Weekly Worker 662 Thursday March 1 2007 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Fountains and fireworks

Lawrence Parker reviews Raphael Samuel's The lost world of British communism (Verso, 2006, pp244)

I commented last year that Rob Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), was getting all hot and bothered at the current wave of histories on the ‘official’ CPGB (‘Popular nails in the “official” coffin’, August 31 2006). Our esteemed friend was annoyed that these bloody academic historians had the cheek to serve up ghoulish tales of past division and controversy.

Of course, despite my polemical scolding part of me was dismayed that Rob felt this way. I was genuinely sorry for someone whose political life was so full of these little disappointments. You can imagine then when I read the comrade’s review of The lost world of British communism in the Morning Star (‘A party history’, December 3 2006) how relieved I was to see that Rob had at last found a book on the CPGB that he could enjoy.

He says: “It makes for refreshing reading after some of the shoddy, one-eyed rubbish that has appeared recently under the guise of British Communist Party history.” Although I find this comment somewhat indicative of the CPB’s inability to constructively engage with contemporary research (its history group is currently initiating a plan to write its own ‘official’ history), Griffiths is correct to suggest that Raphael Samuel’s work is worth reading and deserves a reprint.

This largely stems from the fact that this is CPGB history with a clear, although ultimately problematic, sense of political engagement, rather than the contemporary fashion of treating the party as something dead and buried.

The essays reproduced here originally appeared in the pages of New Left Review between 1985 and 1987 (although another article Samuel produced, which featured documents from Edward and Hilda Upward detailing their struggle against the party’s developing post-war reformism, is frustratingly missing). Thus, the pieces here were written as an intervention into what was, in hindsight, a disintegrating ‘official’ CPGB. As an ex-member, Samuel was obviously deeply affected by this crisis: “I have felt personally threatened by the divisions in the Communist Party - most of all, I think, when the spectre of expulsions and purges was raised” (my emphasis, p43).

What worried Samuel so much was a CPGB wracked by factional disputes through the 1980s. Briefly, the Eurocommunist (or ‘Euros’) wing of the party (grouped around the supposedly fresh ’n’ funky Marxism Today) was intent upon liquidating the CPGB in the direction of the ‘new social movements’ and had allied itself (not without occasional tension) with a section of the right-leaning bureaucracy around general secretary Gordon McLennan. Opposing this group - apparently - was the Morning Star and its editor, Tony Chater, who, alienated by Euro attacks on trade unionists (not revolutionary politics, you notice), swiftly embarked on a trajectory away from the CPGB, treating the party as an ‘outside body’. This equally liquidationist trend eventually founded the slumbering CPB, a ‘party’ set up to serve up the whims of a plodding trade unionist newspaper in the shape of the Star. There were smaller trends around Straight Left (supposedly hard ‘Marxist-Leninists’, but in fact terminally addicted to Labourism) and The Leninist (the forerunner of this paper).

Going back to Samuel’s text, we can immediately dispense with the author’s introductory thesis that pits a faction-ridden CPGB against a 1980s background of fractured political identities in general. He says: “At all points on the political compass there is a secularisation of loyalties, a vertical disintegration of authority, a Balkanisation of thought” (p3). This is partially true, but in hindsight the 1980s also displayed a unitary process, in that society (and not least politicians and political parties) were generally moving to the right, even though there was nothing inevitable or automatic about this shift. In this light, the struggle within the CPGB between its two main factions can be seen as a struggle over how best to deal with this process. The Euros showed a desire merely to melt themselves into the rightward drift, while those around the Morning Star wanted to hide in the bunker of trade unionism.

Considering that Samuel had friends among the Euros (Beatrix Campbell for one), this book aims some lively thrusts against this faction. For example, “… the natural home for the Eurocommunists is with the ‘soft left’ in the Labour Party, supporting Mr Kinnock” (p20). Faint praise if ever I’ve heard it. Or what about this one: “The ‘new social forces’ in whose name the Euros speak are conspicuously under-represented in the party” (p25). Even better is this passage: “Double standards are strikingly apparent in ‘pluralism’, another of the Euro planks. It may be adopted as a ruling principle for the British road to socialism, but within the party itself an entirely different atmosphere prevails … Any attempt to concert opposition or to give collective opinion a voice … is treated as ‘anti-party activity’ … It is an odd way to celebrate the advent of pluralism” (p26).

In other words, for all their ‘soft focus’ words, the Euros probably take the cigar for being the most undemocratic faction in the history of the ‘official’ CPGB - which, in a party history that is rather full of authoritarian fixers, took some doing. If you were to the right of the Euros (a shrinking category of people as the 1980s wore on, it must be said), then you would be assiduously courted and there was a good chance that Martin Jacques would print your reactionary musings in Marxism Today. If you were to the left, then you simply became an unperson in the eyes of this rancid clique.

Of course, Rob Griffiths (who, whatever else we might say of him, was once an opponent of the Euros in South Wales) loves all this. He crows: “He [Samuel] exonerates the Morning Star of charges of ‘Stalinism’ or ‘left sectarianism’ - charges which, even today, are usually intended to obscure rather than illuminate - although not of what he regarded as its rather quaint conservatism.” In other words, Griffiths implies that his faction comes out of all this comparatively well.

However, Samuel has a set of rather awkward observations for the so-called class warriors around Tony Chater who were in mortal combat with the Euros: “To an outsider, indeed, the two sides in the dispute seem to have far more in common than divides them. Both, for example, appear equally preoccupied with following, or creating, a ‘broad front’ politics, though in the case of the Morning Star a privileged place is given to its operation in the trade unions … while in Marxism Today it is the rather more indeterminate alliance of ‘progressives’” (p23). Both factions had the same political method and roots in the class collaboration of popular frontism.

He also observes: “The real affinity of the Star, a close reading might suggest, is not with the hard left of the Labour Party, but with the centre-left … of the trade union movement” (p27). Samuel thus effectively illustrates that the Star faction had nothing remotely principled about it in terms of revolutionary politics. The Euros chased the likes of the feminist movement; Chater and company chased the likes of Ron Todd of the TGWU. Thus, in splitting away from the ‘official’ party and moving toward the formation of the CPB in 1988, this faction was every bit as liquidationist as the Euros. The icing on the mouldy cake was its re-adoption of the British road to socialism - the reformist programme that, with its reliance on the Labour Party, helped undermine the existence of the CPGB in the first place. Samuel is kinder to Chater’s group but he is not kind per se.

In terms of the historical reflections that Samuel serves up, his great strength is his ability to reconstruct the mentality of CPGB members (the author was brought up in a communist family). This is often misleadingly called ‘history from below’, but in fact Samuel utilises documents and memories from all sections of the movement, high and low. The problem with the historical narratives is when the reader begins to consider them next to the backdrop of the party crisis erupting around the author. As we have seen, Samuel admits to feeling threatened by this factional strife.

Some of the history that Samuel presents would no doubt have been effective in waking party members up to the extent of the 1980s crisis (if they were not already aware) and their organisation’s demoralised, disorganised state. He reconstructs some of the CPGB’s dynamism and sense of purpose down the years. Some of this also reflects rather badly on the current ranks of the so-called revolutionary left.

For example, the CPGB gave clear instructions for demonstrations. This was from 1928: “On the marches our party members should step out in good style, not straggling along, as is usually the case. Marshals must be specially appointed to look after the party contingent. Similarly with the singing. The party should lead with the singing of real revolutionary and labour songs such as ‘The red flag’, ‘The Internationale’, ‘Red Army march’, etc. Bawling out, ‘Who the hell’, etc should be discouraged” (p110). Such small examples give a flavour of the ambition of the ‘official’ party at points. Our current ‘revolutionary’ left has no ambitions, no real idea of leadership, so it allows its marches to decompose into weary, disorganised trudges.

Other examples that Samuel culls are much less effective, if not downright counterproductive. He uncritically serves up the CPGB’s ‘will to unity’ through its history: “The Communist Party, in my recollection of it (I left the party in 1956), was singularly free of what are known, in more conventional political formations, as ‘rows’” (p79). This is delusional. Even before 1956 the CPGB was full of “rows”, but party members were taught that it was a heresy to reveal them to the outside world. If you had a political difference (beyond a secondary one relating to the application of a particular line), you had two choices: keep your gob shut or bugger off (sounds familiar, eh?).

This was the party’s distorted understanding of ‘democratic centralism’. Samuel maps this out further, noting that the concept of even reserving a ‘private’ judgement was alien to the CPGB (p82) and reproducing a 1957 party training manual that explains how the leadership gagged minorities through its ban on factions (p83).

If Samuel is really using this bureaucratic nightmare as an effective contrast to the threat he feels from the inner-party squabbles of the 1980s, then one does retrospectively feel rather sorry for him. In reality, these proscriptions were no barrier to the formation of factions inside the CPGB down the years (even though such factions were often clandestine). Indeed, they simply made splits and divisions almost inevitable. Such regimes are a threat to an organisation’s existence from day one.

Take the decision of the opposition around Sid French and the Surrey district to decamp from the CPGB in 1977 and form the New Communist Party. One of the arguments that French and company used at the time was that the party leadership was intent on reorganising their Surrey base, which, in all probability had some truth in it. If the party leadership instead had been able to guarantee this opposition space inside the CPGB to put across its politics then it would have been able to undercut the split, or, at the very least, expose its more sectarian elements.

One can certainly learn lessons from this bureaucratic ‘will to unity’. Unfortunately, they are almost always negative. Which brings us back rather neatly to Rob Griffiths and the CPB.

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