British Bolshevism (2025)

Book Review from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900–21. The Origins of British Communism. By Walter Kendall. Edited by Paul Flewers John McIlroy. Brill. 2025.

This is a reprint of a work first published in 1969, now with a 50-page foreword and a new index. We reviewed this at the time of its first publication so all we need to add is more detail on Kendall’s derogatory remark about us and to comment on McIlroy’s foreword.

Kendall wrote that the SPGB was ‘unwilling to enter the political fray even to the extent of adopting a programme of “palliatives”’. This is a peculiar understanding of the term ‘political fray’ but it let slip what Kendall, a left-wing Labourite, thought that politics was all about — what measures to adopt within capitalism to try to mitigate the problems it inflicts on the working class. The SPGB did most certainly enter the ‘political fray’ in its normal sense of political battle, even to the extent of standing candidates in local elections during this period.

Kendall was also being disingenuous as the SPGB was not the only party he discussed that took this position. The DeLeonist Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which was the other product of the ‘impossibilist revolt’ in the Social Democratic Federation, was also unwilling to adopt a programme of palliatives. Yet Kendall devoted a whole chapter to them and argued against this position (‘barred as it was from any advocacy of reform, the SLP was unable to make contact with the mass of the working class’) rather than dismissing it peremptorily as not part of the political fray.

McIlroy, in his foreword, discusses the validity of Kendall’s conclusion that the founding of the British Communist Party, thanks to the machinations of the Comintern and ‘Russian gold’, was a mistake and had a harmful effect on the working class movement in Britain. As a Leninist himself (subspecies, Trotskyist), he argues against this and speculates that things would have been worse had the CPGB not been formed. But one thing did happen. The SPGB did survive and from the 1920s onwards provided a Marxist criticism of the Leninist distortions and undemocratic practices (as well as the Voice of Moscow) that the CPGB introduced into the working class movement and which represented a step backwards. On this point Kendall was right.

Adam Buick