Neil Redfern, Class or Nation: Communists, Imperialism and Two World Wars, (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2005), pp.1-257. ISBN: 1 85043 723 8. £47.50.

Neil Redfern’s book raises some interesting questions about the role of partisanship in historical enquiry. At one level the book is yet another leftist critique of the CPGB’s history. The author’s aim is to explain why the party ‘enthusiastically supported the British war effort in the Second World War, given that most of its leaders had been militant opponents of the First World War’ (p1). In pursuit of this aim, Redfern traces the history of the party from its origins and foundation through to the 1940s, highlighting the party’s policy on imperialism, nation and war, its analysis of the nature of the state and its view of social democracy.

Redfern approaches the party’s history from the point of view of a committed ‘Bolshevik’. He believes in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and imperialism, the smashing of the bourgeois state, and the transformation of the relations of production to create the material basis of communism. He thinks that a party of dedicated revolutionary cadres is the appropriate organisational form of leninist bolshevism. He argues that both world wars were ‘imperialist wars’ and that the bolshevik policy during the First World War of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ and turning the imperialist war into a civil war should have been pursued in the Second World War as well. He frankly admits that such a policy might well have had some negative consequences, including that ‘[Nazi] Germany might have invaded and defeated a revolutionary Soviet Union unable to gain assistance from imperialist states more concerned with the extirpation of Bolshevism than with the balance of power in Europe’, but, says Redfern, ‘that is a risk that the Communist Movement would have had to take if it had pursued an internationalist strategy’ (p208). At the same time, Redfern is a critic of the ‘Euro-centrism’ of the bolshevik tradition. In his view the Comintern grossly exaggerated the prospects for revolution in the advanced capitalist countries and underestimated those in the colonial world. What the Comintern failed to grasp, says Redfern, is that the great majority of people in the imperialist countries benefited from imperialism, which is why reformism rather than revolutionary politics flourished in Britain and other capitalist states.

As might be imagined a lot of the book is devoted to pointing out how the party failed to measure up to the author’s preferred brand of bolshevism. Redfern’s narrative structure takes the form of the ‘Rise, Decline and Fall of British Bolshevism’. According to the author, the party was from the outset infected by the political corruption of imperialism’s ‘superprofits’ and began to abandon revolutionary bolshevism not long after its foundation and embraced a politics that was not only ‘reformist’ — the least of its sins — but ‘revisionist’, ‘opportunist’, ‘class collaborationist’, ‘nationalist’ and ‘social-chauvinist’.

Redfern is particularly scathing of the party’s performance in relation to the colonial question, arguing that while it often spouted anti-imperialist slogans it did not do a lot about them in practice. Yet it is clear from Redfern’s own treatment that while the party did not give the colonial question the absolute priority he would have liked, it did devote quite a lot of attention to the anti-imperialist struggle and was fully committed to the liberation of the colonies and the dismantlement of empire, although it had its own ideas about how this might be best achieved.

Somewhat surprisingly, Redfern manages to transcend his own polemic and makes a considerable effort to convey the party’s point of view as well as his own. Among the best chapters of the book in this respect are those devoted to the party during the Second World War. Redfern makes plain his own disapproval of the party’s politics during the war, arguing that leaders and members alike embraced nationalism and social patriotism, much like the majority of socialists during the First World War. But he goes to considerable lengths to explain the logic of the party’s line, often in sympathetic terms. He is particularly successful in reconstructing the reasons for the party’s absolute dedication to the British war effort, which led it to quell strikes, support Churchill’s coalition government, witch-hunt opponents of the war, oppose Indian independence, and dampen down discussion of the postwar world.

In the book Redfern wears two hats — that of historian as well as of bolshevik. The chapters on the Second World War formed the basis of his PhD thesis and it is evident here and elsewhere in the book that — willingly or not — he embraced the narrativist norm of telling the story from the participants’ point of view as well as your own. The result is a book that is remarkably unbiased, given the extent of the author’s hostility to the party’s politics. Three cheers for historicism! Speaking as someone whose general attitude towards the party’s history is the more right-wing the better, I found a great deal of interest in the book.

But more interesting than the point that the discipline of history affords us some protection from bias and polemical excess, is that Redfern’s partisanship has positive value as well. His political standpoint leads him to investigate aspects of the party’s history that might otherwise be neglected, minimised or glossed over. For example, Redfern’s belief that the working class were bought off by imperialism means that he is resistant to the ‘revolution betrayed’ school of thought and generally eschews the search for an unrealised militancy in the party or the labour movement. Instead, he emphasises that the party only became popular when it embraced a radical patriotism which chimed with the ‘social-chauvinist’ politics of the general population — not least during the Second World War — a position that commanded the overwhelming consent of its members and supporters. There were leftist dissidents and revolutionary purists in the party but these were few and far between after the mid-1930s.

Another example of Redfern’s partisanship working in his favour is his treatment of the party’s changing stance on the war question, in many ways the central theme of the book. As an advocate of the revolutionary defeatist position Redfern wants to expose in detail how the party came to abandon its anti-war position and commit itself to wholeheartedly prosecuting the anti-fascist war, notwithstanding the fact that it meant supporting one side of an inter-imperialist conflict. Redfern fulfils his task very well and his account deftly captures the transitions, tensions and elisions of the party’s path to a pro-war position. Central to the party’s changing attitude was, of course, the Soviet connection and Redfern very effectively demonstrates that current debates about the contradictions between national and international interests and influences in the communist movement had little meaning in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Nothing was more important to the communists of that era than the defence of the Soviet Union and the suggestion that the party would do anything to undermine the world’s first socialist state — whatever the costs to its own position — was complete anathema. No more so was this case than during the Second World War when all doctrinal disputes paled into insignificance when set beside the millions of Soviet citizens dying on the Eastern Front.

Geoffrey Roberts