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The Communist Party
of Great Britain, Imperialism and War, 1935-45
This PhD thesis was successfully completed at the Manchester Metropolitan University in January 1998.
The four chapters of my thesis correspond to four more or less clearly demarcated periods in the years 1935-45. Chapter One considers the CP's line and practice in the period 1935-41, from the Seventh Congress of the Comintern to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Though there is a considerable body of literature on the Party in this period, it was considered necessary to hoe the ground again in order to elaborate the conceptual framework deployed. However, given that there is such a substantial body of literature, this is a highly condensed account which concentrates on the Party's view of the international imperialist rivalries which were to erupt into war in 1939. Chapter Two is a discussion of the Party's work from Operation Barbarossa to the allied invasion of north Africa and the lifting of the siege of Stalingrad at the end of 1942, generally regarded at the time as a turning point of the war. In this period the Party's single-minded aim was the opening of a Second Front in Europe. Chapter Three looks at the Party's activities in 1943 and 1944, a time when it became increasingly confident of eventual Allied victory and began to consider the shape of the post-war world. Chapter Four examines the Party's line and practice from the Yalta Conference of early 1945 to the Party Congress of November 1945, a period in which it was mainly concerned with the post-war national and international settlements.
The period covered was crucial in the CPGB's development. Historians are generally agreed that in this period it underwent a transformation from a revolutionary to a reformist party. There has however been little attempt to analyse how this transformation took place. This thesis seeks to help to rectify this gap in our historical knowledge. I argue that whilst due acknowledgement must be given to the role played by Soviet foreign policy — I show that even after the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 the CP continued closely to follow the contours indicated by this policy — it is the CP's internal dynamics which mainly explain its transformation.
I attempt to demonstrate that the foreign policy requirements of the Soviet Union dovetailed neatly with ideological baggage which the Communist parties of western Europe had inherited from the native labour movements from which they had sprung. As Marx said of quite different circumstances, 'the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living'. In the case of the CPGB, the most important parts of this baggage were an indifference to the colonial question, a Hobsonian understanding of imperialism and a Euro-centric nationalism. In the 1920s and early '30s the influence of the Comintern was such as to keep this baggage in check. But, I contend, Comintern policy after 1935 allowed it to flourish: the CP essentially reverted to the ideology and politics of the Second International and in the war of 1939-45 reprised the experience of 1914-18.
I find that the most striking feature of the existing literature on the CP is how little the question of imperialism - using this term in the Leninist sense of monopoly capitalism rather than in the sense, usual in Britain, of colonialism - is addressed. It was the crisis of imperialism of 1914-18 which created the conditions for the Party's formation and the subsequent crisis of the 1930s and '40s which was crucial in its transformation from a revolutionary to a reformist party. Quite apart from this 'objective' factor, the question of imperialism was so central to the Party's view of the world, though less so to its actual practice, that it should surely be central to any analysis of it. But in, for instance, Walter Kendall's study of the CP, virtually the only reference to the matter is in a footnote on the importance attached to the question of colonialism by the Comintern in its early dealings with the British Party. Kendall seems to think that the Comintern had been tiresomely pedantic [1].
Most labour historians would endorse Henry Pelling's verdict on the CP, that 'all the absurdities of the history of the Party spring from this one face, that it has been a revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary situation' [2]. Tragic, rather than 'absurd' seems to me a better epithet to apply to the CP. Granted, the Party had throughout its existence been confronted with a non-revolutionary situation in Britain. But what Pelling called the 'absurdities' of the Party's history surely stemmed not so much form being a revolutionary party in a 'non-revolutionary situation' but from being part of a movement with a mistaken assessment of the balance of national and international class forces. I argue that a crucial part of the Comintern's ideological and political outlook was a great overestimation of the revolutionary inclinations of the working class of the imperialist countries and a corresponding underestimation of that of the people in the periphery of Europe and in what is now called the 'third world'. I attempt to show that the practical consequence of this, when combined with the other elements of the CPGB's Euro-centric outlook and with Popular Front politics, was that the CP entered into a social-chauvinist alliance with British imperialism.
For most of the CP historians, the Second World War saw the Party's finest hour, a time of unparalleled growth and influence. It is of course generally regarded as Britain's finest hour too, an attitude manifested in the recent celebrations of D-Day and VE-Day and in the ugly nationalism paraded by football hooligans, most of the British Press and by Euro-sceptics at Conservative Party Conferences. A radical version of this narrative is the received wisdom in the Labour Movement and among left and liberal academics. In this version, the British working class and people stood up to defend against fascist tyranny cherished rights and liberties, won through hundreds of years of struggle, and, through that struggle, in alliance with other 'progressive' forces, won new victories in the shape of the post-war settlement.
Is this not a rather one-sided view of history? Were the British working class and people really fighting in defence of democratic liberties? If we look at Britain in isolation, perhaps. But on a world scale? The vast majority of the people of the British Empire had no democratic rights whatsoever. Not surprisingly then, vast numbers of people were involved in the civil disobedience campaigns led by the Congress Party of India and a significant number of Indian people unwisely fought in or supported Subhas Cahndra Bose's India National Army, formed to fight with the Japanese against the British [3]. What then was really going on in World War Two? What were the British people really fighting for? A fundamental part of the conceptual framework deployed in my thesis is that whatever the British people thought, the principal content of World War Two was a battle between two rival imperialist blocs for world hegemony. The members of the CPGB thought quite clearly believed that they were fighting during the war in the best interest of the working class and people. I argue that they did so because their Party shared in no small measure the ideology and values of the British bourgeoisie.
