Index
Contents: This Issue
Search CHNN
CHNN Home
The Political Trajectory of
J T Murphy and Molly Murphy: Suffragette and Socialist
Ralph Darlington, The Political Trajectory of J T Murphy, Liverpool University Press, pp.336, and, with an introduction by Ralph Darlington, Molly Murphy: Suffragette and Socialist, University of Salford, pp.169, pbk.
Reading Ralph Darlington's admirable biography, I am reminded of the title of the memoirs of a Jewish communist — Joseph Berger's The Shipwreck of a Generation. Both J T Murphy and his wife displayed immense idealism and vitality. He possessed, like many of the other worker-intellectuals who joined the early Communist Party, a dazzling intelligence. In at the birth of the shop stewards' movement, J T Murphy led the militant Yorkshire rank-and-file He also wrote articles and a pamphlet, undoubtedly the best of those times, explaining how the workers' potential power could be most effectively deployed. Within a few months of joining the Socialist Labour Party, he sprung into its leadership At the 1918 general election, he stood as its candidate at Gorton, the constituency of the Minister of Pensions. The First World War bloodbath had created both widows and maimed on a colossal scale. In his election speeches and his pamphlet, Equality of Sacrifice, he contrasted the wealth war had accrued to the arms manufacturers and industrialists with the suffering for working people.
Though at first reluctant to see the SLP join the newly-formed Communist Party, he eventually threw himself with enthusiasm into the new organisation. He played a vital role in the Communist International, eventually reaching the highest echelons, where in 1927 he successfully moved the expulsion of Leon Trotsky.
At the time, the full implications of this action could not be foreseen. It would be as wrong to blame J T Murphy as it would be to blame the unfortunate Durham miners who signed Ramsay MacDonald's nomination papers at the 1929 general election.
What seems to me of greater import is the failure of the entire Communist Party, including J T Murphy, to ever adopt a critical line, independent of Moscow Revolutionaries like John Maclean and Sylvia Pankhurst had not such inhibitions. In my book, The Origins of Bolshevism, I attempted to assess the various positions, but regrettably Ralph Darlington fails to consider this dissident view.
If the CPGB underwent a process of Bolshevisation, as the book suggests, then how was it that, without a whiff of opposition the Party could then be Stalinised? Should we accept, as many right-wing historians do , that Stalinism is the inevitable outcome of Leninism?
After J T Murphy and the Communist Party had parted company, he strived to build the Socialist League, a small left-wing organisation functioning within the Labour Party. While he must have been aware that Reg Groves, one of the founders of British Trotskyism, sat alongside him on the Socialist League executive, he probably did not know that this was an application of Trotsky's French turn, where he asked his followers in all countries to operate within the mass working-class parties.
This tactic seems to have borne little fruit for anybody The comparative handful attracted to the Socialist League were essentially reformists, wanting to give the Labour Party a fresh face and did not strive to liberate new class forces that might show a parliamentary road to socialism was a mirage.
The Socialist League still awaits detailed historical scrutiny. The book can therefore be forgiven, though perhaps J T Murphy cannot, for not being more critical of its leader. In 1935 Sir Stafford Cripps and his wife went on holiday with Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, while in 1939, as one of Britain's highest paid lawyers, he resolved not to attend a Labour Party NEC, where his expulsion was being discussed, but rather to defend the Midland Bank in court.
In his later years J T Murphy dropped out of politics probably disillusioned with his experiences in the Communist and Labour Parties as well as by the general drift of world affairs Yet he still remained a political animal, willing to give researchers the benefits of his wisdom. He did, moreover, establish contact with CP dissidents John Saville and Edward Thompson and wrote an interesting article on the early days of the Communist Party for their journal, the New Reasoner.
Molly Murphy was a much less significant figure. Yet, she was far from living entirely under her husband's shadow. Her autobiography remains a valuable document. It details her experiences as a suffragette in Manchester before the First World War, as a valued foreign comrade in the Soviet Union of the 1920s, and as a nurse in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. This book shows her to have been a formidable feminist and revolutionary throughout her political life.
