COMMUNIST HISTORY
NETWORK NEWSLETTER
No 15, AUTUMN 2003

Introduction

Welcome to issue 15 of the Newsletter. The Newsletter continues to be made available in three formats: a print-version; an e-version (Word PC file attachment); and a web-version. The deadline for submissions to issue 16 is 30 March 2004, and contributions are welcomed.

Kevin Morgan
Richard Cross

Editors CHNN
Department of Government
University of Manchester
Manchester
United Kingdom
M13 9PL
http://les1.man.ac.uk/chnn

Contents

Editors' introduction

Announcements

• Reds! — CPGB History Exhibition
• ICBH CPGB Historiography Seminar transcript

Conference Announcement

• Communist Party of Great Britain Day Conference, 21 February 2004

Thesis Report

• The Communist Party of Great Britain and the 'collapse of socialism': the CPGB, 1977-1991, Richard Cross

Reviews

• James R. Barrett, W Z Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism, reviewed by Nina Fishman
• John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan and Alan Campbell (eds), Party People, Communist Lives – Explorations in Biography, reviewed by Steve Parsons
• Andy Croft and Adrian Mitchell (eds), Red Sky at night: an Anthology of British Socialist Poetry, reviewed by Charles Hobday
• Andy Croft, Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler, reviewed by Philip Bounds
• Faking Real Existing Socialism: some thoughts on Good Bye Lenin!, by Andrew Flinn
• John Callaghan, Cold War, Crisis and Conflict: The CPGB 1951-68, reviewed by David Childs
• Apollon Davidson, Irina Filatova, Valentin Gorodnov and Sheridan Johns, (eds), South Africa and the Communist International: A Documentary History, reviewed by Kevin Morgan

Announcements

REDS! — CPGB HISTORY EXHIBITION: A new temporary exhibition at the People's History Museum, Manchester offers a combined visual and audio history of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The exhibition includes 'striking banners, cartoons, posters and photographs from the museum's collections, including pieces that have never previously been displayed'. Visitors also have the opportunity to listen to oral testimony from CPGB members gathered as part of the CPGB Biographical Project at the University of Manchester. A number of tie-in events have been organised, including (on the first Friday of the month) a 'Bluffer's guide' tour, and in January 2004 a parallel photographic and archival display at the John Rylands University of Manchester Library. A day conference on the CPGB takes place on Saturday 21 February 2004 (see below). Reds! The Story of the Communist Party of Great Britain continues until 25 April 2004. For further information, including opening times, contact: People History Museum, The Pump House, Bridge Street, Manchester M3 3ER; tel 0161 839 6061; www.peopleshistorymuseum.org.uk.

ICBH CPGB HISTORIOGRAPHY SEMINAR TRANSCRIPT: The complete annotated transcript of the February 2002 ICBH seminar 'The Historiography of the Communist Party of Great Britain' (see CHNN No 11) is now available from the Institute of Contemporary British History. Edited by Harriet Jones, the transcript has been produced in three formats. Print and CD-ROM versions are available for purchase, while a .pdf version is freely accessible on-line. Full details are available from the IHR Bookshop, tel 020 7862 8780; email ihrpub@sas.ac.uk, and from the ICBH website at: http://icbh.ac.uk/icbh/witness/cpgb/index.html

Conference Announcement

Location	10.00-3.00	Mechanics Institute, 103 Princess St, Major St entrance, Manchester M1 6DD
	3.30-5.30	People's History Museum Pump House, Bridge St, Manchester M3 3ER

10.00-10.15	Mick Mansfield, People's History Museum Director opens conference
10.15-11.30	Gavin Bowd, University of St Andrews, 'Communist Christ: the passion of Allan Eaglesham'
	Andy Croft, poet and biographer, 'The jellyfish in the kettle: writers and communism'
11.30-11.45	Coffee
11.45-1.00	Kevin Morgan, University of Manchester, 'A Labour leader and the communists: George Lansbury and the Herald in the 1920s'
	Speaker tbc
1.00-2.00	Lunch
2.00-3.15	Nina Fishman, University of Westminster, 'Arthur Horner: communist trade unionist, 1920-1959'
	John Callaghan, University of Wolverhampton, 'Capturing the Labour Party? The CPGB 1948-68'
3.30-5.30	Tea, coffee and biscuits at the People's History Museum and an opportunity to see Reds! The story of the Communist Party of Great Britain

Contact: Kate Chatfield, tel 0161 839 6061, or Lynda Jackson, tel 0161 228 7212.

Cost and payment: £10 (£7 concessions) includes, morning tea and coffee, sandwich lunch, afternoon tea and coffee at the museum, all speakers and museum visit. Cheques should be made payable to National Museum of Labour History and sent FAO Kate Chatfield to People's History Museum, The Pump House, Bridge Street, Manchester, M3 3ER.

Thesis Report

The CPGB and the 'collapse of socialism', 1977-1991

This PhD thesis — 'The Communist Party of Great Britain and the "collapse of socialism": the CPGB, 1977-1991' — was successfully completed at the University of Manchester in 2003.

This thesis examines the evolution of what became a terminal decline in the fortunes of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), as it struggled to respond to the threats posed by a compound 'triple crisis', which, from the late 1970s onwards, began to threaten the domestic left and labour movement; the continental European communist movement; and the system of 'actually existing socialism' in the eastern bloc.

The thesis combines a political history of the CPGB in its final decades with a study of the activities with which its members were engaged in the context of their organisation's deepening malaise. In particular, it scrutinises the work of the CPGB's industrial activists within the trade union movement, and also the different campaigning and ideological initiatives that party members threw their energies behind as the party itself unravelled. The impact that divisions within the party had on the political purchase of the CPGB and its members is a recurrent theme of this section of the work. A study of the North West District of the CPGB explores how far the institutions and cultures of the party affected the choices that dissatisfied members were able to make as the party's crisis developed. In its conclusions, the thesis critiques existing explanations for the CPGB's demise, rejecting both monocasual and determinist accounts of the CPGB's failure, and urging an appreciation of just how complex the tensions between the institution of the party and the agency of its members became as the CPGB disintegrated.

The year 1977 offers an effective starting point for a study of the unwinding of the British Communist Party for a number of reasons. In many respects, the year was the centre of a brief political interregnum for the British left — poised between the peak of the left's advance between 1968-1974 and the arrival of Thatcherism and the 'triumph' of the neo-liberal right after 1979. In 1977, traditional British 'labourism' appeared to be stalling, but the position of the British left and its labour allies did not yet appear to be in jeopardy. For the CPGB itself, 1977 was the year that the party redrafted The British Road to Socialism — accepting amendments to the party's programme which expressed the rising hopes of both party 'reformers' and party 'traditionalists' that the 'advances' of the early 1970s could be reflected in consolidation and growth in the 1980s, if the party oriented its work in the 'correct' way. In 1977, there was no disguising the political disagreements which divided CPGB members — but for the party majority those conflicts remained either latent or manageable, kept in check by the shared experience of the left's 'forward march', and by a collective belief in the political agency of the Communist Party. Large scale public events organised by the party in that year, most notably the 'People's Jubilee' celebrations at Alexandra Palace in June, help to maintain the party's sense of its own significance and political potential.

The party's sense of its own worth had risen considerably in the early 1970s. During that time, British communists active in industry had been carried along in the upsurge of workplace unrest which characterised the industrial relations environment of the period. In the field of intellectual and ideological work, British communists had worked, with some success, to rehabilitate the reputation of the CPGB as a 'generator of ideas', fluent in the politics of Eurocommunism and feminism, and aware of many of the key issues now demanding responses from the left. Yet a critical problem facing the CPGB was that these different elements of the party's work did not automatically translate into a coherent political agenda. In particular, the advances secured in the area of industrial politics and those engineered in the field of intellectual work appeared increasingly disjointed. Communist industrial militants rallying to bring down the Social Contract, secure the return of 'free collective bargaining', and win Labour to a programme of 'genuine' alliance with the unions did not appear to share the same political agenda as party theorists organising the Communist Universities and immersing themsleves in the samizdat culture of an intra-left debate which crossed party lines. To some in the CPGB, it became starkly apparent that building on the party's advances in the intellectual and the industrial arena now required policies that were in sharp conflict.

After 1979 the ideological, organisational and strategic coherence of the CPGB began to diminish, with both the party's 'traditionalist' and 'reformist' wings themselves becoming less stable coalitions. Alongside plunging membership figures, the party found that its influence was on the wane, and that increasingly bitter internal battles were draining the CPGB's resources still further. Until the early 1980s a 'tentative evolution' in party policy held the CPGB together – change was evident enough to encourage those committed to a programme of party reform, yet limited enough to reassure party members of a more orthodox hue. Inevitably, however, the consensus collapsed under multiple pressures and the party fragmented.

A chapter on the domestic political history of the party documents the unfolding inner-conflict after 1977, scrutinising the schism between the Executive Committee and the Morning Star; studying the differing perceptions of party members of the role played by 'factionalism' in the party's ills; examining the impact of the concerted disciplinary campaign undertaken by party leaders; and exploring the political and procedural controversies that accompanied the party's endgame, and the CPGB's 'transformation' into the 'post-communist' Democratic Left in 1991. Combining the oral testimony of party members with material from the official party archives, the study challenges existing typologies of political division within the party during this period; questions some of the persistent 'counter-factuals' of the party's demise; and concludes with a discussion of some key distinctions between the institution of the party and the wider culture of its members, which informs the remainder of the work.

The following chapter assesses the significance of developments within western and eastern european communism in explaining the division and decline of the British CP. The importance afforded to 'international solidarity' work had, by the late 1970s, become another of the lines of cleavage around which CPGB members had become separated. For many 'traditionalist' members, identification with the eastern bloc and of 'Sovietism' remained definitional to their identity as Communist Party members. Work in organisations such as British-Soviet Friendship Society remained a vital component of communist political work up until the late 1980s. Such members could immerse themselves in the publishing culture supported by the party bookshop Collets — taking titles like GDR Today, Soviet Weekly and other state-sanctioned eastern bloc titles, and the pamphlets of the Novosti 'English Language' Soviet publishing house. Such members could also involve themselves with 'pro-Soviet' campaigning organisation in the West — prioritising work on disarmament issues, for example, through the World Peace Council and retaining a critical distance from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

For those party members enthused by the potential of Eurocommunism, their principal reference points were on the west european side of the Iron Curtain — such members tended to see the work of the 'official' 'solidarity' organisations as either irrelevant or actually harmful to their own political project. Indeed, many sought actively to reduce still further the residual iconography of Sovietism in the culture of the British party. Amongst party 'reformers', it was not until the era of glasnost and perestroika that a specifically Soviet 'culturalism' was again re-appropriated — with very different intent — in the 'bolshevik chic' design and marketing work of Marxism Today. In many respects, the interest that CPGB 'reformers' and 'traditionalists' expressed in the communist movements of Europe, and the political work in the which they engaged, had separated — existing in parallel and held together, however loosely, only by the CPGB leadership's exercises in compromise and management. However, despite general secretary Gordon McLennan's efforts to eschew use of the term, it became all but impossible to prevent existing divisions within the British party from hardening over the question of continental 'Eurocommunism'.

And yet, the ability of the CPGB to emulate the strategies of other west european communist parties (had the party been able to unite behind such a course of action — be it to pursue the 'transformism' of the Italian PCI; the retreat into 'traditionalism' of the French PCF; or to match the ideological 'isolationism' of the Portuguese PCP) was restricted for a whole number of interlocking reasons. Whatever view the British party were to take of the Eurocommunist 'option' — the construction of a counter-hegemonic political and cultural coalition, able to win participation in governmental partnerships through the forging of new alliances and the extension of its programme — it was scarcely an 'option' open to the CPGB. In 1975, the British communist party comprised less than 30,000 members. The CPGB had no significant electoral constituency with which to bargain, and no trade union confederation to mobilise in support of its efforts. The party had no MPs and a bare handful of councillors. The Labour Party's dominance of the left was reinforced by the absence of a proportional voting system that might better reflect the interests of minor parties — but there was anyway no reciprocity for the CPGB's appeals for 'Communist-Labour Unity'. The CPGB's resource base was small, and the cultural resonance of the party was, in mass terms, minimal. The absence of a credible 'European option' for a 'rejuvinated CPGB' was in itself a stimulant to the inner-party crisis — as the political fragmentation of the party intensified in conditions from which there appeared to be 'no exit'. In many respects, in comes as no surprise that the advocates of Eurocommunism within the British party themselves subsequently divided — as its supporters differed, in the light of the sclerosis and decline of continental Eurocommunism, on the consequences of the evident 'unsuitability' of the CPGB for a British emulation of its perspectives.

The chapter also explores the response of party members to Soviet 'action' in Afghanistan in 1979 ('invasion' to some members, 'fraternal intervention' to others), and to the rise of Solidarnosc in Poland in 1980-81, scrutinising the lines of division caused by such events and assesssing their domestic impact on the fortunes of the CPGB. The study then focuses on the significance, for British communists, of the rise of Soviet reform under Gorbachov. Unlike the party's experiences with Eurocommunism, Soviet reform initially served to reduce CPGB disunity, as — to the evident relief of the McLennan leadership — both 'traditionalists' and 'reformers' championed Gorbachov's programme as their own. Inevitably, as threats to CPSU monopoly, communist social and civic hegemony and the integrity of the USSR multiplied, opinion within the party polarised once again. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the responses of party members to the 'revelations' of the existence (until 1979, in the British CP's case) of 'Moscow Gold', and of Stalin's 'involvement' in the drafting of the original British Road to Socialism, which gained wide publicity in the weeks before the CPGB's demise. Here again, it discovers political divisions far more complex than any bi-polar model of the party could hope to accommodate.

The study then turns to examine the work of party members in a number of key fields, beginning with an assessment of the CPGB's presence in industry. It seems clear that the evident industrial power which the CPGB exercised in the early 1970s was heavily contingent in nature. Party industrial strength was underpinned by such factors as the bargaining strength of shop stewards, the phenomenon of 'wage drift' and other expressions of a 'positive balance of class forces' on the industrial front. The CPGB's industrial influence was in a number of important senses a reflection of wider trade union strength rather than a catalyst for it. Even at the height of the new militancy, opinion within the CPGB had remained divided over its political content and trajectory, with increasingly critical voices challenging the existing consensus that the combativity of labour was innately and instinctively 'pro-socialist'. Disagreements had grown too about the strategies which guided the work of the party's own industrial militants.

The organisation and operation of communist activists within industry did, in any case, not afford the CPGB an unproblematic workplace 'presence'. The relationship between the CPGB's industrial militants and the institutions of the party could prove awkward for both — a factor masked, to a degree, in periods of political buoyancy, yet revealed more clearly in times of contraction and defeat. Communists active in industry were responsive to numerous other conditioning influences besides the infrequent 'calls to action' voiced by party officials, and these often exerted a more powerful impact on their decision making. If Industrial Department officials sometimes grumbled that members in the workplace often gave priority to union and economic questions to the near-exclusion of 'socialist agitation', they were at the same time aware of an uncomfortable truth obscured by such complaints: that this 'ideological abstention' was often an important explanation for the relative success of the party's cadre — communist militants gained support, and won union elections, primarily because of their industrial practice, and not their wider political affiliations. Communist officials could win support from trade unionists unaware of, indifferent about or opposed to, the perspectives of the British Road to Socialism. Some analysts have argued that the existing tendency towards semi-detachment on the part of the party's workplace activists was exacerbated by the collusion of CPGB leaders with the narrow 'economism' and acceptance of the effective autonomy of so many of its trade union militants. And yet, the assertion that more rigorous 'democratic centralist' command methods might have counteracted the tendency for communists to become immersed in the routines of trade unionism ignores an important consideration: had the party's industrial cadre been directed more forcefully from CPGB headquarters their credibility amongst fellow trade unionists could have been diminished, suspicion about their 'political agendas' intensified, and their ability to work as organisers undermined. The swift collapse of the CPGB's factory branch network after 1977 demonstrates its brittle and shallow nature, and confirms that the party's industrial militants were too weak to 'hold the line' inside a trade union movement in disorderly retreat.

In studying the interplay between party decline and party activity between 1977 and 1991, one chapter explores the work of British communists in four different political settings during that period. It examines the electoral strategies of the CPGB, documenting the contraction of the party's (always marginal) vote, assessing the debate within the party that this intensified, and scrutinising the party's inability to convincingly define its electoral objectives. The chapter then assesses the intellectual and theoretical work of the CPGB in this period, characterising the renaissance in the political reputation of the party — its costs and consequences, as well as its benefits — and the dilemmas that this confronted the party with. Next, a discussion of the impact of feminism on the development of party thinking in this period allows a further exploration of the relationship between the institution and the wider culture of the party in both enabling and containing the work of its members, in the context of party decline. Finally, a study of the events organised under the banner of the party, and of campaigns outside the party supported by its members, makes clear the capabilities (and failings) of British communists in the years between 1977 and 1991.

By the early 1980s, a number of new forums for political debate had opened up inside the CPGB, providing 'reformist' voices within the party an important outlet. The enthusiasm with which many party 'reformers' made use of this of this new environment was matched by the strong sense of unease with which others in the party viewed this process — more naturally suspicious of encroaching 'revisionism' than excited by the prospect of political 'innovation'. What became vital to sustaining this new culture was the tolerance afforded it by party leaders, willing to excuse infractions of party norms in recognition that the new intellectual climate provided evidence of a 'dynamism' so transparently lacking in many other aspects of the party's work. The party hierarchy's tolerance of this new 'iconoclastic' culture did, it was evident, have clear limits — a sense of 'conservatism' which the more impatient 'reformers' disregarded at their cost. This process clashed with, and was partly held in check by, the formal institutions of the party but began to exercise influence over the orientation of the CPGB's work despite this.

At the same time, such forums exposed the growing rifts within the party about the CPGB's political role and, in most instances, engaged the interest of only an enthused minority of party members. This was the central paradox of a showcase event like the June 1983 Marx with Sparx party festival — for its organisers such public debates cast the CPGB as an organisation confident in its politics and prepared to confront the challenges facing the left in a way that might somehow offset the party's worsening organisational decline. For abstainers and critics, it confirmed the complicity of party leaders in the unravelling of the political and organisational integrity of the CPGB.

The theoretical and intellectual work championed by Marxism Today, under the stewardship of Martin Jacques, was arguably the most prominent and conspicuous political project with which the CPGB was associated in the 1980s. Jacques' repositioning of the party's political review and determination to attract new non-party writers and readers was supported (and financially underwritten) by the Executive Committee and the wider party. Jacques and his supporters strove to revive the magazine as an 'intellectual hot-house' in which the left's own project might be rethought from first principles. The degree to which Marxism Today and its public forums 'set the agenda' for the process of self-scrutiny in which much of the British left became engaged as the 1980s progressed can be overstated (and sometimes is overplayed by its supporters), but there can be little doubt that under Jacques' editorship MT both matched and responded to the mood of an growing section of the British left in this period. Yet for party 'traditionalists' Marxism Today's 'success' came at the cost of 'sacrificing its Marxism' and providing 'intellectual cover' to those elements of the left overwhelmed by pessimism and prepared to set abandon principle. Moreover, Marxism Today's public profile was increasingly separate from that of the CPGB, and the rise in the reputation of the magazine was not accompanied by a parallel rehabilitation of the CPGB. Importantly, Marxism Today's project was the province of academics, journalists, policy advisors and political and economic pundits. If — leaving aside the question of the CPGB's continuing financial subsidy — Marxism Today seemed less and less something that the party was collectively engaged with, then the reverse was also true.

The reaction of CPGB members to the development of the party's crisis is scrutinised in a chapter focusing on the North West District of the party. Using Hirschman's 'exit, voice and loyalty' model, the chapter explores the decisions of party activists and officials confronted by the experience of sclerosis, division and conflict within the party district.[1] Hirschman argues that as members of an organisation (be they customers or supporters) become aware of the onset of decline within 'their' organisation they can choose to respond in one of two ways — either by severing their connection with it (that is, by opting to exit), or by remaining a member but articulating their dissatisfaction with the decline (that is, by making use of voice). For Hirschman, the key factor conditioning the response of members is the influence of loyalty — the strength of the sense of connection, affiliation or attachment that an individual feels to the organisation now experiencing difficulties. The focus on the phenomenon of loyalty, and its constraining influence on the deliberations of party members, is particularly apposite in the case of the CPGB. The chapter assesses the value of Hirschman's model in explaining the deliberations of CPGB members in the district, and concludes that it affords a useful explanatory framework. Gaps and imbalances in Hirschman's model are also confirmed — demonstrating shortcomings in the paradigm, and also indicating some of the ways in which the identity of British communist party members might be distinguished from that of other party political actors responding to the onset of decline. This distinctiveness can be seen as a consequence of the nature of communist party organisation and culture and of the impact that organisational decline had on the coherence and integrity of the CPGB — both as an institution and as an enabler of its members' political activity. Although Hirschman cannot account for the peculiarities of Communist Party membership, the gaps in his model allow some important aspects of those peculiarities to be revealed.

From the late 1970s onwards, the number of dissident internal currents (clandestine and open) and 'breakaway' organisations to emerge from within the CPGB's ranks, grew sharply. As the decline accelerated, and growing internal division and conflict rose to threaten the organisation, party leaders — who themselves were far from a united force — instituted a far-reaching review of party politics, strategy (and, later of party organisation) that they hoped might reconfigure the CPGB to better engage with the shifting political, economic and social contexts of the 1980s. The CPGB's own 'policy review' process both reflected and fed into the wider strategic debates increasingly pre-occupying the British left and labour movements, struggling in the hostile environment of mature Thatcherism. The collapse of the Berlin Wall and then, in quick succession, of the states of the Eastern Bloc played a critical role in convincing the party leadership majority that the CPGB (whose future was already in question because of pressing domestic considerations) had to be transformed into a post-communist organisation, which would attempt to take forward the 'most positive elements' of the British communist tradition but set aside the defining principles of democratic-centralism, traditional marxism and the vanguard party form. Those convinced of the efficacy of traditional communist prescriptions saw, in the leadership's support for the CPGB's 'self-liquidation', validation of their insistence that the 'revisionist' perspectives they had opposed since the 1970s would put the party in mortal threat.

In the context of relentless party decline, members of the CPGB proved no longer capable of acting in concert behind shared perspectives. The inability of any of the currents within the party to discover, through their own efforts, sufficient political purchase to provide an convincing domestic role for a British communist party became a decisive factor in the CPGB's dissolution.

Richard Cross

1.	Albert O Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Reponses to Decline in Organizations and States, (Cambridge, Mass: Havard University Press, 1970). [ Back ]

Reviews

W Z Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism

James R. Barrett, W Z Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism, University of Illinois Press, 1999. 357 pp. (including 10 pages of illustrations and index). ISBN 0-252-02046-4.

This biography stands as a shining example for scholars who are endeavouring to find a pathway through the battleground of communist historiography. Barrett's was the second biography of Foster to appear in the 1990s, Edward P Johanningsmeier's biography was published some five years earlier. Barrett explains with commendable tact and scholarly collegiality that his own approach differs from Johanningsmeier's 'excellent biography' and that he therefore feels the appearance of two major biographies in this short space of time to be justified. '[O]ur interpretations differ, but I have chosen not to frame my own story... as a rebuttal... Any thoughtful reader of the two works will see important differences in method as well as interpretation.' (pxi)

In fact, Barrett has approached Foster from a vantage point which is not only different from Johanningsmeier, but also some considerable distance from those, such as Theodore Draper and Harvey Klehr, who seek to explain the significance of the CPUSA leadership's political lives and the party's national trajectory as solely due to orders from Moscow. Barrett states on pages 6-7 where he stands:

I have tried to keep both the indigenous domestic and the international perspectives in mind while reconstructing and interpreting William Z. Foster's career... We ignore either at the risk of misunderstanding Foster's worldview and the constraints within which he and other Communists thought and worked. Those activists associated most closely with Foster were proletarian veterans... Many of them emerged from the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] or the industrially oriented left wing of the Socialist Party...Their commitment to such 'practical' organizing shaped the Party, which was in this sense more the product of social conflict in the United States than most of the more conservative historians of American communism have been prepared to acknowledge. There was, of course, another dimension of American communism and Foster's own political persona... For those of us who have never experienced such a transformation [of Russia after 1917], it is difficult to understand such people as Foster. They were won over not simply to Soviet authority but also to the Soviet ideal and to a model of disciplined Bolshevik politics they believed was the key to human liberation... They were not naive. They understood that in surrendering to Party discipline, they were surrendering a degree of individual initiative and that in deferring to the Soviets, they were often subverting their own better judgements... [T]he makings of their ultimate failure also lay in this model of politics.

Some of the more partisan participants on both sides of the historiographical divide may have been tempted to conclude that Barrett was simply adopting the easy expedient of the media res. But, as far as this reviewer is concerned, such a conclusion is not only superficial, but also disingenuously misplaced. Barrett never evades the issue of the influence of the international communist movement on Foster or the CPUSA. On the contrary, he provides the reader not only with a meticulously documented account of the way in which Comintern and CPUSA personnel interacted, but also with a running commentary on the subjective, psychological impact of the Russian Revolution and the continuing existence of this self-proclaimed workers' state on US communists. He has also provided a rich account of the pre-1917 world in which Foster was formed and of the Great Steel Strike which Foster led in 1919, probably his most creative and historic contribution to the US labour movement, which took place at a time when Foster knew almost nothing concrete about bolshevism.

In two respects, there is no comparable figure to Foster in the British Communist Party. Firstly, no one in the leadership who was a serious syndicalist had developed outstanding leadership qualities in the heat of intense intellectual conflict. Tom Mann's critical experiences as a union leader had been in 1889-1911, whilst Foster's began in 1912 and continued up to 1924-5. And though Mann was an enthusiastic participant in party trade union and unemployed activity, he was never amongst the decision-taking leadership. Neither did the clutch of SLP (Socialist Labour Party) founder members, including MacManus and Murphy, have any decisive impact on communist activity. The leaders of the CPGB operating in parallel to Foster were a decade, a critical half a generation, younger, and reached political maturity in the crucible of World War I.

Secondly, unlike the CPGB, Foster's more or less continuous period in the CPUSA leadership was punctuated by periods of intense internal conflict in which he was a serious player. These were the points at which the question of Comintern influence was critical, for instance. when Foster opposed the full-blooded application of the 'dual union' strategy in 1929, but then trimmed loyally to it when its partisans won out. (Barrett provides a full account, pp160-1.) By contrast, in Britain the winners in the parallel dispute were Harry Pollitt and J R Campbell, who successfully argued the 'class unity' case for not splitting the unions. In Britain, the 'young Turks', enthusiasts for the extreme Third Period line, captured the party leadership for a mere eighteen months, and by the spring of 1930, the dismal results they had notched up, coupled with the Comintern's own more pragmatic scuttle centrewards, combined to reinforce Pollitt's and Campbell's position and enable them to retake the leadership.

Readers should draw well back, however, from drawing quick conclusions from these differences. For example, as Barrett points out, Foster's own initial anti-splitting position was inadequate to deal with the empirical realities of an institutionally rigid organised labour movement in the US. The new unionism of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), emerging in the 1930s, was a vital innovation, showing that when the old unions were outflanked for practical (rather than dogmatic political) reasons, the results could be spectacularly successful. Equally, one could plausibly interpret Ernest Bevin's moves in 1920 to create the Transport and General Workers' Union in Britain as a comparable potent challenge to the old unions. Bevin's conception of the TGWU was based to an important extent on the syndicalist visions of the 1890s, honed in the testing bed of the 1914-18 war. Bevin and Foster were both born in 1881. Arguably, Bevin was the more creative and less rigid. Or, to put it counterfactually, if Foster had not got waylaid by the intoxicating political vision of the Russian Revolution, might he have constructed the American equivalent of the TGWU, thus obviating the need for the CIO?

Foster was long-lived amongst his cohort of working class leaders, dying at aged eighty in 1961 in Moscow. Bevin had died in 1950; Pollitt, nine years younger, died in 1960. Moreover, W Z Foster remained vigorously politically active virtually to the end of his life. This record, as Barrett points out, is evidence of Foster's successful self-discipline, commitment and iron determination. Having suffered a breakdown in health, including a serious stroke, in 1932, he faced up to the need to change the pattern of his political activity. Unable to undertake the physical and psychological strain of agitation and outdoor class conflict, he turned to writing. For the rest of his life, he produced a steady stream of articles, pamphlets and books for the CPUSA. These included two autobiographical books, From Bryan to Stalin, 1937, and Pages from a Workers' Life, 1939. This is an impressive intellectual and political achievement for any person. It is particularly impressive because Foster, came to sustained writing in mid-life. He was a serious auto-didact; and his insatiable thirst for knowledge and commitment to amassing it clearly underpinned his written output. He was able to turn his hand to sustained writing because of his early habits of voracious reading; but he also had the temerity to digest, assimilate and recycle the knowledge he had gleaned in the service of his own political ends.

Barrett devotes ample space to considering Foster's contribution and the CPUSA's course after his stroke and Browder's victory in the internecine political conflict had sidelined him. Having kept the reader informed about events between 1935-45, Barrett could then pick up the threads deftly and seamlessly in 1945 when Foster resumed the leadership. The treatment and judgement of Browderism were particularly perceptive I thought, and greatly add to the book's value for scholars. His description of the changing relationship of the two men over time was fascinating.

I had three minor caveats about the biography. Firstly, it would have been useful to have had a bibliography per se. I find the task of looking for the first time a source has appeared to be both labour-intensive and boring. Secondly, it would have been very helpful for Barrett to provide the reader with a short appendix which gave an account of the other full-length biographies and shorter comments and articles written about Foster. I noticed two biographies, by Joseph North in 1955 and A Zipser in 1981 as well as what was apparently a posthumous collection of Foster's biographical comment edited by Zipser in 1979.

Thirdly, I felt the period between 1935-1939 was the least well-served about Foster's life. I wanted to know much more about what (if any) personal contact Foster maintained with the union activists in the field, many of whom were engaged in pioneering work for the CIO. Did party members come to Foster for advice? Did Foster make any attempt to keep in contact with activists who had left the party but who were nevertheless playing important roles in union work? Having made such a significant contribution to industrial conflict in the 1920s, I wondered whether this aspect of his life had indeed abruptly ceased when he was marginalised from the CPUSA leadership. Surely he maintained a close interest in industrial conflict?

I also had a further, more general observation. Though I can see the logic in Barrett's description of the fate of the US radical movement as 'a tragedy', I do not agree with his conclusion that it was a tragedy of Foster's and the CPUSA's own making (p8). It is, of course, the case that one can argue, and argue compellingly, that the CPUSA behaved in a dogmatic, sectarian fashion and by so doing damaged the forces of the US radical left and trade union movement. But whilst these factors were undoubtedly a contributory factor, they were hardly the sole factor. It seems to me that three far more important factors are: i) the behaviour of US industrial capitalists towards the organised labour movement; ii) the attitude of the US political establishment towards the organised labour movement; and iii) the failure of any social democratic movement to develop in the USA.

The CPGB leadership could adopt what I have described as a strategy of 'revolutionary pragmatism' precisely because leading British capitalists decided after 1926 that they would treat unions as equals. Moreover, their decision was taken partly as the result of pressure applied by the political establishment, who were equally anxious to avoid a repeat of the stand-off of 1926. On the union side, leaders of major unions, such as Bevin, Citrine, Horner, and Joseph Jones, correctly read the significance of this change and who adapted their own strategy accordingly. They had all recognised that the all-out 'total war' strategy espoused by the syndicalists could not be sustained in practice. Though they were also well aware that it always had to be ready in reserve as a credible deterrent.

Thus, Pollitt and Campbell were piloting the CPGB through an environment in which class accommodation and negotiation was proving both possible and also viable in terms of yielding advances for the working class. As Andrew Thorpe has pointed out, the CPGB made a significant contribution in this milieu by astutely exploiting both their position on the far left and also utilising the example of the Soviet Union to chasten, frighten and soften their ruling class. The reason that Browder and Foster were unable to do this lies not in their own conduct but rather in the very different configuration of class and political forces in the USA.

There is, of course, the example of what the CIO was able to accomplish in the late 1930s and then under the extraordinary wartime conditions. Roosevelt had successfully pulled the political establishment towards a position comparable to that taken by the European political establishment some generations earlier — that is to recognise the corporate expression of labour power and incorporate it into the system of laws and conventions over which the state presided. And I think it is here that we will find the self-inflicted elements of tragedy lie. I have been arguing elsewhere that the German revolution of 1918-19 was comparable in significance to the Russian revolution of February 1917, and also that the Weimar constitution which was its result presented the foundations of a new kind of democratic state incorporating workers' rights and limiting managerial prerogative. The magnitude of this achievement presented Lenin and the bolsheviks with a serious political threat to their claim to be leading the international socialist movement.

It is the failure of socialists and trade unionists, not only in the USA. but also in Europe, to give sufficient weight to this development which could be described as tragic. This failure had significant consequences in the post-1945 world when the AFL (American Federation of Labor) and CIO found themselves powerless to beat back the determined capitalist counter-offensive. Had the foundations of workers' rights and co-determination been laid earlier, the Taft Hartley Act might have been defeated. As it was, Roosevelt's death revealed how shallow the changes inside the political establishment had been. Equally, in Britain, the refusal to view the Weimar advances as significant led to a fatal hubris about the perpetual power of British unions. Union leaders viewed the temporary labour shortages of the 1940s and 50s as permanent and failed to incorporate the shift towards practical co-determination which had taken place at the workplace into a positive constitutional re-alignment of the British state.

But these points are hardly specific criticisms of Barrett. They are rather directed more generally towards the whole community of labour historians. I consider that we are all labouring under a strong anti-German reflex which has rendered us incapable of examining the historical significance of the 1918-19 revolution and its child, the Weimar constitution. In this connection, it is remarkable that Eduard Bernstein's seminal work on the German revolution has not been treated seriously by scholars who speak and write in German and equally has not been translated into English to be examined by the larger scholarly community. Bernstein was another auto-didact whose flexiblity and willingness to examine the world as he found it were exceptional. His contribution to the postwar world in which he found himself an old man was remarkable.

Barrett began research for William Z Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism in the mid 1980s, and with some diffidence explains in the preface that its publication was slowed. I think that the reader has clear gained from the work's longer gestation, though Barrett has evidently suffered the usual, nonetheless painful symptoms of carrying the scholarly late arrival. The greater time which W Z Foster spent at the back of his consciousness enabled him to produce a work of limpid clarity and well-informed, measured conclusions. The end result is not only a biography but a life and times which any serious labour historian of the twentieth century will purchase, read closely, and then utilise as a reference point from which to judge future work. We should count ourselves fortunate that Barrett has written it.

Nina Fishman, University of Westminster

Party People, Communist Lives

John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan and Alan Campbell (eds), Party People, Communist Lives – Explorations in Biography (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 2001) 256pp, ISBN 0-85315-936-X, pbk.

Party People is a collection of 10 biographical essays examining the lives of a very disparate group of British communists, written by a number of different writers and based, for the most part, on original research. Extensive use has been made of the CPGB Archive in Manchester and Comintern material from the Moscow archives — the latter is important given the enormous amount of specific information on individual cadres of all the world's CPs held in the CPSU's file. The writing of socio-political autobiographies was a requirement for those involved in the world of the Comintern and this was often done by the same individual a number of times over the years. Another important element has been the use of oral history — reminiscences of friends, colleagues, family and in one case the subject himself. The fact that it has now been over a decade since the end of 'Soviet Communism' has undoubtedly made it easier to broach various matters and establish personal details; on the other hand the passage of years now means there are few living contemporaries and colleagues of the particular party members in question. Quite clearly in a number of cases the essay offers a preliminary exploration of the particular communist life under scrutiny, and presumably book length biographies will appear in due course.

More specifically the book can be seen as an early product of the formidable project initiated under the auspices of Manchester University: a prosophology of British communism. Prosophology derives from the Greek and has the dictionary definition of being: a study that identifies and relates a group of persons or characters within a particular historical or literary context. This has involved, in the case of the British party, conducting numerous interviews with former CP members. However, as some of those involved in the project believe and the editors of the book comment in the preface:

the quantitative depended on the qualitative: there was a need to explore the complexities of individual life histories and their construction, since aggregation and broader analysis depend on such work for their consistency and richness. (p6)

In an incisive opening chapter, which sets the ground for the biographical studies Kevin Morgan discusses the relevance of the writing on communist lives for the historiography of communism.[1] Inevitably individual biographies — from party leaders but even more so the general membership — highlight the different routes to (and exits from) communism, which were determined by the historical context and the specific individual's situation, experiences and psychological make-up. This in turn would influence how they went on to accommodate themselves to party discipline and interpret their communism. Soviet financing and moral and political leadership and its increasing control over the world's communist parties is obviously of fundamental importance in any historical work on communism but Morgan argues that:

in explaining why people became, remained and defined themselves as Communists, we need to be exploring realities and mentalities indigenous to them and not simply offloading the problem to an exteriority described as Bolshevism, Stalinism and 'orders from Moscow'. (p24)

Although in this respect there has been criticism that there may be a danger of pushing the Soviet link too much into the background in an effort to emphasise the 'diffusion and dilution of British Communism' and that communists were 'not a species apart' from the non-communist left:. As co-editors Mcllroy and Campbell have argued elsewhere: 'This is reductionism which dissolves important differences and antagonisms between different kinds of "socialists" over democracy and despotism, reform and revolution, and Russia…'.[2]

The focus of the book is on the period which saw the foundation of the CP and its first two decades or so of existence from 1920-40: communists of the Comintern period. Communists whose lives are dealt with range from William Rust, a lifelong party official, editor of the Daily Worker and someone who can be described as a 'party person' par excellence; to Arthur Reade, the first nationally-known student communist and 'Britain's first Trotskyist', who by all accounts was no longer a member of the CP after 1927. The lives of two prominent communist women are explored in separate chapters: Dora Montefiore, who was a long time campaigner for women's political and social rights and who was 70 years old when elected to the fledgling CP Executive Committee; and Rose Smith, who came from much lower social origins than Montefiore, and who entered the party as a young woman, later to become the CP National Women's Organiser. There are explorations of the lives of four communist miners: Arthur Horner (the Welsh and later national miners' leader) and (in a collective biography of three Fife communist miners) David Proudfoot, and Abe and Alex Moffat. Addtionally, there are studies of the lives of the communist lawyer Jack Gaster (of Jewish extraction), and the communist poet: Randall Swingler (a comparatively late recruit to the party amongst this cohort, who joined during the time of the Popular Front and was to become perhaps the most prominent cultural spokesman of the CP). Finally, there is also a fascinating contribution, in a previously under-researched area, dealing with a number of named 'British Communists in Russia between the Wars', which documents their experiences and reactions to the reality of Soviet life.

Among the life stories presented in the volume there are some that throw new light (for this reader in any event) on specific aspects or episodes of Communist Party history. An example of this is Jack Gaster's role within the Revolutionary Policy Committee (RPC) of the ILP (Independent Labour Party) eventually culminating in 'resignation en masse' and joining the CP. In this case it is argued that 'Gaster's RPC' was not simply a CP proxy within the ILP but was an attempt to create 'a third way' between social democracy and communism drawing inspiration from older syndicalist traditions and a belief in workers' councils. It was, though, the attraction of the Soviet Union and the existence of an international communist movement that finally drew these ILPers into membership of the CPGB. This, though, should be contrasted with the more manipulative CP-organised entryism in the ILP and Labour Party described by Douglas Hyde in I Believed. Likewise, the chapters on Horner and the Scottish communist miners give a good deal of information on the impact of the Comintern instigated Class Against Class policies, in particular that of 'Revolutionary Trade Unionism' and how it affected the party's leading miners and the different regional responses to it. The chapter on Horner is mostly taken up with the conflict between him and the British Party leadership in 1931 because of his refusal to take a combative line against the South Wales Miners' Federation and condemn its 'defeatism' for ending a strike initiated by the Minority Movement to resist the threat of a wage cut for miners (the South Wales miners were isolated and any prolonged strike would have been suicidal).

An interesting aspect of several of the life stories is how they were at odds with what might have been expected of the people in question and their backgrounds, adding further to the complexity of reasons why certain people joined the party — a warning against making automatic assumptions about the reasons what it was that led people into becoming Communists. Thus of Jack Gaster, Gideon Cohen writes:

Contrary to the conclusions of recent work on London Jewish communism, ethnicity provides no explanation of why Jews such as Gaster joined the CPGB. He was not an East End working-class Jew drawn to communism by anti-fascist struggles, despite his prominence as a Communist Councillor for Mile End. (p206)

It might be thought that Randall Swingler's move towards communism would have been linked to a cultural commitment to European modernism but according to Andy Croft, this was not the case — here there was no link between the artistic avant-garde and the political or transmission line from cultural modernism to 'political modernism'. Swingler's communism, Croft suggests, was grounded in 'Christian Platonism, evangelical witness, the public school cult of Beauty and Nature, Wykehamist principles of service' and it 'was always partly romantic and partly puritan' (p177).

To return to the possible danger of reducing or ignoring the Soviet dimension in the lives of British communists there is little indication of this in biographical portraits in the book, but obviously its degree and intensity varied greatly from individual to individual. David Howell suggests in the 'Afterword' that the Soviet Union's 'prominence in individual Communist lives varied between individuals, and its significance fluctuated over time.' (p238) William Rust, who as young man 'hitched his star' to the stalinist power apparatus in Moscow and who thereby rose to a leadership position in the CPGB, is obviously an example of a British communist 'umbilically' linked to the Soviet State. Unlike, Pollitt for example, he had no pre-party political history, was 'a Comintern loyalist regardless of the line' (p94) and long nursed ambitions to become party general secretary. As the ultra-loyal apparatchik he bears comparison with party officials in the People's Democracies and Soviet Union and certainly the impression given of him is of someone for whom politics was primarily seen as a means to achieve personal power (although as a political party of protest this element would always have been much more limited than in a party that held power in a state). The revelations about his personal life — that a daughter from his first marriage who had been placed in a boarding school for foreign Communists in the Soviet Union, nearly died when caught up in the enforced deportation of Volga Germans — underlines his culpability in the crimes of stalinism. He pulled strings to ensure the daughter was eventually brought to safety in Britain but he chose to keep the details of what had happened to his daughter and what she had seen confidential.

The more compromising side of the CP leadership's link with the reality of Stalin's Russia is referred to in the chapter on British Communists in the USSR. 'Visitors and Victims' recounts the details of some those British communists (as the author writes, the whole story is yet to be told) who fell foul of the purges and political repression. The chapter makes copious use of archival sources in Moscow and although the numbers caught up in the 'stalinist meat grinder' were minuscule when set alongside other groups of foreign communists it, nevertheless, makes for sombre reading. How much was known within the leadership or the membership at large about the various figures who went missing?[3] Amongst those from Britain, it was not something restricted to members of the Communist Party.[4] Mirsky, for many years a lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies fell victim to the purges after his return to the Soviet Union. What efforts were made by his former colleagues to discover his fate?[5]

In conclusion Party People is, in this reviewer's opinion, a most thought provoking book that demonstrates how the examination of individual lives can help to illuminate the historical phenomenon of British communism. It is to be hoped that there will be further collections of similarly well-researched biographies of party members (for later periods as well) to accompany the wider synthesising work that will follow from the collection and collation of the mass of details on an increasing number of those who were members of the CPGB.

Steve Parsons

1.	As regards the use of biography as a means of revealing or highlighting aspects of the history of communism readers might be interested to know that the finishing touches are just being put to a book on 'Reform Communism' — a tendency, it is claimed, drawing theoretical inspiration from 'right' communists like Bukharin that existed usually in a subterranean form within the official movement even at the height of stalinism. The book has been written around a collective biography of three key figures: Nagy, Khrushchev and Gorbatov. The author is the Norwegian historian Torgrim Titlestad and has the provisional title of Reformkommunismens historie. It is to be hoped that it appears in some form in English in the not too distant future. [ Back ]
2.	John McIlroy & Alan Campbell, 'Histories of the British Communist Party: A User's Guide', in Labour History Review, Vol. 68, No. 1, April 2003. [ Back ]
3.	A biographical essay on the life of Pat Sloan (a graduate with a First in Economics from Cambridge University and a key party figure in 'Soviet friendship' work) would make interesting reading. He lived and worked in the Soviet Union from September 1931 until June 1936 (with a 6 months' break from the end of 1932) and returned for a month's stay at the height of the purges in the summer of 1937. [ Back ]
4.	The British state did not help matters by revoking the passports of British women who married Russians thus effectively trapping them forever in their husbands' Soviet homeland. I have seen no evidence, though, that the British embassy did what its American counterpart did which was to find technicalities (lack of an up-to-date passport photo, an additional fee in US dollars etc) in order to turn away Americans who were trying to get back home knowing all to well what the consequences would be for the individuals in question. See Associated Press, 'Secret police files reveal Stalin's police killed Americans', AP Press Release, 9 November 1997. [ Back ]
5.	See G S Smith, D S Mirsky: A Russian-English life, 1890-1939. [ Back ]

Red Sky at Night

Andy Croft and Adrian Mitchell (eds), Red Sky at night: an Anthology of British Socialist Poetry, Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2003, ppviii & 324, £9.99 pb. ISBN 0-907123-49-X.

The close relationship between English poetry and socialism can be traced back at least as far as 1794, when Blake published Songs of Experience and Coleridge and Southey founded the Pantisocracy movement, looking forward to the day when:

… each heart
Self-governed, the vast family of Love
Raised from common earth by common toil
Enjoy the equal produce.

It has continued ever since. The Pre-Raphaelite William Michael Rossetti published sonnets praising the French socialists of 1848 and the Paris Commune; Rupert Brooke was an active Fabian propagandist; and Clement Attlee wrote sonnets in the trenches at Gallipoli.

This anthology, after a small selection to represent the years from 1794 to 1914, concentrates on the twentieth century. The opening section is the least satisfying. Poems are included by writers who were not socialists, such as John Clare, Dickens and Wilfred Owen, and important poets such as the christian socialist Charles Kingsley, Francis Adams and Edward Carpenter — who made Whitman a major influence on English socialist verse — are omitted. Shelley, who is included, is a borderline case. His aim was 'the levelling of inordinate wealth and agrarian distribution' rather than common ownership, but his influence on socialist poets has been such that it would be pedantic to omit him.

As well as old favourites by Sassoon and Owen, the socialist reaction to the First World War is represented by some poems which deserve to be better known, such as Ivor Gurney's 'To the Prussians of England' and W N Ewer's satires. The 1920s are dominated by the miners' struggles and the General Strike, on which the miner poets Joe Corrie and Idris Davies supply a bitter commentary. Sassoon's 'The case for the miners' reminds us that he did not reserve his indignant pity for the men in the trenches.

Socialism in the early 1930s was fashionable among the intellectuals — with results that were sometimes embarrassing, as in Rex Warner's 'Hymn'. Yet the period also produced socialist poetry that spoke with a genuine eloquence, such as Hugh MacDiarmid's 'Second hymn to Lenin'. The Spanish Civil War, which inspired an amazing outburst of poetry, is represented here by poems by Edgell Rickword, George Barker, John Cornford and Nancy Cunard. The editors must have found selection difficult, for Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis, Spender, Herbert Read, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kathleen Raine and several less-known poets wrote with equal power on this theme. Socialists made a notable contribution to the poetry of the Second World War, notably in the poems of Hamish Henderson and Randall Swingler, whose dedication to the defeat of fascism gave their work an extra intensity. There is a consciousness too of national identity, of the war against fascism as the climax of the British people's centuries-long struggle for justice, in Jack Lindsay's 'The voice of the wheat' and Maurice Carpenter's 'The ballad of John Nameless'.

That climax seems to have been reached in 1945, with fascism smashed, a Labour government in power in Britain and coalitions dominated by left-wing parties in most European countries. Disillusion soon set in, as Hiroshima marked the beginning of Washington's drive for world domination and the Cold War began. The left was ejected from power in Western Europe; the 'people's democracies' degenerated into stalinist dictatorships; intellectual freedom was threatened by McCarthyism in the West and Zhdanovism and in Eastern Europe; the imperialist states attempted to reconquer their former colonies; and British troops were sent to fight Washington's war in Korea. It is not surprising that the post-war verse of socialist poets such as Alex Comfort, Christopher Logue and Roger McGough is permeated with a bitter irony.

The last half-century has brought socialists little comfort. The American drive remorselessly continues, with Britain playing the inglorious role of the Italy of the new Axis. With New Labour's repudiation of socialism and the collapse of the Communist Party, British socialism is almost back to what it was a century ago, a host of tiny warring sects. And yet, as this book reminds us, there is still room for hope. Poets have written in support of many causes, the defence of which forms an integral part of socialism. James Berry, Carol Ann Duffy and Benjamin Zephaniah have spoken out against the omnipotence of money in our society. Adrian Mitchell, Bob Dixon and E P Thompson have borne witness against the USA's record of aggression and intervention, whether in Vietnam, Chile or Grenada. James Kirkup has reminded us that nuclear war still remains a threat. Edwin Morgan and Gillian Allnutt have unveiled the shame of our cities, their slums and their ugliness. Norman Nicholson, Douglas Dunn, Carol Rumens, Mogg Williams and Tony Harrison have condemned the murder of our industries. Alison Fell and Jean Binta Breeze have spoken for women; Andrew Salkey, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Chris Searle and Carol Ann Duffy for the black community; and Evangeline Paterson for the victims of anti-semitism. There are other causes not represented in this selection on which socialist poets have written, such as the environment, on which Jack Beeching has spoken eloquently. The struggle against war, against unemployment, against pollution, against sexism and against racism must ultimately merge in a single struggle for socialism.

Socialism is dead, we're told, but then they said the same thing after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions. There are some poems whose absence in this collection I regret, such as Herbert Read's 'Song for the Spanish Anarchists', A L Morton's 'So I Became …' and Edgell Rickword's 'Human Rights Year 1974' — which seem to me to contain the very essence of socialism. Even without them, this anthology offers a rich feast. Whether you want a commentary on the history of the twentieth century, a definition of what socialism really is or an assurance that it is very far from dead, buy this book.

Charles Hobday

Charles Hobday is a literary historian and poet

Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler

Andy Croft, Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), £45, hardback, ISBN 0-7190-6334-5.

Andy Croft has done more than anyone else to shape our understanding of the CPGB's contribution to British literary culture. In the face of an academic orthodoxy which dismisses party writers as third-rate exponents of the Soviet doctrine of 'socialist realism', he has shown that their work grew directly out of indigenous literary traditions (which is not to say that the Soviet influence was unimportant) and that it drew promiscuously on existing styles and genres. He has also demolished the idea that the party's intervention in culture was organised along ruthlessly authoritarian lines. While never ignoring the clumsy efforts of machine politicians in King Street to impose their propagandist schemes on party 'creatives', especially in the fractious period after 1947 when Emile Burns chaired the National Cultural Committee, Croft has clearly demonstrated that communist writers were not only self-organising but that their approach to literary aesthetics was often highly unorthodox. This fine biography of Randall Swingler is Croft's first attempt to explore these ideas in the context of an individual communist life.

Randall Swingler (1909-1967) was one of the CPGB's most prominent poets, novelists and editors in the two decades or so between the start of the Popular Front period and his resignation from the party in 1956. Born into the Edwardian upper-middle class (his father was a provincial curate) he was educated at Winchester and Oxford and seemed at one point to be set for a career as a professional flautist. He played an important role in most of the Communist Party's cultural initiatives of the 1930s and 1940s, collaborating with Alan Bush on music for the various theatrical and musical organisations of the inter-war left, writing two novels and several books of poetry (Croft has edited an excellent selection from his poems)[1] and serving as an editor on Left Review, Poetry and the People and Arena. Swingler also provided a link between the Munich generation and the younger marxists who founded the New Left in the 1950s, not least by sitting on the editorial committee of Edward Thompson's New Reasoner until 1959. Having donated most of his inherited wealth to the Communist Party and the Daily Worker, he spent his later years in a state of shambolic poverty in Essex. He collapsed and died in his beloved Soho while still two years short of his sixtieth birthday.

Croft's finest achievement is to show how Swingler's communism grew out of a tension in his outlook between asceticism and a love of beauty. As a young man, deeply influenced by his father's concern for the industrial workers in his Nottingham parish, Swingler was naturally drawn towards a radical interpretation of christianity – one which culminated in 1932 in the christian socialism of his play Crucifixus. Yet the obverse side of his father's generous social vision was a grim emphasis on the need for self-denial. Swingler and his siblings were raised to believe that sensual pleasure was the breeding ground of immorality, and an early poem about his 'Puritan Childhood' recalls how 'the long cold hands of the black father, Sin/Palpably pressed upon our cringing shoulders'. Perhaps the main dilemma of Swingler's adolescence and early manhood was how to square this taste for self-denial, which eventually drew him to the work of the christian platonists, with the induction into the 'Cult of Beauty' which he underwent while a pupil at Winchester. Worried that the love of nature which irradiated the work of the Georgian poets (his main influences at this time) was somehow intrinsically impious, Swingler eventually concluded that the church had badly compromised its political effectiveness when it turned its back on the life of the senses. A more egalitarian social order could only be established once 'Man's Divorce from the Body of God, Nature' had come to an end. Croft seems to believe that Swingler's conversion to marxism (a system of thought which does more than any other to locate humanity in the context of its relationship with the natural world) was a natural consequence of his desire to throw off the sensual constraints of the established church. It's a fascinating example of how membership of the Communist Party could result from something as quintessentially English as an anglican childhood and a love of Robert Bridges, Edward Thomas and Rutland Boughton.

Croft has turned up some very important documents while examining Swingler's private papers, not least the violently abusive (but also very funny) reply which George Orwell sent to Nancy Cunard when she asked him to contribute to her famous pamphlet Writers take Sides on the Spanish War (1937). It says something about Croft's rather elevated view of his subject that Orwell's prose lights a small bonfire on the page, whereas the frequent quotations from Swingler's work glow much less fiercely. The other big find in the Swingler papers was a document revealing the existence of the Ralph Fox (Writers') Group, an organisation which aimed to co-ordinate the activities of the CPGB's poets, novelists and critics in the various cultural groups which sprang up in the 1930s to reflect the outlook of the Popular Front.[2] Often convening at the flat in Primrose Hill which Swingler shared with his wife Geraldine, the Group was chaired by Julius Lipton and included the likes of Mulk Raj Anand, A L Morton, Edgell Rickword, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Alick West. It seems not to have engaged in public work and was presumably unknown to the vast majority of ordinary party members. Croft's discovery of the Group has important implications for our understanding of the CPGB's early cultural work. At present, partly because of Croft's own writings, our impression of the men and women who created a communist culture in Britain is practically Namierite — we see a tangle of disparate individuals who shared only their commitment to the party and a willingness to observe its current political line. Although the Fox Group seems not to have been very successful, its very existence reminds us that the desire to project a coherent literary position was present even in the 1930s – long before Emile Burns demanded complete obedience to the strictures of Zhdanovism.

The excellence of Comrade Heart is only slightly vitiated by a couple of minor flaws. The first is its failure properly to relate Swingler's work to Soviet debates about literature and culture. Although Croft was right to argue some years ago that the great merit of Swingler's generation of communist writers was that they 'helped to mitigate and delay the effects of Soviet literary politics on the British party',[3] it is equally clear that Soviet ideas established the intellectual framework within which they tried to operate. Croft's book goes just a bit too far in seeking to emphasise the Englishness of cultural marxism in the 1930s. It seems especially perverse that there is no reference to the cultural strategy advocated by Georgi Dimitrov in his speech to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, since Dimitrov's main point (that communists should seek to combat fascism by drawing attention to the history of popular radicalism in their respective countries) set the terms for much of Swingler's work in the ensuing years.

The other main problem with Comrade Heart is its overestimation of Swingler's literary talents. Croft believes that Swingler was no minor representative of the Auden generation but a 'truly great' poet whose work has been shamefully excluded from the English canon. He seeks to corroborate his case with some excellent literary criticism (his anatomisation of the 'Audenesque' on page 142 is especially memorable) but at no time does he persuade us that Swingler's verse is anything more than what it it is generally regarded as being — an interesting combination of apocalyptic sonorities and pastoral uplift which strives just a little too earnestly for enlightened effect. It seems unlikely that many of Comrade Heart's readers will be inspired to explore Swingler's writings for themselves. But those of us who follow in Croft's pioneering footsteps would scarcely wish to deny him his enthusiasms.

Philip Bounds
Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Wales, Swansea

1.	See Randall Swingler, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler, edited by Andy Croft, (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2000). [ Back ]
2.	Croft reproduces this document in full in his recent essay 'The Ralph Fox (Writers') Group' in Antony Shuttleworth (ed), And in Our Time: Vision, Revision, and British Writing of the 1930s, (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003). [ Back ]
3.	Andy Croft, 'Authors Take Sides: Writers and the Communist Party 1920-1956' in Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan (eds), Opening the Books: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of the British Communist Party, (London: Pluto Press, 1995), p95. [ Back ]

Good Bye Lenin!

Faking Real Existing Socialism: some thoughts on Good Bye Lenin!

Good Bye Lenin!, a film directed by Wolfgang Becker — which screened in both independent and mainstream British cinemas in the summer of 2003 — involves an East Berlin family and the startling political events which unfold around them in 1989-1990. The central figures in the story are Alex (played by Daniel Brόhl), a largely apathetic twenty year old, more interested in drinking than politics; his sister Ariane (Maria Simon); and, holding the family together, their single parent, Christiane (Katrin Sass) who remains an apparently devoted, though not uncritical, supporter of East German socialism. We are told that the father and husband to this family abandoned them for another woman in the West some ten years earlier. The core relationship of the film is between the mother and the son, and the story focuses on the power of such a relationship but also on the lies and deceptions that sometimes are driven by these bonds. However Good Bye Lenin! is not just about personal relations, it is also a film that examines how momentous political, economic and social changes reverberate around and through the lives of 'ordinary' people. Although some of those involved in the making of the film have attempted to separate the love story from its specific political and historic context, that context remains inseparable to our viewing and understanding of the film.[1]

The film revolves around what several reviewers have noted is a re-working of the story of Rip Van Winkle. On the night of the forthieth anniversary of the creation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Christiane sees Alex at a demonstration that is violently broken up by the police. As a result she has a heart attack and falls into a coma. In the eight months that she is unconscious, events in the wider world move on apace. Borders with the West are opened and political, economic and social change affect every aspect of everyday life. Alex becomes a satellite dish installer rather than a TV repair man. His sister Ariane gives up her university course in economics to be a waitress in a drive-through fast food restaurant and with her new boyfriend transforms the typically East German look of the family flat with all the trappings of Western life. When Christiane unexpectedly begins to recover from the coma, Alex is warned by her doctors that any major shock will kill her, so he resolves to keep from her the knowledge of the changes in the world outside by re-creating the GDR in his bed-ridden mother's room. Initially this means re-decorating the room in its original style and finding (with much difficulty) the old-style foodstuffs such as coffee, pickles, and peas that his mother knew and enjoyed. However the scale of the operation and deception soon mounts as the changes in the outside world increase. Alex persuades his mother's former friends and employers to act as if nothing had changed, hires school students to sing Young Pioneers' songs, and collaborates with friends at the satellite company to edit and fake news and current affairs programmes. In the end Alex has created, at least within his mother's bedroom, a reality which is at odds not only with the rapid Westernisation which is going on in the outside world but also with the repressive state that was the old GDR.

The appearance of the party slogan 'quality supplied to all by all' in the first few minutes of the film, clearly introduces one of the central ironic themes of the story by which we contrast the utopian rhetoric of the GDR with the reality of life under 'state socialism'. But at the same time it alerts the audience to contrast of the values of one system which, if only rhetorically, promotes equality and the collective good against the changes which are to come which give precedence to the individual and the consumer over society and security. It is this latter conflict which has seen Good Bye Lenin! and its success in Germany, being talked about as part of the phenomenon of 'Ostalgie' or nostalgia for the values and certainties of the former East German state. On one level 'ostalgie' represents an easily understood sentimental longing for the past, exemplified by the popular television chat show 'The GDR Show' presented by the former East German ice-skating hero Katarina Witt, proposals for a GDR theme park and the fetishisation of East European food, clothes and other goods such as the previously-ridiculed Trabant car. At a another level, it also suggests that many people across Europe feel an unease with some aspects of the triumphant consumer capitalism which now dominates their lives so completely and regret the total rejection of some of the more positive values and stability of East German life, particularly as regards employment, health care and social welfare.[2] This current fascination for looking back may explain some of the film's popularity but it would not do justice to the breadth of the West-German-raised Becker's vision to reduce it to a piece of comic nostalgia or romantic fiction.

Certainly the film does provide a critique of both the GDR's socialism and of Western capitalism, or more particularly the unquestioning replacement of all the collectivist values of the old society with those of consumerism. The brutality and lack of freedom of the old regime is revealed in the details of the lives of Christiane and her husband, and most explicitly in the beating giving to the protestors by the police. However this is not a film about life in the GDR but about the changes that happened after the wall came down, and as such as much of its focus and satirical eye is directed to the corporate takeover of the East by the West. The obvious targets are the lack of security in the job market and also the changing social relations and priorities of the new society. Emphasis is given to the replacement of the old values and iconography by the icons of consumerism, notably the appearance of advertising for cigarettes and Coca-Cola, and of Ariane giving up university to work in Burger King. Much of what was valued in the old society is now deemed worthless, as symbolised by Alex's throwing his mother's savings of East German Marks into the wind. In her first, and unsupervised, journey into the outside world Christiane comes across several confusing signs of the change all around her: the nazi graffiti in the lift, christian iconography, the presence of westerners and IKEA. Her confusion and the dream-like nature of her walk culminates in the visual centre-piece of the film when a disembodied statute of Lenin flies passed carried by helicopter, seemingly to wave her farewell.

Nowhere are the new power relations between the East and West more clearly symbolised than in the first meeting between the Western father and his estranged Eastern family, when he is unknowingly served at Burger King by his daughter. Despite further meetings, the emotional and political distance between the two sides of the family remains unresolved and irresolvable, and so, the film suggests, does the divide between East and West.

This is not a new observed phenomenon — other East European films in recent years have told similar stories — nor is it simply nostalgia.[3] In many films it is the old, pensioners, who feel particularly adrift and unsupported in the new society, and there are examples of this here, but in Good Bye Lenin! it is also the young like Alex and his friends who are ambivalent about the changes. While the West offers opportunities and freedoms gratefully accepted by the young in particular, the film also suggests that many — whilst not wishing to return to the past — feel a sense of loss and uncomfortable and unrepresented in the change all around them. For historians, and particularly historians of communism, it reminds us that to be weighed against the negatives of those societies, there were also in the eyes of those who lived in them some benefits. This does not mean that these benefits outweighed the faults, which clearly they did not, but it does mean that the prelonged existence of such states and the residual popularity of their ideological underpinnings should not only be understood in terms of repression and coercion but also to some extent of popular consent and support.

All through, the film offers the possibility that though GDR socialism was deeply and fatally flawed by its brutal repressive nature, lack of basic freedoms and control of individual lives, it was also a system that might be humanised and reformed by embracing its original values of equality and collective security. This is shown in part by the continued but not uncritical faith of the mother in the system and in the clever, witty letters of complaint which she composes for friends and neighbours suggesting how the useless and unsuitable consumer products provided by the state might be improved to meet the needs of its citizens. (The fact that the letters she writes after she awakes from her coma are used by her friends to mock the inadequate products of Western companies, suggests that perhaps mass capitalist production is not so different from socialist production in its one-size fits all mentality.)

Fundamentally Alex also offers the possibility of change or at least of rescuing something fundamentally positive from the old system. In no sense can Alex be described as a supporter of the old state. He is alienated from the politics of the old guard and cynical about his mother's beliefs. He attends, though more inadvertently than through active commitment, a demonstration against the Wall and the old regime. Arrested and beaten up by the police, he becomes aware of the state's lies and malicious interference in his parents lives. However it is clear that he does not know exactly what he wants from these changes and he certainly does not uncritically accept or welcome the 'freedoms' which come from the West.

Although initially he recreates the GDR for his mother's benefit, as the justification for his actions become increasingly tenuous, he appears more and more to be doing it for himself. In a 'western' life which is rapidly accelerating and over stimulated, the flat and the old GDR becomes an oasis of calm and the only place where he can sleep. Furthermore the need to respond to the way the outside changes are inevitably encroaching on his mother's sense of reality leads him to re-make the GDR and socialism anew, inventing a society as he would have like it to have become. In his last broadcast, Alex signals both the changes in the world and his own utopian views to his mother by replacing the resigned Erich Honecker with a new President who — speaking from Alex's script — seeks to describe a socialism that continues to inspire with the hope of a better world: by offering more than the shallow consumerism of capitalism, and the promise of a a system which no longer walls people in, but rather truly sets them free.

Alex's choice of the former cosmonaut-turned-taxi driver Sigmund Jδhn to be his fictional president, returns us to a theme which runs through the film. Of course, space technology and exploration was area in which the East was able to portray itself as competing and on occasions out-doing the West, and was a traditional symbol of the scientific triumph of socialism. But also for those who had been a child as Alex had during the era of the great space adventures, it also represented something more uncomplicatedly brave and quite literally out of this world, beyond the reality in which they lived. For Alex, the astronaut's view of earth from space allows him to see life as something more than self-interest, narrow political advantage and trivial individualism, and thus makes Jδhn the perfect spokesman to annunciate Alex's vision of how to build the socialist state that should have been.

However, once again, this is a deeply problematic position. In many ways, what Alex does in creating a better but fictional socialism replays the lies and deceptions of the previous regime which he seeks to reform. This is particularly true, and most evident, in the manipulation of the media and the news. So Alex justifies the appearance of Coca-Cola advertising across the city by faking a news broadcast in which the GDR claims to have been the real inventors of the drink and he explains the appearance of West Germans in East Berlin as refugees from the soulless excesses of capitalism generously welcomed by the socialist state. Though these are very funny rewritings of history, as if glimpsing a parallel world through a looking glass, they also echo the darker, more sinister media manipulations and lies of a totalitarian state. So while Alex suggests ways of imagining a more human socialism, his actions also forces us to ask what is the point of his socialism if it is not a reality? In one sense, the declaration in favour of a socialism without walls, mixed with footage of the Berlin Wall coming down should be an empowering and inspiring one but the feeling is undercut by the deception and unreality involved. In the end Alex has becomes increasingly desperate and dictatorial in his attempts to maintain the alternate reality of his creation; cajoling, paying and eventually blackmailing others to take part in his pretence. Significantly it is his Russian girlfriend, Lara (Chulpan Khamatova) who tries to make him aware of the dangerous nature of his obsession and seeks to tell Christiane the truth before she dies.

Here lies the central concern of Good Bye Lenin! As the film develops we are prompted to question what we know and what those who love one another tell each other. In essence it is a film about truth and lies, reality and perception, memory and the construction of memories. It is both about family relations and about the political and historical contexts within which lives are led — the lies and distortions that disfigure the society are replicated in lies and distortions in even the closest relations. In the course of the film, Christiane reveals that her life and her devotion to the GDR had been based on a lie. She had told the children that their father had run away with another woman to the West and had never sought to contact them while she remained true to her family and the state. In reality her husband, a doctor, had left the East because of the difficulties he faced over refusing to join the party and she had meant to follow. However because of the fear of what the authorities might do and of being separated from the children, she remained in the East, hid her husband's unopened letters and concocted the story of his abandonment of the family. Staying in the East, she reveals to her children, had been the biggest regret of her life. Immediately we must question what we know of her commitment to socialism — did she stay because of fear or commitment? What do we make of her knowledge of the persecution of her husband because of his political beliefs, or of the interference in her own career as her teacher because of the state's suspicion of her beliefs and her associations?

Again the doubt surrounding her attachment to the GDR, forces us to re-assess the justification for Alex's distortion of reality. If his mother does not require the distortion, then who is Alex doing it for? This is even more pertinent in the final scene, when he conducts the whole pretence of the transformation of the GDR into 'socialism without walls' despite the fact that his mother, though now near death and confused, seems to be aware that it is all a fake. In the end the distortions of political systems forces each of the protagonists to express their love and devotion for the other by their complicity in a series of lies and deceptions — a 'truth' which explains the sadness and tragedy which pervades this bitter-sweet comedy.

Andrew Flinn, University of Westminster

1.	Dina Iordanova, 'East of Eden', Sight & Sound, August 2003. [ Back ]
2.	For a overview of the current fashion for the GDR in Germany see Ben Aris, 'How the GDR Became Cool', The Guardian, 24 July 2003. [ Back ]
3.	Iordanova, Sight & Sound, 2003. [ Back ]

Cold War, Crisis and Conflict

John Callaghan, Cold War, Crisis And Conflict: The CPGB 1951-68, (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 2003), pp320, ISBN 0-85315-958-0.

I was embarrassed when a man I admired invited me to join the British Communist Party (CPGB). I was 18 and even though I had read Burns, Kettle, Morton, Pascal, and others, I claimed I did not know enough about communism and declined. Put simply, I was glad to campaign against German rearmament but worried about events in Sofia, Budapest and Prague. Only a few years later, my would-be recruiter was a Labour MP and he is still leading a local authority in 2004. This book brings back the memories: the plucky Albanians terrorised by the Trotsky-Titoites, the hero Kim Il Sung, the Slansky gang, Peter Mandelson's grandfather and the other right-wing Labour leaders, and Ralph Samuel being roughly treated by American troops in Austria on his way to the 1951 World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin.

Callaghan starts with a comprehensive survey of the CPGB's activities and reveals its remarkable range of activities. It certainly punched above its weight! Perhaps he overestimates its relative success here and there, as in the case of the sales of communist literature. Some party members bought extra copies out of their own money to meet their targets.

Who were these communists and why did they join? They were drawn from all walks of life but they were more likely to belong to the NUT (National Union of Teachers) than to the seamen's union (p34). And they were more likely to be organised in area branches rather than factory branches (p36). Callaghan comments: 'it is doubtful that a bigger concentration of people dedicated to books was to be found anywhere in the country. Wanting to understand the world was one of the driving forces of Party members.' (p25) Yes, many found in marxism an explanation of class society and the certainty of future redemption. Christians looking for a secular alternative were among them. Many who were vaguely left-wing for whom the Labour Party was too much part of the Establishment looked to the CPGB. Some were Labour activists disillusioned with their leaders. Others were workers with personal experience of injustice in the mines or the failing cotton industry. Some were ex-servicemen who had learned to hate the system in the forces. Jews and emigrants from the colonies found the anti-racist message attractive. Some were lonely misfits looking for the warmth of a 'church'. No doubt many remained despite their growing doubts because they felt it would be cowardly to leave, convinced that there was nowhere else to go (p55). Yet turnover of membership was high and many did go and made do with the Labour Party. This made it easier for the leadership to maintain its power. Because of the party structure, 'the membership was virtually atomised by the manifold impediments to discussion between branches.' (p43)

Chapter two covers the crisis within the CPGB as there was ever more bad news from the 'Socialist Camp', from 1948 to 1956. The sudden denunciation of Tito in 1948 as an 'imperialist lackey', did not cause too much fallout. He was small, Uncle Joe was larger than life. Radio Moscow likened Tito to Gφring and, at a distance, in his white uniform, there was a resemblance (as I found out in 1955)! It was distressing as more and more traitors were exposed. Some thought it inconceivable that with so many top traitors the system could have survived. Others took a different view. As one Labour, 55-year-old, working class woman said to me in Bolton, in 1952: 'Shoot the buggers! Have we not had our traitors? MacDonald, Mosley and the others!' She had not read Maurice Edelman, James Klugmann or anyone else. She would have shot Churchill, friend of Mussolini, enemy of the working-class! If he was so much against the Soviet Union, there must be some good in it! However, the leadership of the CPGB should have known better than workers in Bolton. Some of Stalin's victims were their friends – as was the case with Rosa Rust and Rose Cohen (p79). They supported the CPSU on every occasion including the second Soviet military intervention in Hungary (p71). The result was that, by April 1957, the party had suffered severe losses including most of its prominent intellectuals and half of' the Young Communists (p76).

As Callaghan points out, however, the 1950s were not all bad news for communists. The decolonisation of the European empires went rapidly forward. Big communist parties were present in France and Italy. Mao's China was internationally recognised. Fear of nuclear war increased and opposition to nuclear weapons (covered in chapter four). Fear of West German 'revanchism' remained strong. In Britain, despite the relative prosperity, there was a growing perception of economic decline. In 1956, Khrushchev's 'secret speech', although shocking, could be seen as a hopeful sign: at last the CPSU was turning to a more democratic approach and the programme that followed offered hope to Soviet consumers (p206). Even Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, acknowledged Soviet economic progress (p207). Soviet space achievements took the world by surprise (p78). 'Mr K', with his homely wife, was a man with whom one could do business. The Anglo-French Suez operation also helped the CPSU and its allies.

It's worth recalling that most people in these years left school without qualifications, yet the CPGB had countless intellectuals. As mentioned above, I certainly benefited from their contributions. My headmaster pressed on me the works of Quintin Hogg and Douglas Hyde to keep me on the straight and narrow! It was an East German communist, with impeccable anti-nazi credentials, who finally did the trick by giving me Orwell's 1984. That was in July 1953. Callaghan is good on communist cultural activity and examines how the CPGB shot itself in the foot by attempting to force all its intellectual stars on to the Zhadanov line (p95). The Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded body, became attractive to intellectual defectors.

Callaghan gives credit to the CPGB as the first party to take up anti-racism and gives some interesting examples of anti-immigrant activities in the unions (p107). But with its campaign against 'Coca-Cola colonisation' it was in danger of racism of another kind. Chapter six more than adequately traces the CPGB's electoral failure. There is a good chapter on the CPGB's struggles in the unions especially the FBU, AEU and ETU where its militants were often under attack from former communists aided, in some cases, by the Catholic Church and the Establishment. MI5 is not mentioned. It would be interesting to read what its infiltrators thought of all these developments. Did they influence the CPGB at all? Peter Wright gives us a glimpse in his Spy Catcher.

Callaghan deals well with the CPGB's difficulties over Czechoslovakia. He tells us, only 'a minority of branches supported the Soviet invasion' of 1968 (p301). He is, however, rather brief in his handling of the Sino-Soviet conflict (p290).

Sadly, in my view, in their desperate need for hope and an example of success, the CPGB leaders failed to understand the nature of Lenin's seizure of power, in October 1917, and what followed in Russia. Having made that mistake they could never extradite themselves from the Soviet bear's embrace (p289). Thus they not only failed to build up an alternative to Labourism, they actually made it much more difficult for others to try. The same was true of their comrades throughout Europe. They actually aided the rise of fascism, because the reality of bolshevism frightened so many people, just as later, the reality of nazism pushed a generation into the arms of the communists climaxing in 1942-4. After that, the ground was less favourable for 'communism'. Although Callaghan argues well that a marxist party independent of the CPSU would not have done better than the CPGB, I am not entirely convinced of this. True, like the CPGB, any such party would have faced the unfair electoral system, the wrath of the media and the loyalty of the mass of workers to Labour. The widespread belief in the myth of this 'scepter'd isle' and its world importance, also limited the scope for alternative parties. Yet there have been many who sought alternatives to British capitalism but were put off by the language, style, methods and, above all, foreign affiliations of the CPGB.

John Callaghan has consulted an impressive number of people and lists a great many sources. He gives us a generally sympathetic view of CPGB members. The book benefits from biographical notes on about 80 individuals and a select index of names. Regrettably there is no general index. Callaghan presents to us a book that will be very useful for those interested in left-wing politics during this period and beyond.

David Childs
Emeritus Professor of German politics, Nottingham University

South Africa and the Communist International

Apollon Davidson, Irina Filatova, Valentin Gorodnov and Sheridan Johns, (eds), South Africa and the Communist International: A Documentary History. Volume 1. Socialist Pilgrims to Bolshevik Footsoldiers 1919-1930 (London, Frank Cass, 2003) ISBN 0-7146-5280-6 (£55 hb); Volume 2. Bolshevik Footsoldiers to Victims of Bolshevisation 1931-1939 (London: Frank Cass, 2003) ISBN 0-7146-5281-4 (£55 hb).

The challenge of making more widely accessible the holdings of the Comintern archives in Moscow continues to be met in a variety of ways. In addition to programmes of digitalisation, like the Incomka project, or the microfilming of holdings relating to particular communist parties, since the opening of the archives there have been appeared a number of publications making more limited selections of documents available to a wide readership. A few, like the Dimitrov diaries and the Stalin-Molotov correspondence, replicate relatively faithfully what the researcher can expect to find meeting the description given.[1] Other collections, though equally authentic in terms of the individual documents reproduced, are hardly less didactically selective than some of the collections which communist parties themselves used to produce. The editors of the volume under review note how 'sensationalist' disclosures upon the opening of the archives made their own work both 'politically and practically' more difficult, and early editions of documents, such as L'argent de Moscou and The Secret World of American Communism, cannot be exempted from the same criticism.[2] At their best they may be regarded as documentary essays, presenting otherwise arbitrary selections of documents to present distinct lines of argument. As a representation of what the archives told us about particular communist parties, they were clearly inferior than attempts to synthesise a larger body of materials such as Studer's Un parti sous influence and Thorpe's The British Communist Party and Moscow.[3]

Apollon Davidson and his colleagues have provided an important addition to the literature that falls somewhere between the two approaches. Like Studer and Thorpe, they focus on the relations between the Comintern and one of its national sections. In their case too, it is one of the smaller sections, though, as we now know, the CPSA/SACP was also one of its most durable and, in the longer term, effective of the parties established after the Russian revolution. Like Studer and Thorpe, they aim to provide what they describe as a 'comprehensive' survey of their subject, but in the form of a collection of documents 'let[ting] the documents speak' rather than simply illustrating the editors' own text, which was deliberately kept to a minimum. Such an ambition is always problematic, and as the editors' own annotations often show, the provision of context, analogy or an awareness of other sources is often crucial in allowing even individual documents to 'speak' to any but the highly specialist reader. Nevertheless, over two volumes and 183 documents, the editors go a long way towards their goal of covering the different phases of Comintern strategy, the institutional structures which gave it force, both the 'secret' and 'mass' aspects of its political activity and — a point the editors particularly stress — the human actors involved, be they South African or Russian.

Only a researcher familiar with the original documents could comment on the particular selections made, but the editing is clearly of a meticulous standard. Excisions, amendments and handwritten annotations are minutely described, and the annotations are extremely clear and helpful. To the specialist in other areas of Comintern history, the general context and many of the broad issues documented will be familiar. However, the distinctiveness of the CPSA's situation is also very evident, not only in the persistent dilemmas of race, class and nation in the special circumstances of a white settler republic, but in the partial replication of colonial-style relationships within the Comintern itself. In particular, the CPGB was accorded special responsibilities with regard to the South African party, exercised through individuals like Jimmy Shields and George Hardy, while conversely the volumes contain a good deal of information on CPSA leaders like Douglas Wolton who also played a more limited role in the British party's affairs. If the volumes are therefore of particular interest for the CPGB's historians, the extensive discussions of the 'independent native republic' thesis will have a resonance for historians of the CPUSA, whose future general secretary Eugene Dennis was a Comintern emissary in South Africa in 1932-3.

Focusing on the CPSA's relations with the Comintern, this collection can usefully be consulted alongside Allison Drew's equally invaluable broader documentary history of the South African left.[4] The volumes also include a helpful introductory overview of the CPSA's early history, a biographical 'glossary' and sixteen pages of plates.

Kevin Morgan, University of Manchester

1.	Lars T. Lih, Oleg V Naumov and Oleg V. Klevniuk, Stalin's Letters to Molotov 1925-1936, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995. For a similar but more selective approach, see for example Aldo Agosti, ed., Togliatti negli anni del Comintern (1926-1943). Documenti inediti dagli archive russi, Roma: Carocci, 2000. [ Back ]
2.	Victor Loupan and Pierre Lorrain, L'argent de Moscou. L'histoire la plus secrete du PCF, Paris: Plon, 1994; Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism, Yale University Press, 1995. Other examples were the special triple issues of the periodical Communisme; see for example the articles by Stιphane Courtois and Philippe Buton, Communisme, 35-7, 1994, pp5-18 and 31-42, presenting telling fragments of the archives as by definition expressing the deeper 'reality' of French communism and effectively foreclosing historical debate. [ Back ]
3.	Brigitte Studer, Un parti sous influence. Le parti communists suisse, une section du Komintern 1931 ΰ 1939, Lausanne, 1994; Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow, 1920-43, Manchester: MUP, 2000. That these accounts are both scrupulously documented and yet present very different interpretations and types of narrative confirms that the availability of the archives has opened up more historiographical issues than it has settled. [ Back ]
4.	Allison Drew, South Africa's Radical Tradition: A Documentary History, Cape Town: Bunchu Books, 1996. [ Back ]