devoted to the Communist Party.” On another occasion McShane says: “I respected McIlhone because he had always made great personal sacrifices for the party, but he was also very bitter against anyone else who didn’t hold the same views as he did” (H McShane op cit pp237, 248.
21. ‘Reply to discussion by Harry Pollitt’: CP/CENT/CONG/05/02.
22. World News and Views Vol 25, No41, October 20 1945.
23. World News and Views Vol 25, No45, November 17 1945. Grumbles about the lack of democracy inside the CPGB were not restricted to the rank and file. For the complaint of Idris Cox, CPGB executive committee member from south Wales, see K Morgan op cit p144.
24. Branch resolutions: CP/CENT/CONG/05/01.
25. ‘Reply to discussion by Harry Pollitt’: CP/CENT/CONG/05/02.
26. R Croucher op cit p143.
27. Ibid p221.
28. Cited in ibid p226.
29. Ibid p186.
30. Cited in K Morgan op cit p137.
31. Cited in ibid p136.
32. R Croucher op cit p372.
33. ‘Reply to discussion by Harry Pollitt’: CP/CENT/CONG/05/02.
34. Branch resolutions: CP/CENT/CONG/05/01.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid. It should also be noted that there were resolutions from Carshalton branch stating that the CPGB should “exercise great caution regarding strikes”, while Ardwick branch called for the government to “speed up” negotiating machinery to reduce strikes and strengthen the trade unions.
38. ‘Reply to discussion by Harry Pollitt’: CP/CENT/CONG/05/02.
39. Pollitt told a meeting of the CPGB EC in 1953: “We have paid a heavy price for the tendencies towards liquidation of factory organisation which we tolerated after the end of the war” (cited in R Croucher op cit p360-61n). The CPGB factions influenced by Maoism in the 1960s were also critical of this decision, seeing it as one the party’s routes into opportunist politics - see L Parker The kick inside: revolutionary opposition in the CPGB, 1960-1991 London 2007, pp18, 32.
40. World News and Views Vol 25, No41, October 20 194540. World News and Views Vol 25, No41, October 20 1945.
41. World News and Views Vol 25, No45, November 17 1945.
42. See my review of Nina Fishman’s Arthur Horner: a political biography in Weekly Worker August 5 2010.
43. What was left of the CPGB’s trade union wing produced the reformist and nationalist ‘opposition’ around the Morning Star in the 1980s, a fraction of which formed today’s Communist Party of Britain faction.
44. R Croucher op cit pp320-22.