Lost prophets

A 1937 poster from the Cardiff Branch of the CPGB campaigning for capital status for the city (image: Cardiff University Library)

In the Kremlin, in the Kremlin, in Nineteen Thirty Nine.
Sat a Russian and a Prussian, working out the Party Line.
Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Party Line.
Now you’re lost and gone forever, oh my darling Party Line.

SO LABOUR Students in early 1991 commemorated the formal oblivion of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The other verses are probably lost, but there was a line about the Central Committee being advised of the “correct” position on the Prague liberation of 1968 –  that was when the heroic forces of socialism bravely ‘intervened’, in the charming phrase of the CPGB Central Committee, to subdue fascist conspirators and CIA provocateurs such as Jan Palach. The party’s opponents believed that the demise of so called ‘actually existing socialism’- which was in practice the antithesis of any sort of socialism worth having – would open up more space for consideration of genuinely social democratic political ideas.

To those who came of age around the time the Berlin Wall came down, the demise of the totalitarian, repressive and sclerotic police states of the Warsaw Pact was a huge relief. The joyous young Germans pouring across Checkpoint Charlie symbolised a transformation that was to have huge repercussions. For a start, the imminent nightmare of a nuclear holocaust dispelled. Environmental concerns were eventually to take the place of a ‘Threads’ style nuclear winter. Back in ’89, though, we simply rejoiced at the lifting of the terrible danger of atomic annihilation which had hung over the post War era.

It seemed then that those whose reaction to the spontaneous movement of national liberation was despondency were either fruitcases or closet fascists. Anyone who by 1989 still believed that there was anything worth defending over the Wall had to be living in a parallel universe. Bizarrely though, the deniers remain. Sharing the analysis of Bertolt Brecht, they think the people of the GDR betrayed their government, seduced by western materialism and accepting  the imperialist propaganda that Erich Honeker and his repressive gerontocracy represented a ruthless dictatorship over the working class.

It is of course possible to cherry pick a few ‘benefits’ of the former GDR and put a gloss on them; there was full employment, crime was almost non-existent and abortion was free on demand – as often as was needed. According to Brian Williams, the GDR was such a paradise they had to build a wall around it with landmines and frontier guards under orders to shoot to kill. And hundreds of East Germans were prepared to run through those minefields, so hoodwinked were they by the misleading propaganda of a neon-lit West where many families had not just one car, but two.

The ability of CPGB cadres to engage in what George Orwell characterised as ‘doublethink’ was impressive. Although the Party’s membership was never more than minuscule it exercised a disproportionate influence on the British left in a way that no other party that described itself as Marxist-Leninist ever managed. On the one hand, they championed the USSR as a “workers state”, heroically disregarding overwhelming evidence, certainly from the 1930s onward, to the contrary. On the other, they were indefatigable in fighting for working people in Britain and campaigning on behalf of oppressed peoples in South Africa, El Salvador, Spain and elsewhere.

The CP’s intellectual wing of Eric Hobsbawn, Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson could hold their own in any company, although both the latter two parted company with the party in 1956. It’s stalwarts in the union movement, too – the likes of Bert Ramelson, Mick McGahey and Dai Francis – were sincere in their commitment to the interests of the working classes as they saw them. Nevertheless, the right-wing media and paranoid members of the security services consistently overstated the party’s influence and the degree to which even veteran members were actually in thrall to Moscow. In part this was overreaction to the comprehensive Soviet penetration of the security services by the Cambridge Five, leading the likes of Peter Wright to see traitors everywhere. It is also clear that from the Zinoviev letter onwards, association with the CPGB was seen on the political right as a handy stick with which to beat their domestic political opponents. Harold Wilson’s biographer Ben Pimlott, for example, suggests that Wilson was dissuaded from appointing Judith Hart to the Cabinet on the basis of an MI5 report which confused her with well-known South Wales Communist Julian Tudor Hart (nowadays best associated with the blindingly obvious Inverse Care Law)

The party’s membership was very predominantly male, tended to be young, often included a high proportion of unemployed people, and was heavily working class, with miners especially significant. Geographically, its membership was dominated by London, Scotland, Lancashire, and South Wales. In Wales, the CPGB gained great influence in the coalfields in the aftermath of the general strike and coal strike of 1926/7. The collapse of the 1929-31 minority Labour government further undermined the attraction of the Parliamentary Road. CPGB stalwart Arthur Horner was the most prominent figure in the SWMF at the time and very nearly won a seat in Parliament (in a straight fight with Labour) at the 1933 Rhondda East By-election.

In the later 1930s the CPGB played a prominent part in recruiting volunteers to fight in the International Brigades on behalf of the Spanish Republic. The idealism and heroism of these ordinary people is almost impossible to comprehend today – as is the desperation of the shattered coalfield communities from which they came. The rights and wrongs of the Moscow Trials were far removed from the minds of those who saw the Communists as the only serious force interested in standing up to fascism. The sacrifices on the Eastern front and its centrality in turning the course of the war reinforced this image. If the Soviet Union wasn’t quite the workers’ paradise it claimed to be, it still appeared to take the side of working people and was widely seen to represent, albeit imperfectly, a genuine alternative to welfare capitalism.

In 1945 the Party boasted 56,000 members, returned two MPs, and came within a whisker of taking a third seat in Rhondda East. This, however, was its highpoint. As the Cold War commenced, the chances of a party that was never able to disown the USSR building a significant electoral base became vanishingly small. In practice, the CPGB never really recovered from the fallout following Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ denouncing the excesses of Stalinism. Leaders in the thirties such as Pollit, Dutt and Horner had enthusiastically copied each and every change of line coming out of the Kremlin, including most notoriously the Nazi-Soviet pact. Rajani Palme Dutt, the leading theorist of the Communist Party of Great Britain at that time, quickly adopted this position, going so far as to say that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had been a massive and ingenious blow against the Nazis and fascism in general. As Beckett put it: “Uncle Joe says stand on your head” and they did.

By the 1950s Dutt’s successors were compelled to voice cautious criticisms of the USSR in an ineffectual attempt to head off the hemorrhaging in their own ranks. Still the party newspaper in 1956 suppressed the reports of their own Budapest correspondent. Since the party relied on receiving around £100,000 a year from the USSR, the development of a truly independent line was not feasible. By the same token, however, the Moscow Gold enabled the CPGB to maintain a newspaper, the Morning Star, and a weekly journal, Marxism Today, in addition to scores of full time staff and large offices in Covent Garden. In many respects during the seventies its organisation was comfortably on a par with the Labour Party’s.

Although never achieving the mass status of its French and Italian counterparts, largely as a consequence of the achievement of the Attlee government in cementing Labour’s hegemony, the CP’s concentration on the trades union movement, along with the discipline provided by democratic centralism allowed it to exercise a significant influence on individual unions and within the General Council. Although Ernest Bevin and his successors took great pains to insulate the TGWU executive from CP infiltration, the party was able to make inroads not just in the miners federations, but engineering, railway and textile workers unions. In the words of Hywel Francis, himself a former CP member, “trade union and the miners’ union and the Communist Party were synonymous … For my father they were indivisible, he was a communist miners’ leader.”

Maintaining such positions, however, required the CP to exercise its own considerable self discipline to avoid losing the loyalties of the rank and file. ‘Revolutionary permeation’ required taking account of objective facts, including realistic assessments of the relative strengths of workers versus the forces of capital. In plenty of instances the CP line within particular unions urged restraint and negotiation rather than confrontation. Most notably in 1985, CP representatives within the NUM such as Mick McGahey, in private, and Kim Howells (formerly nicknamed Kim Il Sung, and now chair of the Security and Intelligence Committee) semi-publicly regarded Arthur Scargill’s tactics as disastrous even while they strove every sinew to keep the strike as solid as possible and avoid the appearance of disunity.

As the 1980s unfolded and membership dropped inexorably, a bitter factional struggle developed for control over the Party’s assets. Beautifully satirised by John Sullivan in As Soon As This Pub Closes, the trendy modernisers eventually triumphed over the more traditionalist ‘tankie’ wing. Having slipped their former Marxist-Leninist moorings some ex-CPGBers (Geoff Mulgan, David Aaronovitch, Dr John Reid – and not to forget our own Dr’s Francis and Howells) embraced new Labour with the alacrity of the converted. The assets of the ex-CPGB were transferred to an outfit called Democratic Left which rejected communism but believed, admirably enough, in a pluralist and socialist society “incompatible with the structures and values of capitalism”. Ten years later, following an effort to join by several folk from the West Midlands who had previously marched under the Socialist Action banner which had to be beaten off by expensive lawyers, this morphed into the New Politics Network – an entirely non-aligned outfit that spent Stalin’s legacy principally on generous donations to constitutional reform campaigns such as Charter 88 and its offshoot Make Votes Count. In 2007, the NPN formally merged with Charter ’88 to become Unlock Democracy.

Of course, the legacy didn’t come only from the former Soviet Union. Perhaps it is the final irony that the proceeds of the sacrifices of thousands of committed anti-fascists have ended up deployed to secure the introduction of an electoral system that earlier this year permitted Nick Griffin’s fascist British National Party to win their first seats – and the resources and platform that goes with them – in the European Parliament.