Marxism in Britain

Dissent, Decline and Re-emergence 1945-c.2000

Keith Laybourn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134351640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Since the Second World War, Marxism in Britain has declined almost to the point of oblivion. The Communist Party of Great Britain had more than 50, 000 members in the early 1940s, but less than 5, 000 when it disbanded in 1991. Dissenting and Trotskyist organisations experienced a very similar decline, although there has been a late flowering of Marxism in Scotland.

Based on the Communist Party archives at Manchester, this text examines the decline over the last sixty years. Dealing with the impact of the Cold War upon British Marxism, the book looks at how international events such as the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechslovakia affected the Communist Party of Great Britain. The issues of Marxism and Britain's withdrawal from the Empire are also addressed, as are the Marxist influence upon British industrial relations and its involvement in the feminist movement.

Focusing on the current debate in British Marxist history over the influence of Moscow and Stalinism on the Communist Party, Keith Laybourn explores the ways in which this issue, which divides historians, undermined Marxism in Britain.

1 The Communist Party of Great Britain during the emergence of the Cold War 1945–56

The CPGB emerged from the Second World War as powerfully organised and as influential as it had ever been or was ever to be and could be said to have almost entered the mainstream of British politics. Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, led to a profound change in the CPGB line which encouraged the full involvement of its members in the British war effort against Nazi Germany. The CPGB membership, which had been below 3,000 in the early 1930s and had risen to about 17,000 in 1939 swelled to around 56,000 in December 1942 as a result of a wave of Russophile sentiment which swept through British society, following the Red Army’s heroic defence of Stalingrad.¹ Yet the political honeymoon of the Party did not long survive the end of the war. The Cold War, which began in the late 1940s, following Winston Churchill’s famous speech at Fulton, Missouri, on the iron curtain that was descending across Europe, isolated the CPGB from the mainstream of British political life although, ironically, the Party’s new policy statement The British Road to Socialism (1951) jettisoned the last vestiges of its revolutionary heritage by abandoning its commitment to Soviet power, and thus its acceptance of full-blown Marxist–Leninist ideas. These developments in policy contrasted with the Trotskyite opponents of the CPGB, such as the Workers’ International League (WIL) and the RCP. They were small in number and influence, but rejected Stalinism and still believed in revolutionary activities. Unlike the CPGB, they were prepared to support strike activity throughout the Second World War.

None of the CPGB’s attempts to work with the post-war Attlee Labour Governments, to develop a stronger trade union and women’s base to the movement and to project a more moderate face to British communism in the 1950s did much to sustain its power and influence in British society. The rapid loss of membership at the time of the Soviet invasion of Hungary also did much to damage a party and a movement which was already in serious decline. For the CPGB, the Hungarian crisis was the worst situation they had hitherto faced in the twentieth century. Concern about the Soviet Union was brought about by Krushchev’s severe criticism of Stalin at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s (CPSU) Twentieth Congress in February 1956. This opened up a debate about democracy within the Party which preceded the invasion of Hungary in October 1956. By that time Party membership, which had been 45,000 in 1945 had fallen to 33,000, and it fell further to about 26,000 by 1957. The frustrations of many Party members at the invasion of Hungary and the lack of internal democratic developments within the Party proved too much for 7,000 members who either left the Party or joined Trotskyite organisations.²

This decline was both dramatic and worrying for the Party. In 1945, the CPGB was still more or less at the height of its power. It had two MPs – Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin – many local councillors and Arthur Horner was secretary of Britain’s largest union, the newly created National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). However, in September 1947, faced with a sudden loss of members, the Party stated that:

The new situation [the economic crisis in Britain] demands that the Party overcome, once and for all, the stagnation in membership which has persisted since the end of the war and which in present circumstances hinders the full mobilisation of the people. To overcome this stagnation and build the Party is now vital for the advance of the entire movement.³

By 1956 the Party had no MPs, its membership had fallen further, its municipal support had declined and its influence in the trade union movement had fallen considerably, despite its involvement in numerous industrial disputes, such as the dock strike in 1951. Attempts to improve its membership did not work, and the Party had polled badly in the 1955 general election. Its position had not been helped by the show trials of Communist Czechoslovakia in 1952 and the Soviet army’s repression of the general strike movement in eastern Germany in June 1953.

As suggested by the CPGB itself, the hostile political climate of the Cold War was partly to blame for this decline, but there were other factors at work. The Labour Party was acting to remove communists from its ranks, and the trade union movement, encouraged by Vic Feather and other officials, was also seeking to limit the power of communism within trade union ranks. There were also tensions within international communism which saw a greater splintering of Marxist groups and the growth of British Trotskyite organisations. This was fuelled by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 which gave Trotskyite organisations further grounds for their opposition of Moscow, and led to the loss of CPGB members, some of whom, as already indicated, switched to rival Trotskyite groups.⁴ The Party considered the very question of its declining membership in the autumn of 1947. It concluded that:

[. . .] To overcome the stagnation and build the Party in now vital for the advance of the entire movement.

The principle [sic] political reasons responsible for the slow growth of the Party since the General Election [1945] includes the campaign of reaction against Communism, a campaign in which the Labour leadership have played a leading part. Another feature was the widespread feeling that with Labour’s victory there was now no need for the Communist Party and its activities, that the Labour Government was self sufficient, the Tories were defeated, and orderly progress and social advance would now be the order of the day.⁵

Nevertheless, the CPGB maintained that there were many people frustrated with developments, in particular the failings of the Labour Government, and experiencing a political awakening and that much work could be done by the, hitherto poorly performing, Young Communist League (YCL). The YCL did increase its membership from 2,991 in April 1951 to 3,281 in April 1952, but soon relapsed as its membership declined along with the rest of the Party.

Despite these problems, Party life was vitally important and sustained the core of the declining Party in its first post-war decade. Many Party members retained a faith in the internal life of the Party which looked towards Moscow for its guidance. This was beautifully illustrated by Raphael Samuels in two articles which he circulated, to some criticism, within Party circles.⁶ That faith in Stalinism was not seriously challenged until 1956 when the truth about its horrors began to emerge, even though there has been considerable evidence of Stalin’s activities in the 1930s.⁷

The Second World War, the General Election of 1945 and the changing attitudes to the Labour Party and the Attlee Labour Governments of 1945–51

The new pacific approach of international communism to the capitalist nations was confirmed by the dissolution of the Comintern (the Communist International) in 1943. This action, and the Soviet involvement in the War effort, encouraged a positive attitude to British Marxism in Britain. However, despite the enormous growth of the CPGB’s membership in war-time, a measure of its true importance was indicated when it was not invited to join the Cominform, the new international Marxist organisation set up by nine Communist parties in September 1947.⁸ The CPGB had been ignored on the grounds that it was politically insignificant. Despite this international estimation of its limited status, the Party, in its loyalty to Moscow and the Teheran (1943) and Yalta (1945) agreements, recognised the need to improve international relations between the capitalist world and the Soviet Union through organising a movement for international peace towards the end of the Second World War and in the early years of the post-war Cold War. These international agreements by the Soviet Union certainly continued to impinge upon the domestic policies of the CPGB.

During the Second World War, and its immediate aftermath, the CPGB was particularly intent upon improving its relations with the Labour Party through an attempt to affiliate to it and its supportive policies. Indeed, it gave conditional support to most of its legislative programme of the first Attlee Labour Government, and particularly to its policies for nationalisation. However, the Labour Party and the Attlee governments were never prepared to respond to such support as Britain was drawn into a post-war alliance with the United States and to consequent hostility against the Soviet Union.

The attempt of the CPGB to affiliate with the Labour Party had been turned down several times during the 1920s and again in 1936. However, as a result of the new spirit of co-operation in the Second World War, the Central Committee of the CPGB, which became the EC in 1943, decided to reapply for affiliation of the Labour Party. Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the CPGB sent a letter to J. S. Middleton, secretary of the Labour Party, on 18 December 1942 asking for the CPGB’s affiliation request to be put before the Labour Party conference in June 1943, and hoping that there could be interim meetings between the officials of the CPGB and the Labour Party. The Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of 27 July 1943 opposed the application.⁹ Middleton’s reply to the CPGB was that it was not free from the influence of the Comintern and therefore could not be supported in its application. In response, Pollitt suggested that the CPGB’s affiliation with the Labour Party would raise no difficulties with the Comintern and that the CPGB was self-financing. There ensued a protracted debate between the CPGB and Labour.¹⁰ Notwithstanding the rebuff, the CPGB mounted a further campaign to gain support to which the Labour Party responded with articles in the Daily Herald and a pamphlet entitled The Communist Party and the War – A Record of Hypocrisy and Treachery to the Workers of Europe.

The dissolution of the Comintern in May 1943 did little to allay Labour Party criticism of the CPGB. Although the CPGB claimed that nearly 3,400 Labour groups had passed resolutions in support of their application by June 1943, the Labour Party swept its request aside, with 712,000 votes for the CPGB affiliation and 1,951,000 against.¹¹ Nevertheless, the CPGB maintained the hope of affiliation, although its other political recommendations, most notably the introduction of a new system of proportional representation in parliamentary voting and local conferences of progressive organisations to select candidates in the forthcoming general elections, were rejected at the 1944 Labour Party conference.

Labour leaders drew a distinction between British Communists and the far more powerful CPSU. Whilst international agreements could be made with the one, no alliance was possible with the other. By the same token the Labour Left, including Fenner Brockway and Emrys Hughes (editor of the Glasgow Forward), were far more critical of the United States, an ‘expanding Imperial power’, than of Soviet Russia. They even acknowledged that the USSR might have needed political reassurance at the end of the War. As Aneurin Bevan, the left-wing Labour leader who became Minister of Health and Housing in the first Attlee Labour Government, wrote:

It is quite natural and inevitable that Russia should influence preponderantly the life of nations immediately on her borders and that she should seek to prevent them from combinations that may be aimed at her. That is the price we have to pay for a bitter recent past.¹²

However, the Labour Left carried little influence within the Labour Party. The majority of Labour MPs were inclined to support the Soviet Union in the war effort but were not prepared to entertain close relations with the CPGB.

Despite this situation, it is clear that the CPGB was concerned about the future post-war situation. On one major issue, of whether the CPGB should support the continuation of a post-war government of national unity or a Labour-led government of unity, there has been some considerable debate.

Neil Redfern has recently suggested that the widely held belief that the CPGB campaigned for a continued coalition or national government of Labour and Conservatives in the July 1945 general election is a myth which was fostered by Henry Pelling and erroneously accepted by a succession of historians such as James Hinton, Noreen Branson, Kevin Morgan and Willie Thompson.¹³ Instead, Redfern argues that developments were more complex than that. He argues that in 1943, the CPGB began to drift towards the idea of continuing with wartime national government in peace time because any peacetime government of unity would be dominated by progressive rather than reactionary forces. It appears that this was enforced by the meeting of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at the Teheran Conference of December 1943, which anticipated a peaceful post-war existence. The CPGB, influenced by this meeting, also began to see the Labour Party not as the third bourgeois party but as ‘a vehicle for social advance in the post-war world’. It hoped to work with the Labour Party, even though Labour was continually spurning its overtures. In its equivocal discussions on forming a post-war national government or working in an electoral alliance with Labour, the balance of the CPGB thought was tipped to Labour by the fact that the Commonwealth [Common Wealth] Party won the Skipton parliamentary by-election in January 1944 on a 12 per cent swing against the Conservatives. However, Redfern notes that after the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which saw Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill meet again to build up a peaceful post-world order, the CPGB changed this policy temporarily. Indeed, ‘For a few weeks after the Yalta Conference the CP did argue that a national government would be necessary to carry out these tasks but it is a myth that it campaigned for the war-time coalition to be re-elected.’¹⁴ However, the CPGB had changed its mind once again by the time of the general election of 5 July 1945. Indeed, this final switch of opinion seems to have occurred by mid-April 1945. The EC of the CPGB had issued a statement in favour of a post-war national government in The Worker in late March 1945, but had done no campaigning for this policy. The May Day Statement of the Party made no reference to the government of national unity or to the progressive Tories as it drifted to support a Labour Party committed to fighting the 1945 general election as an independent organisation.¹⁵ Because the Labour Party refused to work with the Communist Party in an electoral arrangement, the Communist Party put forward its 21 candidates at the July 1945 general election, although it advocated the support of all Labour candidates in other constituencies.¹⁶

Essentially, then, Redfern argues that there were several twists and turns in the position of the CPGB on the continuation of a coalition government or support for a Labour-led post-war government of unity. He maintains that these changes were partly conditioned by Soviet incursions into British domestic politics, through the events at Teheran and Yalta, although the rank and file changed these policies to meet their own concerns for socialist unity, rather than national unity, in the 1945 general election. He also makes it quite clear that he accepts that Moscow was instrumental in developing the strategy of a peaceful transition towards socialism, whilst accepting the views of Andrew Thorpe that the Comintern could not force the CPGB ‘over sustained periods, to do what it did not itself wish to do’.¹⁷ At the end, Redfern reiterates his support for the views of Andrew Thorpe, and what is now known as the ‘realist’ school of thought which emphasis the independent action of the CPGB. He also notes the abandonment of insurrectionary tactics in favour of the wartime unity continuing into peaceful post-war co-existence with the parliamentary road to socialism being advocated. Indeed, he writes that:

Though the process was conditioned to a considerable extent by the external factors of Comintern and Soviet Union, the Communist Party developed its revisionist strategy mainly under its own steam. Its ideological and political outlook had been comparable to that of the Second International (though even the ‘social patriots’ of 1912 would have baulked at the CP’s war-time praxis). The present writer does not believe that Bolshevism was an ‘alien import’ into British socialism, but there must be considerable doubt that Bolshevism ever really entered into the soul of most British Communists.¹⁸

This is clearly an authoritative article written with half an eye to the raging debate between the ‘realists’ and the ‘essentialists’. Yet, it sits uneasily between the two views, suggesting that the primary force was Stalin and Moscow, whilst admitting to local variation within the terms that Moscow laid down, even though Bolshevism carried little support in Britain. Also, it does not explain why in April and May 1945, the Party leadership was apparently ignoring the overwhelming support which the Party membership had shown for the idea of a continuing national government in a vote taken in mid-March 1945. There was pressure on Harry Pollitt to abandon the idea of a continuing national government coming from Walter Hannington and William Rust, who did not like the implications of the Yalta accord, but why did he see fit to overturn the vote of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction to British Marxism Since 1945
• 1 The Communist Party of Great Britain During the Emergence of the Cold War 1945–56
• 2 The Emergence of the Broad Left 1957–70
• 3 The Red Seventies: Industrial Conflict and the Emergence of Eurocommunism 1971–9
• 4 The Challenge of Thatcherism, the Triumph of Eurocommunism and the Collapse of ‘Stalinism’, 1980–91
• 5 Postscript: The Re-Emergence and Reconstruction of Marxism in Britain or ‘All Dressed up with Nowhere to go?’
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography