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History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1941-1951
Noreen Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1941-1951, Lawrence and Wishart, ISBN 0-85315-862-2, pp.262
The period 1941-51 saw the emergence of the CPGB into the basic political, programmatic and organisational shape that it retained until its demise in 1991. It is a period that highlights the contradictions in the CPGB's policies and activities, and emphasises the inseparability of the party's national role from its destiny as part of the international communist movement. Undaunted by the scope of the project, Noreen Branson has thoroughly and systematically dissected the work of the party during these ten years and provided a comprehensive account covering international, national and local dimensions, combining both the big picture and a mass of fascinating detail, all in her clear and accessible style.
The period opened with the party experiencing an unprecedented wave of popularity, as the Soviet Union halted the German advance by November 1941 and launched a counter-offensive in the winter of 1941-2. The impact of this on the British population was shown very clearly by the party's membership: more than doubling in a four month period from 22,000 in December 1941 to 53,000 in May 1942. Shortly afterwards the Daily Worker was unbanned, and the party spared no efforts in its campaign to support the war effort through increased industrial production. The party also campaigned for the opening of the second front to relieve the pressure on the Red Army; for women's equality, playing a leading role in the Women's Parliament; in support of anti-colonial struggles and against 'colour prejudice' and anti-semitism; and for political education for the forces, and in the development of the 'forces' parliaments'.
This astonishing range of campaigning work continued after the end of the war with the squatters movement, the development of the peace movement, trade union campaigns, campaigns for colonial liberation — amongst many others. The record of the CPGB in the campaigning field was outstanding as this book clearly demonstrates — through empirical evidence not phrase-mongering. But during this period the party also faced two increasingly complex problems, which set the overall framework for the book: the development of the Cold War, and the relationship of the CPGB to the Labour Party, and after 1945 to the Labour government.
The origins of the Cold War are clearly charted, through the Truman Doctrine, HUAC, and the Marshall Plan to the creation of the two Germanies, the Cominform, NATO and the Korean War. The increasing hostility of the Labour government towards the Communist Party was clearly partly a result of this, with the CPGB opposed to the Atlanticism of the Labour government, opposed to Bevin's rabid anti-communism in Greece and so on. The Cold War tensions were also partly an explanation for the purges and witch-hunts of communists in the trade unions and civil service and for the proscribing of organisations by the Labour Party — and Branson's detailed description of these events is both shocking and moving. The other part of the explanation which Branson draws out well is that the attempts to smash communist power in the labour movement coincided with the Labour government's desire to impose wage restraint, and with the CPGB's deprioritisation at its 20th Congress in February 1948 of the drive to increased production.
Less clear is the extent to which the CPGB took its line from Moscow. Branson observes early on in the book, after the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, that the party 'emerged as a party solely responsible for its own actions'. This is an overestimation of the party's autonomy, for while formally it may have been free to make its own decisions, in reality this was not the case. The example of Yugoslavia in 1948 shows this clearly: it illustrated not only what happened to a party which tried to choose its own path to socialism, but also how the CPGB accepted the Cominform line — there was no real alternative course of action in the framework in which it existed.
There is a further area where the extent of Soviet influence is debatable: changes in the party's programmes and changes of line. In 1941 'For Soviet Britain' was still the party programme, based on the approach of Lenin's State and Revolution. By 1944, 'Britain for the People' had fundamentally shifted to the position that the Party maintained until 1991 — that Parliament could be changed rather than abolished, that the state machine could be democratised rather than destroyed. This approach was more fully expanded and consolidated in the first 'British Road to Socialism' in 1951. 'Britain for the People' also underlined the importance of co-operation between the USA, Britain and the Soviet Union and for this continuing after the war. There would appear to be a correlation between the dissolution of the Comintern, the new line of 'Britain for the People', and indeed with 'Browderism' in the USA - which was this type of approach carried to the extreme — and clearly the correlation was the needs of Soviet foreign policy. It is also apparent that the CPGB, perhaps belatedly, changed its approach from critical support of the Labour government, after the change of line of the Soviet Union in 1948 and Zhdanov's 'two hostile camps' speech.
The mistaken position of the party towards the 1945 election — of campaigning for a government of 'national unity' rather than an outright Labour victory — is also a manifestation of this line, an example of British 'Browderism'. Yet this approach can be seen not solely as the product of the desire to perpetuate the war-time alliance: it was a continuation of the approach pursued by the Comintern since the 1920s. In 1927, the Chinese Communist Party was smashed after subordinating itself, on Soviet orders, to the bourgeois nationalist forces of the Kuomintang. This was followed in the 1930s by the subordination of working class forces to bourgeois forces in the popular fronts and their failure to prevent the rise of fascism. In other words, the Comintern consistently misapplied the united front tactic developed in the early years of the Comintern: that working class forces should ally with other class forces where common goals are identified, but should not subordinate working class interests to other class interests. This is not a view that Branson puts forward in the book, but it does seem to be a pattern in Soviet theory and policy in the periods before and after the decade covered by this book — from the pursuance of alliances by communists in the post-war national liberation struggles with national bourgeoisies, allowing bourgeois forces to predominate, right up to the 1990s, where the Communist Party of the Russian Federation effectively sustained Chernomyrdin's premiership for a considerable period. It is difficult, however, to arrive at a comprehensive overview and understanding of these issues, and of the flaws of Soviet policy and their implications for the movement as a whole, and the CPGB in particular, when the written history is divided into a number of volumes covering relatively small periods. This is a problem, perhaps, with the structure of the series.
Nevertheless, Branson's book is a significant contribution to our understanding of this period. It is a sympathetic interpretation of the activities of a small party which strove to have a big and positive impact, and it is an interpretation with which I largely concur. The party and its dedicated activists touched the lives of many, and it was overwhelmingly a force for progress in British society. Its problems were largely the result of the mistaken policies and crimes of the Soviet leadership — a framework it could not realistically break out of.
