Letter: Who did what in the war? (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who did what in the war?

Going back to the year after the war I lived in London and used to come along to your meetings and debates with other parties. I used to come to Leicester Square to one on a Sunday evening. In London recently I bought one of the SPGB books, on war, and I must say I enjoyed reading it.

You state that the Communist Party supported the war at first, then in October 1939 they were against it. Well, didn’t the Communist Party give Harry Pollitt the sack during the changeover? I think I am right when I say that later on in the war Harry Pollitt put up in a by-election at Silvertown as a “Stop the War” candidate. And when did the Labour Party join Churchill’s government? They opposed them.

Now in your book Questions of the Day you write about Parliament and the elections. Well, does the ruling class go to the country when it suits them? From 1931 to 1945 the Tories only had two elections, and in 1910 and 1974 there were two elections in one year.

I must say there have been a lot of wars since the SPGB published the book War and the Working Class in 1936: all the killings going on in Ireland at the moment.

With best wishes to the SPGB.

L. J. Taylor 

Peterborough.

Reply:

The answer to your question about the Communist Party is as follows. In March 1939 the Daily Worker published an appeal to Attlee and Sinclair, the leaders of the Labour and Liberal parties, and Churchill for the Conservatives, to get together and form a “Popular Front” government to oppose Germany. On 2nd September this demand was affirmed in a manifesto issued by the Central Committee of the CP for success in the war about to start. Harry Pollitt wrote a pamphlet How to Win the War, in which he said: “The Communist Party supports the war, believing it to be a just war”.

A month later the CP changed its mind and issued a fresh manifesto published in the Daily Worker on the 12th. It said: “The manifesto of October 7th corrects the declaration issued on September 2nd. The present war is not a just war, but an unjust and imperialist one.” Pollitt was relieved of his job as General Secretary of the CP, but continued as its leading propagandist after he had made an abject confession of error. The CP continued to oppose the war and, when the coalition government it had asked for was formed in May 1940, yelled indignantly: “What a man [Churchill] to take under the wing of the Labour Party!”

The reason for the change was, of course, keeping up with Russian foreign policy. Pollitt assumed that the CP would support a war against Germany without taking into account the Russo-German pact of August 1939. When Germany invaded Russia in May 1941 the CP again became vigorous supporters of the war and the Churchill government.

On your second question, the frequency with which governments “go to the country” depends on their assessment of the need to have the support of the working class demonstrated or reaffirmed. The chief reason why there was no general election from 1935 to 1945 was the war, in which the coalition government (not the Tories alone) assumed itself to have general support with a desire for as little disruption as possible.

Blogger's Note:

A later version of the Questions of the Day pamphlet is online on the SPGB website.