Revolutionaries (2 page)

There was, of course, another factor involved: internationalism. Today, when the international communist movement has largely ceased to exist as such, it is hard to recapture the immense strength which its members drew from the consciousness of being
soldiers in a single international army, operating, with whatever tactical multiformity and flexibility, a single grand strategy of world revolution. Hence the impossibility of any fundamental or long-term conflict between the interest of a national movement and the International, which was the
real
party, of which the national units were no more than disciplined sections. That strength was based both on realistic argument and moral conviction. What convinced in Lenin was not so much his socio-economic analysis – after all, at a pinch something like his theory of imperialism can be derived from earlier marxist writings – but his palpable genius for organizing a revolutionary party and mastering the tactics and strategy of making revolution. At the same time the Comintern was intended to, and very largely did, give the movement immunity against the terrible collapse of its ideals.

Communists, it was agreed, would never behave like international social democracy in 1914, abandoning its flag to follow the banners of nationalism, into mutual massacre. And, it must be said, they did not. There is something heroic about the British and French
CPS
in September 1939. Nationalism, political calculation, even common sense, pulled one way, yet they unhesitatingly chose to put the interests of the international movement first. As it happens, they were tragically and absurdly wrong. But their error, or rather that of the Soviet line of the moment, and the politically absurd assumption in Moscow that a given international situation implied the same reactions by very differently situated parties, should not lead us to ridicule the spirit of their action. This is how the socialists of Europe should have acted in 1914 and did not carrying out the decisions of their International. This is how the communists did act when another world war broke out. It was not their fault that the International should have told them to do something else.

The problem of those who write the history of communist parties is therefore unusually difficult. They must recapture the
unique and, among secular movements, unprecedented
temper
of bolshevism, equally remote from the liberalism of most historians and the permissive and self-indulgent activism of most contemporary ultras. There is no understanding it without a grasp of that sense of total devotion which made the party in Auschwitz make its members pay their dues in cigarettes (inconceivably precious and almost impossible to obtain in an extermination camp), which made the cadres accept the order not merely to kill Germans in occupied Paris, but first to acquire, individually, the arms to do so, and which made it virtually unthinkable for them to refuse to return to Moscow even to certain imprisonment or death. There is no understanding either the achievements or the perversions of bolshevism without this, and both have been monumental; and certainly no understanding of the extraordinary success of communism as a system of education for political work.

But the historians must also separate the national elements within communist parties from the international, including those currents within national movements which carried out the international line not because they had to, but because they were in genuine agreement with it. They must separate the genuinely international elements in Comintern policy from those which reflected only the state interests of the
USSR
or the tactical or other preoccupations of Soviet internal politics. In both national and international policies they must distinguish between those based on knowledge, ignorance or hunch, on marxist analysis (good or bad), on local tradition, the imitation of suitable or unsuitable foreign examples, or sheer trial and error, tactical insight or ideological formula. They must, above all, make up their minds which policies were successful and sensible and which were neither, resisting the temptation to dismiss the Comintern
en bloc
as a failure or a Russian puppet-show.

These problems are particularly difficult for the historian of the British
CP
because, except for a few brief periods, they appear
to be so unimportant in this country. The party was both entirely loyal to Moscow, entirely unwilling to involve itself in Russian or international controversies, and an unquestioned chip off the native working-class block. Its path was not littered with lost or expelled leaders, heresies and deviations. Admittedly it enjoyed the advantage of smallness, which meant that the International did not expect the spectacular results which put such a strain on, say, the German party, and of operating in a country which, even on the most cursory inspection, was unlike most of Europe and the other continents. Being the child, not of a political split in social-democracy, but of the unification of the various groups of the extreme left, which had always operated to some extent outside the Labour Party, it could not be plausibly regarded as an alternative mass party to Labour, at least an immediate alternative. Hence it was left free – indeed it was generally encouraged – to pursue the tasks to which militant British left-wingers would have devoted themselves anyway, and because they were communists, to do so with unusual self-abnegation and efficiency. Indeed initially Lenin was chiefly concerned to discourage the sectarianism and hostility to Labour, to which the native ultra-left was spontaneously drawn. The periods when the international line went against the grain of the national left-wing strategy and tactics (as in 1928–34 and 1939–41) stand out as anomalies in the history of British communism, just because there was so obviously – as there was not in all other countries – such a strategy. So long as there was no realistic prospect of revolution, there was only one
TUC
and the Labour Party was the only – and still growing – party likely to win the support of the politically conscious workers on a national scale, in practice there was only one realistically conceivable road of socialist advance. The disarray of the left today (inside and outside the Labour Party) is due largely to the fact that these things can no longer be taken for granted and that there are no generally accepted alternative strategies.

Nevertheless, this apparent simplicity of the British communists' situation conceals a number of questions. In the first place, what exactly did the International expect of the British, other than that they should turn themselves into a proper communist party, and – from a not entirely certain date – that they should assist the communist movements in the empire? What precisely was the role of Britain in its general strategy and how did it change? This is by no means clear from the existing historical literature, which is admittedly not of high quality, with rare exceptions.

In the second place, why was the impact of the
CP
in the 1920s so modest, even by unexacting standards? Its membership was tiny and fluctuating, its successes the reflection partly of the radical and militant mood of the labour movement, partly of the fact that communists still operated largely within the Labour Party or at least with its local support. Not until the 1930s did the
CP
become, in spite of its modest but growing membership, its electoral weakness and the systematic hostility of the Labour leadership, the effective national left.

Thirdly, what was the base of communist support? Why did it fail, again before the 1930s, to attract any significant body of support among intellectuals, and rapidly shed most of the relatively few it attracted (mostly from the ex-Fabian and guild socialist left)? What was the nature of its unusually strong influence – though not necessarily membership – in Scotland and Wales? What happened in the 1930s to turn the party into what it had not previously been, a body of factory militants?

And of course, there are all the questions which will inevitably be asked about the rightness or wrongness of the party's changing line, and more fundamentally, of this particular type of organization in the context of interwar and post–1945 Britain.

James Klugmann
¹
has not seriously tackled any of them. This extremely able and lucid man is clearly capable of writing a satisfactory history of the communist party, and where he feels unconstrained, he does so. Thus he provides the best and clearest account of the formation of the party at present available. Unfortunately he is paralyzed by the impossibility of being both a good historian and a loyal functionary. The only way yet discovered to write a public ‘official' history of any organization is to hand the material over to one or more professional historians who are sufficiently in sympathy not to do a hatchet job, sufficiently uninvolved not to mind opening cupboards for fear of possible skeletons, and who can, if the worst come to the worst, be officially disavowed. That is, essentially, what the British government did with the official history of the second world war, and the result has been that Webster and Frankland were able to produce a history of the air war which destroys many familiar myths and treads on many service and political toes, but is both scholarly and useful – not least to anyone who wishes to judge or plan strategy. The Italian
CP
is the only one which has so far chosen this sensible, but to most politicians almost unthinkable, course. Paolo Spriano has therefore been able to write a debatable, but serious and scholarly work.
²
James Klugmann has been able to do neither. He has merely used his considerable gifts to avoid writing a disreputable one.

In doing so he has, I am afraid, wasted much of his time. What, after all, is the use of spending ten years on the sources – including those in Moscow – when the
only
precise references to contemporary unpublished
CP
sources – give or take one or two – appear to number seven and the
only
references even to printed Communist International sources (including Inprecorr) number less than a dozen in a volume of 370 pages. The. rest are substantially references to the published reports, pamphlets and especially periodicals of the
CP
in this period. In 1921–2 the Presidium of the Comintern discussed Britain thirteen times – more often than any country other than the French, Italian, Hungarian and German parties. One would not have known it from Klugmann's book, whose index lacks all reference to Zinoviev (except in connection with the forged letter bearing his name), Borodin, Petrovsky-Bennet, or, for that matter, so purely British a field of party activity as the Labour Research Department.

An adequate history of the
CP
cannot be written by systematically avoiding or fudging genuinely controversial issues and matter likely to be regarded as indiscreet or bad public relations within the organization. It cannot even be offset by describing and documenting, more fully than ever before, the activities of the militants. It is interesting to have 160 or so pages on the party's work from 1920 to 1923, but the basic fact about this period is that recorded in Zinoviev's report to the Fourth World Congress at the end of 1922, namely that ‘In no other country, perhaps, does the communist movement make such slow progress', and this fact is not really faced. Even the popular contemporary explanation that this was due to mass unemployment is not seriously discussed. In brief, Klugmann has done some justice to the devoted and often forgotten militants who served the British working class as best they knew how. He has written a textbook for their successors in party schools, with all the clarity and ability which have made his high reputation as a teacher in such courses. He has provided a fair amount of new information, some of which will only be recognized by those very expert at deciphering careful formulations, and little of which – on important matters – is documented. But he has neither written a satisfactory history of the
CP
nor of the role of the
CP
in British politics.

¹
James Klugmann,
History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Formation and Early Years
, London, 1966.

²
Paolo Spriano,
Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano
, vol. 1,
Da Bordiga a Gramsci
, Turin, 1967.

The learned study of communist movements, an academic industry with a large but on the whole disappointing output, has generally been practised by members of two schools, the sectarian and the witch-hunting. They have tended to overlap, thanks to the tendency of many ex-communists to progress from disagreement to total rejection. Broadly speaking, the sectarian historians have been revolutionaries, or at least left-wingers, mostly dissident communists. (The contribution of communist parties to their own history has been muffled and until recent years negligible.) The main purpose of their enquiry has been to discover why communist parties failed to make revolutions, or produced such disconcerting results when they did. Their main occupational weakness has been an inability to stand at a sufficient distance from the polemics and schisms within the movement.

The witch-hunting scholars, whose orthodoxy was not fully formulated until the years of the cold war, saw communist parties as sinister, compulsive, potentially omnipresent bodies, half religion and half plot, which could not be rationally explained because there was no sensible reason for wishing to overthrow the pluralist-liberal society. Consequently they had to be analyzed in terms of the social psychology of deviant individuals and a conspiracy theory of history. The main
occupational weakness of this school is that it has little to contribute to its subject. Its basic stereotype is rather like the Victorian one of ‘the trades union', and it therefore illuminates those who hold it more than communism.

Mr Newton's rather ambitiously named
The Sociology of British Communism
¹
demonstrates, to the satisfaction of anyone ready to be convinced, that the witch-hunting school has no visible bearing on the British Communist Party. This
CP
does not consist, and has never consisted to any substantial extent, of deviants or alienated minorities. In so far as its social composition can be discovered – and Mr Newton has collated what information is available – it consists primarily of skilled and semi-skilled workers, largely engineers, builders and miners, and of school teachers who come largely from the same family backgrounds. As in the case of so-called ‘traditional radicalism', it is ‘not supported by uprooted or unattached individuals, but on the contrary by individuals who are closely connected with their community and its radicalism'. It does not consist of ‘authoritarian personalities' similar to fascists, and indeed the conventional myth that the two ‘extremes' interchange easily has little basis in fact.