11.05.1995

The Party's not over yet

Mark Fischer reviews 'Enemy within: The rise and fall of the British Communist Party' by Francis Beckett

BECKETT’S aim of producing a popular ‘objective’ history of the Party for the general public is a good one. The fact that this can be done today indicates a degree of ‘mellowness’ in the establishment towards the CPGB. With communism ‘dead’ and the Party collapsed, the spectre seems to have been exorcised.

Beckett’s popular outline is however a highly anecdotal and ‘personal’ history. He leans sympathetically towards the stolid types in the Party - the Pollitts, the Bob Stewarts (a “stout, sincere man with a sober moustache” - p14).

Beckett’s key weakness is - as he blithely admits in his interview with me - that he really does not understand communist politics. Understanding what drives Communist Party members is thus impossible.

Beckett tries to define the early Communist Party’s relationship with the Labour Party by informing us that Lenin believed that that the British Labour Party was “the authentic voice of the British working class and that little could be achieved without it” (p13).

The debate on affiliation to the Labour Party is portrayed as being between those - like the “stout” and “sincere” Mr Stewart - who wanted to participate in elections and affiliate to Labour (as the “authentic voice” of the working class presumably) and others who castigated the Labour leaders as “the deadly enemy of the revolution which you and I are seeking” (p15).

Beckett alone cannot be blamed for this distortion of the explicitly revolutionary, anti-Labour Com-munist Party of 1920. His list of acknowledgements reads like a rogues’ gallery of opportunists, pro-Labourites and liquidationists in the Party over the years - Monty Johnstone, Noreen Branson, Mike Squires, Mick Costello, Andrew Murray, Douglas Hyde, Brian Pollitt, to name but a few.

His failure to understand the birth of the Party leads him to misunderstand its death. Rather than the left being thrown into some irrational, collective, self-feeding frenzy in the 1980s (p229), the collapse of our Party was the end of a long drawn out process of decline. Death by “a thousand opportunist cuts”, we have called it.

However the book tries to present the Party’s history in terms of many of the remarkable, dedicated and sincere people who made it up. But don’t expect any deep political insight into what made them communists in the first place.

His failure to mention either the fight of the Leninist wing of the Communist Party (although he verbally admits he knew of its existence) or the Party today, organised around the Provisional Central Committee, places a question mark over the book’s core integrity. Dealing with the continuation of the Party under the PCC would have made a book about the “rise and fall of the Communist Party” less ‘tidy’, but rather more accurate.

Mark Fischer