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“A middle aged man in a shabby raincoat stood outside the TUC’s central London headquarters that cold November morning in 1991 selling the Communist newspaper, the Morning Star, The Morning Star had dedicated supporters prepared to turn out in all weathers to sell the paper. But this was a bad morning – he sold only 18 copies.”
“Yet 213 people passed him on their war into the TUC for a meeting – the forty-third and last Congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Henceforth CP). They were there to wind up their party after seventy-one years and created a new organisation which rejected mst traditional Communist beliefs and ways of working”.
The Enemy Within The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party. Francis Beckett. 1995.
This month the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) is celebrating ‘100 years’ of the Communist Party.
Where will you be on 1 August? On that day, one hundred years ago, in the wake of war and revolt across Europe, Britain’s Marxists formed a new kind of revolutionary political party. It served only one master, the workers. It was a party the rich could not buy.Its members could be found in every arena of class struggle,
Their General Secretary Rob Griffiths, a former lecturer, was a leader of a faction around the Morning Star which fought a bitter battle to retain control of the daily. Names from the later stages of that factional struggle, ‘Straight Left’ (Andrew Murray, Seumas Milne, both part of the inner Corbyn circle), Socialist Action, Tariq Ali (thanked by Murray for his “support and political commitment” in last year’s The Fall and Rise of the British Left), and the Leninist, forerunner of the Weekly Worker, appear in Francis Beckett’s postscript.
Many dispute the claim that the present Communist Party of Britain is the inheritor of the CPGB.
That’s as it may be.
But few people are aware of, or care, about what happened to their temporarily victorious rivals in the old CPGB, from their rapidly fading Democratic Left, New Politics Network to Unlock Democracy..
A common view on the left is that the CPB was, until the December General Election, preparing to celebrate its first return to political relevance since the 1970s, when the CPBG’s Industrial Organiser Bert Ramelson exercised influence within the trade union movement.
In 1973 Ramelson said: “We have more influence now on the labour movement than at any time in the life of our party. The Communist Party can float an idea early in the year. It goes to trade union conferences as a resolution and it can become official Labour Party policy by the autumn. A few years ago we were on our own, but not now.”
In the 2019 book written by Andrew Murray (who until 2016 was a member of the CPB), he railed against the “preference for individual rights over the collective” “the poisonous seeds of the politics of personal identity and human rights”, “rancid identity politics”, the “newly declared culture war”, and the “Brexit derangement syndrome” of those opposed to leaving the EU (Pages 97, 214 – 5. The Fall and Rise of the British Left.)
Alas. After December’s result Murray’s work fell stillborn from the press. Yet if it did not hearald the triumph of a Labour government a few of the ideas it floated have become popular, at least amongst the contributors of Spiked.
The CPB, which advocated not voting Labour and abstaining in the 2019 European Elections, has mulled over the election result.
For them Brexit was a key issue,
Labour’s fatal abandonment of its principled position over Brexit, was most concentrated, where the Brexit Party gained a strategic wedge of votes, where the Red Wall collapsed and where the Tories were able to mobilise people who don’t usually vote.
Labour’s 2019 loss: hard truths for the right wing NIck Wright.
Put simply, anything other than accepting the Brexit Referendum result was wrong. Allowing the hard-right Brexit project to get a hold was the way forward. Promoting the Communist Party of Britain’s own pro-Brexit, ‘People’s Brexit’, position, would have doubtless been a bonus.
Or as Murray – who was a key Corbyn adviser on Brexit, explicitly says in the Morning Star’s sister journal, the US Jacobin owned Tribune,
Leaving the EU was the issue that this desire came to hang its hat on in many areas. This was a democratic impulse which Labour, despite a radical leadership committed to popular initiative, got itself on the wrong side of. These are the people Labour left behind in the dash to support a second referendum.
Class Politics After Corbyn Andrew Murray.
There is no recognition of the role the pro-Brexit stand of the anti-EU left, including the CPB, played in legitimising the Get Brexit Done message of Boris Johnson, and helped carry him to election victory.
In response to Labour’s defeat the CPB now call for a new Popular Front.
CP PROPOSES ‘POPULAR FRONT’ ALLIANCE AND ‘TRIDENT DIVIDEND’
Reminding the executive meeting on Soviet Victory Day that capitalist crisis can lead to fascism, Mr Foster urged trade unions, trades councils, People’s Assembly, CND and other campaigning groups to build a ‘Popular Front’ alliance against Tory policies that would put the interests of monopoly capital above those of working people and their families.
Unity could be developed around a left-wing programme for public ownership, democratic economic planning and progressive taxation. It was also essential to halt rent evictions and extend the pay furlough, Universal Credit or tax credits to all workers, claimants and students in need.
During the present pandemic, Britain’s Communists said workers should take collective action to refuse to accept unsafe practices or conditions during this pandemic and take every opportunity to strengthen workplace trade unionism.
In a detailed organisational report, assistant secretary for membership Alex Gordon revealed that more than 60 people had applied to join the Communist Party in April, taking recruitment to the highest level since the 2003 Iraq War.
They have not forgotten an internationalist approach to the culture wars:
Culture wars and the UYGHURS
Years ago, communist party historian VG Kiernan wrote a path breaking book, the ‘Lords of humankind’ in which he mapped the culture wars of imperialism, with crude attempts to capture high moral ground, as a prelude to wars of greed and land capture. A thesis worth remembering when trying to make sense of the current propaganda war against People’s China, in which Muslim believers are reported to be forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, with women forcibly sterilised. The current press campaign against China, follows a path of cultural racism and imperialism.
The Morning Star itself devotes much of its space to the old theme of attacking the Labour Party. Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer is in their sight. They are happy to publish would-be damaging outbursts,
Len McCluskey says Labour leadership looks like uninspiring team of ‘middle managers’ while Britain teeters on brink of worst recession since 1930s
Sir Keir would only win an election with the left’s support, he said, dismissing theories of the left’s “demise” as “greatly exaggerated.”
Mr McCluskey urged Labour members on the left not to become “demoralised’ and called on Sir Keir to stick to the policy pledges he made during his campaign to replace Mr Corbyn — including renationalisation of utilities and rail, a green new deal, abolition of tuition fees and higher taxes for top 5 per cent of earners — to promote party unity.
He revealed that he would push for a meeting of left-wing allies in coming weeks.
Anniversary Reading.
There is much to say on the 100th Anniversary.
Perhaps we could begin by looking at the history of the CPGB.
There is, it hardly needs saying, a vast literature on the CPBG and British Communism. There are many many important books to look at.
This Blog would recommend Raphael Samuel’s The Lost World of British Communism (2006) to those who wish to begin to look at the CPGB’s history.
Samuel describes the final years.
CLASS POLITICS: THE LOST WORLD OF BRITISH COMMUNISM (PART III)
The schism in British Communism, like many of those in Marxist political formations, resembles nothing so much as a war of ghosts in which the living actors are dwarfed by the spectres they conjure up. The debate on the ‘British way’—the major issue at the 1977 Congress when the present schism first emerged—echoes the never-resolved debate on ‘parliamentism’ which nearly paralysed the cpgb at birth; while the argument for the ‘broad democratic alliance’ mirrors the turn from the ‘class against class’ politics of the Comintern’s Third Period (1928–34) to those of the Popular Front—an analogy which has been strenuously promoted by the supporters of Eurocommunism.
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Totemic importance is attached to its long-term programme, The British Road to Socialism—‘the most comprehensive strategy for the Left in Britain’—despite its origins in now suspect notions of ‘People’s Democracy’. ‘Democratic centralism’ is strictly insisted upon, being used not only to expel individual dissidents but, in the case of London and Lancashire, to dissolve entire Party districts. The Party continues to despatch fraternal delegations and to take comfort from the success (or relative success) of brother or sister parties. (The Japanese Party seems recently to have joined the Italian as a possible model.) The cpgb goes through all the motions of being a great national party. It fields candidates at general elections, even though, to judge by the results on the 11th of June, it no longer has even the semblance of local support; it launches economic and industrial ‘strategies’ even though there are no longer factory branches to carry them through; it publishes statements on the issues of the day even though there is no longer a daily paper to print them.
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The hatred and contempt with which each side treats the others—as also the bewilderment and distress of the silent majority of Party loyalists—seems now to exceed that in the Labour Party at the height of Bennism. In the Eurocommunist camp, as then on the Labour Left, it is typically expressed in generational terms—‘Why don’t you just die?’ was the shout of one of the new wave ‘pluralists’ when, at a recent aggregate, an old-timer attempted to speak.
One book that should be read as essential background is Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union 1929-1941 (2008) It is a brilliant account of reactions within Britain to the Soviet Union during the industrialisation and forced collectivisation programmes of the 1930s.
It is hard to project yourself mentally back to the years which shaped the CPGB, whose influence outside of left circles only really took off in the 1930s.
Claude Cockburn’s The Devil’s Decade (1973), is a book (by a key supporter at the time) about the 1930s that gives the broader political struggles that shaped the CPGB, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and their role backing the Republic during the Spanish Civil War and the “Unity” campaign with Labour. Cockburn’s revealing autobiography I Claude (1967) This goes from Cockburn’s deep involvement with the CPGB and international Communism, up till his final break – the repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Cockburn is witty without losing an appropriate sense of the gravity.
There is also novel covering a later period, The Rotten Elements, (1969) Edward Upwood,
…the second book in Upward’s The Spiral Ascent trilogy and continues the story of Alan and Elsie Sebrill a few years after the first one. When it was first published this book was subtitled A Novel of Fact because one of its aims was to give an historically accurate picture of policies and attitudes in the British Communist Party during the late 1940s. The phrase rotten elements was sometimes used in the party to refer to members who deviated seriously from the correct party line.
The previous novel ended as World War II was starting. This one starts some time after the end of the war. Elsie and Alan are happily married with two children, a boy and a girl. Both are committed members of the Communist Party and Elsie is the branch secretary of the local party. However, there is a problem. Both – but Elsie in particular – feel that the Party is deviating from the correct Marxist-Leninist line.
….
Alan and Elsie raise the issue of the Party in Britain deviating from the true Marxist-Leninist path. There are several doctrinal issues here but two are key. Lenin had always maintained that true communism could only be obtained by the violent overthrow of capitalism, imperialism and the bourgeois state. The British party clearly seems to be deviating from this view. Related to this is the attitude to the Labour Party (which, at the time this novel takes place, was the governing party in Britain). The view of the Sebrills is that the Labour party is a bourgeois, imperialist party and must be overthrown to bring about true revolution. The British Communist Party line seems to be that it is merely one stage on the way to communism and that the party can collaborate with it, if it and they are moving to a more socialist system.
Apart from The Enemy Within, this Blog would also recommend another of Francis Beckett’s books, Stalin’s British Victims, Sutton Publishing, 2004
In his new book, Stalin’s British Victims, Beckett researches the stories of four women who suffered under Stalinism. He shows just how far the leadership of the British party was aware of what was going on, and demonstrates the almost indestructible ideological commitment that led communists to deflect, ignore, explain or deny the evidence of their own eyes.
The most poignant story that Beckett tells is of Rose Cohen, co-founder of the CPGB and admired by the party leader, Harry Pollitt, who went to live in Moscow with her Russian husband in the late 1920s. In 1937, first her husband and then Rose herself were arrested. Pollitt, Beckett establishes, interceded for her with the authorities, but to no avail. She was tried, sentenced and quickly executed for being a British spy. Years later her niece Joyce Rathbone set out in search of her lost cousin, born in the same year as herself and brought up in Stalinist orphanages, forbidden to talk about his parents.
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So Pollitt and his fellow party leaders knew that old comrades were being despatched by Stalin, and thought some of them innocent enough to want to try and save them. They also experienced the brutal snubs delivered to those foreigners who poked their noses into Stalin’s purges. However, as Beckett shows, this did not prevent Pollitt’s strenuous public defence of the Moscow trials. In March 1938, three months after Rose received a bullet in the base of her skull, Pollitt declared in the Daily Worker that these trials of “political and moral degenerates” were a “mighty demonstration to the world of the power and strength of the Soviet Union”. Did he think Rose had become a “degenerate” and that her dawn extinction in the Lubyanka was a salutary lesson to the world about the revolutionary resolve of the first workers’ state?
David Aaronovitch. New Statesman.
There is little to say about the moral credibility of the Party’s past after that.