Editorial: From Comintern to Cominform (1947)

Editorial from the November 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Communist International, formed in 1919 at a time when Lenin and his associates expected the workers of all the leading countries to place Communists in power, continued in existence as an instrument of Russian foreign policy until it was wound up in 1943, presumably because, with problems of the peace settlement ahead, the Russian Government thought it tactful to remove an organisation that was at that time not very useful but was a source of irritation and alarm to the Allied governments.

On October 5th, 1947, the birth of an Information Bureau was announced (named by opponents the “Cominform”), representing the Communist parties of nine countries, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Rumania, Russia and Yugoslavia. According to the statement issued by the new group (Daily Worker, 6/10/47) it represents “the anti-imperialist and democratic camp, the principal aim of which is to undermine imperialism, strengthen democracy and liquidate the remnants of Fascism.”

It will “elaborate an agreed platform of action” directed against “the main forces of the imperialist camp – against American imperialism, its British and French Allies, the right-wing Socialists, in the first place in Britain and France.”

Again according to the Daily Worker, the communiqué issued by the Cominform “names Attlee, Bevin and Leon Blum among the ‘treacherous leadership’ of the Socialist movement,” It is explained by the Russian Communists that the new organisation “by no means signifies the restoration of a global Communist organisation with a centralized leadership, such as the Communist International represented at the time” (Daily Worker, 11/10/47), but it is evident from the declared objects that the aim is just the same, that of smashing Labour parties as a step towards the conquest of power by the Communist parties in the various countries.

What should be the attitude of workers to the new organisation? Are its aims and methods deserving of working-class support? Is it genuinely a body aiming to defend democracy, to oppose capitalism and imperialism, and to work for triumph of Socialism?

Let us first consider who engineered its formation by what methods. It was formed at a secret meeting in Warsaw in September, held on the initiative of Soviet Russia. The meeting was kept secret, not only secret from the openly capitalist press and capitalist parties of the world but secret also from the working class of the world, including the rank and file members of the Communist parties of the nine countries. The formation of the new body, like the dissolution of the old one in 1943 was decided over their heads and with their knowledge. The rank and file and even the leaders of the British Communist Party only learned of it after its secret decisions had been decided upon. The meeting, moreover, was called by Russian Communist Party officials, acting, of course, on the instructions of the Russian Government. In that country the Government is in the hands of the Communist Party, the membership of which numbers only a very small minority of the population. No political party is allowed to exist except the Communist Party, so that there is no political party to put up candidates in opposition to Communist Party candidates at elections. When, therefore, the Communist Party in this or any other country declares its support for “democracy” that is what they mean by democracy.

From the Socialist and working-class standpoint these dictatorial organisations, arriving at decisions at secret meetings, are wholly evil. Their activities are the antithesis of democracy and their work can only hinder the growth of a genuinely democratic, working-class Socialist movement.

There are, it is true, certain differences between the new organisation and the old. Instead of claiming world-wide scope it is at present limited to nine countries, most of them so placed that the Russian Government is in a position to extract direct and powerful influence on these governments with or without the camouflage provided by the Cominform. Its headquarters are to be in Belgrade, not Moscow, which suggests that the Russian Government will be able whenever it wishes to do so disclaim direct responsibility. As far as influence over the Communist Parties themselves is concerned the actual form taken by the new organisation is not of much account because the Communist Parties invariably toe the line laid down by Russia. They did so under the Comintern and continued to do so when the Comintern was officially abolished.

How little the Communist Parties and the Communist leaders in various countries are able to pursue a line of their own choosing was shown in 1939. The British Communist leaders came out in support of the war against Germany but immediately had to recant, make abject apology, and fall into line with Russian policy. It has been shown again by the Russian Government’s decision to support Jewish immigration and partition of Palestine. In the past the British Communists opposed it, now they must reverse their policy. Speaking in the House of Commons on June 19th, 1936, Mr. Gallacher, Communist M.P., declared: “Palestine can never be a home for the Jews.” He said that the Jews “have been fooled by their politicians who, under the leadership of the Zionist movement and who are the agents for British Imperialism against Arab masses.” He described the revolt of the Arabs against the attempt to set up a Jewish state as “a thoroughly justifiable revolt. It demands the end of immigration of a character which threatens the existence of Palestine.” Likewise a pamphlet published by the Communist Labour Monthly opposed partition as a scheme of British Imperialists. (“Who is Prosperous in Palestine?” 1936, p. 41.)

The Communist Parties are merely the propaganda agents for Russian governmental policy. What they is not a consistent policy based on principle but a policy based on the day-to-day tactics of the Government in its fight against the other imperialist powers.

In home policy there is the same want of principle. They alternatively oppose the Labour Party, saying it is a capitalist party, and support it, saying is a socialist party. In 1929 they described nationalisation as “State Capitalism” and the Labour Party as the “third Capitalist Party” (“Class Against Class,” p. 8), yet now pretend that nationalisation is socialism and ask the Labour Government “how is it that only one industry has been nationalised?” (Daily Worker, 13/10/47.) In 1939 they took the initiative in asking Mr. Churchill to form a National Government along with the Labour and the Liberal parties. When this was done they attacked the Labour Party for associating with Churchill! Then in 1941 when Russia was invaded they supported Churchill and now again discover that he has all along been and enemy of the workers.

The future Socialism depends on the growth of democratic, socialist organisations. The new Cominform, as well as the Communist parties that are at present not affiliated to it, are the enemies of both Socialism and Democracy.

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

Bolshevising the Red Flag (2025)

Book Review from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Raising the Red Flag. Marxism, Labourism, and the Roots of British Communism 1884-1921. By Tony Collins, Haymarket Books.

In his 1969 pioneering work The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-1921: The Origins of British Communism (reviewed July 1969), Walter Kendall advanced the view that Bolshevism-Leninism was something that was alien to the formally democratic traditions of the working class movement in Britain, introduced from an economically and politically backward part of the world where conditions were quite different. Collins, writing as a Leninist, argues that in fact those who founded the British Communist Party were all too much in the tradition of reformist labourism. Both views have some merit.

The main constituents of the CPGB when it was founded in January 1921 were the British Socialist Party (BSP), part of the De Leonist Socialist Labour Party (SLP), Workers Dreadnought (Sylvia Pankhurst), and some from the Shop Stewards Movement and the left-wing of the Independent Labour Party (ILP).

The British Socialist Party was the name the Social Democratic Federation adopted when it amalgamated with some branches of the ILP in 1911. It was essentially the same organisation from which the SLP and the SPGB broke away in 1903 and 1904 respectively over its lack of democracy, and its reformism and opportunism. It was to provide the bulk of the original membership of the CPGB and, Collins argues, its political approach too of seeing itself as the left wing of the Labour movement.

Collins examines the origin and practice of the founding factions and finds them all wanting in one way or another from a Leninist point of view. The defect they all (except the Shop Stewards Movement) share, he says, is what he calls ‘abstract propagandism’ as opposed to seeking to lead a discontented but non-socialist majority in an insurrection against the capitalist state. The Shop Stewards Movement is criticised for restricting itself to purely industrial matters and the 1911 pamphlet The Miners Next Step for advancing the slogan of ‘no leaders’. His view is that, on the contrary, new leaders were required, but the leaders of a vanguard party of dedicated revolutionaries. In fact, he argues that it was the absence of this ‘subjective’ factor that was the reason why there was no workers’ revolution in Britain just before and just after the First World War.

Tendentious

Explaining his criticism, Collins writes:

‘The SLP’s answer to the syndicalists was that a party was necessary to win a parliamentary majority which would then support the workers as they took over industry, whereupon parliament would hand over state power to the industrial unions. … Shorn of its industrial militancy, this was not very different from the SDF or the SPGB, who believed in the manner of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists that the working class would come to socialism through being educated about its benefits and thus vote for socialists in parliamentary elections’ (p. 58).

‘The Bolshevik conception’, Collins goes on to bemoan, ‘… did not exist in Britain’.

His criticism is a caricature, and tendentious in suggesting that ‘education’ meant something other than the action of workers, who had become socialist through their experience of capitalism, persuading their fellow workers to realise, on the basis of the same experience, that socialism was the only solution. It was true, though, that the implication was that a majority of workers who wanted and understood socialism was needed before socialism could be established and that, if that majority existed, workers should, among other things, vote for it. The Bolshevik conception rejects the principle that a socialist majority is necessary, indeed even possible, as it teaches that workers can only reach a trade-union consciousness and so require a vanguard party to lead them politically.

Although the SPGB is mentioned in passing a number of times, as here, only one short paragraph is devoted to our political position:

‘By this time the SDF leadership had completed its purge of leftists with the expulsion of the leaders of the London opposition, who formed the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. Once out of the SDF, its leftism proved to be a chimera. The SPGB declared its object to be ‘the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery [of government] including [those] armed forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation’, and pursued a grim messianic parliamentary reformism for the next hundred years and more’ (pp. 30-1).

None of our opponents at the time (and even our honest opponents today) would have accused us of ‘parliamentary reformism’, as what characterised us was a refusal to advocate reforms to capitalism (called ‘palliatives’ at the time). We did advocate using parliament but not to try to reform capitalism but to deprive the capitalist class of their ownership of the means of production and their ability to use the armed forces of the state to maintain it.

Collins’s accusation is outrageous, obviously biased and possibly dishonest. It is also ignorant. The term ‘instrument of emancipation’ was consciously taken from the preamble to the 1880 programme of the Parti Ouvrier Français, a preamble that Marx himself had drafted and which speaks of the working class needing to form themselves into a political party which should use ‘universal suffrage which will thus be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation’ (tinyurl.com/bdf7vmj8). Clause Six of our Declaration of Principles which Collins is misinterpreting is saying the same — that to end capitalism the workers need to gain control of the machinery of government (state power) which currently upholds capitalist ownership of the means of production. It is a call for the revolutionary, not the reformist, use of parliament.

It also makes Collins a bad historian as the views of the SPGB are just as relevant, if only in terms of the numbers who held them, to his subject of Marxism during the period he is studying as are those of the SLP, John Maclean and Sylvia Pankhurst. In fact, five of the people mentioned by him either were to become or had been members of the SPGB (Jack Fitzgerald, E. J. B. Allen, T. A. Jackson, Valentine McEntee and George Hicks).

Because he didn’t bother to go into the matter in detail, Collins seems to think that the SPGB favoured participation in elections and nothing else. Actually, like the SLP, the SPGB was (and still is) in favour of industrial as well as political action, the difference being over which was the more important. The SLP said industrial, we said political. Ironically, this is the position Collins himself takes up in criticising The Miners’ Next Step and the Shop Stewards Movement, though, as a Leninist, by political action he envisages a vanguard party staging an armed insurrection to seize state power in a period of acute industrial unrest.

He doesn’t list the Socialist Standard as among the contemporary publications he looked at. Which will explain how he missed that in March 1915 we published an anti-war statement by the Bolshevik representative in Britain, Maxim Litvinov, when he couldn’t find anyone else prepared to do so . He also ignores, while noting that the BSP, the SLP and Keir Hardie wobbled on the outbreak of the war, that the SPGB immediately denounced it in a manifesto dated 25 August 1914. Nor does he mention that our members were among those imprisoned or going on the run for refusing to be conscripted.

Two issues

The groups which founded the CPGB initially disagreed on two issues which Collins examines in detail — affiliation to the Labour Party and participation in elections. The BSP was in favour of both. Sylvia Pankhurst was against both, while the SLPers favoured electoral action but not affiliation (which would have been our position but we are proud to have had nothing to do with the founding of the CPGB). In the end Lenin and the Communist International decreed that the new party should accept both, which was easy enough to ensure as the bulk of its members had come from the BSP (born SDF).

Collins’s point about the early CPGB being a continuation of the reformism of the SDF/BSP is valid, as we recognised at the time from having opposed for the previous sixteen years the views and actions of those involved. However, in the mid-1920s the Communist International decided to ‘bolshevise’ the CPGB and imposed on it a strictly Leninist organisational form with a leadership that told its members what to do and which way to turn (and which itself took orders from the rulers of state-capitalist Russia). This was, as Kendall had pointed out, quite alien to the traditions of working-class organisations in Britain. Unfortunately, it resulted in the ‘Bolshevik conception’ getting established here and in Leninist theory and tactics passing as Marxism and revolutionary socialism, as Collins’s book itself bears witness. It was left to us, alone for most of the time, to keep the standard of anti-Leninist Marxism flying high.

Adam Buick

Socialism's deadly foes (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

It used to be an axiom of Party speakers that if the Labour Party did not exist the capitalist class would have to invent it. The same is true of the so-called Communist Party, though in a different historical context.

The Labour Party throughout its vile and bloody history has stood ever ready to serve British capitalism, as government, loyal opposition, and in coalition with Tories and Liberals. Bloody history? Yes. Did they not support and help organize the slaughter of millions of workers in two world wars? Did they not endorse the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Were they not the government when the Korean war started in 1950? Did they not support and aid the American butchery in Vietnam? All this is viciously anti-working class. Yet these are only some major crimes that spring to mind. The catalogue is a long one.

While their cloth-capped pacifist Keir Hardie was playing recruiting-sergeant during World War I, the SPGB was opposing the war and propounding Socialism. While one-time conscientious-objector Herbert Morrison was in the Churchill War Cabinet during World War II, the SPGB was arguing the common interest of the world’s workers.

The post-war Labour government started Harwell and the development of nuclear weapons in this country. They fostered the lunatic justification: “They’ve got them — so we must have them”. It was Aneurin Bevan, the darling of the mutton-headed left, who did not want to go “naked” to the world’s conference chambers. “Negotiation from strength” meant being “clad” in nuclear armoury. They hold the distinction of being the first government in this country to carry on conscription in peacetime.

They used troops to break strikes. Their Attorney-General (now Lord Shawcross) prosecuted dockers in April 1951. Seven dockers had been charged under the Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order. Shawcross is recorded in Keesing’s Contemporary Archives (May-June 1951) giving a warning to strikers generally that, if there were no trade dispute involved, a strike which was calculated to cause a breach of contract, or so interfere with the course of justice, or affect the policy or interests of the state, “might constitute a grave criminal offence”. Bevan then had the job Foot now holds as Minister of Labour (members of NALGO please note).

At every election since the war, including 1945, the Communist Party has worked for the return of Labour governments, supported Labour candidates and urged workers to vote Labour. They are equally guilty. It is manifestly absurd to work for the return of Labour governments and then disclaim responsibility for what those governments do.

The guilt of the “Communist” Party goes deeper than supporting the Labour Party. As mouth-piece of Soviet state capitalism they too support wars. They supported the atom-bombing of Japan. They applauded the development of the atomic bomb in Russia because it broke the American monopoly, saying it “will encourage peace-loving people everywhere” (Daily Worker, 24 September 1949). Two years later when the British bomb was announced they called it: “A cowards’ weapon, designed for the unrestrained massacre of the civilian population” (Daily Worker 18 February 1952).

After Russia was attacked in 1941, nobody was more in favour of fighting for capitalism in World War II. They even supported the return of Tory candidates in by-elections to better prosecute the war. For more than 50 years they have slavishly followed Russian foreign policy; even stooping to support Stalin’s pact with Hitler, calling it a “victory for peace and socialism” (Daily Worker 23 August 1939).

They also supported the wars in Korea and Vietnam though, being motivated by the interests of Russian capitalism, they were on the other side to their Labour buddies in these two bloodbaths.

Flash back

How did all this come to be? How can it happen that these two parties which use Socialist-sounding phrases and (in the case of the Labour Party with the support of millions of workers) come to be buried in the dirty business of maintaining capitalism? The answers are to be found in fundamentally wrong assumptions right from their beginnings. It is a long story and from the standpoint of working-class interests and Socialism a sad and futile story.

The Labour Party in 1906 and the “Communist” Party in 1920 embarked upon the day-to-day struggle to do “something now”. The former being a native product of British capitalism in the quest for reforms, the latter taking its cue from their masters in the Kremlin. They are both the heirs to the fallacy of the old Social Democrats that Socialism can be an ultimate objective, while “in the meantime” they build a movement to seek votes on the basis of a list of reforms.

The false assumption behind this idea is that the working class cannot understand Socialism; they have to be baited by reforms. Above all, workers cannot consciously organize and free themselves, they must have leaders. So the trap is set. The trap is capitalism and the quarry is reformist.

Starting out on the wrong foot and facing the wrong way all subsequent developments were inevitable. Instead of being stepping-stones, reforms became the only attainable ends. Their spurious socialism is reforms and nationalization. As if to rub salt into the wounds of mockery, they used to say they were in a hurry and could not wait for the SPGB and workers’ understanding.

Given a working class who are overwhelmingly non-socialist, the Labourites and Communists have to appeal to the same politically ignorant electorate as the avowedly capitalist parties. If you play their game, “you” must have a policy for everything they have a policy for. To get votes you must do what they do. No use talking about the abolition of the wages system, common ownership and production solely for use. Talk about pensions and housing. Make promises. Outbid the Tories and Liberals. Sound plausible. Promote leaders. Be British. Be concerned about the nation and British interests. Their game is running capitalism. To sound plausible means you must convince millions of workers that you can run capitalism better than they can. Though all your policies pre-suppose the continuation of capitalism, you must foster the illusion of attacking the system and being indignant.

How many times during the seventy years of the Socialist Party of Great Britain have we been asked : “Where have you got? What have you achieved?” While the clamour for popular demands has become a way of life the voice of Socialism has remained small. In fact, the two things go together. The massive proportions of the one presuppose the relative smallness of the other. The point is that for all their mass appeal the Labour Party and the CP have solved not a single problem.

Despite many years of Labour government, capitalism is still here. They are a living demonstration of the futility of reformism. There has been continuous legislation of reforms concerning every aspect of capitalism. The only argument advanced has been that the reforms were necessary to solve problems. History is littered with the wreckage of their useless enactments.

Look where you will, there have been no solutions. Health and welfare, Act piled upon Act while the chaos gets worse. The wages struggles of doctors, nurses and welfare workers run parallel with the continuing poverty of the workers who need health and welfare services. Instead of ending poverty, the chief function is to administer it.

Pensions? Despite all the reforms, wretchedness and misery continue to the accompaniment of sentimental slush from the hypocrites in government getting £16,000 per year who think £10 per week is enough for one and £16 enough for two old workers.

Education. Another sorry story. While newspapers carry headlines about “class-room jungles” the reform-mongers reach for their bottomless bucket to start another round of bailing-out operations.

Rents and mortgages make the bitterest mockery of all. Nothing screams more loudly the irrelevance of reformism. From the first Housing Act in 1851, every government has been going to solve the housing problem.

The post-war Labour government was finally going to banish it in five years. In 1948 Aneurin Bevan promised : “When the next election occurs there will be no housing problem in Great Britain for the British working class”. (Hansard 14 July 1948). They were going to clear away the slums. Now, nearly thirty years later, the present Labour government blandly informs us the slums are here to stay. A report by the National Economic Development Office calling for the clearance of 380,000 slums was rejected as being against the policy of both this government and the last one. The Daily Mirror (11 April 1974) which supported the return of the Labour government quotes a spokesman for the Department of the Environment as saying: “Demolition is a dirty word now. Renovation is the best thing for slum areas”. By their own criterion of “something now” they are abysmal failures.

They were going to abolish the House of Lords and tax the rich out of existence. The rich and the Lords are still on our backs and the party which in 1945 used the catch-phrase “Fair shares for all” is still talking nonsense about “fairness” in a society that rests upon legal robbery.

Nationalization was to be the way to run industry and transport as public services not for profits. Millions of workers were kidded to regard nationalization as the answer to social problems in general and to maldistribution in particular. This was how the Labour Party was able to exploit the misguided loyalties of the workers. The economics of capitalism made short work of their silly schemes.

The bitterness and disillusionment that followed did more than give the Tories thirteen years in power. It caused many workers to regard Socialism as a failure and to become suspicious of politics generally. The fact is that the policies of the Labour Party are conceived for the running of capitalism, not its abolition. They are ignorant of or indifferent to what Socialism means. When this is coupled with the cynical quest for power by the shabby upstarts who lead this blind mass it is easy to understand how damaging to the cause of Socialism the whole futile exercise has been.

The Tories have been able to poke fun at the founderings of the Labour Party and, by misrepresentation, to discredit Socialism. In the same way they are able to point to the tyranny of capitalist Russia. Socialism suffers on the one hand because of the distortion of those who control the mass-media, and on the other hand because the great majority of the working class have so far accepted those falsehoods.

Our main indictment of the Bolsheviks is not that from 1917 they have built up capitalism in Russia. Given the historical conditions of the time — industrial backwardness, a largely illiterate peasant population and a working class outside Russia not yet ready for Socialism — capitalism was the only possible outcome. This is what the SPGB said at the time. The fact that they have passed off a million outrages as Socialism — this is our indictment. They have twisted Marxism into its opposite for more than half a century. Marxism demands the abolition of the wages-system, so the political frauds in the Kremlin invent “socialist wages”. Marx saw the state as a product and instrument of class society, so the Leninists invented a contradiction in terms called the “workers’ state”. Marx wanted a conscious majority of the working class (see The Communist Manifesto) to gain control of political power for the purpose of ending class society, so the Bolsheviks called their minority seizure of power “the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

Their brutal hierarchy is worthy of comparison with the medieval Papacy. Their terrorist secret police. The purge trials and slaughters of their own comrades. Their deals with Hitler and later with Churchill. Their vast military machine. The use of military might to crush workers’ risings in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Their commodity production and rivalry with western capitalists for world markets and investments, all carried on to the accompaniment of propaganda calling it Socialism.

These are just headings under which their deeds may be listed. The reality in human suffering is incalculable. Can there be any wonder that the progress of Socialist understanding has been slow?

For a generation they worshipped Stalin and his “greatness” while millions lived in fear of his secret police. All criticism was brutally crushed. New crimes were invented to cover any rivals for power. To be denounced as a Trotskyist or a Titoist meant that you were an enemy of the state. (Those who were shot were spared years of degradation as political prisoners.) During this period meetings of the Socialist Party of Great Britain were disrupted by members of the Communist Party who would tolerate no criticism of their Soviet Fatherland. Three years after Stalin’s death some of those who had served him denounced him, and the faithful were thrown into confusion.

It is impossible to estimate the harm all this has done to the spread of Socialist ideas. At every meeting someone asks “What about Russia?” We have to waste time debunking myths before we can expound the positive Socialist case of the SPGB.

Understanding as we do the realities of capitalism, we know that our fellow-workers in this country, as in Russia and throughout the world, are confronting similar problems. We are as confident as ever that the world’s workers will come to reject the spurious palliatives of Labourites and “Communists” and will achieve their own emancipation by establishing Socialism. Working to this end has always been the sole commitment of the SPGB. There could be no task more worthwhile.

Harry Baldwin

50 Years ago: Harry Pollitt (2010)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

What a tragedy was the life of Harry Pollitt! Here was a man who, horrified by the conditions of the working class as he had known them in his youth, set out in a genuine attempt to improve those conditions. He conceived a personal dislike of “the bosses,” and was determined to “make them pay” for what the workers had had to suffer. Yet Harry Pollitt never gained a thorough understanding of the forces that mould modern society, in Russia as well as in Britain. As a result, his deeply-felt hostility to the ruling class in Britain simply resulted in his becoming, indirectly, an overseas ally of the Russian ruling class. It is not enough merely to oppose capitalism, as one has known it: one must be for its alternative, Socialism. Had Harry Pollitt succeeded in his efforts, he would merely have been instrumental in establishing state capitalism in Britain, in place of the variety we have at present. And that would have left the workers exactly where they  are  now.

[From “The Passing Show” by A.W.E., Socialist Standard, September 1960]

The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party. (1931)

From the June 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

From information that has been published from time to time about the number of its members, it is possible to judge of the varying fortunes of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Of late those variations have been consistently downwards.

A Communist Party member, writing to the New York Militant (March 15th, 1931), a “Trotskyite” organ, states that the Communist Party began with 5,000 members. Statements made at the time put the membership higher, but it has not been possible to obtain authoritative information to that effect.

In March, 1921 (see Communist, April 2nd, 1921), 5,000 members of the were reported to have joined the Communist Party en bloc. The Editor of the Communist remarked that this was the virtual end of the I.L.P., which henceforth “can have no share or part in the Revolution.” Within a year or two the Communists were pushing the “United Front” campaign and asking the I.L.P., to join hands with them, not, indeed, to further the “Revolution,” but to secure the election of MacDonald, Thomas, Henderson, and the rest of the Labour Party leaders.

International Press Correspondence (August 12th, 1924), an official Communist publication, gave the 1923 membership as 5,116, and the 1924 membership as 3,000. The Report of the Central Committee to the 1927 Conference of the British Party (see Manchester Guardian, September 29th., 1927) gave the membership for 1925, 1926, and 1927 as 5,000, 10,800 and 7,377. Of the 7,377 members, 2,300 were in South Wales, 1,500 in Scotland, 1,321 in London, 737 on Tyneside, 534 in Manchester, and 420 in Sheffield.

With regard to the 1926 membership, it was stated at the Moscow Congress in July, 1930, by Manuilsky, that the highest point reached in 1926 was 12,000 (see Daily Herald, July 8th, 1930). The figure 12,000 probably relates to a later date in 1926 than the figure 10,800 given in the preceding paragraph.

Pravda (October 25th, 1930), the Russian Communist paper, gave the membership for the middle of 1928 as 9,000, and for February, 1930, as 3,200 (see Observer, October 26th, 1930). It also disposed that, out of a total membership of four millions in the Communist International, only 500,000 were outside Russia.

At the Bermondsey Communist Party Conference in January, 1929, a delegate, Miss Budden, said that the membership was then 3,700 (Daily Telegraph, January 21st, 1929).

Manuilsky (see above) gave the membership in July, 1930, as 3,500 (Daily Herald, July 8th, 1930).

The Tyneside District Committee of the Communist Party questioned the accuracy of the official figures and gave the membership at the middle of 1929 as not more than 2,500, possibly less (see Communist Review, October, 1929).

Finally, the Communist Party member who supplied information to the New York Militant states that the present membership is under 1,000. He states also that the circulation of the Daily Worker has dropped from 10,000 a day to less than 5,000; as compared with a circulation of 70,000 for the former Workers’ Weekly, and a circulation, at its highest point, of 110,000 for the Sunday Worker.

The following table sets out the estimates for the various years. The figure for 1921 is made up by adding the 5,000 I.L.P. recruits to the previous 5,000 members.

Year	Membership
1920	5,000
1921	10,000
1923	5,116
1924	3,000
1925	5,0000
1926	10,800
1926	12,000
1927	7,377
1929	3,700
1930	3,200
1930	3,500
1931	1,000

The Communists’ chief criticism of the S.P.G.B. has been that our method, with its insistence upon educating the workers in Socialist principles, is too slow. What do the Communists now think of their own “quick” methods? We wonder if the Russian Government and the Russian workers are satisfied with value received for the money—which must run into hundreds of thousands of pounds—spent here on propaganda, little of it having anything to do with Communism?

Edgar Hardcastle

The Gleam of Socialism? (2024)

Book Review from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Gleam of Socialism’. By Robert Griffiths, Praxis Press, 2004.

Why is there still a Communist Party? Good question. After all, the main role of that party throughout its history was to win support amongst workers for the foreign policy of the old USSR and its rulers. In fact, that’s why that state helped the finances of the party until the late 1970s, either directly or by buying thousands of copies of the old Daily Worker and its successor, the Morning Star.

No doubt, the leaders of the party weren’t just useful idiots but had sincerely convinced themselves that Russia was on the road to socialism and that in serving the interests of the USSR they were furthering the cause of socialism. But it wasn’t socialism. Far from it. It was a one-party dictatorship, the aim of whose rulers was to develop capitalism, in the form of a state capitalism, as rapidly as possible; which inevitably involved the economic exploitation of the workers there through the wages system and the extraction of surplus value. But this is the view of those Griffiths describes as ‘ultra-left anti-communists’.

Griffiths is the current general secretary of the ‘Communist Party of Britain’ (CPB), formed as a breakaway in 1988 from the historic ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’ whose leaders were indeed coming to the conclusion that there was no longer a need for a party dedicated to taking a lead from the rulers of the USSR. When the state-capitalist regime there finally collapsed in 1991 they decided to change the party’s name, to Democratic Left. Confusing matters, a grouplet, opportunistically, immediately took up the name and still exists under that name, publishing the Weekly Worker. This current CPGB has nothing to do with the historic party of that name. The original CPGB’s legitimate political successor can be said to be the CPB and the Morning Star.

There is also a previous breakaway, for the same sort of reason, in 1977 to form the still extant ‘New Communist Party’ which might have been able to claim this if they had not decided to link up with North Korea.

Griffiths’s book is a collection of articles, some of them published previously including short pieces on various well-known past CP members, mainly from Wales, from where he himself hails. The more substantial part is a history of the old CPGB — and its various policy twists and turns — and is accurate enough factually. It’s the explanation for them that is at fault as he presents them as being made in response to changes in conditions in Britain rather than at the behest of Moscow. Nor is there any reason to doubt the accuracy of his blow-by-blow account of the struggle in 1980s between the Old Guard CPers, centred around the Morning Star, and the ‘Eurocommunists’ who had won control of the party apparatus and who wanted to turn the party into a coalition of social movements, a sort of democratic green feminist left, and who were indeed ‘revisionists’ and ‘liquidationists’ from the Old Guard’s point of view.

The main reason for accepting the CPB as the political successor of the old CPGB is the continuity of political analysis which Griffiths illustrates. The CPB still sees the old USSR as having been socialist and still analyses present-day capitalism as ‘state-monopoly capitalism’ and still sees the way forward as a broad alliance of all anti-monopoly elements led by the ‘united working class movement’ to elect a left-wing Labour government. The aim, in other words, is an economy with a state-capitalist sector and a fairly extensive private non-monopoly sector under a reformist government.

Perhaps surprisingly, Jeremy Corbyn is described as a ‘longstanding friend of the Communist Party’. Maybe he just sees them as general Old Labour left-wing reformists like himself.

Adam Buick

Watching big brother (1978)

TV Review from the October 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

On three consecutive Tuesdays in October (one of them ironically the wedding day of millionairess Onassis to a top Soviet official) Granada TV presented Decision: British Communism, a study of the Communist Party of Great Britain as it prepared for and carried on its 1977 Congress. Permission for the filming of branch and committee meetings was doubtless intended to confirm the Party’s new found enthusiasm for the democratic process; the result did no such thing, however. The programmes showed well the CP’s authoritarian structure. The seven member Political Committee dominates the Party, pushing through its policies against opposition from ‘liberals’ (Eurocommunists) and hardliners. At one branch meeting a ‘liberal’ stated that a recent suggestion to the London District Committee for a greater degree of internal democracy was quashed by two groups — one considering the existing level too great because it had led to division, and another which regarded everything fine as it was. When the ‘liberals’ on the committee pressed the matter, ‘‘all the old talk of CIA infiltration was dragged up”.

At a time when the USSR is busy prosecuting dissidents, sight of the CP’s Executive giving a standing ovation to a representative from the Soviet party confirmed a commitment to pluralism. A major cause of friction between the leadership and the liberals concerns the relationship of the CPSU to the European parties. When the leadership stated that Brezhnev had publicly declared each CP to be sovereign, it was pointed out year before the Czechoslovak invasion.

The last, and most interesting, programme focussed on congress itself, and in particular a dispute over the wording a place on the agenda of a pro-Soviet resolution. The Party’s Arrangements Committee (responsible for vetting resolutions and ensuring that nothing too anti-leadership gets a good hearing) scored a tactical victory in moving the motion to the last day, thus avoiding a display of disunity in the presence of the man from Moscow. McGahey, the wily Congress chairman, denied the right of discussion or opposition from the floor, roused the faithful with a few words on the “great and historic” events of 1917 and moved swiftly to the vote.

The clearest thing to emerge from the series was that the Communist Party has no conception of Socialism at all. Their aim is a state dominated economy (“an alternative to the power of the big monopolies”), not a society in which the state, together with money buying and selling will have ceased to exist. Their idea of the socialist revolution is still the elitist one of a vanguard party dragging the workers to socialism, entering into pacts with other political parties and "classes” (!) along the way.

Brian Philips

Blogger's Note:

Episode 3 of this Granada series is available on YouTube. Sadly, the first two episodes are unavailable at the time of writing. The documentary maker who filmed the series, Roger Graef, died in 2022.

Communism and socialism: is there a difference? (2023)

From the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent series of programmes on BBC Radio 4, ‘Britain’s Communist Thread’, looked at the fortunes of a political party established in Britain in 1920 with allegiance to the government calling itself ‘communist’ that had recently seized power in Russia. That party was the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the government it supported was the Bolshevik one, led first by Lenin and Trotsky and later by Stalin. By the 1930s the CPGB had 60,000 members drawn from all parts of the British working class, from intellectuals to manual workers, and managed to get a small number of its candidates elected to parliament. Many of its members were convinced that a better and more equal kind of society that they called communism (or socialism) had or was being established in Russia under Stalin and they wanted the same in Britain. Most of them remained in the Party until the 1950s, for the most part unaware of the maniacal brutality that took place in Russia under Stalinism, since that only began to become widely known after Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khruschev’s succession to the leadership of what had become the Soviet Union. Many drifted away, especially after the brutal suppression of the 1956 uprising in Hungary, and then, even more, after the Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to put an end to the so-called Prague spring.

Euorocommunism

Among those who remained, some still hung onto their support and admiration for the Soviet regime and slavishly followed the Moscow line, but others in the CPGB began to look elsewhere, to the kind of ‘communism’ advocated by parties in countries like Italy and France, so-called ‘eurocommunism’. In reality eurocommunism was a thinly disguised version of the kind of politics practised by the Labour Party in Britain and just an alternative ‘left-wing’ way of administering capitalism. But it led to a split in the CPGB and eventually its dissolution in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union itself had given up on its own ‘communism’ and moved to what looked as though it was going to be a Western-style parliamentary ‘free market’ capitalism. But some in Britain, despite the overwhelming evidence of the horrors of Stalinism and the dead end it constituted, could not let go of their attachment to the Soviet model and, with the CPGB falling apart, set up a new party along the old lines, though with a much smaller membership than before, the Communist Party of Britain, which still exists today with an estimated membership of 1,000.

Many of the people interviewed in the radio series had participated in these events and had first-hand knowledge of the mindset (or perhaps one might say the pathology) of those who stuck with the CPGB through thick and thin. But, whatever their current views, most of the interviewees now saw ‘communism’ as a compromised term, contaminated through its associations with what had happened in Russia. And this was the case even if they were not prepared to disavow some of the ambitions underlying what they saw as the ‘communist’ idea. Indeed, the CPGB itself, at a relatively early stage, seemed to have got that message and had begun to favour the term’ socialism’ rather than ‘communism’ to describe its ideas, as in its standard pamphlet ‘The British Road to Socialism’.

Interchangeable

But despite any associations that these two terms may have, do they actually mean the same thing? Well, historically the answer to that must be yes, even if neither was necessarily used with the content often attached to them today. In the 19th century the two terms were widely used by political thinkers such as Marx and Engels interchangeably to mean a moneyless, wageless, classless world society of free access to all goods and services, characterised by voluntary cooperation and democratic organisation. A society based on the principle of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ was how they described it. So a million miles away from anything that came to exist in Russia during Bolshevik/Soviet times (or more recently in countries like China or Cuba). Which is why, when such regimes or their supporters describe themselves as ‘Marxist-Leninist’, what we are seeing is a simple contradiction in terms. But none of this prevented the labels of ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ being commandeered by the leaders of the Bolshevik takeover, in particular Lenin and Trotsky, who falsely claimed to be basing their politics on Marx’s ideas. When Stalin took over from Lenin, he confused things even more by not only using these terms to describe the regime he was the absolute ruler of, but by seeking to differentiate them with the claim that what was currently happening in Russia was ‘socialism’, which, once it had gone through the necessary stages, would lead to ‘communism’. It never did of course and couldn’t, because the whole premise of a dictatorship leading to any kind of classless democratic society was entirely flawed (and indeed Stalin, if he knew anything, must have known that).

Connotations

However, the label of ‘communism’ stuck to the Soviet regime, so that, when that regime collapsed in ignominy, the label itself was, as one of the radio programme participants put it, ‘contaminated’. Of course, in terms of the substance of what passed as ‘communism’ in Russia, the Socialist Party would regard its demise as a positive development. But that also meant that it was a problematic term to describe the kind of society we advocate and so we tend to shy away from it. The same fate has not befallen the term ‘socialism’, at least not to the same extent. Though socialism may mean many different things to many people, at least it does not tend to automatically send out connotations of one-Party rule, autocracy and suppression of thought and ideas.

And this is perhaps a lucky twist of fate for the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), since, from our establishment in 1904, ‘socialist’ is the word we have normally used to describe our organisation and the society we exist and work to see established. It has often been suggested to us that, to be noticed more widely, we should change our name and use a different term to describe our objective, since, though not as compromised as ‘communist’, ‘socialism’ still does have negative associations in many people’s minds. We have resisted this both on the grounds that it has a historical significance that has not suffered the same fate as ‘communism’ and also because we take the view that, the more we make its meaning absolutely clear, the more its positive significance and content will become evident, especially as social development makes the need for the kind of society it points to increasingly urgent and necessary.

Howard Moss

The Communist Party isn't (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The chief thing to realise about the Communist Party is that it isn’t. Whatever the party stands for (and it is not exactly easy to know), communism simply does not figure. You can go through reams of their paper, the daily Morning Star, and among the thousands of words you will be lucky if you find a mention of the word. Can you imagine reading an issue of the Socialist Standard which says nothing about socialism? Quite unthinkable. And also quite impossible, because we print our definition of socialism in every issue, irrespective of what the articles happen to be discussing in any particular month. What, you may ask, would be the point of a journal of the Socialist Party which kept quiet about socialism? What, then, can be the point of a communist party which keeps quiet about communism?

So let us make it clear from the outset that there really is only one communist party in this country, and that is the SPGB. We are, and always have been, the only party that stands for one thing only — the common ownership of the means of production. It makes not a scrap of difference whether you call that socialism or communism. Conversely, the form of ownership in the world today is capitalism, call it what you will. So another question that the so-called Communist Party has to answer (and this article will contain quite a number) is: why did you form your party at all? After all, your founders in the early 1920s were fully aware that there had been a party preaching communism in the country since 1904. One or two of them, like T.A. Jackson, had actually been members of the SPGB, so they couldn’t plead ignorance of the fact that a genuine communist party was already in being. It stands to sense that if you think that socialism/communism is the only answer to the evils that afflict society, then you join the party that stands for the establishment of that system. (The same applies, of course, to the proliferation of parties like the SWP and the IMG. Their founders did not join the already existing socialist/communist party, and there could only be one possible reason for that. They did not really stand for communism at all. They just paid lip service to a name. Their real objective must have been something else.)

The Communist Party’s raison d'etre was clear from the outset, and had nothing to do with communism. It was simply to act as the propaganda mouthpiece of the gang who had seized power in Russia and who called themselves communists. (They even changed the name of the country by adopting the equally fraudulent title, the USSR. One of the two ‘esses’ stands for Socialist; which one it is doesn’t matter because the name Lenin should have adopted was the Union of Soviet Capitalist Republics. But honesty was not one of Lenin’s most outstanding characteristics.) The new Russian ruling class, who had crushed the people who had crushed the Tsar, felt they needed parties who would support them in the various countries of Europe (and in the other continents too, soon enough). They founded them and funded them. And, paying the piper, they called the tune to which the spurious communist parties, including our own dear CPGB, danced.

When Moscow said form ‘united fronts’ with Labourites and Social Democrats, they enthusiastically did so. When their masters said that Labourites were ‘social fascists’ who should be physically smashed, they did that just as enthusiastically. When Stalin apparently wanted the Western powers to join him in an alliance against Hitler, our communists were there leading the red thugs who attacked the blackshirt thugs. And when Stalin made his infamous pact with Hitler in 1939 and so gave the green light for the outbreak of World War II, the communists denounced the war as an imperialist adventure and forgot to smash Hitler. When Hitler obliged his ally by launching his attack on Russia in 1941, the British ruling class had no more fervent supporters than the communists, who actually denounced trade unionists who went on strike as traitors to the great People’s War (it had changed to that overnight, you see).

It is necessary to point out here that when communists talk about their heroic deeds in smashing the British fascists in the heady days before the outbreak of the war, it was by no means only fascists that they smashed up. They were equally enthusiastic smashers of socialist meetings too. All this is quite understandable. After all, the state which has oppressed the Russian working class ever since Lenin seized power would not stop at breaking up socialist meetings. Anyone trying to make socialist propaganda in the so-called workers’ state would soon find themselves dealt with by the KGB and put into prison, or a labour camp, or the grave. The Communist Party of Great Britain merely aped their masters — and their paymasters too.

Anyone who doubts that can get some revealing information from the memoirs of the late Bessie Braddock who, before becoming a Labour MP after the war, was a leading member of the Liverpool communists. Yet even now there is precious little attempt to hide the fact that the Russian party subsidises the party here. It is only thus that the party can cope with the enormous expense of running the Morning Star. The bulk of its circulation goes to Russia and the satellite countries of Eastern Europe, where the ruling class pays well for the pleasure of filling their libraries (and doubtless their dustbins) with the rag. These days the majority of the Communist Parties of Western Europe call themselves Euro-communists and pretend to criticise (but rather quietly, of course; no demos, no breaking the windows of the Russian Embassy, nothing vulgar like that: that sort of thing is only for the American Embassy) such things as the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

If the CPGB has really ended its role as the puppets of their Moscow paymasters, can they — can anyone — say what they are supposed to exist for? To advocate reforms of capitalism while pretending to be communists who want to end capitalism? But there is a party called the Labour Party which is vastly bigger, much older, and has been doing that rather well ever since it started. The real truth is that without Russia, the communists would simply disappear. Their paymasters go on funding them because they realise that their Euro-communism is merely a veil to enable the CPGB (like their fellows in France and Italy and Spain) to appear to be not too close to the oppressive regime in Moscow.

Let us end with a couple more questions to the CPGB (our columns are open to them to reply — not that theirs would ever be to us, of course). In all the millions of words in the Daily Worker until Stalin’s death in 1953, can you show us one single word denouncing the red monster who slaughtered millions of innocent Russian workers (quite apart from those killed in the Hitler war)? Can you show us one single word in the Morning Star denouncing Russia as a capitalist police state which denies even basic trade union rights such as are available to workers here? And finally, why did you change the name of your paper? Was there some sudden feeling of guilt, some realisation that it was not a workers’ paper after all? It seems a small question. But it has never been answered.

L. E. Weidberg

Dishonest I.L.P. Journalism. (1928)

From the April 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

Elsewhere in this issue appears a review of “A History of English Socialism,” written by G. Benson, and published by the New Leader, Ltd. The book in question contains the untrue statement that our organisation assisted in the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The book was reviewed in the New Leader on December 9th, 1927, and the reviewer laid special stress on the “direct honesty of statement” and the “proof of wide reading and hard-earned knowledge” possessed by the author, Mr. G. Benson. When we called attention to the incorrect and damaging statement about ourselves we were definitely promised by the Acting Editor of the New Leader that a correction would be published in the New Leader.

This promise was made in writing in a letter dated 18th January, 1928, but the following week the General Manager of the New Leader wrote refusing to insert the correction on the flimsy pretence that the matter “has nothing to do with the New Leader as an organ, but concerns the New Leader, Ltd., its controlling company.”

Then on February 2nd, two months after the publication of the book and the review in the New Leader, the General Manager, a Mr. L. A. Plummer, informed us that a correction slip containing the bare statement that “The words and ‘and the Socialist Party of Great Britain’ are here inserted in error,” would be sent out with copies sold in the future.

We naturally protested that large numbers of copies were already in circulation and it was not unreasonable to ask that the New Leader, which had strongly urged the value of the book to its readers, should take the step it had promised and publish a correction. The attempted distinction between the New Leader and the New Leader, Ltd., is in keeping with the I.L.P.’s past record of subtle propaganda methods ; are we to understand from this that the I.L.P. has in fact no control over the proprietors of what purports to be its own official organ?

Members of the I.L.P. will, we trust, notice the fact that whereas our columns, like our platform and our meetings, are open to all our opponents, it is not possible for us to obtain the retraction of a grossly untrue and damaging statement in the New Leader.

Editorial Committee

Recent events in Russia (1956)

Party News from the July 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

Report of Meeting at Denison House

As was reported briefly in the May issue of the Socialist Standard a successful meeting to put the Socialist estimate of recent changes in the situation in Russia was held at short notice at the Denison House Hall.

Two speakers stated the Party viewpoint. Comrade D'Arcy devoted his attention mainly to consideration of the international aspect of the question.

Comrade Young dealt chiefly with the Communist Party in this country.

Unfortunately, the raucous and rowdy elements who have been noticed around the Party platform at Hyde Park recently were conspicuous by their absence, preferring not to avail themselves of the opportunity to state the C. P. case inside the hall.

Even so, there were the usual individuals who heard for the first time that the Russian Government borrows vast sums upon which it regularly pays 4% interest

Comrade D'Arcy quoted from the election speeches of Kruschev, Bulganin and Molotov (delivered in 1955) to show that they were still eulogising Stalin a year after his death.

He further drew attention to the impact of the international economic situation on Russian affairs. He thought that the renunciation of Stalin and the appeals for co-existence were the reflection of the Moscow Government's need for a larger share of world trade. The economic development of Russia would be bound to produce its political counterpart. The growth of the working class in that country would make it more difficult to run by simple police state methods.

Several amusing instances were given by the second speaker of the ludicrous position of the British Communist Party throughout the years. After quoting the Daily Worker to show that the articles on the death of Stalin were completely repudiated two years later, the speaker gave examples of the antics of the Communists resulting from their lack of principles. Supporting the Labour Party in 1924—opposing it in 1929—supporting it in 1940 and 1945, supporting the war, opposing it—supporting it.

Calling on the unemployed to march to die military barracks at Burnley and fraternise with the soldiers, only to find them empty, and converted into slum property.

With reference to the so-called “day-to-day” struggle, the speaker read two extracts, one from the Daily Worker and one from the Workers Weekly. 

“Many times we light-mindedly call for strike action without the semblance of preparation having been made, so that in some districts, when workers see our comrades, they are apt to say, 'Hullo, what are we to strike for to-day?’ "—Daily Worker,  January 25th, 1932.

“ The unemployed have done all they can, and the Government know it. They have tramped through the rain in endless processions. They have gone in mass deputations to the Guardians.

They have attended innumerable meetings and have been told to be “solid.” They have marched to London enduring terrific hardships. All this has led nowhere.— Workers Weekly, February 10th, 1923. (Italics ours.)

Both speakers emphasised the repeated declaration of the Socialist Party that the fundamental mistake of the Bolsheviks was their illusion of minority action.

Socialism can only be majority action.—Democracy.

As a result their policies resulted in increasing disaster, throwing “Communists” in this country into even greater confusion and panic.

Numerous questions were answered and an interesting discussion took place in which various points of view were expressed. One contributor thought there might be a likelihood of a genuine democratic advance in Russia due to working class maturity.

Others questioned this view, asking for evidence for the statement that there had been any real change there, seeing in the "new Party line" just one more adroit manoeuvre.

A request was also made for still further consideration of this aspect of the business, which some thought inadequately dealt with by the meeting.

The S.L.P. and Formation of the Communist Party, 1920 (1942)

From the January 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In our October issue we dealt with a complaint by the Socialist, organ of the Socialist Labour Party, that we had published an incorrect statement to the effect that the Communist Party was formed in 1920 by the “fusion” of several organisations, including the S.L.P. The Socialist, in its issue of November, replied to our statement of October.

We will deal with the various points one by one.

First there is our original statement that the S.L.P. and other organisations were fused into the Communist Party in 1920. That statement was made in good faith by the writer of the article, and passed in good faith by the Editorial Committee. That it came to be published could justify a charge of negligence, but the Socialist, instead of making only that charge and giving their version of the facts, wrote an abusive article imputing that the statement was a deliberate falsehood:—”The facts could have been easily verified, and there is no excuse for the falsehood unless it be that he lied deliberately with intent to deceive his readers, and thereby create a false belief regarding the S.L.P. His assertion has not even the shadow of fact behind it.”

This imputation of deliberate falsehood is one for which the Socialist has and can have no kind of evidence, and in their November statement they so far forgot their complaint that we knew the facts and falsified them deliberately, that they offer instead the explanation that our statement was made “without knowing the facts.” As we do not wish to copy the Socialist’s methods of controversy, we do not ask for an apology, though it would certainly seem to be called for.

Since, however, the Socialist is evidently under the impression that we are attempting to justify the original statement, we state that it was wrong, and offer our apologies for publishing it.

As the original statement is agreed to be incorrect, we come to the next point, What were the true facts? In our October issue we drew attention to two published statements, one by a Communist to the effect that “the main part of the S.L.P.” was fused into the Communist Party, and another by Mr. G. D. H. Cole that “most of its more active members . . . passed over to the Communist Party in 1920.”

On the plea of first things first the Socialist, in its rejoinder, declines to deal now with this aspect except to argue that it is necessary to distinguish between the whole and the part (which is true) and that to say that the “main part of the S.L.P.” went into the Communist Party is “in flat contradiction” with the statement that the S.L.P. went in. The Socialist having declined except in its own good time to say what is its version of the facts that matter must be left there for the present.

One other statement made by the Socialist does, however, require comment. In their September statement they say: —

“Never in the whole of its history has the S.L.P. fused, united, federated nor anything of the sort with any party whatsoever.”

Readers who are not familiar with the history of the S.L.P. may be led by those words, “nor anything of the sort,” into assuming that the S.L.P. has not been prepared to associate with other parties towards which it from time to time declared its hostility. This is not the case. One instance of its willingness to do so may be found in the Socialist of December, 1918. Under the heading “The Crisis: A Call to Labour,” the Socialist prominently displayed a manifesto calling on the British workers to take action against the Defence of the Realm Acts, against the intervention of Allied troops in Russia, against the blockade of Germany, etc. It ended with an appeal to British workers to rouse themselves and join hands with their fellow workers in other lands and “march through the gates of freedom now opened wide.” This manifesto is expressly stated to have been “issued jointly by the Executives of the Independent Labour Party, the British Socialist Party and the Socialist Labour Party.”

It was the British Socialist Party which was mainly instrumental in forming the Communist Party.

While, therefore, the Socialist is entitled to object to statements that the S.L.P. fused with the B.S.P., the knowledge that it was prepared to issue joint manifestos with the B.S.P. does suggest that the display of indignation is excessive.

Editorial Committee.

The S.L.P. and the Formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920 (1941)

From the October 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In a long and angry statement headed ‘The ‘Truthful’ S.P.G.B.” the Socialist, organ of the Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain, charges us with downright lying in the following passage which appeared in the Socialist Standard of July, 1941, in the article, “A Comparison” : —

“Mention must be made, also, of one of the most remarkable developments of the post-war world, viz., the formation of the Communist Party, by the fusion of the British Socialist Party, Workers’ Socialist Federation, South Wales Socialist Society, and the Socialist Labour Party.”

The gist of the complaint made by the Socialist is that the above statement is untrue, and that the writer of it could easily have verified the facts if he had wanted to do so. In particular the Socialist says:—

“Never in the whole of its history has the Socialist Labour Party fused, united, federated nor anything of the sort with any other Party whatsoever. It has never had the slightest association with the C.P.G.B. except that of antagonist. It has never even had under consideration any question of fusion with the Communist Party.”

The writer adds that the statement published in the Socialist Standard is also false as regards the other organisations mentioned. He states that there were three bodies formed calling themselves the Communist Party: —

“The first Communist Party (for there have been several) was formed by the unity of the Workers’ Socialist Federation with the South Wales Socialist Society under the patronage of Sylvia Pankhurst and Eden and Cedar Paul. It contained no member of the S.L.P. and so far as records go, not even an ex-member of the Party. Some time later the next Communist Party was formed consisting of the B.S.P. together with some odds and ends from various quarters, amongst which were some ex-members who had been thrown out of the S.L.P. earlier, and also some ex-members of the S.P.G.B.

At the time the above events took place, the present Communist Party was as yet unborn. The C.P.G.B. was the third Communist Party to be formed.”

Now as far as we are concerned the only question that matters is the actual facts of the case, and if these are to be arrived at the writer in the Socialist could have helped by being less heated and abusive and by giving the full facts himself. As it is he leaves unexplained the circumstances surrounding the formation of the third Communist Party, the one now in existence. Also, although he several times says that the facts could easily have been verified he does not say where this could have been done and does not mention that the statement made in the Socialist Standard, though possibly inaccurate, is an account which has been accepted and has found its way into print in a number of quarters.

For example, Mr. Allen Hutt, a Communist writer, in his “The Post-War History of the British Working Class,” says: —

“At a convention in London over the week-end of July 31st-August 1st, 1920, the C.P.G.B. was formed as a fusion of the B.S.P. with the main part of the S.L.P. and with the South Wales Socialist Society.” —(Page 53.)

Similarly, Mr. G. D. H. Cole, in the Encyclopædia Britannica (Twelfth Edition, Vol. 32, 1922) says of the S.L.P. that

“Most of its more active members, however, passed over to the Communist Party in 1920”.—(Page 507.)

These two gentlemen may of course be mistaken and we certainly do not question the statement that neither the S.L.P. nor any other organisation can be held responsible for the actions of its ex-members.

To put the matter in proper order we suggest that the Socialist might usefully deal with Mr. Hutt’s assertion that “the main part of the S.L.P.” entered the Communist Party. If the Editor of the Socialist likes to send a brief letter containing his version of the facts we shall, of course, be willing to publish it.

Editorial Committee.

Moscow Turns a New Somersault and Mr. Pollitt Holds the Baby (1939)

From the November 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is many years since a prominent English Communist fell a victim to the acrobatic changes in Communist Party policy. Some years ago J. T. Murphy walked the plank and fell. He resigned, but his resignation was refused on the grounds that working-class parties do not accept resignations. His deviation was duly and gravely considered by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party and he was expelled.

And now Mr. Pollitt has fallen from grace. True he has not been expelled, nor has he resigned. In this connection the Daily Worker (October 12th, 1936) puts the matter very nicely: “There is no truth in the suggestion that Harry Pollitt has resigned from the Communist Party. In view of the differences of opinion which were expressed during the discussion (on the question of continuing the war), the Central Committee decided that Harry Pollitt should not continue as General Secretary, but should undertake other duties for the Party.” Despite a weak attempt to obscure the facts, Mr. Pollitt is obviously a casualty of the polite English equivalent of the Russian purge. Mr. Pollitt’s name was associated more publicly with the recent peace-front and anti-Nazi line than any other Communist. Without warning Moscow decided on a change of policy. To put some sort of face on the change, Mr. Pollitt has been liquidated. A short while ago the first hint of a change in Russian foreign policy came when Litvinoff was removed from his position of Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the Russian Government. The uninitiated may be puzzled by the procedure. It is, nevertheless, a way they have where the dictatorship ideology prevails. Unlike countries where democratic institutions exist, the machinery of dictatorial government provides few means of escape from situations like this.

For many years Mr. Pollitt has been the most outstanding and popular personality in the Communist Party, loyal to every change in policy. He was the loudspeaker which faithfully relayed Moscow. No matter how much the line changed Mr. Pollitt could always put over those changes with sufficient adroitness to make black appear white, and white appear black. Though, of course, constant changes in policy could not fail to promote skill in this direction. And what changes there were! One week the “line” was, support the Labour Party, the next, oppose it. One day the “line” was to treat the Labour Party like well-meaning, but mistaken, brothers in a common cause, and the next to refer to the erstwhile brethren as “traitors,” “Social-Fascists,” “renegades,” “capitalist hacks,” etc., and etc. Had the Vicar of Bray known our modern professional Communists he surely would have acquired rapid promotion to the Archbishopric of Canterbury! And yet even the Communist Party has met a situation which now taxes its ingenuity in finding plausible explanations to satisfy its followers. And this time it is no ordinary somersault. Previous changes in policy have been relatively harmless. have had no worse effect than to provide entertainment for the sophisticated. But the present is the somersault of somersaults. It is supreme in its cynicism, trickery and double-dealing. Communist Party supporters have been as severely shaken as the self-righteous equanimity of the official elements.

The policy of the Communist Party in this country and elsewhere has always been subject to the dictates of Moscow. Of recent years it has been along lines which the present ruling clique in Russia considered to be in conformity with Russia’s trading interests. The desertion by Russia of the traditional policy of isolation and the joining of the League of Nations placed the Communist Party in the position of having to turn its back on about fifteen years of anti-capitalist and anti-League propaganda. It was embarrassing, but not beyond their resourcefulness. The results have now come home to roost. Russia’s need and desire for position and prestige in the international trading and political world were the mainsprings that pressed her on. The necessities of the game soon found her supporting one Power or group of Powers as against another Power or group. And the Communist Party soon found that it not only had to support the League of Nations, but what it really stood for: the political dominance in Europe of the Powers that dominated the League, Great Britain and France. And so the Communist Party, which never practises half-measures, were soon the loudest in demanding the logical application of League principles. Hence its demand for military sanctions against Italy and the closing of the Suez Canal during the Abyssinian War. When the influence of the League waned they came out openly in support of an alliance between the “peace-loving” Powers against the “aggressors.” In domestic politics this resulted in the demand for the popular front, which became a plank in Communist Party programmes, even as far afield as the United States. The Popular Front was to include “progressives” of all parties, that is, all those who agreed with the Communist Party and their methods of “standing up to the aggressors.” They roundly abused Chamberlain for even negotiating with the untouchable Hitler. The effect on Communist Party propaganda was not without its amusing side. The hammer and sickle and the slogan, “Workers of the World, Unite,” disappeared from the front page of the Daily Worker. The customary violent and flamboyant abuse vanished and the “traitors” became “statesmen.” Tories, duchesses, bishops, and Communists appeared together at public meetings in support of the new policy, and cooed at each other like old maids at a christening party.

And now it has all ended, suddenly and without warning. Even the wily political variety artists at Communist headquarters have been caught napping. The Russian Government changed its mind and deserted the Allied group of capitalist Powers in favour of Germany. The Nazi and Soviet gentlemen have arranged a truce in the war of loathing and abuse which they have hurled at each other for years, and ingenuous Communists have now had the pleasure of gazing in rapture at the Press pictures of Stalin and Ribbentrop smiling sweetly into each other’s eyes. Whereas the old policy expressed itself in demands for self-determination for small nations, e.g., Czecho-Slovakia, Spain, Austria, and so on, the new one has to approve the agreement to carve up Poland and to square the “self-determination” propaganda with Russia’s efforts to acquire dominance over small nations like Latvia, Estonia and Finland, an effort which she pursued with the familiar Nazi technique of placing an army on the borders of those countries. Military force, the last word in capitalist argument, will decide the issue when Russia seeks to “protect” little nations, not conferences which will discuss democratically the “rights” of “self-determination.”

But does the Communist Party eat its words? Does it come before the workers in humble repentance for the criminal hoax which it has perpetrated upon them in the name of Marx and revolutionary traditions? Do they—do they hell! In the words of many a humble stumper of earlier and more honest days, when less of the bourgeois accent was heard from the Communist platform—not bloody likely! The Communist Party has subtler methods. Witness a statement issued by the Central Committee which appeared in the Daily Worker (October 12th). It says: —

 

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 war. . . .

A few strokes of the pen and the tearing, raging, democratic (pro-British, pro-French), anti-Nazi (German) propaganda has been wiped out. Only the Catholic Church could equal this easy wiping away of past sins. Note that the “Manifesto of October 7th corrects the declaration of September 2nd.” A three years orgy of high-pressure propaganda in all branches of Communist activity is a little error, made on September 2nd, and corrected on October 7th. Could chicanery go further? Just a little. Read on: “In view of the differences of opinion . . . the Central Committee decided that Harry should not continue as General Secretary.”

Get the implication? It was Harry Pollitt’s error which stood to be corrected. It was Pollitt who wrote the pamphlet, “How to Win the War,” which has proved awkward for Moscow and the Communists. In it Pollitt wrote: —

  “The Communist Party supports the war, believing it to be a just war, which should be supported by the whole working class and all friends of democracy. . . . To stand aside from this conflict, to contribute only revolutionary-sounding phrases while the Fascist beasts ride roughshod over Europe, would be a betrayal of everything our forbears have fought to achieve in the course of long years of struggle with capitalism.

  The British workers are in this war to defeat Hitler, for a German victory would mean that Fascism would be imposed on the defeated countries. If there is one thing that is certain, it is this, that the British working class detests Fascism, as it does those who in Britain have helped to strengthen it, and is determined to do everything in its power to bring about the defeat of Fascism and that of its supporters in Britain. Therefore it will do everything it can to bring the war to a speedy conclusion, but only by the defeat and destruction of Hitler and the Nazi rule from which the German people have been suffering for six years.”

But Pollitt wrote what every Communist journalist has been writing and working up to for years, what every paid and unpaid speaker has been expounding. He wrote what was strictly in accordance with the policy dictated by the Russian Government and in line with their interests. Now he has slipped—in short, he has been left holding the baby. Could anything more expose the whole make-believe of leadership and dictatorship?

But the Communist Party now says that the war is an imperialist war, and cries for peace. Shall we, then, be soft in our judgment and give praise? Pause, friend, and think. The Communist Party has had no change of heart; it has merely obeyed the College of Cardinals at Moscow. In doing so it has been true to its traditions and its paymasters. And when Moscow calls again it will obey. And if later it appears to be in line with Russia’s interests to make a deal with the “democracies,” then the Communist Party will experience another change of heart. The “just war” which became an “unjust war” by the simple process of the Daily Worker issuing a decree on October 7th, will again become a “just war.” The suppression of objective truth, the sycophantic flattery of representatives of the capitalists will re-appear. Watch carefully the peaceful Communist Party. The honest pacifist commands our respect. The purely professional, time-serving politician, our contempt.

But—it is an ill wind that blows no good. The case that we have stuck to for twenty years has again been justified by events. At the time of the Russian upheaval, and since, we have consistently maintained that Russia had to develop along capitalist lines. It has done so, and the history of the last twenty years, culminating in the present position, proves our case right up to the hilt. After futile attempts at isolation, Russia was compelled by her own economic development to enter the international competitive markets and into commercial and political relations with the rest of the capitalist world. Its foreign policy reflected the needs of its position in the international market. Ten years ago W. N. Ewer brought upon his head the opprobrium of some of the Labour and Communist Press because of an article he wrote in the Communist Labour Monthly, in which he made out the case that Russia’s foreign policy was a continuation of the foreign policy of the Czarist Government. Mr. Palme Dutt later had to publish a repudiation of the article in response to the official demand of the Communist Party. Russia’s subsequent development has shown a still further acceleration of the process to which Ewer drew attention. By whatever name the Communists like to call Russian efforts to achieve political and commercial dominance in China, and of similar efforts in S.E. Europe, they are, for those who understand, different only in degree from what has always been condemned by the Communists as imperialism. To-day the Soviet Government and its agents might give another name, but they cannot alter its essentially capitalist character. Russia’s foreign policy expresses needs which are governed by her position in the competitive cockpit of international markets, her need for markets and trade routes, and the acquisition of territories for dominance, or influence. Where the economic urge drives, pretty names will not alter the fact that this is the very thing that the Communists have been pretending to denounce for about twenty years.

The workers must face the fact that the Communist movement throughout the world is tied to the Russian Government; it cannot, dare not, consider the merits of any policy in the light of what ‘is in line with working-class interests. The Communist movement owes its first loyalty to Moscow. What is best in working-class interests is secondary, even if it is ever considered at all.

This is the lesson of events which Communists throughout the world must accept or, in default, mesmerise themselves into mental paralysis.

Harry Waite