Monday, October 3, 2022

50 Years Ago: The Communists and the Labour Party (1981)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard 

At the 1923 General Election all pretence about ‘conditional support’ was dropped. Now the Communists were not only willing supporters, but were almost lyrical in their enthusiasm for the leaders of the party which they said “was not a Labour Party at all”. MacDonald they had formerly described as a “lackey of the Bourgeoisie”; now they felt so friendly that the Workers’ Weekly (December 7th 1923) affectionately called him ‘Ramsay Mac’. Their local Branch Secretary reported on their activities: 
“We Communists here are doing our best to help Ramsay MacDonald to beat the capitalist candidate”.
The Workers' Weekly described the election campaign as follows:
‘Local organisations of the Communist Party are working for Ramsay MacDonald in Aberavon, Bromley in Barrow, Ernest Hunter of the ILP in Hackney, J.R. Clynes in Manchester and in hundreds of other Constituencies’
(Workers' Weekly. December 7, 1923) 
In Barrow where they were helping J. Bromley, the Labour candidate, their secretary wrote:
“All our illusions and theoretical deductions have been hung out on the clothes line to dry”.
(From an article The Communists and the Labour Party: How Moscow helped MacDonald published in Socialist Standard October 1931.

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