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Essentialists and realists:
reflections on the
historiography of the CPGB
The recent conference in Manchester, 'People of a Special Mould?', was stimulating and thought-provoking for historians of British communism. By virtue of its membership of an international movement, British communism is comparable to the communism of other societies and states in varying degrees. It shares with all of them at least two common reference points, the Soviet Union and the Communist International. However, the significance of these reference points is not always the same. It differs for historians of communism in those countries where communists held or participated in state power compared to countries where they did not. Within each of these sub-groups there are further sub-sub-groups, eg. countries where communists were routinely repressed and martyred by the state (pre-1939 Japan) so that communists' physical presence was transient and their political contribution apparently limited. There is no single essential pattern to which the history of communism conforms, though such a view also has its advocates and was heard in some of the discussions concerning the CPGB at Manchester.
To describe these different historiographical positions, I favour the terms of 'essentialists' and 'realists'. Essentialists seem to hold that it was orders from Stalin which were the predominant factor in determining communists' conduct and formal ideological positions. Thus they argue that the course of CPGB history is above all determined by the essential Stalinist nature of all things communist. This proposition seems to avoid: (i) any consideration of either the position before Lenin's incapacity or after Stalin's death; (ii) all serious research on the dynamics and internal politics of the Comintern and Profintern and their changing relation over time to the CPSU(B); (iii) all serious research on the internal politics of the CPSU(B). Realists, on the other hand, insist that events in British communism have to be examined in the light of the real events and people who made them. Parallel conflicts have been taking place in relation to American and Italian communism for some time. The emergence of a realist-essentialist debate here suggests that British communist historiography is also attracting the serious academic interest which the party's significance in British and Comintern history merits. In this article, I briefly set out some of the premises of the realist approach, with particular reference to the party's industrial activities.
I. The problem of intent
Essentialists question British communists' self-definition as revolutionaries because they doubt whether the CPGB leadership ever intended to make a revolution. Consequently, they question my own formulation of British communist trade union activists between 1933-45 as revolutionary pragmatists [1]. The same question, 'when is a revolutionary not a revolutionary?', pre-occupied the German SPD from 1896 and the Second International from 1899 in the form of the controversy over Eduard Bernstein's revisionism. This first revisionist controversy repays study by historians of British communism, particularly of the post-1945 period.
My response to the question, 'when they consistently behaved as reformists, how is it possible to describe British communists as revolutionary between 1933-45?' is to cite the aphorism they habitually invoked: revolution would come to Britain when life itself turned up a revolutionary situation, and they never doubted that life itself would present them with the opportunity to make one. In the meantime, communists played their part in preparing the groundwork, so that when the revolutionary situation appeared, they would be ready to take advantage of it. For British communists, preparations involved embedding themselves in the bowels of the proletariat, specifically in the trade union movement. Harry Pollitt and J R Campbell inculcated a clear vision of communist activists occupying the leadership of trade unions at all levels, from factory to national executive. But they also were clear that communists should provide the progressive, modern policies to enable unions to wage the economic struggle successfully.
As against this formulation, essentialists may argue on a teleological basis: 'Pollitt's and Campbell's policy was not really revolutionary, because the CPGB was not really committed to overthrowing the British state...'. In my view this argument is unsustainable and reveals a lack of familiarity with the two men's conduct and writing. Had the British state experienced a serious political crisis at any time between 1933 and 1945, Campbell and Pollitt would have immediately brought their political skill, strategic calculation and members' positions inside the trade union movement to bear upon the situation with the intention of producing a revolutionary result. But when life itself did not produce this mise en scène, because they were not voluntarists, they did not blame themselves or their strategy. They suffered no self-inflicted wounds when the Hunger Marches did not topple successive governments. Nor did they practise self-flagellation when the 1937 London bus strike ended in stalemate. For them, the situation was clear enough. Communists leading political and economic struggles should direct their leadership towards the achievement of material gains and also aim to strengthen the class's self-confidence and self-organisation. This usually entailed negotiating compromise and frequently also an orderly retreat. It rarely involved decisive victory, and never resulted in unconditional surrender from the other side.
II. The conduct of the daily economic struggle
I have argued that Pollitt's and Campbell's approach of revolutionary pragmatism was inherently contradictory, for it held trade union loyalism and rank-and-filism as coeval organising principles, but that the two men were well aware of this contradiction and made no attempt to resolve it. They had learned that the two conflicting principles could and did co-exist for most of the time when communist activists were waging economic struggle on a day-to-day basis in workplace bargaining, union negotiations and political lobbying. Pollitt and Campbell believed that the need to preserve a continuous and effective form of union organisation was as important as the need to inspire workers with the will to resist managerial prerogative and demand better wages and conditions.
I considered four examples of union organisation where communists played leading parts: Dagenham, 1933-45; Pressed Steel, Oxford, 1934-9; Siemens, Greenwich, 1933-9; the Aircraft Shop Stewards' National Council, 1934-7; and the London Busmen's Rank-and-File Movement, 1933-7. In each case, leftwing activists (including communists) adopted a strategy in workplace bargaining and local negotiations which consistently placed greater emphasis on rank-and-filism than union loyalism. In each case, the employers responded by eventually inflicting signal defeats on the union forces, perceiving that the union forces had gone beyond the conventional boundaries demarcating managerial and union prerogative.
In each of these examples, Pollitt and Campbell made no attempt to defend the strategy of the militants (including their own party activists). Instead, they acted to limit the damage done both to union organisation and their own members in the workplaces and union institutions. In any situation of economic conflict, there are, of course, differences of opinion amongst union leaders about how far a particular episode can be pushed before the employer(s) decide to retaliate by inflicting maximum damage on the union side. There is certainly no a priori correct way to win either military or economic warfare. But to have a reasonable chance of success, a leader does require an objective which is both limited and attainable with the forces at hand. Without these practicalities, any plan of action will fail.
Between 1933-45, many communist union activists acquired the skills requisite for making such calculations and leading successful economic struggle. Many others did not, remaining pure revolutionaries who were simply not interested in either conceiving or achieving limited practical goals at the workplace. Others still failed because for one reason or another they proved unable to develop the requisite tactical facility. Interestingly and not surprisingly, many communist union activists gained valuable experience from observing non-communist union officials at work on the ground. But others were attracted to communism by the example of outstanding party members who occupied pivotal positions in the workplace union structure. They learned to emulate these communist activists who understood the need to compromise and retreat and practised both successfully.
III. Unions as a vehicle of working-class emancipation and democratising the state
From 1932 the CPGB, guided by Pollitt and Campbell, stressed the importance of communists working inside trade unions. They did so on the basis of the fourth precept of revolutionary pragmatism (the others being life itself, union loyalism, and rank-and-filism): the importance of the working class organising within a united front. As Pollitt reminded TUC general secretary Walter Citrine in the Daily Worker on 7 March 1934:
The Communist Party fights for real trade unionism... The Communist Party does all in its power to strengthen the trade union branches, to recruit the unorganised and to develop powerful movements of the rank and file, which are able to conduct the fight against the employers and their allies...Because of the consistent policy of the Communist Party in the interests of the whole working class...the united front of the rank and file against the employing class is becoming stronger day by day.
By concentrating their members' energies on union activity, Pollitt and Campbell were certainly not behaving in either a reformist or an economist mode. In inter-war Britain, unions had two essential functions for socialist revolutionaries. First, many union activists and leaders were committed socialists who envisioned their unions playing an important role in stiffening the Labour Party's socialist resolve. Secondly, many trade unionists viewed the strengthening of unions as mass democratic organisations as an important bulwark not only against fascism, but also as a class weapon in the ongoing political conflict in Britain for democracy.
Accepted under duress, the establishment of a mass franchise in 1918 and 1928 had had a profound impact on the political establishment's perceptions of the political process and their own relation to the electorate. On the other hand, non-communist union leaders, notably Ernest Bevin, were alert to the union's levelling and emancipatory potential. The novel implications of universal suffrage were integral to their perceptions of the unions' role in the political process.
Pollitt and Campbell shared this common political culture with union leaders of the first rank, like Bevin, Jack Little, Ebby Edwards, Jack Tanner, Will Lawther, Julia Varley, Anne Godwin, and Bob Williams. Along with many foundation party members, formed by their experiences of the First World War, they viewed the CPGB as having a special role to play within British political conflict, and staked their own political futures upon it. One of the reasons for their conviction of the CPGB's unique importance was the empirical evidence that the USSR's existence constituted a leftward pressure on British politics, making the political establishment more responsive to organised working-class pressure.
However, they did not behave as if their communism set them apart from British workers. They felt perfectly at ease with the men and women on the TUC General Council and on trade union executives. Moreover, these men and women mostly reciprocated. They might not have liked the communists' politics, but they had no difficulty with most of their union activities. Bevin, unlike Citrine, was by no means a dogmatic anti-communist, and made regular statements about the Soviet Union needing to follow its own path to socialism as well as the importance for British trade unionism of having a culture of militancy at rank-and-file level. In May 1934 the Daily Worker quoted without comment a speech he made to the TGWU in Glasgow:
he warned the members that we were in this country gradually evolving to a system of state capitalism...he often felt he was sorry to say, that there was not the same fighting instinct in the younger men as there was in the older generation...He finished with a passionate plea for unity and the will to win, stating that although he had occasions at times to battle with the left-wingers, well, he did admit that many of them were good trade unionists.
Writing in the TGWU Record in August 1933, he observed:
in the case of Soviet Russia, who is endeavouring to work out a different economic system from that existing in this country, we have fought determinedly against intervention; we have sent deputations to the Government and assisted Russia to obtain export credits, and have done everything in our power to assist her, not withstanding the fact that we have often met with abuse and attack from the Russians themselves. We have done this because we believe that this great economic experiment may considerably influence the development of world planning and social change.
It is important to examine the relation between the CPGB and the Labour Party between 1933-45, and in particular the existence of substantial numbers of dual members, formally denied by both parties. I suspect that communists inside the Labour Party were rarely instructed by the party apparat what to do, and routinely relied on their individual judgements as the basis of their conduct. The same was true of their conduct of the economic struggle and union affairs. In this respect, there simply was no bolshevisation of the CPGB. Party members continued to behave much as they had before in their respective socialist groupings.
We also need to know more about the quality of branch life and factory cell life between 1933-45. It would seem that party activists were thinking consistently and in a directed fashion about what they should be doing as communists. They took their lead from the Daily Worker, Labour Monthly, Left Book Club selections, irregular party aggregate meetings, irregular meetings of their appropriate industrial/union fraction, and above all, perhaps, from a habitual conversations with other party activists (and non-party activists) attending the unending round of meetings of which a labour movement activist's life consisted. They were not, however, thinking of what they should be doing to push their factory into a revolutionary situation. In this sense, Pollitt and Campbell had steered the CPGB away from the dangerous shoals of syndicalism.
IV. The significance of the Second World War
The Second World War marked a watershed for the CPGB for several interconnecting reasons which I can only outline here.
At the start of the war, the Politburo's refusal to accept Pollitt's and Campbell's strategy of retaining, whilst trimming and tweaking, the war on two fronts position had a profound and lasting impact on union and Labour Party leaders. Hitherto, CPGB leaders had made substantial progress inside the labour movement towards being taken as their own people, and the Moscow connection was not notorious except for people on the right such as Citrine and Feather. After the dramatic change of line, the seeds of conditionality and qualification were sown in the minds of most union leaders. The impact was slow-burning and cumulative, but I believe it can be seen eventually in men and women as disparate as Jim Bowman, Jack Tanner, Sammy Watson and Anne Godwin. I believe that Pollitt and Campbell were convinced that Stalin and the Comintern would accept a trimming/tweaking fudge, and that this was vital for the party to maintain its credibility and influence inside the British labour movement. They entered the crucial Central Committee sessions of 2-3 October 1939 with every intention of carrying the meeting; and it is notable that it was Gallacher and Horner, also veterans who had experienced the vicissitudes of the Third Period, who sided with them.
Having completed this volte face, the CPGB quickly rowed back towards the 'war on two fronts' position. Pollitt and Campbell regained full credibility inside the party leadership, for in British conditions their strategic and tactical heads were simply irreplaceable. With Hitler's invasion of the USSR, they were swiftly restored to the leadership, and the CPGB formally resumed the position it had adopted at the beginning of the war. Many historians have perceived in this a slavish subordination of domestic political considerations to the higher end of saving the Soviet fatherland. However, the evidence shows that in reality there was a wide variety of responses from individual party activists, ranging from 100% commitment to the USSR war effort (e.g. Arthur Exell and Norman Brown in Oxford) to subordinating the needs of the USSR to militant principles (eg. D Llewellyn and others in South Wales). These variations were also reflected within the leadership.
For Pollitt and Campbell the primary aim was to expedite winning the war, for both the USSR and Britain. This meant countenancing strikes and go-slows when activists considered them essential to ventilate grievances. It also meant opposing attempts to fan militancy on rank-and-filist principles, as leftist groups like the RCP and its associates were doing, frequently with great success. Nowhere is this clearer than in the coal industry, where the evidence from Hugh Dalton's diary and the PRO suggests that the CPGB, notably Horner and Pollitt, were the decisive influences on the MFGB's strategy, and consequently the Labour Party's thinking. There was literally no one else combining sufficient seniority and knowledge with the same political will inside the PLP or the MFGB. It was the great merit of Ebby Edwards and Hugh Dalton, for the MFGB and the government respectively, to recognise Horner's abilities and to give him his head.
The USSR's role in defeating Germany had a profound impact on sections of the British people. The British did not experience at first hand either the Red Army itself or the aftermath of the war in central Europe, with the uprooting and resettlement of millions of people according with the changing boundaries of the USSR and its neighbours. Many British people conceived an affection, admiration and respect for Uncle Joe, the Red Army and the Russian people; and this sentimental attachment became a clear tactical consideration in successive British governments' attitude towards the cold war and the USSR. Its effect was to neutralise much of the propaganda emanating from the Catholic hierarchy, the ACTU, the TUC General Council and Transport House.
Although a beneficiary of these changed attitudes, for the CPGB the Soviet Union was also an albatross, fatefully limiting the party's political room for manoeuvre. This was also true of both the French and Italian communist parties, but in the British case the problems were largely self-imposed. With no split occurring in the trade union movement, this terrain was still largely accessible for communists to operate within, while British communists also had the opportunity to take seriously their Stalin-approved programme, The British Road to Socialism, and to build upon Stalin's statement to Morgan Phillips that a British transition to socialism was conceivable under the reigning monarch. In the exceptional political uncertainty which obtained both nationally and internationally between 1945-48, it is at least arguable that had the CPGB taken a determined decision to distance itself from the USSR, a transition to a linked but not politically dependent relationship could have been accomplished.
V. The CPGB in the cold war
This course was not taken. The Cominform's inaugural meeting in September 1947 produced no immediate changes in the CPGB's public positions, and it did not take up a clearly oppositional stance towards the Labour government until as late as1949-50. For many contemporary observers, the turning point was the September 1948 TUC, when the CPGB delegates' certainly adopted more militant positions than previously; but the unyielding hostility which characterised the party in 1949-50 is in my view not yet discernible.
The reasons for the shift to a full cold war mode of operation still need to be established. The Soviet Union's conduct of the cold war was certainly a significant factor, and the enthusiastic loyalty which party members both old and new felt towards the USSR was obviously important. Nevertheless, the situation was a complex one. Insofar as Stalin applied his mind to Britain, support for a peculiarly British road to socialism, emulating a sanitised model of people's democracies, remained strong. This path involved taking up a palpably revisionist position towards the state, burying any a priori requirement to seize state power or institute the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The development of this line of thought had, of course, been proceeding inside the CPGB leadership since at least June 1941. The May 1944 draft programme Britain for the People marked a shift from the previous insistence on the need to seize state power and emulate the soviet model. On the other hand, pure revolutionaries remained in the party who believed that a qualitative political change — though not necessarily a Leninist seizure of state power — was necessary before socialism could be achieved. Despite Stalin's approval, they never accepted the Bernsteinian spirit of Pollitt's 1947 Looking Ahead or the British Road to Socialism. Others still — Kerrigan, Zinkin, Carritt, Rust — were in the spiritual/emotional thrall of the USSR and everything the CPSU(B) did, while there were any number of positions in between.
Further research is likely to show that at the municipal and community level, party activists continued to make positive contributions: a radical, progressive, democratic aspect of CPGB life which has been insufficiently emphasised by historians. Particularly in the new towns and suburbs of south-east England, these activists played important roles in politicising, greening and socialising new working-class communities. In the same way, communist union activists continued to play a vital part in the definition of trade union culture and politics, not just in the suburban-industrial girdle around London but in the Midlands, the west of England, the south coast, Yorkshire and Lancashire. These aspects of the CPGB's history remain palpably under-researched and largely unacknowledged.
The CPGB and its union activists
Does revolutionary pragmatism, the term which I applied to communist union activists in the period 1933-45, have any relevance in the postwar period? I believe that it does. The principal change occurred in relation to the concept of life itself, which it was accepted was not now inevitably going to turn up a revolutionary situation and seizure of power, but rather some form of people's parliamentary democratic socialism. This, however, became a purely formal change, for with the onset of the cold war the leadership were clear that the advent of a revolutionary situation, whatever its consequences, was as far away as ever. The distinction between a people's parliamentary democratic socialism and a soviet Britain was therefore of no immediate consequence.
If we examine the substance of the party's political position in relation to the economic struggle between June 1941 and 1949-50, we can see that it does, in fact, contain a fifth precept, accepting a share of the responsibility for the maintenance of the state in reasonable order, which I will describe as democratic responsibility. When the party leadership made the transition to a cold war position, the democratic responsibility factor was silently dropped from its approach without full explanation and apparently without protest from any of the party's union activists. I think it is here that we will find the key to the CPGB's strategy in relation to the economic struggle and trade unions. Given the communist influence inside the trade union movement, its sudden disappearance also provides a key to examining the course of trade union/state relations.
Compared to its pre-war position, the CPGB could function more openly both inside unions and at the workplace. Not surprisingly, it was able to recruit more easily. My impression is that those it recruited at the workplace and through union activity were not dissimilar to comparable pre-war cohorts. They were attracted to the CPGB because it was leftwing, its approach was more intellectually coherent and rigorous than that of many Labour leftwing activists, and also because they admired and wanted to emulate the CP members who were usually exemplary lay and full-time officials. Longstanding problems with the retention of members were probably magnified post-1945, but were partly offset by the important new dimension of personal ambition to get on inside the trade union movement. There were regions in the AEU, areas in the NUM, the ETU of course, arguably also pockets of the TGWU even during the ban on communists' holding office, where communist membership or at least approval was necessary for winning union office, both lay and full-time. This remained the situation at least until 1956, and arguably into the 1970s.
To argue that the CPGB did not concentrate on revolutionary aims and did not seek to organise politically, qua party, at the workplace seems to me irrelevant, because at least since 1926 the CPGB had never seriously attempted to do either of these things. Instead, it is more relevant to note that many non-communist union activists retained a comparable profound belief in socialism as being qualitatively transformative. Their view of socialism was messianic, like so many of the pre-1914 SPD rank-and-file. In this sense, one can doubt the practicality of the CPGB's revolutionary intent, but not its bona fides.
The CPGB and the British trade union movement
With the war there occurred a decisive change in the balance of class forces which remained of relevance until the 1980s. The trade union movement was now accorded an integral and central place in the social order and this changed situation provided the rationale for the CPGB's adoption of democratic responsibility as a fifth precept in its approach to the economic struggle. The party leadership agreed with Bevin and Citrine that unions should accept a share of the responsibility for orderly industrial relations and tailored its policies accordingly. However, from 1949-50, the CPGB leadership stopped addressing the real world at the national political and economic level. Instead, it adopted a position which avoided dealing with the overall balance of class forces. Its tactic was to stress instead the micro level, at which there were still an abundant number of examples where workers at individual workplaces were badly paid, worked under poor conditions and treated arbitrarily. At the aggregative, general level, party pronouncements became dogmatic, stressing the kind of absolute verities of Capital Vol I about the inevitable collapse of capitalism for which Bernstein had attacked the SPD in the 1890s.
This evasion/avoidance strategy rendered party union activists incapable of thinking realistically about the situation of the trade union movement in British society. Although they could still assess realistically the situation in a single workplace, moving beyond the micro, cabbage-patch horizon became problematic. The absence of democratic responsibility from the precepts required of a communist trade unionist effectively stifled any open and productive thinking about the situation of trade unions. A talented ideologue with Campbell's experience and finesse could deftly manoeuvre around the dogma when dealing with topical issues such as automation. But many, if not most, party union activists were content to follow a political lead adhering very closely to a view of British capitalism in which the organised working class had no power and therefore could not be called upon to exercise any responsibility. They were content to do so because most of them were rarely called upon themselves to be responsible beyond the workplace. At the workplace level, there has been too little detailed research to adequately describe what party shop stewards and convenors were doing, beyond observing that the four precepts of revolutionary pragmatism were clearly observable in their behaviour.
The politically vexed question of unofficial strikes and party activists' attitude towards them is interesting. To suggest that any party shop steward or convenor who did not positively encourage unofficial strikes was class collaborationist is either syndicalist or disingenuous. A speculative conclusion might be that party members were not generally inciters of unofficial action, though even the most conservative communist would not always rule out such action, while from the 1960s concerns about being outflanked by trotskyists would obvious have pulled in the same direction.
The effect of the disappearance of democratic responsibility from revolutionary pragmatism is notable. The political situation required that all union activists understand and observe the importance of acting responsibly, in the interests of the working class as a whole and in order to safeguard its historically unprecedented position of power and influence. There were certainly communist activists who understood the need to operate with this sense of responsibility, notably those in the NUM dealing with a non-capitalist National Coal Board, or those who had developed a non-syndicalist perspective of collective bargaining from negotiating alongside outstanding union officials and empirical observation of the vicissitudes of economic struggle. Examples of the latter are the engineering union activists Les Ambrose and Dick Etheridge.
In this connection, the contrast between former communists Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon is striking. Jones had probably evolved his own sense of the need for democratic responsibility, based on his own acute powers of observation and analysis, independently of the party and largely isolated from contact with socialist thinking going on at the time. His close relations with the party during the war would have been reinforced by the party leadership's own adoption of democratic responsibility, and his wartime experiences as a TGWU district officer in Coventry were evidently formative in this respect. Bill Wedderburn, who served with Jones on the Bullock Commission, was impressed with Jones's frequent recollection of Joint Production Committees. Scanlon, however, remained a strong advocate of laissez faire industrial relations, in stark contrast to the positive statutory framework for trade unionists at the workplace advocated by Johnnie Campbell, Jack Tanner and communists in the AEU between 1942-7.
VI. Closing thoughts
The impact of 1956 on the CPGB's influence in the British trade union movement has yet to be fully assessed. One clear piece of evidence is the adoption of a 'broad left' approach to the pursuit of full-time and lay positions inside unions and at the workplace. Already adopted by many party activists in the pre-1939 period, this in effect was a continuation of earlier pre-1920 practices. This overt, newly reformulated 'broad left' approach was also in accord with the real united front of revolutionary pragmatism. There is evidence for thinking that on the ground 1956 made little difference on the recruitment and retention of members. Union activists were mostly concerned with workplace and institutional union matters, and in these areas, the impact of the CPSU 20th Congress and Hungary was not great. After all, why should young toolmakers in Southall, Clydebank or Dagenham be more concerned with Budapest than his AEU District Committee? On the other hand, at a national political level, the impact was critical and long-lasting. Woodrow Wyatt's decision to broadcast about communist influence in trade unions created a very strong impression in Westminster. It also increased the turnout dramatically in the 1956 AEU Presidential elections. Heightened Conservative interest in trade union matters must also be traceable in part to their own partisan feelings about Hungary. Communist industrial policy in this neglected period is just one crucial area for future research.
