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

Typical trot (2001)

First-edition cover

Pamphlet Review from the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘I Know How, But I Don’t Know Why’: George Orwell’s Conception of Totalitarianism. By Paul Flewers.

Flewers’s pamphlet is an attempt to outline and criticise George Orwell’s political views on totalitarianism as revealed especially through 1984 and Animal Farm. As an explanation of why Orwell came to write his masterworks this is a good account. Flewers indicates the way Orwell’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War transformed his thinking, leading to a near-obsession with totalitarianism (particularly vis-à-vis Russia), and picks out his underlying motivation—the quest for “decency”.

As criticism however the work is deficient. In a nutshell, Flewers says that Orwell lacked a clear idea of how Russia became a totalitarian state because he could only observe without analysing. Since Orwell despised grand theories this is hardly surprising. But the deficiency lies not with Orwell but with Flewers. “Why was there no Lenin figure in Animal Farm?” he asks. Why overlook “the democratic features of Bolshevism?” (hack, cough) or view Lenin’s opportunism in 1917 as a “disingenuous and dishonest ruse to win support” (yessiree!). Besides the fact that Animal Farm is satire (I might just as pedantically ask “where’s Martov got to?” or “why doesn’t Makhno make a cameo?”), Orwell makes clear what his intentions were in Animal Farm: “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself.” Flewers of course denies that “any leadership will inevitably become a ruling elite once it seizes power”. As a Trot he would, wouldn’t he?

Kaz.