Alan Campbell

Organizing the Militants: the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, 1966–1979

The Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions has been largely ignored in conventional accounts of the campaigns against restrictive union legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. This article discusses the origins of the LCDTU, provides an account of its activities centred on the union struggles against state intervention, and briefly explores some of the issues concerning rank-and-file movements. It concludes by suggesting that, although the LCDTU merits recognition for the key role it played in defeating the legislation, it can best be characterized as a front organization of the Communist Party rather than as an independent rank-and-file movement

Some Problems of Communist History

Our respondents, North American and British alike, have provided a series of perceptive comments on our essay “A Peripheral Vision”. They are as wide-ranging as they are well argued and provide ample food for thought on the direction of Communist historiography, not only in Britain but in America and beyond. We want to thank all of them for their informed, often argumentative and sometimes critical collaboration, as well as Dan Leab, the editor of American Communist History, who has made this exchange possible.

A peripheral vision: Communist historiography in Britain

Contemporary debates about the nature and role of national Communist movements and their relationship to the Comintern and Soviet Russia are longstanding and enduring. It is almost 20 years since Geoff Eley, a British historian working in America, discerned among researchers of the Communist past a new enthusiasm for social history and a turn from institutional and ideological analysis to reconstruction of rank-and-file activism. What he perceived as underlying this turn was a concern with the national roots of Communist parties and emphasis ‘‘on the autonomous character of an individual party’s development as opposed to the older stress on the control of Moscow.’’ Welcoming the possibilities which this approach promised for more complete histories, he put his finger on the problem: ‘‘. . . the pull towards social history can sometimes diminish the significance of the formal Communist affiliation leading in extreme cases . . . to a history of Communism with the Communism left out.’’ David Mayfield, another University of Michigan historian, echoed Eley’s concern at the growing neglect of international factors and emphasis on national specificities and traditions. Influenced, he felt, by reaction against Cold War insistence on Communism as Soviet conspiracy and the felt needs of radicals in the climate of Euro-Communism and disillusion with the Soviet model, the new historians had lost sight of ‘‘. . . the international dimensions of Communist experience. . . .The clearest manifestation of this blind spot in the literature is the near absence of the Comintern as a crucial ideological presence and focal point for Communist loyalties.’’ Eley and Mayfield believed that the political and the social, institutional factors and human agency, the national and the international should be brought together. However, integration proved elusive. Indeed in America, which Eley

'For a Revolutionary Workers' Government': Moscow, British Communism and Revisionist Interpretations of the Third Period, 1927-34

Hitler’s accession to power brutally sealed the fate of the German Communist Party (KPD). With 360,000 members, the strongest affiliate of the Communist International (Comintern) was dissolved in March 1933, its militants interned or executed.1 Its liquidation was the most tragic West European consequence of the disastrous, ultra-left policy of the Third Period, determined by the Comintern, rooted in Russian considerations and accepted, sometimes with reluctance, by national communist parties. Such has been the verdict of a wide range of historians. It is a conclusion which has recently come under attack from academics anxious to revise our understanding of these turbulent years.2 This article engages with this new revisionism. We sketch the anatomy of the Third Period and its consequences for European communist parties. Next, we outline the arguments of recent historians who, contrary to traditional judgements of the impact of the Comintern’s ‘new line’ upon the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), suggest both that there were strong indigenous pressures inevitably leading to its adoption and that its consequences were more positive than previously assumed. We go on to subject these arguments to critical scrutiny in the light of evidence from the recently accessible Comintern archives. Our survey reaffirms the validity of previous evaluations of the Third Period. John McIlroy and Alan Campbell

Party people : communist lives : explorations in biography

This collection of biographical essays brings to life a diverse and colourful cavalcade of British revolutionaries from the first part of the 20th century. The cast includes pioneering women Communists, doughty trade union leaders and dusty apparatchiks, together with lawyers, poets, critics and the odd sexual outlaw. The book also depicts the tragic fate of groups of British Communists who encountered Stalinism at first hand in the USSR. Much of the information in this section - as elsewhere in the book - is the result of new research on recently released material from previously closed archives in Moscow.

The Last Chance Saloon? The Independent Labour Party and Miners’ Militancy in the Second World War Revisited

The second world war witnessed widespread conflict in British industry, notably in mining. We review the role of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a small revolutionary socialist organization, focusing on its work in the trade unions. Its development is discussed in the light of recent claims that, with the Communist Party (CP) pledged to national unity after Hitler’s invasion of Russia, the ILP generated and harnessed militancy in the mines around demands for their immediate nationalization under workers’ control. We discuss the organization, policy and personnel of the party at the outbreak of war. Its approach to agitation in the unions is analysed and compared with that of the Communists and Trotskyists. Its activity in the coalfields throughout the war is assessed. We conclude that strikes in coal and other industries were motivated by workplace problems, not aspirations for workers’ control. Disputes reflected conventional discontents exacerbated by wartime conditions rather than opposition to the war or demands for ‘a socialist Britain now’. The ILP was ill-equipped to mobilize grievance and its role in its articulation was marginal. By 1945 its efforts in industry had failed to arrest its decline – the CP again provides instructive comparison – or improve its electoral prospects.

The British and French Representatives to the Communist International, 1920–1939: A Comparative Survey

This article employs a prosopographical approach in examining the backgrounds and careers of those cadres who represented the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Parti Communiste Français at the Comintern headquarters in Moscow. In the context of the differences between the two parties, it discusses the factors which qualified activists for appointment, how they handled their role, and whether their service in Moscow was an element in future advancement. It traces the bureaucratization of the function, and challenges the view that these representatives could exert significant influence on Comintern policy. Within this boundary the fact that the French representatives exercised greater independence lends support, in the context of centre–periphery debates, to the judgement that within the Comintern the CPGB was a relatively conformist party.

‘The Trojan Horse’: Communist Entrism in the British Labour Party, 1933–43

Abstract Entrism – the infiltration of political organisations by competitors – is typically associated with Trotskyism. Large-scale Communist entrism in the British Labour Party has been neglected by historians and reference in the literature is slight and impressionistic. Archival material permits reconstruction of a sustained attempt by the Comintern and British Communists to subvert Labour Party policy between 1933 and 1943. Documenting the development and dimensions of Communist entrism, this article establishes that, by 1937, 10% of Communist Party (CPGB) members were operating secretly inside British Labour, campaigning to change its policy on affiliation and engineer a Popular Front. Biographies of 55 such Communists provide new data and permit a typology of entrist activity. The episode sheds new light on Popular Front initiatives and the extent of genuine support for them within Labour. It illuminates the conspiratorial side of Stalinist activity at a time when the CPGB presented itself as a conventional British party.

Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography@@@Class against Class: The Communist Party in Britain between the Wars

A major study of the Communist party of Great Britain between the wars, when it adopted the military strategy of class against class, in its struggle to be the effective alternative to both the Labour Party and the TUC. This revisionary study, based on newly-discovered material in the Manchester archive of the Communist Party, shows that far from losing influence and being driven to the brink of collapse, the CPGB then consolidated its position, led national hunger marches and organized social and cultural events, while membership grew and the party developed as an effective and valued body in the pantheon of leftwing British politics.