David Renton

Past its Peak: 1945–56

Coming out of the war, the Communist Party seemed to be at the height of its power. Largely as a result of its politics of left patriotism, it had gained a level of respectability. In the difficult conditions of war, with its members ever likely to be called up, the party held together a large membership of between 35 000 and 56 000 members. These members were overwhelmingly drawn from manual industry. Of the 754 delegates to the 1944 party congress, over half were members of the five main manual unions. One hundred and ninety three were members of the AEU engineer’s union, 81 were members of the TGWU transport workers’ union, 52 were members of the miners’ NUM, 33 were members of the electricians’ ETU, 32 were members of the rail-workers’ union, the NUR. At the Labour Party Conference in May 1945, the Communist Party’s motion calling for ‘Progressive Unity’ was supported by the delegations of the AEU, the NUM, the ETU, the firefighters’ union, the painters union, the vehicle builders’ union, and the train drivers’ union ASLEF. The party-backed engineering workers’ paper, the New Propeller, had a circulation of 94 000. In 1945, the party had two MPs, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, and one member, the bus worker Bert Papworth, on the General Council of the TUC. The best sign of the CP’s strength was its newspaper.

The Party at War: its Finest Hour?

By the time Neville Chamberlain spoke to the nation over the BBC on the morning of 3 September 1939, announcing the official declaration of war between Britain and Germany, the Central Committee of the Communist Party had already publicly declared their position in support of the war, but against the Chamberlain government. In a two page, tabloid newsprint ‘special’, entitled ‘War Communist Policy: to the Men and Women of Great Britain’, 250 000 of which were printed overnight on 2 September, the party explained their view: You are now being called upon to take part in the most cruel war in the history of the world. One that need never have taken place. One that could have been avoided even in the very last days of the crisis, had we had a People’s Government in Britain. Now that the war has come, we have no hesitation in stating the policy of the Communist Party.We are in support of all necessary measures to secure the victory of democracy over fascism. But fascism will not be defeated by the Chamberlain Government.1 Thus was born the short lived War on Two Fronts policy, pronounced by the Communist Party’s General Secretary Harry Pollitt, which had been gestating within the Communist Party leadership through 1938 and 1939.

The Zig-Zag Left: 1928–39

At the end of the 1920s, the Communist Party embarked on a destructive shift leftwards. In its policy, the party claimed that the main obstacle to revolution came from other forces within the workers’ movement. The Labour Party and the trade unions constituted ‘social fascism’, an ‘auxiliary apparatus of the bourgeoisie’, which cheated the workers away from revolution. In 1929 it was announced that ‘the Labour Government has already begun to show its Social-Fascist character’, which was illustrated by Labour’s policy of ‘Fascism and violent suppression of the working class’. In its ultra-left practice, the Communist Party isolated itself from ordinary workers within the trade union and labour movement. The party attempted to implement its new politics in industry, through championing break-away red unions, although the unions formed in this way both failed. As Noreen Branson’s official history of the party records, ‘The trade union leaders had tried to destroy the party; ironically “Class against Class” made their job much easier.’1 The fruits of its first ten years of successful political and industrial agitation were thrown away, and the party declined until it had just two and a half thousand members in November 1930. It was by no means obvious that the Communist Party would survive to see the decade’s end.

High Hopes: 1920–28

At its foundation, the Communist Party of Great Britain possessed a membership made up of trade union militants who had played a leading role in several years of industrial struggle. In Walter Kendall’s words, ‘The Communist Party absorbed within its framework practically the whole pre-existing revolutionary movement and leaders. This movement and its participants, whatever its other faults, was at least self-acting, autonomous, a genuine endeavour to come to grips with the problem of British reality.’ The industrial leaders of the party, including such figures as Harry Pollitt, Arthur McManus, Tom Bell and Willie Gallacher, were known and respected across the working-class movement. The party also enjoyed considerable prestige for its position as the British sister party of the Russian Bolsheviks. Their successful revolution offered hope to the oppressed people of the whole world. The method of soviets or workers’ councils connected with the authentic experience of militant workers in Britain, France, Italy and throughout Europe. Yet by the end of the decade, the Communist Party had taken up the suicidal politics of Class against Class, seeing its main enemy in the Labour Party which represented the mainstream of working-class opinion. So within ten years of its formation, the party’s membership had halved and its support collapsed.

Not Fade Away: from 1968 to Dissolution

1968 marked a significant turning point in the fortunes of the Marxist left across Europe. The radicalisation of the 1960s was expressed in anti-Vietnam War protests, student struggles and by a growing willingness of younger workers to take militant forms of industrial action including factory occupations, mass political strikes and the use of flying pickets. This trend was most visibly demonstrated in the May ‘68 events in France where mass student revolt sparked of a general strike. The views of many of the social theorists of the 1950s and 1960s who had argued that workers had been thoroughly incorporated into the culture of bourgeois society, looked decidedly flimsy seen through the prism of the newly born radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s.1 This process of radicalisation was to throw up many new leftist political formations, and give a significant boost to the fortunes of small groups of revolutionaries of a Trotskyist, Guevarrist or Maoist complexion. Tiny organisations mushroomed into sizeable if often unstable and ultimately short-lived parties all of whom defined themselves clearly to the left of established Communist parties. This trend was most clearly observed in southern European states; Italy in the wake of the ‘Hot Autumn’ militancy of 1969, and Spain and Portugal after the end of their respective periods of dictatorial rule in the 1970s.1

The Monolith Cracks: 1956–68

1956 was the ‘annus horribilis’ of the British Communist Party and the Communist movement internationally. Once again it was developments in Moscow which were to impose themselves on the British party. The death of Stalin in March 1953 had been greeted by the party as a great tragedy with the party press given over to eulogising the life and works of ‘The genius and will of Stalin, the architect of the rising world of free humanity …’.1 However within the Eastern European socialist block Stalin’s death had a far more direct, material impact.