Introduction
Apologies to all (again) for the late arrival of this Newsletter. This has once more fallen victim to other commitments, but with effect from the next issue Richard Cross has kindly agreed to help put the Newsletter together which should restore it to its more regular schedule.
Richard, who is doing postgraduate research at the University of Manchester, will already be known to some readers for his work on the final years of the British Communist Party and hisreview of Paul C Mishler's Raising Reds appears in the current issue.
The next issue will be circulated at the end of October: copy to myself or Richard by the end of September please.
Editors CHNN
Department of Government
University of Manchester
Manchester
United Kingdom
M13 9PL
Contents
Editor's introductionAnnouncements
- Communist Cartoonists
- Oral History
- Dona Torr
- 'Moscow' or 'Amsterdam'? The Red International of Labour Unions 1920/21-1937, Reiner Tosstorff
- Dissident Cuban Communism: The Case of Trotskyism 1932-65, Gary Tennant
- A Reply to John Saville, by Neil Redfern
- Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States, Paul C Mishler, reviewed by Richard Cross
- Claudia Jones, A Life in Exile, Marika Sherwood, reviewed by Jean Jones
- Under the Red Flag: A History of Communism in Britain, Keith Laybourn and Dylan Murphy, reviewed by Andy Croft
- The Anglo-Marxists: a Study in Ideology and Culture, Edwin A Roberts, reviewed by Willie Thompson
Announcements
COMMUNIST CARTOONISTS: Dave Cope writes: "Can any reader help identify the following cartoonists who drew for the Daily Worker in the 1930s/1940s: 'Hob-Nob'; 'Whist'; 'Patrick'; 'Bland'? Or 'Michael' who drew cartoons for the CPGB in the 1920s?" Contact: Dave Cope, 7 Hambledon House, Cricketfield Road, London E5 8NT; 020-8985-2090; davecope@cricketfield.demon.co.uk.
ORAL HISTORY: For the CPGB biographical project at the University of Manchester we have now recorded around a hundred interviews which in due course will be deposited in the National Sound Archive. We are still anxious for any further suggestions of possible interviewees. Please send brief details to the project administrator: linda.lawton@man.ac.uk.
DONA TORR: Antony Howe, who is completing a PhD on the CPGB Historians' Group at the University of Sydney, is particularly keen to hear from anybody who has leads or information regarding Dona Torr. Please write to: antony.howe@history.usyd.edu.au.
Thesis Reports
Moscow' or 'Amsterdam'?
The Red International of Labour Unions, 1920/21-1937
This thesis (in German) was accepted at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz in the spring of 1999 in partial fulfilment of the 'habilitation' procedures (a 'second thesis' according to German academic customs).
The Red International of Labour Unions (RILU or, in the Russian abbreviation, Profintern) was founded in Moscow in 1921 shortly after the Comintern's Third Congress and was dissolved sixteen years later. In comparison with studies on the Comintern its history has been rather neglected. In the former Soviet and East European historiography several general histories were published in the 1970s and 80s largely due to the fact that the Profintern archive was slightly more accessible than that of the Comintern. [1] However, these studies were typical products of late-Stalinist historiography with all its limitations, omissions, etc. [2]. In Western labour / socialist his- toriography the RILU has always stood in the shadow of its parent organisation. Apart from a few notable exceptions, [3] its study has been dealt with in the context of several national trade union and CP histories where, for a certain period, communist trade unionism won a mass base. In such cases, for example, France, Czechoslovakia and a series of 'colonial and semi-colonial' countries, the question of the RILU was of undeniable importance. However, in these studies the broad assessment has been that: 'The fate of the Profintern will never be more than a footnote in the history of the international labour movement - it never amounted to much (....)' [4]
In contrast, E.H. Carr indirectly put forward a counter-position when he argued that the RILU 'was in the nineteen-twenties by far the most powerful and important of the auxiliary organizations which gravitated around the Comintern. It was, indeed, the only one which could claim independence, and was more than a mere subsidiary organ.' He stressed 'the large organization of the Profintern, and its extensive representation abroad, in which it far surpassed any other of the [Comintern's] auxiliaries'. [5] In fact, in his multi-volume History of Soviet Russia, Carr presents the best description of the RILU's history until the 'turn' of 1928-29, where his study ends, which was possible without access to the Soviet archives.
I wholly subscribe to Carr's appreciation. In fact, I argue that the formation of many CPs cannot be explained without reconstructing the way in which they built a mass base in the organised working class, ie, in the trade union movement (or, indeed, the way in which they failed to build such a base). Similarly, the biographies of many party leaders cannot be satisfactorily traced without taking into account the respective individual's work inside the RILU's structures. Harry Pollitt, William Z. Foster or, of lesser importance, George Hardy, or for a shorter period of time Alfred Rosmer and J. T. Murphy, are but a few such examples. There is, however, a further aspect which until now has been largely neglected. That is, the RILU was the original meeting point for syndicalists and Bolsheviks. As such, the contribution of syndicalism as the second root of international communism alongside that of the pre-1914 international social democratic Left has not been fully recognised in the literature. Undeniable for the Comintern in general it was not that important, but it had a decisive influence on some CPs. And importantly, it was through the RILU and not the Comintern that the syndicalists [6] were attracted to and influenced communism.
The general underestimation of the contribution of syndicalism seems to me to be a rather ironic echo of Stalinism. One of the effects of Stalinism's re-writing of communism's history since the 1930s has been to downplay the role of syndicalism. Its emphasis of anti-bureaucratism and anti-parliamentarism was scarcely compatible with Popular Frontism.
However, this must not lead to underestimating the role of the RILU in international trade unionism, dominated at that time by social democracy. International trade union organisations had come into being even before World War One. There were the 'vertical federations' based on a single craft or industry (the so-called International Trade Secretariats (ITS) and the 'horizontal federation' which united national trade union centres in the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). Dominated by German social democracy, the IFTU had also attracted elements of the 'pure' British trade unionists and a part of the syndicalist movement. (Already before 1914 the syndicalists were split on an international scale between those who were willing to work in broad international organisations — in the main these constituted the most influential unions such as the French — and those who opposed this and advocated a strategy of 'dual unionism'. However, these were unable to construct an organisational alternative to the major trade union internationals.) [7]
While in the first chapter I give a short overview of the different workers' internationals and of how the separation of political and trade union internationals gave rise to the IFTU before World War One, it is in Chapter Two that I explore the circumstances which led to the founding of the RILU. The Bolsheviks had captured the majority of the Russian trade union federation in early 1918 and made vague proclamations for a revolutionary trade union international. Obviously, though, at the time their main preoccupations lay elsewhere. Besides, the IFTU had become inactive after 1914 (or rather, it was used by both warring camps to justify their conduct in the military conflict). With the end of the war, however, the IFTU was reorganised and became known as the Amsterdam International because of the location of its headquarters. An attempt on the part of the Bolsheviks to send a delegation to its first conference failed due to the Allied blockade. However, with the IFTU supporting the formation of the League of Nations, which in turn granted the IFTU a place in its newly-founded International Labour Organisation, there appeared to be no common political basis upon which the Russians could join. Thus, denouncing the IFTU, the Russians proclaimed the need for the IFTU to be superseded by a revolutionary international. It did not appear contradictory to the Bolsheviks that at the same time in the Comintern they were waging a determined struggle against an 'ultra-leftist' abandonment of those same mass trade unions which, through their national trade unions federations, constituted the member organisations of the IFTU. This contradiction could only be explained with reference to the Bolsheviks' expectation that the victory of the world revolution was only a matter of time and was indeed imminent. This would then have 'resolved' the question of the IFTU. At this 1919-20 conjuncture, nearly all syndicalist organisations also felt attracted to the Bolsheviks, seeing in the 'soviets' only another form of the revolutionary 'syndicat'.
It was against this background that with victory in the Civil War and the lifting of the blockade in the spring/summer of 1920 various international delegations visited Russia and entered into negotiations which led to the formation of the 'International Trade Union Council'. The Bolsheviks initially developed this body together with British (left-wing TUC leaders) and Italian delegates, who intended to form a left-wing current inside the IFTU. In addition, the presence of many syndicalists in Moscow who openly opposed the IFTU presented the Bolsheviks with an opportunity to line them up against the IFTU reformists. However, while these syndicalists continued to support the revolution they nevertheless felt somewhat reluctant to give the Bolsheviks their complete, unquestioned support because of the latter's insistence on forming political parties. But having found common ground with the Bolsheviks in the field of international trade union co-operation, the syndicalists thus demanded from them formal independence for the Council against the Russians' initial insistence on the need for the Council to join the Comintern as some type of subdivision. During the Councils' early days its main task was the preparation of a representative world congress of revolutionary trade unions. It was during these negotiations that Lozovsky, nominally a 'second-string' trade union leader with some 'anti-party' errors in his past, came to prominence due to his pre-war international experience (and language skills), while Tomsky, the principal Bolshevik trade union leader, had to concentrate on his work in the Russian trade union leadership.
The founding congress of the RILU held in the summer of 1921 is subjected to an in-depth analysis in Chapter Three. The Congress was made up by delegates representing, first, all the different syndicalist and semi-syndicalist currents and, second, the trade union factions of the CPs. In preparation for the congress the communists tried to win over whole sections of the reformist unions but were unsuccessful. Amsterdam had answered with an offensive of its own using the issue of trade union discipline — you cannot belong to two internationals at the same time. In this way, confrontation simply ran along the lines of the slogan 'Moscow or Amsterdam?' and simply led to a wave of expulsions. The communists were only able to bring the party trade union factions into the new international organisation. The existing trade union centres such as the TUC, the German ADGB, the French CGT, etc. remained intact and continued to act as the backbone for the Amsterdam International. With this failed approach to reformist unions, relations with syndicalists dominated discussions. There were also heated discussions about the mandates of delegates which led to incriminations and much manipulation. The Bolsheviks succeeded in winning over a part of the syndicalist movement (including Rosmer from France and Nin and Maurín from Spain), thereby jointly dominating the new international. Although, then, the RILU was formally constituted, the question of the fate of the imprisoned Russian anarchists did nearly plunge the congress into chaos. Indeed, a section of the syndicalist movement, mainly those from 'dual unionist' groups who were heavily influenced by anarchism drew their conclusions and founded a counter-international a year later.
The new international immediately had to confront the questions of its narrow organisational base, the contradiction of claiming to be an independent organisation, and having a sizeable proportion of its members inside its principal competitor in the labour movement. Only in France and Czechoslovakia were RILU trade union federations able to be formed when splits were taking place in organisations belonging to Amsterdam. This situation led to the turn to united front tactics, adopted in tandem with the Comintern at the end of 1921. The outcome of this is dealt with in Chapter Four together with the RILU's organisational progress up to the Second Congress at the end of 1922. [8]
The year 1922 witnessed a series of failed initiatives. Aided by the RILU's earlier aggressive propaganda war against the 'yellow traitors', Amsterdam demonstrated stubborn resistance to having anything to do with the RILU. The IFTU, denying the RILU as a 'dual international' its right to exist, presumptuously invited the Russians to join since it could be sure that this offer would be rejected out of hand by the Bolsheviks. The RILU, though, did develop a more subtle attitude towards the International Trade Secretariats which, though also tied to social democracy, stood slightly to the Left of Amsterdam and certainly were regarded as being more closely linked to their worker base. (It was for this reason that the Russian unions tried to enter the ITSs. This move was intended as a first step which would open the doors to other RILU unions. [9]) In an attempt to influence these ITSs and the different trades/professions in general, special organisations — the so-called International Propaganda Committees (IPC) — were created by the RILU. However, only in a few cases, most notably among transport workers, were these committees really active.
A real chance for a united front then suddenly seemed to appear on the back of the international crisis which arose after the French army occupied the Ruhr valley in early 1923. This crisis also led to a crack in the Amsterdam leadership. Its secretary, Edo Fimmen, who had earlier led the assault on the communists, changed his position and supported reaching an understanding with the Russians, a position which eventually cost him his job. [10] He did, though, keep his second post as secretary of the transport workers' international. Ultimately, though, all attempts at building a united front came to nothing with the failure of the planned 'German October', which itself also conditioned the struggle inside the Bolshevik leadership.
What had begun with Fimmen then crystallised as a tendency inside the IFTU with the TUC acting as the standard-bearer. They sought to invite the Soviet trade unions (thereby also hoping to resolve the fate of the RILU which without the Russians would have lost its principal base). There was a tendency within the Russian leadership, mainly around Tomsky, who wanted to accept the proposals while others openly opposed it. (All this was closely related to the faction struggle in the Russian CP.) While the Russian trade unions went on to set up the 'Anglo-Russian Committee' with the TUC, the RILU leadership around Lozovsky openly struggled for the international's survival, but was not able to attack directly the Russian trade unions. For a while, it seemed that the RILU had found a new raison d'être in terms of winning influence in the emerging trade union movement in the colonial countries, particularly in China, a task which traditionally Amsterdam had ignored. The RILU even built an 'auxiliary' in the form of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat which was based in China from 1927. However, this perspective received a decisive set-back with the defeat of the revolution in China in the summer of 1927.
The RILU survived mainly because of the collapse of the Anglo-Russian Committee and the 'left' turn of the Comintern which led to the adoption of the 'dual unionism' perspective (i.e., taking a hostile stand towards the reformist unions which were declared to be 'social-fascist'). While this turn was later justified in terms of being a consequence of the world depression, in fact the turn had already begun a year earlier with the Fourth Congress of the RILU in March-April 1928. The creation of revolutionary trade unions around the world inflated the RILU on paper. However, even with this apparent immediate advance, not all sections followed the new line whole-heartedly. This, for example, was the case in Britain. After serious set-backs there were also the typical self-criticisms which pointed out the need not to neglect work inside the reformist unions. These criticisms more often than not, though, remained on paper. Even additional 'sub-internationals' were created. In 1929 a Latin American federation was set up, while in 1930 an International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers and an International of Sea and Harbour Workers were formed. While, undeniably, many communist trade unionists led heroic struggles against the consequences of the economic crisis, their politics as popularised around the world by the RILU were ultra-sectarian and self-defeating. Communist trade union influence underwent a dramatic drop as the 'revolutionary unions' were essentially nothing more than a second edition of the local CP. The years 1928 to 1933, then, which also witnessed the expulsion of different opposition currents of Trotskyists and Right Oppositionists (this corresponding to the state of affairs inside the Comintern) are therefore discussed in rather less detail.
The turn to the Popular Front from 1934 had quite a contradictory outcome for the RILU. While it led to an upturn in communist trade union influence all over the world, the RILU itself became an obstacle for the wider strategic considerations of the Soviet and Comintern leadership which was then seeking to reach some sort of understanding with social democracy. The RILU leadership tried in vain to be a player in these international manoeuvres, but was simply considered to be superfluous by Dimitrov (who seems to have negotiated this with Stalin in 1936). At the heart of their considerations now stood a concern to get the Russian trade unions into the IFTU. After the RILU had already lost most of its member federations outside the Soviet Union, in the spring/summer of 1936 its own apparatus was 'demobilised', with the remaining offices being wound up in 1937. (This early dismantling of the RILU's structures also meant that it was only lightly affected by the mass arrests which took place in 1937 and which dealt such a serious blow to the Comintern apparatus.) Typically, the dissolution of the RILU (and, consequently, of its internal 'auxiliaries') was decided upon by the Comintern leadership in outright violation of the RILU's rules. This whole organisational development was also an expression of the deep change which had taken place in communist trade union work since the early 1920s. The communists had begun by basing themselves on the rank and file and had followed a near syndicalist approach in aiming to revolutionise the unions and destroy the bureaucracy. By the mid-1930s, however militant the rhetoric and, in part, the deeds, at the centre of the RILU's strategic deliberations stood its concern to enter the leadership bodies of the trade unions.
The RILU's demise also demonstrated just how empty its claim was that it represented an independent organisation, a long held criticism of the syndicalist and social democratic movements. This, though, does not mean that the RILU was designed as such from the beginning. Clearly, it had been conceived as an attempt to compromise with the syndicalists. As such it had certain room for manoeuvre so long as the syndicalists (or part of them) maintained some autonomy with respect to the Comintern and CPs. After the syndicalists either joined the CPs or split away, the RILU's early perspective changed. The RILU lost its own distinct momentum and simply turned into the 'trade union apparatus' of the Comintern, administering the trade union work of the parties at the international level.
This outline should make it clear why the thesis concentrates on the years from 1920 to 1923. The subsequent periods are only addressed insofar as the RILU attempted to maintain or regain a raison d'être, for example, in the dispute with the 'liquidationist' tendencies of the Russian trade unions or in 'discovering' a new mass base in the colonial countries. A special emphasis is also given to the role of the RILU's General Secretary, Alexander Lozovsky. Having headed it from the beginning until its dissolution, Lozovsky had a quite exceptional career inside international and, especially, Soviet communism surviving as he did the factional struggles of the 1920s as well as the purges of the 1930s (only to become a victim at the end of Stalin's life).
In addition to the many contemporary publications of the RILU and its adversaries, this thesis is largely based on material held in the RILU archive in the former Central Party Archive of the CPSU (now: RGASPI). Organised in the days of the Soviet Union it contains an enormous amount of trade union material from all over the world. It was therefore necessary to concentrate on papers which related to the central bodies (ie, leadership and congresses). Some additional material, though on a very limited basis, has also been consulted in the archives of the Soviet trade unions, as well as those of Western trade unions regarding relations and confrontations with the RILU and the Soviet trade unions. These include the trade union papers at Warwick and some archives of the International Trade Secretariats held both at Warwick and the Friedrich Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn.
Reiner Tosstorff, University of Mainz
rtosstorff@hotmail.com
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G M Adibekov, Krasnyj internacional profsojuzov, Moscow 1979; B A Krasnyj, internacional profsojuzov 1920-1924gg., Saratov 1976; B A Karpacev, Krasnyj internacional profsojuzov (1933-1937), Saratov 1981; B A
Karpacev, Krasnyj internacional profsojuzov 1920-1937 gody, Saratov 1987; A Kochanski, Czerwony Miedzynarodowka Zwiazkow Zawodowych (Profintern) 1920 - 1937, Warsaw 1985.
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After Glasnost began Adibekov wrote an interesting self-critique. G M Adibekov, 'O politik komunistov v profsojuznom dvizenii', Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 8, 1991, pp. 97-109.
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See, for example, Albert Resis, 'The RILU: Origins to 1923', unpublished PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1964.
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G Swain, 'Was the RILU Really Necessary?,' European History Quarterly, No. 1, 1987, pp. 57-77. (Cited excerpt from p. 73.)
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E H Carr, Socialism in One Country (1924-1926), Vol. 3/2, London 1964, p. 938-939.
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Given that 'syndicalism' is not the topic of my work I have not discussed in any detail the numerous differences which existed within the syndicalist movement. While I do not deny the existence of these differences, and they may in part explain syndicalists' different attitudes to the Bolsheviks after an initial outburst of support, all syndicalists nevertheless gave priority to the construction of a revolutionary workers' union as opposed to a party. This common belief justifies the use of the broad label of 'syndicalism' for the sake of brevity and cohesiveness.
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The IFTU's development before 1914 was dominated by heated debates between 'reformists' and syndicalists or among the latters with issues such as syndicalist cell-building inside 'reformist' trade-unions, industrial strategy, organisational split with reformists, etc., which resemble very much the disputes in the twenties. One can assume, that for those social democratic trade union leaders of the twenties who had been active in the international field before 1914, Bolshevism must have appeared as a continuation of syndicalism. The international dimension of syndicalism before and after WW1 has been exhaustively analyzed in the work of the Canadian historian Wayne Thorpe.
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The congresses took place in 1921, 1922, 1924, 1928 and 1930. The real leadership, though, lay in the hands of a small Executive Bureau with its permanent headquarters in Moscow. This Executive Bureau was also aided by
a Secretariat. In addition, from time to time a Central Council (the Executive Bureau plus representatives from individual countries) acting as an intermediate body sat in session.
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In the end, though, only the food workers' international accepted the application of the corresponding Russian trade union. All the others were rejected, sometimes after some heated discussions. Of course, there was even less consideration of applications from other RILU unions. I have analysed the RILU's experience with the ITS and the reasons for the Bolsheviks' success with the food workers in a paper presented at the American Historical Association's 1998 Convention, which is currently being prepared for publication.
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His interesting case as a defender of the united front is set out by me in more detail elsewhere. 'Unity between Amsterdam and Moscow? Edo Fimmen's Relationship to the Communist Trade Union Movement', In: B Reinalda
(ed), The International Transportworkers Federation, 1914-1945, Amsterdam 1997, pp. 94-105.
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Dissident Cuban Communism:
The Case of Trotskyism, 1932-65
This thesis, which traces the history of Trotskyism in Cuba, was accepted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Bradford in the summer of 1999. It focuses on the theoretical, tactical and organisational development of the Oposición Comunista de Cuba in the early 1930s, the Partido Bolchevique Leninista and the Partido Obrero Revolucionario in the 1930s and 40s, and the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Trotskista), the Trotskyist group which was reconstituted after the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
Hitherto, studies originating outside Cuba have generally argued that the Cuban Trotskyists were closer to Joaquín Maurín, the leader of the Bloque Obrero y Campesino in Spain, than to Trotsky. [1] Such 'Maurinista' interpretations suggest that in the 1930s the Cuban Trotskyists sought to unite proletarian, and national liberation movements in a struggle for a democratic anti-imperialist revolution. [2] Like the classical bourgeois revolution, this 'democratic' revolution was limited to securing the agrarian revolution and creating a relatively autonomous area within which all local classes could develop and expand. It was also seen as an independent stage on the path to socialism rather than a temporary phase in the deeper proletarian anti-imperialist revolution. This distinct proletarian revolution would not only be carried out against feudal and imperialist interests, but in line with Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution also against those of the national bourgeoisie. The only substantial Cuban work on the subject, the doctoral thesis by Rafael Soler Martínez El Trotskismo en la Revolución del 30. [3] has concluded that although the Cuban Trotskyists in the early 1930s constituted a revolutionary force, they were at the same time divisionists, sectarians and dogmatists who contributed to the division and defeat of the revolutionary movement. Although Soler's study contains valuable and extensive information on the social and geographical composition of the OCC and PBL, his emphasis on a descriptive, inventory-like account is also the major limitation of his work. Apart from repeating many of the old Stalinist fictions of Trotskyism, he makes little mention of the fundamental political issues at stake in the debates in the communist milieu. Indeed, in failing to discuss the crucial question of Trotskyists' attitude to the relationship between the democratic and socialist revolution, other than by bold unsupported statements of Stalinist 'truth', Soler fails to recognise that from the primary source material he himself cites the allegation of 'sectarianism' is largely baseless. He thereby also ignores the seemingly more apt accusation of 'opportunism'.
In contrast to these studies, particularly that of Soler, I argue that although the Cuban Trotskyists attempted to interpret the essence of Trotsky's thought in a way which took into account the peculiarities of the Cuban context, they never consistently and unambiguously insisted on a central tenet of Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution, namely, the necessary proletarian nature of the anti-imperialist revolution. They did not unequivocally view the working class through its own democratic organisations as the leader of the revolutionary process and, consequently, failed to focus their attentions on forging a conscious proletarian leadership for a revolution which was carried out not only against feudal and imperialist interests, but also against capitalist relations of production. I argue that the reasons the Trotskyists followed this one-sided approach to revolution lay in the roots of the Oposición Comunista de Cuba (OCC). That is, the Opposition only began to emerge inside the Partido Comunista de Cuba after October-November 1930 when the Caribbean Bureau of the Comintern directed the party away from the broad front projects of working in the already constituted trade unions and away from supporting an armed insurrection initiated by the parties of petty bourgeois nationalism. Crucially, then, the fact that the Opposition only took shape after the Third Period turn had been implemented meant that at its inception the OCC had not developed a critique of the Comintern's former Second Period position of forming anti-imperialist blocs with bourgeois nationalist parties such as the Guomindang in China.
While a number of leading figures in the OCC challenged the broad Second Period trajectory of the early Oppositionists and orientated the OCC towards the International Left Opposition and the formal adoption of the fundamental postulates of the theory of Permanent Revolution, the OCC's birth mark of one-sidedly emphasising the slogans and struggle for national liberation and the democratic anti-imperialist revolution continued to shape the development of Trotskyism in Cuba in the subsequent years. The Partido Bolchevique Leninista's (PBL) largest branch, in Guantánamo, ignored the directives of the Central Committee and operated independently in pursuit of its policy of forming a broad 'progressive' association from the outset. [4] The conflict between the broad front, democratic anti-imperialist tendency and that of the more Trotskyist elements ultimately matured in 1934-35 in the debate over the so-called 'external road'. Although never advanced as a coherent thesis in any internal document or at any conference of the party, the central thread of the 'external road' theory was that the PBL should dissolve itself into the anti-imperialist bloc around Joven Cuba, a Left nationalist apparatus led by Antonio Guiteras which reduced the revolution to a military-technical affair. While the natural haven for the 'broad front' nationalist elements inside the PBL was Joven Cuba, those sectors of the PBL which rejected actual liquidation inside radical nationalist parties and blocs also promoted an ill-defined United Front with the Guiteristas. While this tactical alliance was narrowly based and sought to sharpen the revolutionary situation rather than deepen it, the alliance also marked the PBL's implicit acceptance in practice of the one-sided approach of forming an alliance for a democratic anti-imperialist revolution as a distinct stage on the path towards proletarian revolution.
A further central contention which I develop is that although the Cuban Trotskyists' theoretical understanding of the nature of the revolutionary process located them in what Donald Hodges has termed the 'national liberation' tendency in Latin American Trotskyism in the 1930s and 40s, [5] their failure to make clear delineations between proletarian and petty bourgeois anti-imperialist forces in the 1930s and 40s ended up with them making increasing political concessions to Stalinism in the 1960s. That is, along with major tendencies in the 'orthodox' international Trotskyist movement after the Second World War, they advocated a caricature of the Comintern's post-1924 conceptions of the revolutionary process which did not propose a politically independent course for the working class. In the mid- to late 1940s the much reduced Trotskyist group all but dissolved inside a number of dubious organisations which, though professing a continuity with Joven Cuba, largely focused on removing the official communists from leading positions in the labour movement by the use of various underhand, often violent, methods. In the 1950s and 60s the Cuban Trotskyists then transformed the theory of Permanent Revolution from a conscious proletarian strategy to an objective process guiding the Cuban Revolution by effectively viewing the radical petty bourgeoisie or 'deformed' Stalinist states as the leader of the anti-imperialist revolution.
My distinctive argument is based mainly on previously unused archival documents, from both Cuba and further afield, together with the oral and written testimonies of various participants. In terms of structure, the thesis is divided into two inter-related parts. Part One (Chapters Two and Three) outlines the international and national context to the development of Trotskyism in Cuba. In this part, importance is attached not only to patterns of development within the international, especially Latin American, official communist and Trotskyist movements, but also to an appreciation of the development of the Cuban political economy. This analysis sets out the backdrop to my argument that in addition to the Cuban Trotskyists' own political failings, their organisational fortunes were also conditioned by external factors, principally the weak local class formations and Bonapartist-type regimes in Cuba, both pre- and post-1959. These features, which led to the official communist party being granted state-sponsored control of the labour movement at various intervals in exchange for certain economic incentives, had the effect of debilitating further the potential for working class action and the construction of a powerful class-based revolutionary movement in Cuba. Part Two (Chapters Four to Seven) covers the evolution of Trotskyism in Cuba in terms of its ideas, organisation and activities. Beginning by analysing the origins of this dissident current in the ranks of the Cuban Communist Party, these chapters focus on the fundamental theoretical positions defended by the Cuban Trotskyists in an environment dominated by the incompleteness of the democratic revolution. Particular attention is given to their development during the so-called Revolution of the 1930s when the PBL, with approximately 800 members, constituted one of the largest and most influential Trotskyist parties in the world. Chapter Seven examines the Trotskyists' programmatic differences with the government of the, at least nominally, communist Cuban government in the 1960s which led to the Trotskyist party's subsequent suppression.
Gary Tennant, University of York
This work on dissident Cuban communism will go to make up the main body of material in the next issue of the journal Revolutionary History. Those interested in the content of this edition which will be dedicated to the history of the Trotskyist movement in Cuba should contact Ted Crawford at the publishers Socialist Platform.
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RJ Alexander, Trotskyism in Latin America, Stanford, Hoover Institution Press, 1973, pp215-235; P Broué, 'Le Mouvement Trotskyste en Amérique Latine jusqu'en 1940', Cahiers Léon Trotsky (Paris), No. 11, September 1982, pp13-30.
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Maurín (1897-1973) and the BOC are perhaps best known for their advocacy of the 'triple front' in which proletarian, agrarian and national liberation movements would unite in a struggle for a 'democratic socialist' revolution. Maurín has also been remembered for, at one point, arguing that it was necessary not only to win over the existing national liberation movement, but also to participate in its formation where it did not already exist. While Trotsky intransigently labelled Maurín 'a petty bourgeois revolutionary', Andy Durgan's illuminating research has described the varied roots of Maurín's thought and how he evolved towards the Left away from a clear-cut two-stage strategy in the 1930s. AC Durgan, B.O.C. 1930-1936: El Bloque Obrero y Campesino, Barcelona, Laertes, 1996.
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R Soler Martínez, El Trotskismo en la Revolución del 30, PhD Thesis, Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, 1997. Soler presents a summary of his work in the article 'Los Orígenes del Trotskismo en Cuba: Los Primeros Trotskistas Cubanos', En Defensa del Marxismo (Buenos Aires), Year 7, No. 20, May 1998, pp54-70.
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While Trotsky, like the Comintern during its Second Period, sought unity with other progressive sectors of the population, he took issue over the Comintern's claim that the bourgeoisie in the colonial and semi-colonial countries was supposedly 'progressive'. A fundamental postulate of his theory of Permanent Revolution was that the national bourgeoisie was ultimately more frightened of stimulating a revolutionary movement among the rural and urban poor than it was of imperialism. For Trotsky, therefore, the revolution had to carried out by the working class in alliance with the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie, and directed against the influence and interests of the bourgeoisie.
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Hodges draws the useful distinction between two broad tendencies, the 'proletarian' and the 'national liberation', within Latin American Trotskyism. He posits that the 'national liberation' tendency emphasised the semi-colonial status of Latin American countries, whereas the 'proletarian' tendency stressed the completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution and the direct struggle for socialism. DC Hodges, The Latin American Revolution: Politics and Strategy from Apro-Marxism to Guevarism, New York, William Morrow and Co., 1974, pp81-83.
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Reply to John Saville
I welcome John Saville's criticism of my thesis on the Communist Party and the Second World War, though it is a pity he chose to make his criticisms without actually having read the thesis. I reject his criticisms, and in particular, the accusation that my work 'is a regrettable example of the simplistic dogma that has been all too common during the twentieth century'. I presume that Saville, as a Marxist, would agree that the test of theory is practice. On such grounds, I would argue that it is Saville who is upholding a dogma — namely, the concept of the Popular Front.
It is more than fifty years since the allied victory and the Second World War led to the imposition of a new imperialist settlement on the world. In several countries – notably Burma, Indo-China, Indonesia, Greece, France and Italy — the international communist movement rendered invaluable assistance to imperialism and demonstrated in practice the essential opportunism of the politics of the Popular Front.Yet Saville continues to insist that this strategy was correct.
It is easy to criticise the communists of the '30s and '40s, and I should say that when I had completed my thesis, I had developed a far greater respect for them than I had had when I started. Even so, I believe that their mistakes (and of course the mistakes of my generation, the class of '68) contributed greatly to the impasse that the left now finds itself in.
The Popular Front rested on the Euro-centric, chauvinist assertion that the over-riding priority of the communist movement must be the defence of the Soviet Union and of liberal democracy in Europe against the threat of fascism. I believe that communists were correct to defend the Soviet Union but I also believe that the strategy of the Popular Front was, as many others have pointed out, essentially a rationalisation of the foreign policy requirements of the Soviet Union. Communists assumed that the movement must do whatever the Soviet Union did. But as Mao was later to point out, compromises made by parties in power need not necessitate other parties making similar compromises. Indeed, in 1945, in his criticism of 'Browderism', Jacques Duclos made this point.
Comintern considered that the advent of fascism in Germany demanded revision of its previous analysis of economics and politics in the era of fascism. Such a view clearly informs Saville's rather patronising remark that 'one assumes that Redfern developed a comparative analysis (of fascism and bourgeois democracy) in the body of his thesis'. No, I did not, for the simple reason that I do not accept the underlying assumptions of the Comintern's analysis.
Saville notes that there is no 'dissent from (his) side concerning the imperialistic character of British and French societies', but argues that 'Germany was not to be classified as an imperialist power in the way that Britain was'. Indeed, it was not, for fascist though it was, Germany was a minor imperialist power compared to Britain, France and the USA. The Comintern's analysis that the fascist states were the 'main instigators' of war rather ignored the fact that they were 'aggressive' because the 'defensive' democratic states were the principal imperialist powers. In other words, it ignored the political economy of imperialism. [1] I must admit that I have harboured doubts about my criticism of Comintern policy with respect to the defence of democracy in Europe: does Saville have no doubts about his defence of this policy when he reflects on the CPGB's robust support for the re-conquest of British colonies and for imperialist dominance of the Mediterranean and middle east?
Even in its own terms, the Comintern's analysis was opportunist. Its claim that the defence of democracy was central to the new strategy only stood up, as Orwell pointed out at the time, if we didn't count that vast majority in the British and French colonial empires who had virtually no democratic rights. I would not go so far as Marika Sherwood [2] but as I argue in my thesis, one reason why British Communists accepted the Comintern's new strategy so readily was that the Communist Party, the commitment of a significant number of its members notwithstanding, had exhibited a general indifference to the colonial question since its foundation. By 1939, this indifference had become but one facet of an outlook that was at least as nationalist as internationalist.
Saville assumes that I 'would have recognised that Lenin's slogan for the 1914 war — turn the imperialist war into a civil war — was not a practical proposition in the British society (of 1939-45)'. Well, yes and no. Clearly, such a slogan — if applied purely to Britain — could have reflected at best an aspiration, not a concrete task. But to put the question in this way reveals that Saville still shares the Euro-centric assumptions of those who shaped the strategy of the Popular Front. Turning the imperialist war into a civil war would have been a viable aspiration for a movement which still had ambitions to challenge capital on an international scale. But as I show in my thesis, by 1939, the CPGB had thoroughly conflated the categories of class and nation and its members were — at least 'objectively' and to a considerable degree subjectively — more concerned to defend the British nation and Empire than to fight for the interests of the international working class.
Saville invokes the experience of the left under Nazi rule to support his criticism inquiring if I believe 'that a Nazi victory would have provided a different kind of society?' No, of course not, though a Nazi victory would have as likely led to an accommodation between Britain and Germany as to the imposition of fascism in Britain. What would have happened if the communist movement had pursued revolutionary objectives in the Second World War, it is impossible to say. What we can say is that such politics were possible. Those who defied the Comintern and later the CPSU — notably the Chinese and Yugoslav Communists — demonstrated this.
But rather than ask such rhetorical questions, we should surely consider what the allied victory led to. Yes, it led to the welfare state in Britain, but the counterpart of this tawdry welfarism was colonial war in Malaya. The imperialist post-war settlement led to oppression in the colonies and dominated nations which was qualitatively no different from that experienced by workers in Nazi Germany. It is true that a crucial element of the allied victory was the defence of socialism in the Soviet Union and the subsequent creation of the socialist camp. I would argue that the war-time experience also served to undermine the foundations of socialism in the Soviet Union, but that is a matter for another day. As for the socialist camp, few would dispute that history has shown how shallow were the roots of socialism in most of the countries of that camp.
One final point, trivial in itself, but important to me personally. Saville seems to think that I am a Trotskyist. But I am not, nor have I ever been, a Trotskyist. Trotskyism shares with Stalinism the Euro-centric perspectives criticised here.
Neil Redfern
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I use the term 'imperialism' in the Leninist sense of monopoly capitalism, rather than the more restricted sense, common on the British left, of colonialism. As I argue in my thesis, the CP's theory of imperialism tended to be Hobsonian, rather than Leninist and this profoundly affected the CP's policies.
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Sherwood makes the sweeping, unsubstantiated assertion that the 'British Communist Party, with the exception of very few members, is shown to have been as imbued with racial prejudice and indifference to the colonies as was the rest of the population'. 'The CPGB, the Colonies and the Black Britons', Science and Society, 60 (1996), p.160.
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SOME RECENT BOOKS
Raising Reds
Paul C Mishler, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-231-11045-6.
Between 1922 and 1944 the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) organised and ran an extensive range of programmes, clubs, camps and societies designed to nurture, educate and discipline the children of American communist families, and to draw in recruitable youngsters from outside the party's immediate circles. Raising Reds provides an illuminating and broadly sympathetic account of the CPUSA's attempts to generate and sustain a 'young communist' current, that is sensitive to the shifting ideological perspectives that guided the party's 'youth work', and able to incorporate the perspectives of both participants and organisers. Richly sourced, the author makes effective use of archival and manuscript collections, party publications, anti-communist federal government documents, and interviews with party youth workers and organisers, as well as a wealth of secondary material.
In his introduction, Mishler argues that this exploration of the 'lived culture' of the US communist movement is a necessary corrective to the 'Soviet-determined' models of the CPUSA being aggressively promoted by a number of hostile historians now able to raid the archives of the Comintern. Yet the temptation facing new cultural historians of the American CP, anxious to rescue the object of their fascination from accusations of treachery and illegitimacy, is to 'over-compensate' for the crude determinism of Haynes, Klehr and others, and in so doing produce an excessively optimistic or indulgent account of party life. Mishler's evident desire to 'accentuate the positive' does, on a number of occasions, lead him to accept the formal 'mission statements' of the CPUSA's youth programmes at face value, rather than subject them to critical scrutiny.
With that proviso, Raising Reds remains an intriguing and insightful text on a fascinating and little explored area of early western communist party activity. Mishler succeeds in isolating the central dilemmas and tensions that the CPUSA's youth projects were confronted by, and his assessments of the way that the party struggled to reconcile them is sophisticated and suitably nuanced. Through his evocative descriptions of party youth activities Mishler captures some memorable images — Paul Robeson umpiring a summer camp baseball tournament; earnest young communist volunteers knitting socks for the war effort; campfire folk evening sing-alongs conducted by Pete Seeger — to name but three.
In the 1920s, a high percentage of CPUSA members were new immigrants. This left both party officials and party families with a clear, but far from straight-forward, choice. Should the party direct its energies into efforts to establish supportive, but culturally distinct, ethnic societies among immigrant communists; or should it seek to integrate immigrant communist communities into mainstream 'indigenous' US society? The party's youth agencies pursued both 'separatist' and 'assimilationist' strategies at different times in response to this tension. Although the early CPUSA upheld a 'scientific' Marxist-Leninist vision of the communist project, at particular moments youth work could represent a 'warm current' in party thinking, in which summer camps could be conceived of as both 'vacation resorts and utopian experiments.' (p.83) In the most sectarian of the Third Period years, however, youth work could be didactic, austere and narrowly instrumental. Shifting party perceptions of gender found expression in youth activities, which at times could be integrated and equally supportive of girls and boys, and at other times differentiated and sharply restrictive for both. The 'historical certainty' of the CPUSA's marxism also imbued its early youth projects with a bold sense of self-confidence and excitement which provided much needed (if wholly illusory) reassurance for an often marginalised and precarious communist community.
In its early years the CPUSA saw in its youth work the opportunity (and the duty) to reproduce 'the party in miniature.' Youth work followed party-prescribed political objectives, and in its campaigns served as a junior adjunct to the parent organisation. The priorities were to inculcate a 'revolutionary' consciousness amongst the young, and combat the 'insidious' influence of school and 'capitalist society.' Importantly, the intention was also to displace particular ethnic allegiances with a suitably 'internationalist, marxist' identity. The metaphors were simple ones. In this vision, youth needed to be moulded into 'the littlest proletariat'. In the directed activities of the YP summer camps, the children were seen to take on the identity of 'the workers' while the adults played the role of 'the party'.
Mishler's positive view of the Popular Front strategy, common to a majority of the 'new historians' of the CPUSA, is reflected in the priority afford to that period of party youth work. The onset of Popular Front politics saw the Young Pioneers disbanded, and the promotion, in its place, of the youth sections of the International Workers' Order (IWO), the organisation which became 'the center of the political culture of Popular Front communism in working-class communities.' (p.67) Greater emphasis was now placed on recognising and seeking to synthesise particular ethnic identities into new radical senses-of-self and community, and on negotiating new relationships with the dominant culture. The scope of youth work itself was redefined to include recreational, sporting and cultural activities as well as the traditional political ones. The stated goal of 'socialism' was gradually replaced in the IWO's lexicon by new 'democratic' and 'social' objectives and with a special concern for a breadth of 'labor and progressive movements.'
The effort of jewish communists to construct a radical, secular jewish working class culture — in particular through the work of the after-school clubs, the shules — is also examined and the tensions between ethnic, religious and political affiliations with which jewish members of the CPUSA grappled is discussed. A chapter on 'primers for the revolution' provides a diverting and thoughtful account of the little-studied theme of communist children's literature — an overview enhanced by the inclusion of a discursive booklist in an accompanying appendix. In these works Mishler finds additional evidence of the tension that pitted 'particular' against 'universal', and 'insider' against 'outsider', identities — here rehearsed in the morality tales of children's story books, and the 'lessons' of approved educational and scientific texts.
Three radical summer camps from the Popular Front era are analysed in some detail. The renowned Camp Kinderland evolved from the work of the shules, celebrated and explored radical jewish culture, and was recognised as autonomous from, if still closely allied to, the CPUSA. In the work of Kinderland, art, music and creative self-expression were seen as central concerns. Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, also strongly influenced by jewish culture, pursued a multicultural programme of work and recreation. The integrated ethnic and racial mix at the camp drew the hostile attention of both camp neighbours and the state authorities. Camp Woodland looked to merge 'urban-based radicalism with the "naturally" democratic traditions of rural America' (p.99), to create a new and authentic oppositional culture, in which folk music was to have a significant place.
Mishler offers a measured appreciation of the similarities and specificities of each of the three camps. However, in doing so he remains too reliant on formal statements of camp practice, such as the authorised testimony recorded in year books, which, by their very nature, communicate a particular version of the actual experience of camp life. In this account no-one complains of a stolen summer, or moans about irksome parades or tedious lecture programmes. Political conflicts are rare, and camp workers and children co-operate harmoniously. The chorus is one of contentment and fortitude. Mishler does acknowledge the existence of a number of tensions between camp visitors, but his decision not to explore these — more problematic — themes can be frustrating.
In a brief concluding chapter Mishler notes how the crises that rocked the CPUSA between 1946 and 1956 made it all but impossible to sustain a viable youth programme. Given the impact that wider social, political — and generational — changes had on the party's ability to function and exert influence more widely, this is, Mishler concedes, hardly surprising. The Families Committee of Smith Act Victims is highlighted as the last CPUSA-backed body of the time directly concerned with issues of child welfare. With the party now in retreat, the Committee's work reflected the narrow, defensive pre-occupations forced on party families by the increasingly hostile anti-communist climate. Mishler suggests that in the inhospitable context of the Cold War years, US communist culture retreated from the public social sphere to resettle in the more discrete and introspective setting of familial party networks.
Mishler argues that the children of CPUSA members played a significant role in the emergence of the New Left in the US, as a generation of post-war 'red diaper babies' grew to maturity and entered the political fray. This contention is certainly open to challenge. It can be questioned for privileging the inspirational role played by 'red diaper babies' ahead of other actors. It might also be queried for its reluctance to acknowledge the fact that one of the defining characteristics of the New Left was its outright rejection of what it saw as a sterile, regressive — and even counter-revolutionary — 'Old Left'. In this the CPUSA was seen as fully implicated — 'Stalinist' summer camps and all, and Popular Frontism notwithstanding. Yet it is self-evident that Mishler does not conceive of the CPUSA's cultural legacy in such negative terms.
Although the question is a valid one, this story of the struggle of American communists to construct a youth culture, able to support communist families and recruit radical youth, does not need to justify itself by reference to its more recent historical resonances. An alternative approach would have been to reflect on the meanings that these experiences had for those who lived and worked through them — parent; youth worker; cheerful volunteer; miserable conscript; or investigating federal agent. But Mishler's desire to secure later historical 'significance' for his subject, brings his account of communist youth work to a conclusion without a considered final judgement on the complexities involved in 'raising reds' that he teases out in the preceding narrative.
Richard Cross, University of Manchester
Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile
Marika Sherwood, Claudia Jones, A Life in Exile, (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1999), ISBN 0 85315 882 7, 222pp., £13.99 pbk.
At a time when racism in all its forms is headline news in Britain, a book, which considers the life and work of a great but subsequently neglected black activist, must be welcomed. Marika Sherwood renders a service by producing this biography of the remarkable Claudia Jones, especially in retrieving previously unpublished information about the nine years she spent in exile in Britain.
Claudia was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, on 21st February 1915 Her parents moved to Harlem in 1922, Claudia and her three sisters following two years later. After the death of her mother, her father struggled alone to support the family through the Depression. One consequence of their poor living conditions was Claudia's tuberculosis, which she contracted in 1932. After leaving High school, she worked in a number of menial jobs but in February 1936, inspired by the CPUSA's campaign in defence of the Scottsboro boys, she joined the Young Communist League where she developed her skills as a journalist in addition to proving her worth as a campaigner. By the mid-1940s, she was editor for Negro Affairs on the CPUSA's Daily Worker and executive secretary of the National Negro Commission. A brilliant orator and indefatigable worker, she served on the National Committee of the CPUSA, was appointed executive secretary of the National Women's Commission and editor of the Negro Affairs Quarterly. Eventually, however, the combined strain of her workload and state harassment — she was arrested on several occasions during the McCarthy witch hunts — led to a health breakdown and she was diagnosed as suffering from heart disease. In January 1955 she began a twelve-month gaol sentence during which her health deteriorated further, exacerbated by lack of adequate medical care in prison. Despite national and international support for her release and a campaign to allow her to remain in the US, she was deported to Britain in December 1955.
The Daily Worker welcomed Claudia on her arrival in Britain and, following her release from a two-month period of hospitalisation, the CPGB held a reception for her. The Party also tried and failed to persuade the Home Office to grant her a passport — she was unable to travel abroad freely until 1962. An immediate problem was one of housing; she initially stayed with fellow US communist exiles until May 1956 when she was offered the lease on a flat belonging to the Rev Hewlett Johnson, the 'Red' Dean of Canterbury. To begin with, employment was provided by the CPGB at the New China News Agency, but this was not a successful placing — there were tensions between the staff and Claudia complained that she was regarded as a 'burden' by some. Claudia clearly felt undervalued by the Party and her relationship with its hierarchy soon became strained. She believed that the Party could give a clearer lead on the race issue and pushed for it to take more direct action rather than restrict itself to issuing policy declarations. Nevertheless, she continued to participate in communist affairs being a member of the CPGB's International Affairs Committee and the West Indies Committee (later the West Indies Advisory Committee), although her involvement with these fell away by the 1960s. She agreed to a request by the Party to participate in a 'special commission to combat racism' in January 1964 and worked on the draft of the party's Policy statement on the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, which it vigorously opposed.
From the late 1950s, Claudia began to focus more exclusively on black issues, helping to organise and co-ordinate work among 'colonial' peoples in Britain and campaigning against racism and discrimination. In March 1958, the West Indian Workers and Students Association, of which Claudia was a leading member, launched the West Indian Gazette which aimed to provide a source of information and inspiration for the black community. Paul Robeson was one of its patrons and performed at fund-raising events. The newspaper suffered from a series of problems and setbacks — soon after publication began it was subject to an attack on its offices by the Klu Klux Klan as well as strife within its founding committee and it continuously faced financial troubles and consequently, staffing problems. Despite this, Claudia managed to keep the paper going — the Gazette finally folded in summer 1965, just months after her death. The existence of a quality paper addressing black issues must have provided reassurance for a fearful minority in the period following the Nottingham and Notting Hill riots in summer 1958 and its circulation reflected this, reaching a peak of 30,000.
Two of the more enduring organisations which were established in the wake of the riots were the Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and the Inter-Racial Friendship Co-ordinating Council and Claudia worked within these, helping to raise issues such as the need for legislation to prevent incitement to racial hatred and allegations of police hostility towards the coloured community. She later formed the Afro-Asian-Caribbean Conference to fight against the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, collaborated with Fenner Brockway's Movement for Colonial Freedom from the late 1950s and worked with the anti-apartheid movement and the Indian Workers Association. Claudia was also a moving spirit in the establishment of the Caribbean Carnival in Britain. After the Gazette sponsored a Caribbean Carnival Committee as a positive reaction to the divisive events surrounding the riots, Claudia used her skills to bring together African, Caribbean and other artists and performers in a celebration of black culture. The first Carnival took place on 30th January 1959 with part of the proceeds from the sale of the souvenir brochure pledged to pay the fines of those involved in the Notting Hill troubles.
Claudia was impressed by what she saw in August 1962 when, her passport having finally been returned, she visited the USSR and the following year she returned to attend the World Congress of Women. Neither of these visits were arranged by the British CP, but were probably facilitated through her contacts with the wider communist movement. In summer 1964 she attended the Tenth World Conference Against the Hydrogen and Atomic Bombs in Tokyo. From Japan she flew with other delegates to China, where they were greeted by Chairman Mao. During the same year, Martin Luther King called in to see her on his way to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. But as the geographical boundaries of her world were relaxing, the illness which had dogged her during her years in exile was tightening its grip. In December of that year, Claudia was again admitted to hospital and following her release, died of a massive heart attack in her bed on Christmas Day. She was aged just 48. Among the many friends and colleagues who attended her funeral were representatives from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Those who paid tributes to Claudia included speakers from the ANC and the CPGB, the Algerian Ambassador, Fenner Brockway and Paul Robeson, who subsequently became chair of the Claudia Jones Memorial Committee. The February edition of the Gazette carried salutes from, among others, CPUSA leaders, the High Commissioner for Ghana and the Head of the International Department of the Soviet Women's Committee. Claudia's remains are buried next to Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery.
Although there is much to enjoy in this book, I believe that it would have benefited from a more circumspect analysis as some of the author's conclusions about the British Communist Party and its treatment of Claudia are rather sweeping. The Party may well have been guilty of an inadequate response to the issue of racism in Britain, some members may have shared racist attitudes prevalent in the general population, but this does not prove that the organisation was racist. It is claimed that the CP did not acknowledge the issue of racism and did nothing to protest about racism in the 1950s. The Party's 'Charter of Rights for Coloured Workers in Britain', issued in February 1955, seems to be dismissed because it was an initiative of the International Committee and it is claimed that, when the issue of racism in Britain was addressed in Party literature from the mid-1950s it was because of the efforts of new, more vociferous coloured members. Yet it was only during these years that racial tensions, fuelled by those who raised fears over colored immigration for political ends, became an issue in Britain. The CP implacably opposed the fascist organisations, gave its full support to Fenner Brockway's efforts to introduce an anti-discrimination bill, worked with the Movement for Colonial Freedom and the National Council of Civil Liberties to oppose racist immigration controls and raised the issue of racial discrimination with trade unions.
It is claimed that Claudia was ignored and rejected by the Party and suggested that this behaviour was based on racist attitudes. But Claudia's estrangement from the British CP was more likely to have resulted from a number of reasons. She arrived in Britain in 1956, when the Party was beginning to tear itself apart over the Khruschev revelations — the CPUSA itself was decimated by the events of that year. Arriving as an unwilling exile in a foreign country, subject to surveillance by the security forces and suffering from serious health problems, she had found it 'impossible to be both uprooted and ill' (p.37). There were bound to be problems in integrating such a larger than life, high-status figure into the existing Party structure, whatever their racial origins. In addition, her close companion during these years, Manchanda, was generally remembered as being difficult, even a trickster — he 'kept people away' (q p.51). This was demonstrated by his refusal to permit a committee formed in 1982 by the Afro-Caribbean Organisation to erect a headstone on Claudia's grave. Finally, the author cites the fact that the Party press did not print an obituary for Claudia as evidence of the CP hierarchy's neglect of her, but an obituary did appear in the Daily Worker (1 January 1965) and this was followed by an account of the funeral oration delivered by John Williamson on behalf of the EC of the CPGB the following week (Daily Worker, 11 January 1965).
Jean Jones, University of Wolverhampton
Under the Red Flag
Keith Laybourn and Dylan Murphy, Under the Red Flag: A History of Communism in Britain, Sutton Publishing, 1999, pp.xx + 233, ISBN 0 7509 1485 8, £25.
If you try to buy this book on the Internet, you will find it listed as Under the Red Flap, making it sound like a pop-up book, a kind of Where's Spot? for the small children of labour historians. Spot the Mistake would be a better title, since the book is written with a breath-taking lack of care.
In the careless world of Under the Red Flap, Kevin Halpin becomes Kevin 'Halpen', Carrillo becomes 'Carillo', Rakosi becomes 'Rakovsi', Bob Rowthorn becomes Bob 'Rawthorne', Ivan Beavis becomes 'Ian' Beavis, Simon Barrow becomes 'Sion Barrow', Malcolm MacEwen becomes 'Malcolm MacEwan' and Emile Burns becomes 'Emilé Burns'. Johnny Campbell turns up as 'Jimmy', Douglas Springhall as 'David' and Bill Rust — rather improbably — as 'Willie'. The magazine Changes is retitled Change, the British Peace Committee is renamed the 'British Peace Commission' and the Yorkshire District CP is called variously the 'West Yorkshire District' and the 'Yorkshire Council'. Ivan Maisky is described as 'a member of the Russian Embassy' (rather than the Ambassador!) and Edward Thompson apparently contributed an essay to the Reasoner entitled 'The Smoke of Budapest'.
What a bad book this is! Poorly researched, badly organised, repetitive, carelessly written, unsympathetic to its subject, wholly unoriginal and apparently ignorant of recent scholarship. A sloppy, pointless, fruitless, lazy collection of second-hand anti-communist cliches disguised as labour history.
It is so bad it is almost comical. Did you know the Labour Party once ran a scurrilous 'anti-social' campaign against the CP? That the Dutts lived, not in Brussels, but in Amsterdam? And that the International Brigades included a number of 'political commissioners' in their ranks? There is something Pooterish about a book which solemnly claims to 'reveal through documentary evidence that, despite protestations to the contrary, the British Communist Party and its leadership were dominated by the Comintern' ...
It is just possible that the authors of Under the Red Flop do not realise how banal their thesis is, since their knowledge of other work on the history of the Party appears to be extremely patchy. For example, there is no mention of Francis King and George Matthews (eds), About Turn, or Andrews, Fishman and Morgan (eds), Opening the Books. On the other hand, however, Kevin Morgan appears to have a new book out subtitled Rupture and Constitution in British Communist Politics.
Having set out to prove that the Party was fatally isolated within the British labour movement because of its 'close association' with the Soviet Union, Under the Flip Flop pursues this thesis with a dogged tautology. Nothing is considered except the Party's relationship with the Soviets, the trades unions and the Labour Party. Under the Red Rug has nothing to say about the Party's anti-colonial struggles, its work in the Peace and anti-war movements, its pioneering work among women, or the role of Party members in the Forces during the Second World War. There is no reference to life in the Districts (although District Committees are wheeled on to suit the book's idea that Party Centre was constantly at war with the membership). The many published memoirs and autobiographies which might offer a richer, more interesting and lively picture of Party life and membership are ignored (except a little anti-Party pamphlet by Ruth and Eddie Frow, which is given a whole page). This is a narrative untroubled by any of the Party's many publishing and ideological initiatives or by the artistic and educational culture of the Party. There is nothing to be said, for example, about Unity Theatre, New Writing, the Left Book Club, ABCA and CEMA, the Folk Song revival, the Christian-Marxist dialogue, 'The Forward March of Labour Halted' (Gramsci is not even mentioned!). Laybourn and Murphy do not seem to have heard of the Sunday Worker, Left Review, Our Time or Modern Quarterly (and my own A Weapon in the Struggle does not, of course, even merit a dismissive footnote).
There is too, an irritatingly coy (and contradictory) political subtext running through Under the Red Frog. Laybourn and Murphy repeatedly sneer at the Popular Front as an exercise in 'class collaboration' (curiously, they seem to think that the Popular Front strategy was an attempt at an electoral accommodation with the Labour Party) at the same time as they reproach the Party for its supposed sectarianism — the fault, they seem to believe, of Hyndman rather than Lenin.
All is not lost, however, since Under the Fried Frog ends on a note of finely-judged evaluation, a scholarly judgement of such abrupt and memorable banality that an otherwise forgettable book is almost redeemed: 'Clearly there were some achievements to be proud of and at least the CPGB tried to improve and defend the position of the workers in British society.' Stunning.
Andy Croft
The Anglo-Marxists
Edwin A Roberts, The Anglo-Marxists: A Study in Ideology and Culture, (Rowman & Littlefield, New York), 1997, 269pp.
This is a text which, so far as I know, has not come to the attention of researchers here into the history of British communism or the British left in general — I was wholly unaware of it before coming across it quite by accident in a second-hand bookshop, and various people I spoke to had never heard of it. It deserves though to be better known, for it constitutes, whatever its merits or defects, part of the growing historiography of the CPGB.
The term 'Anglo -Marxism' is not encountered very often but when employed is usually taken as referring to the trend initiated by the New Left Review and associated particularly with Perry Anderson as a seminal figure. Roberts, an American political scientist, however has a novel argument. He attempts to demonstrate that a theoretical school, appropriately designated as Anglo-Marxism, was developed by Communist Party intellectuals between the thirties and the fifties. Its main feature, he claims, is that it recast native English philosophical traditions in a Marxist idiom largely independent of the stalinist political matrix in which the school was formed.
Remarkably enough it is not the well-known Historians' Group of the forties — who as Harvey Kaye has argued convincingly, form an Anglo-Marxist school of historiography — that Roberts focuses his attention upon, but less-renowned figures such as J D Bernal the scientist and more obscure ones still, like the philosophers John Lewis and Maurice Cornforth. The broad framework in which he places them is that of English empiricism, stretching back from Bacon, Hobbes and Locke in the seventeenth century to Wittgenstein and the Oxford linguistic philosophy of the twentieth. 'What they seem to share are common insights drawn from their origins in a distinctly Anglo-Saxon cultural paradigm'. (p9)
In the opening sections of his analysis Roberts follows fairly closely the interpretation advanced by Stuart Macintyre in A Proletarian Science. This argues that British Marxism and the Communist Party were originally the creation of workers who drew their theoretical inspiration from an indigenous tradition of separate (and separatist) working-class adult education continuing a strong infusion of Darwinism and Comteism, in which the writings of the now forgotten Joseph Dietzgen were esteemed as second only to those of Marx. it was displaced and superseded however once control of the Party's theoretical and intellectual agenda fell, with Comintern encouragement, to the university-educated Palme Dutt in the Party leadership and to academically-trained writers and propagandists. As Roberts expresses it, Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism took over from the native prewar 'impossibilist' tradition; but subsequently, so he tries to demonstrate, such Marxism-Leninism was given an English academic inflection.
Roberts develops his thesis (literally — the book is a written-up PhD) at length to argue that the very talented individuals with whom he deals constituted a recognisable and distinctive school of Marxism- Leninism. He contends that behind the variety of fields to which they applied Marxist theory — general science, biology, philosophy, literature — their thinking, 'a unique and creative school of thought' (p.56), was informed and dominated by a distinctive empirical and scientistic approach implicit in the English philosophical tradition. To this they tried with greater or lesser success to assimilate the dialectical categories of Marxism — or else simply ignored them. Their Marxism was thus of a wholly different temper to the Hegelian variety of Lukács or the Frankfurt school. 'To study Cornforth's and Lewis's works is to study an Anglo-Marxism, not just Marxism with an English voice' (p.104).
It must be acknowledged that in the dimension of individual intellectual biography the book is an interesting and thought-provoking exercise and that Roberts succeeds in rescuing from theoretical oblivion and the enormous condescension of posterity thinkers like John Lewis and Maurice Cornforth who, cramped by their Stalinist intellectual heritage (even while trying to transcend it), may have made no great contributions to Marxist theory — but even so had serious and significant things to say. Discussing Cornforth in particular, his insights into this philosopher's relationship to linguistic philosophy are often acute and penetrating
Nevertheless in any overall sense Roberts's attempt must be regarded largely as a failure and his concept of a distinctive Anglo-Marxist school as being a highly dubious one. It may perhaps be possible to maintain that these intellectuals were influenced by a cultural climate of English empiricism - certainly there is a prima facie case of this sort to be made, but that is a much more modest claim. The Anglo-Marxists has a forced and strained quality to it, the impression given is that the evidence is being shoehorned into a preconceived conceptual framework rather than the conclusion emerging out of the evidence, and that the connecting argument between the specific chapters is extraordinarily weak. Roberts finally goes on to maintain that while the 'school' fell apart following 1956 and the Marxism of the Andersonian New Left Review was a very different animal, the latter's fading credibility later on 'opened the way for the resurrection (unintentionally) of the [alleged] Anglo-Marxist tradition ... at the hands of scholars, such as Cohen, Geras, Callinicos...' (p274) These three, (the last two particularly) would doubtless be astounded to find themselves numbered in the company that Roberts has been examining throughout his volume.
It is possibly a minor point to note that the proof-reading of the text is deplorable and the number of typos astonishing, but there are also many significant factual errors. Among them, there is complete misunderstanding of the outlook of that early sectarian splinter, the SPGB; Willie Gallacher is assigned to the wrong political party prior to joining the CP; a J. MacLean (John MacLean)? makes an appearance, who supposedly became a high-ranking party member. More trivially, I myself am quite inaccurately designated an official party historian.
In short, while there is most surely an informative text to be written exploring the collective odyssey of the CPGB's major intellectuals in the context of their party and professional careers, this is clearly not that one, but instead remains an acute disappointment.
Willie Thompson, Glasgow Caledonian University
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