Kevin Morgan, Bolshevism and the British Left, part one: Labour Legends and Russian Gold, pp315; Bolshevism and the British Left, part two: The Webbs and Soviet Communism, pp263, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2006, ISBN: vol. 1: 1905007256, vol. 2: 1905007264.

These are the first two of a three-volume history of British bolshevism, which portrays British communism as an integral part of the wider British labour movement. The first volume amounts to a detailed account of the funding of the CPGB by the Communist International within the framework of party funding in Britain in the interwar period. Initial lavish funding of the CPGB in the 1920s allowed the party to employ an array of paid organisers but also brought internal criticisms of 'Moscow gold' fostering adventurism, demoralisation and bureaucratisation. The Labour intellectuals in the Labour Research Department (LRD), looking for some independent means of finance, were tempted by the Soviet offer only to find that it came with strict Soviet control. George Lansbury was also tempted to accept funding for his struggling Daily Herald, but was ultimately forced to decline the offer.

In relation to members of parliament and candidates, Morgan shows clearly how Labour MPs and those aspiring to be Labour MPs remained dependant on wealthy backers during the entire interwar period. Party financing in the UK had an inbuilt 'democratic deficit', which, according to Morgan, might explain why the issue of 'Moscow gold' received relatively little attention in the 1920s. Processes of professionalisation and centralisation within the working class parties were eyed suspiciously by many activists, as they saw it as going against the grain of voluntarism and activism.

On the important issue of the impact of 'Moscow gold' on the development of the CPGB, Morgan admits that it furthered the process of stalinisation but argues that its impact on the British party should not be overestimated. He finds little evidence of a systematic and continuous political control of the Comintern over the CPGB and points to the importance of political capital of Communist leaders acquired outside of the apparatus of the CP (e.g. Arthur Horner). Leaders such as Pollitt also showed a lack of deference to the Comintern officials over issues such as cross-party collaboration. Making good use of the comparative method, Morgan argues that in party journalism and over ventures such as the Left Book Club, the CPGB cooperated with other sections of the labour movement in a way which ensured that the Communists were often perceived as part and parcel of a wider labour movement. The CPGB's policy of revolutionary permeation was in marked contrast to the insistence on independent leadership of such sister parties as the German KPD. Within the Comintern this led to acrimonious debate with Morgan wondering whether it was mere linguistic incompetence when Pollitt referred to the KPD's Wilhelm Pieck as 'Comrade Prick' (p227). In the 1930s, when 'Moscow gold' was drying up for the British communists, their independence from the Comintern increased, as the CPGB was learning to stand on its own feet.

Overall, the first volume successfully contextualises the issue of 'Moscow gold' within the wider framework of party finance in interwar Britain and asks pertinent questions about the inter-relationship of democracy and mechanisms of financing political parties. The second volume addresses the issue of fellow travelling and chooses Beatrice and Sidney Webb as central actors to be analysed. The Webbs were in many respects archetypal figures of an English reformist tradition of socialism (fabian gradualism), yet in the 1930s they famously came to endorse Soviet communism as the beginnings of a 'new civilisation'. Through an in-depth and complex exploration of the continuities in their political thinking which predisposed the Webbs and many of their fellow socialists to become fellow travellers, Morgan highlights the affinities between strands of social democratic thought and Soviet communism. Interestingly those affinities were particularly strong not among statist socialists but among guild socialists, cooperators and those with non-statist conceptions of socialism. Morgan thus demonstrates that there were a variety of different routes from British socialism to British bolshevism. En route, Morgan also fills an important gap in the literature on fabianism in that he sheds light on the Webbs' political thought after 1910 and in that he discovers the Webbs as theorists of community rather than the state.

Among those factors which made the voyage from fabianism to bolshevism possible for the Webbs and their collaborators (such as the Coles, which also receive a considerable amount of attention), the distinct lack of a worked-out theory of the state figures prominently. Other factors, which are all discussed thoroughly in this volume, include a marked indifference to party ties, enmity to social 'parasitism', thinking in terms of human civilisations (sometimes with distinct eugenicist and racial overtones), the elitist cult of the expert, the idealisation of voluntary working class organisations, such as trade unions and cooperative societies, the idea of a rationally organised society and of 'rational consumption', the wholesale embrace of modernity (including technocratic rationality), the lack of any proper conception of politics, disappointment with 'Labour corruption' in the wake of 1931 and the desire to see an improvement in the social status of intellectuals like themselves. Morgan discusses all of these factors with great sophistication and insight into the mechanisms of fellow travelling.

The underlying question connecting those two volumes (and arguably also the third) is why British political culture into the 1940s allowed considerable overlaps and fuzzy borders between social democrats and communists, when these borders were often far more firmly drawn on the european continent. One possible explanation alluded to throughout is that ideas of state and party were far less central to British socialists than to continental ones. Especially in volume one Morgan makes excellent use of comparison to shed light on this question. Sadly there is much less comparative material in volume 2, although the issue of fellow travelling lends itself, just like party finance, to the comparative gaze. However, overall one can already confidently say that this three-volume history of British bolshevism will be a lasting achievement of more than two decades of intense research about the British left. No one working on the British left will be able to ignore these volumes. Given the contested nature of some of the questions these volumes seek to provide answers to, there will be no doubt scholars who would put the emphasis on this or that question differently, and one hopes that these debates might be carried out in the spirit of tolerant pluralism that was after all, for many continental socialists, one of the defining characteristics of the British labour movement.

Stefan Berger, University of Manchester