Contribution to the 15^th International Communist Seminar
"Present and past experiences in the international communist movement".
Brussels, 5- 7 May 2006
www.icsbrussels.org , ics[at]icsbrussels.org

Impact of the Communist International on the foundation and the development of the Communist Party of Great Britain

Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)

by Harpal Brar

Historical background

The obstacles in the way of founding a revolutionary party in Great Britain

After the final defeat of the Chartist movement in 1848, there followed a period during which British capitalism had at its disposal not only a vast colonial empire but also a monopoly in the world market. The rapid expansion of industry consequent upon the above, enabled British capitalism to ease the condition of the working class. Between 1850 and 1875, wages rose considerably, by almost a third. The major beneficiary of this rise was doubtless the labour aristocracy, consisting of skilled workers and craftsmen – these constituting between 10% and 15% of the working class. Their weekly wages were nearly double those of unskilled workers. This privileged stratum, increasingly assuming the leadership of the working class and turning its back on Chartism (which was undoubtedly revolutionary for its time), got on with the job of building craft unions designed to protect their trade and craft privileges in order to better the conditions for the sale of the labour power of their members within the conditions of capitalism. Let alone working for the abolition of the wages system, this upper stratum increasingly acquired a stake in this system, became infected with bourgeois respectability and a downright contempt for the mass of the working class, the vast majority constituting the unskilled workers.

In these circumstances, it is hardly to be surprised at that no working class party arose which had the ability and willingness to represent the interests of that class and there was widespread demoralisation of the working class and its leaders were corrupt and venal.

In his letter of 7 October 1858, Engels wrote to Marx: "The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie. Of course, this is to a certain extent justifiable for a nation which is exploiting the whole world".

15 years later, in an article dated 22 February 1874 on The English elections, Engels captures the depressing political scene in the following words:

"As regards the workers it must be stated, to begin with, that no separate political working-class party has existed in England since the downfall of the Chartist Party … This is understandable in a country in which the working class has shared more than anywhere else in the advantages of the immense expansion of its large-scale industry. Nor could it have been otherwise in an England that ruled the world market.

"Whenever the workers lately took part in general politics in particular organisations, they did so almost exclusively as the extreme left wing of the 'great Liberal Party'"

Marx expressed similar views on this question in a letter to W Liebknecht dated 11 February 1878, in which he wrote:

"The English working class had been gradually becoming more and more deeply demoralised by the period of corruption since 1848 and had at last got to the point when it was nothing more than the tail end of the Great Liberal party, i.e., of its oppressors, the capitalists. Its direction had passed completely into the hands of the venal trade-union leaders and professional agitators. These fellows shouted and howled behind the Gladstones .. and the whole gang of factory owners … in majorem gloriam [to the greater glory] of the tsar as the emancipator of nations, while they never raised a finger for their own brothers in South Wales, condemned by the mine-owners to die of starvation. Wretches!".

Towards the end of his life, in March 1891, Engels refers to the old skilled unions as "rich and therefore cowardly"; and, 6 months later, expressing his delight at the unsuccessful attempt of the TUC to reverse the decision of the Congress the year before to campaign for an 8-hour day, he says: "the old unions, with the textile workers at their head, had exerted all their strength towards overthrowing the 8-hour decision of 1890. They came to grief… and the bourgeois papers recognised the defeat of the bourgeois Labour Party [Engels' emphasis]" (Letter dated 14 September 1891, cited in Imperialism and the split in socialism, Lenin, 1916).

Commenting on these profound pronouncements of Marxism, Lenin says:

"Here are clearly indicated the causes and effects.

"The causes are:

"(1) The exploitation of the whole world by this country [i.e., Britain]

"(2) Its monopolist position in the world market.

"(3) Its colonial monopoly.

"The effects are:

"(1) A section of the British proletariat becomes bourgeois.

Engels publicly expressed these idea, repeated for decades, in his Preface to the second edition of his Condition of the working class in England. In this Preface, written in 1892, he speaks of the effects of England's industrial monopoly during the period of 1848-1868 on the English working class movement, thus:

"… during this period of England's industrial monopoly the English working class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were very unequally parcelled out among them; the privileged minority pocketed most, bet even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then. And that is the reason why, since the dying out of Owenism, there has been no socialism in England". With the end of English monopoly already in sight, Engels expresses himself in the following optimistic terms:

"With the breakdown of that monopoly, the English working class will lose its privileged position, it will find itself generally, the privileged minority not excepted, on a level with its fellow workers abroad. And that is the reason why there will be socialism again in England."

Engels' hopes of an immediate revival of socialism in Britain were belied by the emergence of imperialism – a development that Marx and Engels did not live to see. As a result of this development, instead of Britain's monopoly disappearing, it merely gave way to a monopoly of a handful of financially rich and powerful countries who "… obtain superprofits amounting to hundreds of millions, even billions, 'ride on the backs' of hundreds and hundreds of millions of the populations of foreign countries, fight among each other for the division of the particularly rich, particularly fat and particularly easy spoils" (Lenin, Imperialism and the split in the socialist movement, October 1916).

In the same article, Lenin develops in the following terms the Marxist analysis of the connection between monopoly and growth of opportunism among a significant minority of the working class, the 'upper stratum', the 'aristocracy of labour' of a given country, and the resultant split in the working class:

"The bourgeoisie of a 'Great' imperialist Power is economically in a position to bribe the upper sections of 'its' workers by devoting for this purpose one or two hundred million francs a year since its superprofits amount perhaps to a billion."

Organisational breach between labour and the liberal party

Formation of the Independent Labour Party

Although, as pointed out earlier, the privileged workers continued to act as the tail end – an extreme radical wing – of the Liberal Party right up to the end of the ninth decade of the 19^th century, the early 1890s witnessed a change in this state of affairs. The first organisational breach in this hitherto existing alliance – between the Liberal Party and labour – took place in 1893 with the founding of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). This breach was the direct result of stiff foreign competition, in the face of which the liberal bourgeoisie, which was dominantly represented in the textile and mining industries, proved to be just as ruthless as the Tories. The defeat inflicted by the employers during the 1892 strike in the textile industry played the role of a catalyst in formation of the ILP. The founding conference of the ILP (1893) left no one in doubt that its leadership, in particular Keir Hardie, who was the moving spirit behind the formation of the ILP, though in favour of the organisational independence, was not in favour of the political independence of the ILP.

In other words, in the sphere of politics, the Lib-Lab alliance was to continue undisturbed. It was precisely for this reason that the founding conference refused to call the new party 'Socialist Labour Party'. Instead it was to be called the 'Independent Labour Party' on the flimsy excuse that the party had to appeal to the mass of workers and not merely to socialists. Translated into ordinary language, the masses to whom the ILP appealed, and who comprised its constituency, were none other than the upper stratum of workers, organised in craft unions, characterised by a narrow outlook, bourgeois respectability and a contempt for socialism.

Formation of Labour Party: opportunism continues unabated

Although the ILP was thorough opportunist in character, immersed in Lib-Lab politics, and in no way opposed to the political alliance with the Liberal Party, it nonetheless encountered hostility on the part of the old unions who did their best, by a series of bureaucratic measures, ranging fom the adoption of the block vote to ending trades council representation (solely because the ILP dominated smaller unions and trade councils), to isolate it. The economic reality, however, was inexorably making it impossible to preserve the Lib-Lab alliance, as that alliance no longer could guarantee the privileged status of the upper stratum of the working class. Faced with stiff competition from abroad, British capitalism, throughout the last decade of the 19^th century, forced on the unions several confrontations, inflicting bitter defeats on the latter. In the face of this sobering reality, at its 1899 Congress, the TUC felt obliged to decide in favour of convening a conference to form a Labour Representation Committee (LRC). The said Conference took place in February 1990 and was attended by 65 delegates representing unions with a combined membership of 568,000, as well as by representatives of political organisations such as the ILP, the Fabian Society and the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). The Conference had little difficulty in rejecting the SDF formulation that the new organisation ought to be a "party organisation separate from the capitalist parties based upon a recognition of class war". Instead, it went on to accept, by a majority of 102 votes against 3, the motion worded by Keir Hardie to the effect that "this Conference is in favour of working-class opinion being represented in the House of Commons by men sympathetic with the aims and demands of the labour movement."

From the very outset, not only was the LRC intended to be a parliamentary body, first and foremost, it also excluded nine-tenths of the working class, formed as it was by the craft unions to protect their interests, in and outside of parliament, better than was possible under the old Lib-Lab alliance, now rendered obsolete by the changed economic reality. In 1992, only 1.5 million, out of a total workforce of 14 million, belonged to any trade union, and even fewer (less than a million) belonged to unions affiliated to the TUC. The unions which set up the LRC were overwhelmingly the organisations of the aristocracy of labour. At the time of the setting up of the LRC, out of a total of 10 million unskilled workers, merely 100,000 were organised in trade unions. What is more, at a time when the majority of the workers had no vote (in addition to women not having a vote, there was no universal male suffrage either), the electorate, which was to be the constituency of the LRC, was largely drawn from the upper privileged stratum of the working class.

The turn of the century brought with it such a decline in the competitiveness of British capitalism as to threaten the conditions of life even of the upper stratum of the British working class. Unemployment among the members of the unions rose from 2.5% to 8% in the first decade of the 20^th century, while wages fell by 6% during the same period. To these deteriorating conditions, the response of the trade unions was one of total submission.

In the face of bourgeois attacks on the working class, during this entire decade, the LRC and from 1906 the Labour Party (as the LRC came to be called from this year) continued to act as the tail end of the Liberal Party by concluding secret electoral pacts with the latter, with not the slightest attempt at political independence. In parliament, the Labour Party, which by 1910 had nearly 40 MPs and held the balance, acted merely as an adjunct to the Liberal Party, refusing to oppose the latter on the pretext that such action would result in the fall of the Government and its replacement by the Tories (does not it sound topical!).

The Liberal Party corrupted Labour leaders through finance and theoretical guidance. Since the Labour Party acted as the tail end of the Liberal Party, not surprisingly, the policy of Labour leaders was characterised by social reformism, discouraging strikes, parliament as the sole instrument of social advance, opposition to class war and an intense hatred of Marxism.

The four years before the First World War witnessed a rise in the working-class movement, with marked resistance to the capitalist offensive. Millions of workers took to strike action. These strikes were caused by a steep rise in the cost of living, reduced wages and disputes over union recognition. The seamen and dockers' strike of 1911, that of the railwaymen and miners in 1912, and the famous Dublin lockout of 1913, marked a high point in the development of the working-class movement. If the number of strikes in 1908 was 399, it rose to 903 in 1911, and during the latter half of 1913 and the first half of 1914, there were on average 150 strikes every month. The Labour Party earned notoriety for itself by its total condemnation of the rising militant strike movement. J R Clynes declared at the 1914 Labour Party Conference: "too many strikes caused a sense of disgust, of being a nuisance to the community" (quoted in R Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, p.38).

In view of this opportunist 'socialist' stance of the Labour Party, it is not surprising that a grateful Lloyd George, one of the cleverest of bourgeois politicians ever to head a British government, declared that "we can console ourselves with the fact, that the best policemen for the syndicalist is the Socialist." (Cited in British communist Party, Tom Bell).

Socialist groupings in Britain on the eve of the First World War

On the eve of the war, there were two socialist trends in the working-class movement (a) social reformism espoused by the ILP and the Labour Party (b) continental socialism – Marxism – espoused by the Social Democratic Federation (British Socialist Party) and the Socialist Labour Party.

A few words about the BSP and the SLP. The BSP was formed in 1911 from the Social-Democratic Party (formerly SDF) and was part of the Second International. It had broken with Hyndman on account of his chauvinism and support for the First World War. It supported the October Revolution and identified itself with the Hands Off Russia Committee. It affiliated to the Third International within months of the latter's founding in 1919. Its membership ran to 6,000, although a lot of them were members on paper only. It had been affiliated to the Labour Party and its most important leaders were Harry Inkpen, J F Hodgson, Theodore Rothstein, Harry Pollitt (the future General Secretary of the CPGB) and John Maclean (who broke away from the BSP in 1919).

Here we need to refer to one important incident which had major ramifications for the working class movement in Europe and Britain, namely, the 1900 Paris Congress of the Second International, which discussed the Millerand affair. Millerand, a prominent member of the French Socialist Party, had joined the French bourgeois cabinet, even though the latter contained Gallifet, the butcher of the communards. Kautsky put forward a resolution excusing Millerand's action and the whole issue led to a schism between the opposing sides on this question within the French Socialist Party, between Possibilists (the opportunists) and Impossibilists who were at the time led by Guesde. Hyndman, the leader of the SDF, supported Kautsky, which in turn led to a split in the SDF, the split being further connected to differences on the attitude towards the Labour Party and trade unionism pure and simple. The opposition asserted the counter-revolutionary nature of the Labour Party and trade-union bureaucracy. Since Justice, the organ of the SDF, refused to publicise the opposition's views, the latter brought out its own paper, The Socialist, which was to begin with printed in Dublin by James Connolly's Irish Socialist Workers' Republican Party. The split materialised at the 1903 London Conference of the SDF. After the expulsion of George Yates, who wrote the article 'The official SDF', critical of the latter, to coincide with the Conference, the Impossibilist group of delegates withdrew and the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) was formed in Edinburgh in August 1903, with James Connolly as its first organiser.

It was very active in the formation in 1906 of the Industrial Workers of Great Britain. The SLP opposed the war vehemently and passionately supported the Russian revolution. It published a great deal of Marxist and Bolshevik literature. While rejecting bourgeois parliamentarism, it stood for militant participation in parliamentary activity. It took part, with 3 candidates, in the 1918 General Election on an anti-war platform, distributed 100,000 leaflets and sent a considerable proportion of these to the armed forces overseas who, for the first time, by virtue of the new franchise, had the vote. Defence of Russia, of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, were the principal point and centre of its election campaign.

The SLP was strong in Scotland and in northern England and in 1920 had 1250 members, and its organ, The Socialist, by January 1920 had a circulation of 8,000. Its most important leaders were Mitchell, Clunie, William Paul, Arthur Macmanus and Tom Bell.

At this time there was a tremendous appetite among the working class for learning and the SLP was a pioneer in the area of setting up workers' study groups. The leadership of the Labour Party and the reactionary trade unions, in order to meet the workers' demands for education, on the one hand, and at the same time to keep the workers away from Marxism, on the other hand, set up the Workers Educational Association (WEA), where the teaching of capitalist economics was the centre of its activities. The WEA's most important outgrowth was Ruskin College in Oxford. Its first principal was Denis Hird, who had sympathy for Marxism, for which reason he was dismissed by the WEA and the managers of the college. Those students who defended Hird formed a Committee which took the name of Plebs in 1909. The Plebs went on to establish a series of colleges in Britain for the propagating of the teachings of Marxism. The SLP, for its part, continued to popularise Marxism through study circles, which were increasingly held in engineering shops and factories.

The theoreticians of the ILP – MacDonald, Snowden and Glasier – supported by the Fabian Society (founded in 1884), especially by such members as G B Shaw and H G Wells, intensified their efforts to counteract Marxism in whatever form it manifested itself. They published a series of works by the revisionist theoreticians of Social Democracy, such as Bernstein, Vandervelt, Jaurès and Turatti – thus reinforcing revisionism and reformism in the Second International. Be it remembered that the outstanding members of the Labour Party were also the leaders of the ILP.

Thus it can be seen that on the outbreak of the First World War, the socialist movement in Britain was badly divided, with no centralised revolutionary party; the socialists split into groups, with the workers divided into trade unionism, syndicalism and simple parliamentary action.

On the declaration of war, the government hurried to enter into relations with the trade-union leaders and the infamous Treasury Agreement was signed in February 1915. Under it, trade union leaders pledged to suspend all the Rules of the Unions not to interfere with production. They pledged to work with non-unionists; agreed to the abolition of the normal working day and to sanction overtime and Sunday work, etc., etc. Thus was cemented the alliance of the Labour leaders with imperialism.

The war produced harsh conditions for the working class. Rising costs of living, rising rents and profiteering put unbearable burdens on working people. On the housing front, the working class responded with the formation of Rent Committees which represented a powerful force in uniting the social demands of the workers with their industrial grievances and forced the government to pass Rent Acts. Women played a very important part in the struggle against rising rents.

The entire movement of the Clyde engineers represented an attempt by the workers, inspired by the influence of pre-war revolutionary propaganda and agitation, and industrial unionism, at co-ordination in opposition to the government. Although economic in its origins, this movement assumed a political character, in particular when it challenged the government's military interference in the shops (i.e., military conscription). Lloyd George, Arthur Henderson and Lord Murray, on their visit to Glasgow in December 1915, were booed at every workplace, and the workers refused to listen to them at a meeting in St Andrews Hall. Cat calls, jeers and signing of the Red Flag greeted them, and the meeting ended in uproar. Following this meeting, the Clyde Workers' Committee (CWC), with W Gallacher as its chairman, began publication of its paper, The Worker. The government responded to activities of this Committee with repression, trials, harsh sentences and a wide network of espionage at work places, replete with agents provocateurs.

The workers' response to government repression was to create their own unofficial movement, and in 1917 a strike took place in which 1.5 million engineers came out against the Man Power Bill. The entire policy of the shop stewards' movement at this time was to develop opposition to the war and expose the chauvinist leaders in the Labour movement (the Hendersons, etc.) as agents of the ruling class, contrasting their role to that of Connolly in the Easter Rising of 1916. Let it be remembered that Connolly had attacked the imperialist war as a war in the interests of "royal freebooters and cosmopolitan thieves". He had declared "war waged by the oppressed nationalities against the oppressors, and the class war of the proletariat against capital … is par excellence the swiftest, safest, and most peaceful form of constructive work the socialists can engage in". Connolly was to go on to begin his agitation for an uprising and the formation of a Citizens' Army. For reasons which cannot be gone into here, the Easter Uprising was crushed by the British government using 60,000 troops and, among others, Connolly, badly wounded, was taken out of his hospital bed, propped up in a chair and shot on May 12, 1916. The British War Cabinet, of which Henderson was a member, unanimously sanctioned Connolly's execution.

In the words of Tom Bell: "The Easter rising in Dublin (1916) played an important part in moulding the future of the revolutionary movement in Great Britain. The heroic and revolutionary example of Connolly enabled the workers to see with startling clarity, the contrast between the devotion, loyalty and self-sacrifice of a true son of the exploited class, and the corrupted leaders of the labour aristocracy." (page 34).

The Russian revolution

The February revolution in Russia, which overthrew the Tsarist autocracy, was greeted enthusiastically in Britain by class-conscious workers, who saw in it a prelude to a real proletarian revolution. In the aftermath of the February revolution, a great Conference was held in June 1917 in the Albert Hall, Leeds, to discuss the formation of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils (Soviets). 1,150 delegates, representing 209 trades councils, 371 trade union branches and workers' committees, 294 ILP branches, 86 branches of the British Socialist Party (the SDF began to call itself the BSP in 1911) and 184 women's and co-operative organisations, attended this Conference. The ILP dominated this Conference and Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden delivered demagogic speeches and rhetorical tirades, while harbouring no sympathy for the idea of Soviets. In the end nothing came out of this Conference, which proved no more than a mere demonstration.

Meanwhile there were desertions and mutinies in the Army and Navy, and a little later, a successful police strike took place in 1918. Rumours of insurrection in the German Navy led to animated discussions in the British fleet on the ultimate unity of British and German sailors against their warmongering governments. At Plymouth and Portsmouth, the red flag was run up on several ships. The insistent demand of the soldiers was for demobilisation and the right to form trade unions affiliated to the TUC. The government, with the help of the Labour and trade union leadership, managed to divide and defeat the sailors. This in turn helped it to pave the way for intervention against what was now Soviet Russia and to send ships to the Baltic, the Black Sea and Archangel. While the crew were ignorant of their destination, the officers put out violent anti-Bolshevik propaganda with such phrases as "Humanity in Peril" and "Where Lenin rules, starvation exists".

In December 1918, the Army Service Corps (ASC) took a huge demonstration to Whitehall and Downing Street to protest against being sent to Murmansk. In 1919 the Black Watch and Coldstream Guards at Dover refused to embark for Russia. Demonstrations of soldiers opposed to waging war against Russia took place in the streets of Aldershot and Blackpool. At Folkestone, 10,000 soldiers demonstrated and held the town for several days. At Ryde, the Isle of Wight, 4,000 soldiers clashed with the police, with several being killed or wounded. Such actions were by no means confined to British ports: a revolt took place in Libau on a cruiser. The Glory had to be sent back from Murmansk, and 4 destroyers, for refusal to fight on their arrival at Murmansk, also had to be sent back. Mutinies of sailors erupted in Baku. These actions, on top of the refusal of sailors to leave Edinburgh, Invergordon, Devonport and Portsmouth, demonstrated that the British soldiers and sailors had deep sympathies for the revolution in Russia. Eventually this great movement found its expression in the slogan of "Hands off Russia", and the Hands Off Russia Committee movement, which was to play a great part in forcing the government to call off its dirty war of intervention against Bolshevik Russia (the information in the above paragraph is drawn from Tom Bell).

The war also gave a powerful boost to the anti-colonial movement in India and elsewhere. At home, the army of the unemployed began its upward climb, growing from 8% of the trade union movement in 1918 to 24% in 1919-1920. Combined with demobilisation, it gave rise to widespread unrest. The government was forced to introduced the 'dole' for the unemployed. In reply to Conservative assertions that the government was wasting money, Lloyd George boasted later that through this measure "he had bought off the revolution". There was growth of the movement for shorter hours by the end of 1918, especially on Clydeside, resulting in a strike at the end of January in which 100,000 Scottish workers participated. This huge strike movement, with tremendous revolutionary potentialities, was defeated by the joint actions of the government and the Labour and trade-union aristocracy.

The October Revolution

The October Revolution had an electrifying effect on working people everywhere. Class conscious workers greeted it with rapturous enthusiasm. Harry Pollitt, the future General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was later to describe the day he met Lenin as the "greatest of my life" and said, vis-à-vis the revolution, that "the thing that mattered to me was that lads like me had whacked the bosses and landlords," adding "These were the lads and lasses I must support through thick and thin… For me the same people could never do nor can ever do any wrong against the working class… You cannot be a real Socialist and enemy of reaction and at the same time assist in any way to carry on a struggle against the Soviet Union" (Pollitt, Serving my time, Lawrence & Wishart, 1940, p. 139).

Shapurji Saklatvala, one of the first two communists to be elected to the British House of Commons, once told a friend that he did not tolerate the least criticism of the Soviet Union "as that would be for him like a sin against the Holy Ghost" (Sehri Sakhlatvala, The Fifth Commandment).

In 1921, R P Dutt, who was to be chief theoretician of the CPGB for 5 long decades, was requested to write an entry on communism for the 12^th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a commission he executed brilliantly. After stating that the Bolsheviks were the "natural leaders of the revolutionary working class movement of the world," he went on to argue that the political agenda of communism was dictated by the catastrophic conditions of capitalism, of which the recently-concluded war was just but one indication. The structure of the Communist Party, consequently, derived from the demands of an era in which civil war between the exploiters and the exploited was inevitable. In the circumstances, the proletarian party could only be constituted on the "strictest internal discipline" hand in hand with a revolutionary foreign policy. The Communist International (CI) was, he went on, "more than a coming together of sympathetic parties in a common struggle; it is the union of different divisions of a single army, each with its own tactical problems, but all with a single ultimate directing centre." The October Revolution, he insisted, "forced into the realm of actual decision the old controversies of class war or class peace, working class government or democracy". He concluded by saying that the communists "declare firmly that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of every obtaining order of society."

This was entirely in accordance with the 21 conditions of membership laid down by the CI at its second congress in 1920 for affiliation to that body.

Let alone the revolutionaries, for a very short period even some of the hardened enemies of Marxism were swept along by the earth-shaking and epoch-making effects of the October Revolution. Speaking at the 1919 ILP Conference, and reviewing the momentous events of the previous 5 years, Philip Snowden had this to say on the matter under consideration:

"This year last has been crowded with events of tremendous importance. We have seen the beginning of the end of the old order of class domination and economic slavery. Slowly and painfully humanity has climbed the hard road to the summit of Calvary, but the resurrection to the new life is at hand. Over two thirds of Europe the Red Flag of Socialism, red with the blood of our martyred dead, floats where but yesterday despotism held the people in vile subjection. The mighty reverberations of the Russian Revolution have sounded through the world … With prophetic insight the Independent Labour party in its manifesto issued on the outbreak of war in August 1914 said: 'In forcing this appalling crime upon the nations, it is the rulers and diplomatists, the militarists, who have sealed their doom. In tears and blood and bitterness the greater democracy will be born. With steadfast faith we greet the future; our cause is holy and imperishable, and the labour of our hands has not been in vain.' The state of the world today is a fulfilment of that prophesy."

The Bolshevik revolution shook imperialism and its spokesmen to their very foundations. Its significance and all-embracing sweep and effect can be gauged from the following evaluation given by no less a person than Lloyd George the then British prime minister at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919:

"The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt, amongst the workmen against pre-war conditions. The whole existing order in the political, social, and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other… There is a danger that we may throw the masses of the population throughout Europe into the arms of the extremists …

"The greatest danger that I see in the present situation is that Germany may throw in her lot with Bolshevism and place her resources, her brains, her vast organising power at the disposal of the revolutionary fanatics whose dream is to conquer the world for Bolshevism by force of arms. The danger is now mere chimera. The present Government in Germany is weak; it has no prestige; its authority is challenged; it lingers merely because there is no alternative but the Spartacists, and Germany is not yet ready for Spartacism, as yet. But the argument which the Spartacists are using with great effect at this very time is that they alone can save Germany from the intolerable conditions which have been bequeathed her by the war.

"If Germany goes over to the Spartacists it is inevitable that she should throw in her lot with the Russian Bolshevists. Once that happens all Eastern Europe will be swept into the orbit of the Bolshevik revolution…

"Bolshevik imperialism does not merely menace the States on Russia's borders. It threatens the whole of Asia and is as near to America as it is to France. It is idle to think that the Peace Conference can separate, however sound a peace it may have arranged with Germany, if it leaves Russia as it is today." (Quoted in R P Dutt, World Politics 1918-1936, Gollancz, London, 1936, pages 43-44).

The founding of the CPGB

In the two years of negotiations resulting in the London Unity Convention of July 31-August 1, 1920, and the Leeds Convention (28-29 January 1921), apart from the ILP, the BSP and the SLP, two other organisations took part. These were Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation (WSF), with its organ, The Workers' Dreadnought, and the South Wales Socialist Society (SWSS).

The WSF supported the October Revolution, opposed not only parliamentarianism but also participation in parliamentary activity, was vehemently opposed to any contact with the Labour Party, despised immediate actions on partial economic issues and participation in the work of the trade unions.

The SWSS, a descendant of the Miners' Reform Movement (which had a record of militant opposition to right-wing trade union leaders and which grew up before the war), was syndicalist with a belief in mass revolutionary struggle through revolutionary trade-unionism. It was vehemently anti parliamentarian, suspicious of political parties and even more suspicious of official trade unions and their leaders. Although weak, behind it stood the revolutionary sentiments of the Welsh miners, especially in the Rhondda area. As an organisation, it ceased to exist before the completion of unity negotiations and was replaced by the equally organisationally weak South Wales Communist Council (SWCC). But its organisational weakness must not be allowed to cause us to underestimate the strength of Marxist ideas and the militant spirit in the valleys of South Wales, nor the rallying power of small Marxist clubs and organisations, and the influence of men like Bill Hewelett of Abertillery – the first of the fighters in Wales for communist unity. Although it contributed very little to the preparations for a unified communist party, the SWSS and SWCC served as a link to the militant and revolutionary miners and steel workers.

Other participants

Shop Stewards' and Workers' Committees

These developed, as pointed out above, during the war in opposition to official trade union and labour leaders, who were busy supporting the war and actively recruiting for it, while at the same time attacking wages, hours and long-established workshop privileges. The Shop Stewards' Committees sprang up in factories, shipyards, pits and railway depots, mainly on economic issues, but quickly developed into organs of struggle against the war itself. The government's attacks on these Committees and the brutal treatment of them by the police only served to make them more militant and political. Under the influence of the October Revolution, which they greeted with real warmth and enthusiasm, the Shop Stewards' Committees, more spontaneously than consequent upon deep study, became increasingly revolutionary. Shipyards and engineering workshops in Scotland were the centre for these Committees. Formed in 1915 under Gallacher's leadership, the Clyde Workers' Committee, later enlarged into the Scottish Workers' Committee, with a shop stewards paper, The Worker, edited by J R Campbell. Having then spread to London, Sheffield and Newcastle, these Committees went on to form, in 1916, the National Shop Stewards' and Workers' Committee. These Committees opposed the war, supported the October Revolution, and in January 1920 held a national conference of the shop stewards' and workers' committees in London. Representing 72,000 workers, the Conference voted for affiliation to the CI. The Shop Stewards' Committees contained some of the most militant, class-conscious, workers, experienced in struggle, revolutionary in outlook and imbued with a bitter hatred of capitalism and of the corrupting influence of reformism. They were anti-parliamentarian, anti political parties and anti Labour Party and anti official trade unions. To begin with they found it hard to see any role for a new revolutionary party. The most well-known leaders of this movement were Gallacher, David Ramsay, J T Murphy and E Lismer, and this movement was to furnish some of the best revolutionary leaders in the CPGB.

The left wing of the ILP

This included individuals such as RP Dutt, Shapurji Saklatvala, Emile Burns, J Walton Newbold, JR Wilson, EH Brown and Helen Crawford.

First soundings in the unity process

The first tentative soundings on the question of socialist unity took the form of meetings and discussions between the BSP, SLP and ILP. The first important meeting between these organisations took place on 6 March 1919, with Philip Snowden in the Chair, and little progress was made but for agreement for yet another meeting, which was held a fortnight later on 19 March 1919. At this meeting fundamental questions such as reformism versus revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, were debated. The ILP leaders were irreconcilably opposed to the developments in the Soviet Union, for they stood for gradual transformation of capitalism through reforms brought about by parliamentary activity entirely within the framework of capitalism. They stood for the capitalist state, which they equated with democracy, and opposed the rule of the working class, which they equated with dictatorship. At the end of the meeting, Snowden declared "It's no use. You are asking to give up all the things we have stood for for the last 30 years." (see Tom Bell, ibid. p.52).

March 1919 brought to a close the first phase of the unity negotiations. It did not achieve any results in the way of advance towards organisational unity but this phase revealed that the ILP was incurably reformist and had no place in a revolutionary party. The significance of this phase lies first in that it brought to the fore a growing demand at the end of the war for a united socialist party in Britain. Second, it set in motion the process of negotiation for achieving such a party. Third, it revealed that unity in a single party with the ILP was not only impossible but undesirable. Fourth, it clearly revealed that the October Revolution alone pointed the way to the victory of socialism through a decisive break with reformism and that the new Party must be solidly based on Marxism if it was to fulfil its tasks. Fifth, it made patently clear the need for unity between Marxist groups and revolutionary organisations and set the stage for the next phase of unity negotiations.

March 1919 was also the month of the founding of the Third (Communist) International. The founding of the CI accelerated the understanding, already gained by the most revolutionary leaders of the British socialist groups, on the basis of their own experience, that a complete break with reformism was essential and that the revolutionary party of the proletariat must be based on the principles of Marxism.

Second Stage of the unity process – March 1919-20

The first unity meeting in this phase took place on 13 May 1919 between the representatives of the BSP, SLP, WSF and SWSS. At this meeting they all accepted affiliation to the CI, rejected class collaborationism and reformism, affirmed their commitment to the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, to the dictatorship of the proletariat and to the Soviet system. But there were deep divisions between them on two main tactical questions: (a) attitude to parliamentary action and (b) attitude to the Labour Party. As to the first question, while the BSP and the SLP were in favour of participating in parliamentary and local elections, the WSF and SWSS were totally opposed to such activity. On the attitude to the Labour Party, while the BSP were in favour of affiliation to the Labour Party, all the other organisations were vehemently opposed to such a course of action.

The SLP suggested that the question of affiliation to the Labour Party be deferred for one year after the pending formation of the Communist Party at which time there should be a referendum of the membership. Eventually all parties agreed, including the SLP delegates, that the question be voted on 3 months after the formation of the Party. When this was reported to the SLP executive, the latter, by a majority, decided to take no further part in the unity negotiations. The SLP delegation though thus repudiated did not give up and called a conference of all branches of the SLP as well as of socialist societies and groups who favoured unity. This conference took place in Nottingham in April 1920, at which the decision of the SLP delegation was endorsed and those in the SLP who wished to continue with the unity process (notable among these being Tom Bell, William Paul and Arthur Macmanus) assumed the name of the Communist Party Unity Group.

Following the Nottingham unity conference, a further unity conference, attended by representatives of the BSP, WSF, SWSS and the Communist Unity Group (CUG), was held and all those attending pledged themselves to work for a united Communist Party. The discussions were resumed on 9 May, with the BSP, CUG and WSF representatives in attendance (the SWSS had now ceased to exist as an organisation). It was agreed that differences on various tactical questions should be resolved at the Unity Convention itself. On 29 May, while the WSF was still hesitant, the BSP and CUG delegates agreed to call the Unity Convention for August 1920, it being the definite purpose of this Convention to establish the Party. All those organisations, groups and local societies that accepted 3 fundamental principles of affiliation to the Communist International, Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Soviets would be invited to send representatives. Those attending were to pledge themselves to abide by the decisions of the Convention. Further, the Convention itself was to resolve the question of affiliation to the Labour Party.

They also decided to set up a Joint Provisional Committee.

Communist Unity Convention – 31 July to 1 August 1920

On 7 July 1920, the official invitation to the Unity Convention was issued, accompanied by a Call for a Communist Party, addressed to the communists and socialists of Great Britain. The great need in Britain, it stated, is a Communist Party of which the essential principles would be (a) communism against capitalism, (b) the Soviet system against bourgeois parliamentary democracy, and (c) the dictatorship of the proletariat. Meanwhile Lenin, replying to a question from a member of a British delegation to Russia, had stated that "genuine partisans of the liberation of the workers from the yoke of capital cannot possibly oppose the foundation of a communist party that alone is able to educate the working masses."

On 8 July, Lenin had in fact written a letter to the Joint Provisional Committee greeting the Unity Convention and advising participation in parliamentary activity and affiliation to the Labour Party, but this letter was received only a few days before the Convention. At the Unity Convention, a heated debate took place particularly on the question of affiliation to the Labour Party. The Conference, by a small majority (115 for affiliation and 85 against), decided in favour of affiliation to the Labour Party.

In advising the CPGB to affiliate to the Labour Party, Lenin directed his fire at both right-wing opportunism and left-wing dogmatism. To those, in particular some members of the BSP, who asserted that the Labour Party was a working-class party, Lenin refuted them thus:

"Of course, the bulk of the members of the Labour Party are workers; however, whether a party is really a political party of the workers or not, depends not only upon whether it consists of workers but also upon who leads it, upon the content of its activities and of its political tactics. Only the latter determines whether we have before us really a political party of the proletariat. From this point of view, the only correct one, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party because, although it consists of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst reactionaries at that, who act fully in the spirit of the bourgeoisie." (Speech at Second Congress of Communist International, 6 August 1920).

On the other hand, Lenin was of the view that the major difficulty faced by the communists in Britain was their isolation from the masses, which prevented a successful fight against opportunism, and since the Labour Party, through its connections with trade unions, had a considerable following among the workers of Britain, and since its federal structure allowed socialist groups to affiliate to it, Lenin's view was that the communists would do well through affiliation; that they would have the chance to expose the reactionary leadership of the Labour Party in the eyes of the Labour Party membership and the wider masses of the working class. This was, however, on the condition that the Communist Party "can preserve its freedom of criticism and can pursue its own policy". Lenin put forward powerful arguments in support of affiliation in his Draft thesis on the main tasks of the Second Congress of the CI, in his Message to the London Unity Convention, and above all in his speeches at the Second Congress of the Comintern.

Immediately following the Second Congress of the Comintern, its Executive Committee made a new call for the amalgamation with the newly-established CPGB of all other socialist and revolutionary groups remaining outside it. It called for the formation of a Committee of Representatives of all the organisations to prepare a further Unity Congress and which all the parties and groups would be represented according to the size of their membership. Following this, during the 5 months – from August 1920 to January 1921 – a number of meetings and discussions were held, culminating in the Leeds Unity Convention on 28-29 January 1921, which came to be known as the Second Congress of the CPGB. This conference was much more businesslike, and everything went as planned, and this for two reasons: (1) The London Unity Convention had already united into a single organisation all the most important revolutionary groups outside of Scotland, and it exercised a strong pull on those who remained outside, and (2) it had behind it the prestige of the Communist International, which with all its authority was urging the final fusion of all Marxist forces in Britain into a single Party.

A very important role in this regard was played by William Gallacher, who had been present at the Second Congress of the International, which took place at the same time as the London Unity Convention which founded the CPGB. Gallacher was strongly opposed to participation in parliament, affiliation to the Labour Party and the setting up of the Communist Party itself, obsessed as he was at that time with shop stewards' and workers' committees, believing there was nothing that the latter could not do which a party could. He was nevertheless persuaded by Lenin's powerful arguments to change his mind on all these questions. This is how he describes his discussions with Lenin and the effect they had on him:

"Gradually, as the discussion went on, I began to see the weakness of my position …

"The more I talked with Lenin and the other comrades, the more I cam to see what the party of the workers meant in the revolutionary struggle. It was on this, the conception of the Party, that the genius of Lenin had expressed itself. A Party of revolutionary workers, with its roots in the factories and in the streets, winning the trade unions and the co-operatives with the correctness of its working-class policy, a Party with no other interests but the interests of the working class and peasant and petty bourgeois allies of the working class, such a Party, using every avenue of expression, could make an exceptionally valuable parliamentary platform for arousing the great masses of workers to energetic struggle against the capitalist enemy.

"Before I left Moscow, I had an interview with Lenin during which he asked me three questions.

" 'Do you admit you were wrong on the question of Parliament and affiliation to the Labour Party?

" 'Will you join the CPGB when you return?

" 'Will you do your best to persuade your Scottish comrades to join it?'

"To each of these questions I answered yes." ('Revolt on the Clyde').

Gallacher was true to his word. He returned to Britain at the end of September 1920 and, through his efforts, brought the leading members of the Shop Stewards' and Workers' Committee movement into the CPGB, and it was he who at the Leeds Unity Convention moved the formal motion for the merger.

Thus was established the CPGB. Its founding was a culmination of a bitter experience of the British working class in the years preceding the First World War as well as during it. Further, the efforts to form this Party received a considerable boost and inspiration from the October Revolution and the Communist International. It is indeed debatable if a united Communist Party would have been founded in Britain at that time had it not been for the inspiring events in Russia, the powerful figure of Lenin and the authority of the Communist International. For the first time, the British working class had the opportunity to be led by a united Communist Party, rather than several socialist groups; for the first time, the British working class found an alternative to the opportunism and reformism that had led it to defeat on countless occasions.

Application for affiliation to the Labour Party

Already, within days of the founding of the CPGB in London on 31 July and 1 August 1920, the CPGB applied (10 August 1920) for affiliation to the Labour Party. In this application for affiliation, the CPGB informed the Labour Party that its founding Congress had declared in favour of the Soviet system, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and adherence to the Third International; that it had repudiated the reformist view that a social revolution was possible through ordinary methods of parliamentary democracy; that it was on the basis of these decisions that it was making an application for affiliation.

It goes without saying that in its letter, dated 11 September 1920, Arthur Henderson informed the Executive Committee of the CPGB that its application for affiliation had been rejected for the "objects of the Communist Party" did not "appear to be in accord" with the Constitution, principles and programme of the Labour Party. The CPGB was to continue its campaign for affiliation right up to 1928, but without any success for, in the words of Tom Bell, "… whatever illusions we might have, the Labour Party Executive certainly had none."

The December 1923 election returned the Labour Party with the largest numbers of members in parliament, and it went on to form the government. The composition of this government and its actions, its home and foreign policy, were imperialist through and through, and no different from those of the previous Conservative or Liberal governments. On the question of colonies, the following quotation from J R Clynes, a leading member of the first Labour cabinet, could be used as an epitaph on the tomb not only of the first but also of each subsequent Labour government. Answering the accusation that Labour had a disrupting influence on the Empire, he maintained on the contrary: "In the same period of years, no Conservative or Liberal government has done more than we did to knit together the great Commonwealth of Nations which Britain calls her Empire… Far from wanting to lose our colonies we are trying to keep them." (Memoirs, Vol II, pages 54-5).

Labour and the General Strike of 1926

This year marks the 80^th anniversary of the British General Strike of 1926. Following the defeat of Chartism in 1848, the General Strike was the most momentous event in the history of the British working class, with great revolutionary potential. But it was defeated by the combined forces of the British state, the TUC and the Labour Party. The General Strike failed, among other reasons, because the TUC General Council and the Labour Party "proved to be either downright traitors to the miners and the British working class … or spineless fellow travellers of these traitors who feared a struggle and still more a victory of the working class…" (J V Stalin, Collected Works, Vol 8, page 170). And further, it failed because the TUC and the Labour Party regarded it as a measure of an exclusively economic character and refused to turn it into a political struggle. The General Strike proved conclusively, if such proof was needed, that in any major confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, between labour and capital, the trade-union and Labour leadership would unfailingly betray the cause of the proletariat and desert to the side of the enemy. It proved conclusively, too, that international social democracy could always be relied upon to act as a true friend of international imperialism in the form of a Trojan horse in the working-class movement.

Labour, the third capitalist party

It was in the light of the conduct of the Labour Party over 3 decades and the experience of the first Labour government, when Labour had stuck to a bipartisan approach in internal and external politics alike, when it had opposed every working-class mobilisation at home and supported gleefully every brutal imperialist suppression of the national liberation movements abroad, notably in China and India, when it had tenaciously opposed all united action with the CPGB and made use of 'loyalty clauses', bans and proscriptions against the communists as a means of stifling all working-class mass movements, that the CPGB was obliged to revise its attitude to the Labour Party.

Faced with the reality of what the Labour Party was doing the CPGB at its 1928 Congress justly denounced the Labour Party for having "come out unmistakably as the third capitalist party". On the eve of the 1929 General Election, the CPGB, in its pamphlet Class against Class, the programme with which it entered that election, elaborated further on its 1928 statement. Declaring itself in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the programme went on: "The Communist Party … enters the General Election … to reveal to the working class the nature of the present crisis, to expose the sham of parliamentary democracy maintained by the Tories, Liberals and Labour alike… Three parties … appeal to you in the name of the 'NATION'. One party, the Communist Party, appeals to you in the name of the working class. No party can serve two masters. No party can serve the 'nation' so long as the nation is divided into two warring classes. No party can serve the robbers and the robbed. The Communist Party is of the workers, the oppressed." (page 7).

We may now marvel at the sagacity and the political acumen of the Troto-revisionist fraternity who, nearly eight decades after the CPGB's above characterisation of the Labour Party as the "third capitalist party", ignoring all the rich experience of this long period, and it total disregard of the lessons of the General Strike and of the experience since then, are still calling upon the working class to elect a Labour government "committed to socialist policies", or, since this illusion is no longer sustainable, to elect a right-wing Labour government "under pressure to implement socialist policies." Oh well! Ears, as the saying goes, never grow higher than the forehead.

In adopting the policy of Class against Class, the CPGB received considerable assistance from the Communist International. As long as the latter body continued to exist, the CPGB, notwithstanding occasional mistakes, was nevertheless able to follow a correct policy and fulfil its duties to the British proletariat as well as to the international working class movement and the oppressed colonial peoples. With the adoption of its revisionist programme The British Road to Socialism the rot set in, the process of degeneration being accelerated by the triumph of Khrushchevite revisionism in the USSR following the death of Joseph Stalin. After four decades of revisionist degeneration, the CPGB liquidated itself.

We in the CPGB(ML) are doing our best to revive the militant and revolutionary traditions of the CPGB during the 3 decades – from its formation to the early 1950s. The task is not an easy one but we shall endeavour to do our best. Surveying the political scene in Britain and the sorry state which surrounds the working-class movement in our country, I am reminded of the following conversation which took place in 1919 between George Bernard Shaw and the then very young Rajani Palme Dutt:

"'The Germans', Shaw began, 'are prodigiously lucky; they are freed from the burden of armaments and will forge ahead commercially, while we shall be ruined with an intolerable arms expenditure.' With all the impetuous crudity of youth I set out to teach my grandfather the elements of politics and declared: 'that may be witty but it's not true', and argued that the Versailles Treaty placed heavy burdens upon the German nation, against which they would sooner or later revolt.' Shaw looked at me compassionately, as at a neophyte, and said: 'that may be true but it's not witty; and if you only speak the truth in England, however brilliantly, nobody will listen to you; you will be ignored'. He then proceeded to read me a long lecture of avuncular advice. He explained from his own experience that a young socialist writer must choose between two alternatives: either to write the truth to his own satisfaction in a few journals of infinitesimal circulation for a handful of an audience who would all violently disagree with you and abuse you for your pains; or to reach out to the millions by mixing up the truth with a fantastic amount of nonsense and conventional fictions, which would enable them to swallow the truth without knowing it. I remember that I obstinately answered back that there was in my opinion a third alternative: to tell the truth and also to reach the masses, that Marxists in a certain number of countries had already solved this and that, although it was more difficult in England, we should eventually solve it here also." (RP Dutt 'George Bernard Shaw – A Memoir', Labour Monthly, 1951.

While recognising the difficulties we face, and the enormity of the task, we in the CPGB(ML) too share RP Dutt's view. We too believe that we too can tell the truth and reach the masses. To paraphrase Engels, the British working class may be the last to arrive, its contribution shall be weighty.