Geoff Andrews, Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism 1964-1991, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2004).

This is the sixth and final volume of Lawrence and Wishart’s comprehensive history of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The title is apt: during these years, as capitalism went global and the epoch that began with the Bolshevik Revolution drew to a close, the party was wracked by internecine conflict over its purpose, strategy and self-image. Geoff Andrews succeeds admirably in charting the course and explaining the nature of this conflict. As Donald Sassoon puts it in a cover blurb, he tells ‘the story of a failure, the failure to transform what was a militant working class party into a rallying point for left-wing critics of labourism.’

Though originating in a PhD thesis, the story is told in a lively, accessible style which captures something of the passion, exhilaration and intrigue with which the conflict was waged, as I can attest from my own experience as a party member in the 1970s, as a supporter of Marxism Today in the 1980s and as a member of Democratic Left thereafter. The plausibility of the story and the reader’s pleasure in its telling are enhanced by numerous citations from interviews with former party officials and activists. Andrews builds up a strong central narrative, using oral evidence mainly to supplement archival and published sources rather than to explore the by-ways of micro-history. En route, however, he provides some delightful asides, as when former student leaders, asked to assess the relative merits of Althusser and Gramsci, are reported as complaining that reading Althusser ‘did your head in’ and ‘was a bit like taking acid’. None of those interviewed hailed from the stalinist wing of the party, whether because people from this tendency were not approached or because they refused to co-operate – it is not clear which. Nevertheless, Andrews is scrupulously fair in reporting and commenting on the views, aspirations and illusions held by all the protagonists in the drama.

He argues that the CPGB was always much more than the British outpost of Soviet communism. That it survived at all after losing a third of its members, including most of its leading intellectuals, in the aftermath of the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 and the suppression of the Hungarian uprising later that year suggests as much, and subsequent events confirmed this view. From roughly 1964 to 1977, the CP underwent an unexpected renaissance. For a few turbulent years, as British capitalism foundered and the post-war settlement collapsed, the party became a minor, but significant player in the British trade union movement and, to that extent, on the wider stage of British politics. During these same years, it also became a repository for hopes and energies released by the emergence or re-emergence of social movements based on gender, sexuality, race, national identity and ecology, all of which forced the left to rethink the relationship between class and politics.[ 1 ] These developments gave rise to two political projects, which Andrews calls ‘militant labourism’ and ‘British Gramscism’, respectively. The collision and interplay between them form the crux of his account.

The CP was always a party of contradictions. A good example is The British Road to Socialism, adopted in 1951 - with the imprimatur of Stalin – to replace the previous party programme, For a Soviet Britain, adopted in 1935. With its commitment to parliamentary democracy and its devotion to the British labour movement, the British Road evidently signified the rejection of leninism. There were, to be sure, ambiguities about how an elected ‘left government’ would deal with attempts to destabilise it of the sort that had been a staple concern of the European left since the days of the Second International. And it was certainly anticipated that the ‘transition to socialism’ would be punctuated by crises. But the whole spirit of the document and its explicit acceptance of political competition and pluralism ruled out any notion of armed insurrection led by a vanguard party, which was, of course, why the programme was routinely scorned and derided by trotskyists. Despite this, the party insisted on retaining democratic centralism as its central principle of organisation, thereby preserving the outward forms of its leninist heritage.

In practice, as Andrews shows, the leadership allowed dissidents considerable latitude. It usually stopped short of invoking disciplinary sanctions against transgressors and only rarely sought to curtail the expression or dissemination of heterodox views.[ 2 ] Still, the fact that the party clung to an outmoded and discredited organisational form is indicative of its conservative culture, while the fact that dissidents were variously encouraged, tolerated or chastised, but not penalised or purged, is indicative of a leadership that was sometimes impressed, usually bemused and invariably cautious in its response to political and cultural innovation. The comparison Andrews draws with relations between a benevolent paterfamilias and his rebellious offspring is apt, provided one recalls that the sons and daughters were often supported by freethinking uncles and aunts who were equally impatient of dogma and tradition, if rather more circumspect in their political tactics. From time to time, to be sure, the leadership sought to curb the activities of rank and file members representing the ‘new social forces’, as distinct from the skilled, white, male manual workers whom most party members still revered as the crack troops of the class struggle. Andrews recounts three such episodes involving YCL (Young Communist League) activists, feminists and dissident intellectuals. Yet in each case, the leadership eventually backed off and the rebels got their way. In each case, moreover, what was ultimately at stake was whether social class was in some sense intrinsically more important than other social identities and whether the party’s claims on its members’ allegiance took precedence over those of non-party organisations and movements. Thus, these examples of how democratic centralism worked in practice serve to confirm the book’s general thesis: that from the late 1960s onwards, two warring souls inhabited the same political body.

Andrews rightly insists that the party’s internal conflicts cannot be explained by reference to the international communist movement. The rival camps were often described as ‘Eurocommunist’ and ‘Stalinist’ or, colloquially, as ‘euros’ and ‘tankies’. These labels served as convenient shorthand at the time, but they fail to take account of the specifically British features of the CPGB, embedded as it was in the British labour movement and its traditions. Naturally, the various forms of dissidence and innovation that made the party such a stimulating political and intellectual milieu from the 1960s to the 1980s were influenced by developments in the wider communist movement: 1956; the Prague Spring; Eurocommunism, glasnost and perestroika. But the party’s demise was intimately linked to the crisis of British labourism in the 1960s and 1970s and this, in turn, was intimately linked to the long-running crisis of British capitalism which reached a climax in this period.

From 1966 onwards, British capitalism began to show signs of deep dysfunction as economic growth faltered, real take home pay stagnated, profits were squeezed, inflation accelerated, unemployment rose and, despite the devaluation and later depreciation of the pound, the balance of payments remained in persistent deficit. This dismal performance was the result of two interacting forces: the defensive strength of organised labour and the competitive weakness and complacent insularity that were the legacy of Britain’s imperial past. The most pressing economic problem was inflation. This was not so much because of its narrowly economic consequences, though these were serious enough once the rate at which prices were rising ceased to be low, steady and tolerably predictable and became high, variable and worryingly uncertain. Rather, the recurrent distributional conflicts that drove and were continually reactivated by inflation threatened to destabilise society and provoke a right-wing backlash. In short, as the Swedish social democrats had warned in the 1940s and as subsequent events confirmed, ‘inflation is the deadly enemy of socialism’. If the left and the labour movement failed to acknowledge that trade unions were involved in causing inflation and failed to take responsibility for controlling it, the only feasible alternative was for government to abandon the commitment to full employment that had formed the centrepiece of the post-war settlement, institute an old-fashioned deflationary purge and allow unemployment to rise to whatever level was necessary, as Marx once put it, to ‘curb the pretensions of the working class’.[ 3 ]

The CPGB, whose Industrial Department orchestrated campaigns to defeat both ‘anti-trade union’ laws and successive incomes policies, maintained that these policies were an attempt to force the working class to pay for the capitalist crisis. This position was condemned as intellectually bankrupt and politically irresponsible by a small group of economists on the party’s Economic Advisory Committee who advocated a ‘socialist social contract’ in which pay restraint would be traded off against structural reforms aimed at democratising economic decision-making: within the enterprise as well as at the macro-economic level; in private firms as well as in the public sector; and with respect to strategic issues, such as corporate investment and product development, not just the everyday management of the workplace. A democratic alternative economic strategy along these lines offered a way of combining the creative energy of the new social forces with the disciplined strength of the industrial working class in a hegemonic bid to tackle Britain’s economic crisis and prefigure the socialist future.

Students, feminists and others who had imbibed the politics of Gramsci welcomed this approach as a shining example of how to conduct the war of position, which should be emulated throughout the party’s work. The party leadership and most ‘industrial comrades’, however, wanted no truck with ‘capitalist’ incomes policies in any shape or form, insisting that trade union militancy was the royal road to socialist consciousness – a proposition that would have outraged Lenin. Their rejection disinterred the old syndicalist idea that, sooner or later, if the workers remained united, refused to be co-opted by the state and screwed up social tensions to breaking point, the capitalist system would be brought down and a new age would dawn – a proposition that was blatantly at odds with the gradualist, democratic logic of the British Road and had more in common with the views of its trotskyist detractors.

Tragically, neither this specific controversy nor the wider ideological divide from which it sprang was ever resolved. The fate of incomes policy – and, indeed, of traditional social democracy – was sealed by the gradual decay of the Social Contract, the catastrophic blows suffered by the Labour government in the winter of 1978-9, the victory of the Conservatives at the subsequent general election and the neo-liberal counter-revolution for which this paved the way. The fate of the party was to remain deadlocked – or perhaps one should say stalemated – as the embattled camps waged an increasingly bitter and costly civil war which culminated in a de facto division of the party’s remaining assets: the Gramscians took control of Marxism Today; the party officials, who belatedly came off the fence and sided with the Gramscians when their enemies staged an attempted palace coup, retained control of a hollowed-out party apparatus; and the proponents of class politics led by Tony Chater, editor of the Morning Star, and Mick Costello, who succeeded Bert Ramelson as national industrial organiser, held on to the Star and the party’s declining industrial base. In effect, the party was over long before the formal decision to disband was taken at a special conference in 1991.

This is not quite the end of the story, however. In the final part of the book, Andrews reviews the death of militant labourism, with the defeat of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, and contrasts it with the outstanding success of Marxism Today which Martin Jacques transformed from a rather worthy and obscure theoretical journal, little read outside the CP, into the house magazine of the British left, with a circulation of around 10,000 and a reputation for cutting-edge analysis and debate that sometimes reverberated in mainstream politics and the mass media. Apart from its fresh design and breezy style, the appeal of Marxism Today lay in its twin central concerns: the historic decline of the British left and the emergence of a neo-liberal new right in the form of Thatcherism, which had succeeded where the left had failed in building a broad popular alliance and was using its command over the state to push through a programme of regressive modernisation. Though the magazine operated at arms’ length from the party, despite receiving a hefty subsidy, its themes and arguments prompted a final attempt to replace the British Road to Socialism with a programme that reflected the sweeping changes that were taking place in the world economy and in the social structure and political landscape of Britain. The result was The Manifesto for New Times, which performed the obsequies on militant labourism, appraised Thatcherism as a hegemonic project and outlined a Gramscian approach to the task of building a new, democratic left. Appearing in 1989, on the eve of the collapse of communism, this document became the party’s swansong.

Andrews’ book is, indeed, essential reading, not just for historians of British communism, but for anyone who believes, as I do, that important lessons were learned in the CP’s final years which are far from having been absorbed by what remains of the British left. From this point of view, however, the book leaves something to be desired. As I have tried to suggest above, it underplays the depth and gravity of the crisis faced by British capitalism in the years from 1964 to 1975, a period which, for anyone below the age of 40, has now entered a cognitive twilight zone and which, for that reason alone, needs to be revisited and reclaimed by the left. Furthermore, a question that naturally arises when one returns to the scenes of ancient battles is whether their outcome might have been different. Granted that militant labourism was doomed to defeat, could a Gramscian alternative really have made headway at this time? What specific policies would have made a difference at critical junctures and under what assumptions about antecedent developments and the ways in which key players responded to them? Of course, counterfactual history needs to be handled with care and should not become an excuse for unbridled speculation. It is, nevertheless, important both as an aid to understanding what actually happened and as a means of ensuring that the same mistakes are not made again.

This point is linked with a second. While Andrews’ summaries of the relevant literature are exemplary, he is at times insufficiently critical. For example, Marxism Today did a magnificent job in explaining the significance of Thatcherism and helping the left to understand what had gone wrong, but it never really engaged with the difficult task of devising and winning support for transformatory policies, especially in relation to the economy. By this I mean policies which deal effectively with pressing problems of the present, but at the same time are designed to initiate processes of institutional and cultural change: in short, policies that bear the seeds of a new civilisation.

A similar criticism can be levelled against the Manifesto for New Times. While this was written in a lively, jargon-free style and provided a much-needed set of bearings at a time when old political landmarks were disappearing, in its enthusiasm for a pluralist and non-statist version of socialism and in its loathing for the vanguard party, the new programme failed to acknowledge the limitations of non-party social movements. For one thing, there are often conflicts between different movements. Some Greens, for instance, hold views on abortion which are incompatible with feminist conceptions of reproductive rights. Likewise, organisations representing ethnic minorities sometimes resort to moral blackmail in a bid to get white sympathisers to support policies on policing or immigration which are completely untenable. More fundamentally, the left needs to acknowledge that movements as well as parties can be sectarian. If I insist that my movement is the most important for anyone at all to support and that the oppressive features of life that give rise to the movement are the gravest and most far-reaching of all oppressions, I am guilty of a form of chauvinism. One of the reasons parties matter is that they are, or can become, the bearers of general principles and social philosophies capable resolving such conflicts and avoiding sectarian attitudes.

Finally, while Andrews considers the claim that the Marxism Today was, in some sense and to some degree, responsible for the rise of New Labour, his treatment of this issue is somewhat perfunctory, amounting to little more than a comparison of the political trajectories of prominent intellectuals. Evidently, a more satisfactory answer requires a broader perspective on British politics than it would have been reasonable to expect in a history of the CPGB. In any case, this is a question for others to pursue. When they do so, they will benefit immensely from Andrews’ groundbreaking work.

David Purdy

1. Note, however, that the feminists, students and intellectuals who joined the party in these years were drawn disproportionately from the white population and that despite the CP’s honourable record in opposing colonialism and racism, its relationship to ‘black power’ was distinctly fraught. Nevertheless, as a component part of a more general upheaval in social consciousness and political behaviour affecting all the advanced capitalist countries, the black power movement helped to galvanise the realisation that these – and perhaps all – societies contain multiple, intersecting social divisions and that social identities and interests are not inscribed in the social structure.
2. What was probably the most egregious such episode took place in 1976 when the draft of a book on political economy written by members of the party’s Economic Advisory Committee in response to a request for an official party text, was withheld from publication at the behest of Bert Ramelson, the party’s national Industrial Organiser. As chair of the committee, Bert never tried to suppress debate: on the contrary, he encouraged and relished disputation – the fiercer, the better. Like a Jesuit priest, however, he took good care to insulate the rest of the party from heresy – including the Executive Committee. One of the theoretical chapters of the text exposed logical flaws in Marx’s theory of value and commended an alternative, neo-Ricardian account of the relationship between wages, prices and profits. But this was a somewhat esoteric issue which on its own would probably not have mattered. The main reason for cancelling the project was that the chapters dealing with the economics of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ expressed views on the causes of inflation and the need for an incomes policy which were at odds with the official party line.

   Direct censorship of this sort was rare. For the most part, the leadership maintained control over the organisation by three methods: deploying its powers of patronage, playing off one faction against another and appealing to ingrained norms of loyalty and discipline. The principal form of patronage was the use of the ‘recommended list’ for elections to district and national committees to reward loyalists and keep out troublemakers, though as the careers of Martin Jacques and Dave Cook demonstrate, some of those who benefited from this system subsequently broke free from the suffocating grip of bureaucratic conformity, at the cost of temporary demotion, and became political leaders of real stature and achievement.

3. In this and the following two paragraphs I have deliberately sharpened what Andrews has to say about incomes policy and British politics in the mid-1970s because I believe that this was the critical issue in the inner party battle and that the period from the first miners’ strike at the beginning of 1972 to the start of Phase One of the Social Contract in the summer of 1975 was the turning point in the wider political struggle over the future of Britain.