Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of the Spartacist journal, Winter 1985-86, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social and political questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist periodically throughout the year.
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"British Communism Aborted:The Far left: 1900-1920"- A Guest Book Review/Commentary
A REVIEW
The Origins of British Bolshevism
by Raymond Challinor Croom, Helm Ltd., London, 1977
If knowledge is not always power, ignorance is always weakness. With the deteriorating American school system calculated to produce ignorant youth in a period of reaction and Cold War, education of Marxist cadre is a crucial task for a Leninist organization. In this spirit, the Spartacist League/U.S. has instituted a nationally centralized program of internal education in Marxism and general knowledge.
As an aspect of this educational program, a significant part of the Central Committee plenum of the S L/ U.S., held last August, was devoted to a consideration of Raymond Challinor's The Origins of British Bolshevism. This is a study of the British Socialist Labour Party (SLP) from its origin around 1900 to its rapid disintegration in the early 1920s, following the organization's refusal to participate in the formation of the British section of the Communist International. Also as part of the education program Ed Clarkson of the SL Central Committee gave an educational presentation on Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder to a National Committee plenum of the Spartacus Youth League, the SL's youth section (reprinted as "Leninist Tactics and the Road to Workers Power" in Young Spartacus Nos. 130 and I3l, October and November 1985). We print below an edited version of a presentation to the plenum by comrade George Foster of the Sparta cist League Central Committee on Challinor's book.
This study of the British SLP illuminates in one important, concrete case the historic problem of forging Communist parties in the West out of the subjectively revolutionary elements in the pre-1917 socialist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. It also adds appreciably to our understanding of why the Communist Party in Britain was stillborn. The sterility of the CPGB and absence of a real Leninist tradition in Britain have been key negative conditions for the complete hegemony of Laborite reformism over the workers movement right down to the present.
The Third International
Much of the discussion focused on Challinor's parochial and nationally limited conception of revolutionary organization. The very title conveys a false understanding, as if a genuine counterpart of Russian Bolshevism was spontaneously generated on British (or Scottish) soil. Unlike the British SLP, the Russian Bolshevik Party was forged as an instrument to struggle for power amid the universal revolutionary ferment of the last years of the tsarist empire. It was this which set the Bolsheviks apart from even the best pre-World War I socialist parties in the West. In the discussion one conference participant pointed out:
"...[T]he Communist International does not fall from the skies, it comes from the experience of the Russian workers movement and the Russian Revolution— [T]he combination of a great empire; a central ethnicity that was not to be threatened, but massive national oppression; the growth of a great, raw, militant proletariat; pressures given the autocracy such that every member of the intelligentsia went through a selection process—all this churned up through wars, agrarian issues—[thus it was] that of all the parties of the Second International the Russian Social Democrats had the vanguard of experience."
The Bolsheviks' revolutionary experience was generalized and codified in the famous 21 Conditions for membership in the Communist International.
The British SLP was an example of a small Marxist propaganda group, originating and developing under relatively stable conditions of bourgeois democracy, which was then confronted with convulsive events, namely, the first imperialist world war and the Russian Revolution. The SLP had become so habituated to its prewar situation that it failed to make the turn toward the tasks of a new, far stormier period of social struggle.
Presentation
Comrades all have the study guide, the questions that were prepared to be thought about in conjunction with reading the book of Challinor.
For some of these questions the answers are quite clear; others are complex and require a lot of evaluation, thought and weighing; and at least one of them ought to frighten you a bit—which is, how does a party prepare for unanticipated and perhaps unprecedented events in a situation where the tasks posed by those events may for a period be far beyond your capacity? And the simple answer that comes to mind is: go through the experiences of the Bolshevik Party. Which may seem like a tautology, but isn't. And that's the point of this talk—that comrades Lenin and Trotsky and the first four congresses of the Communist International provide us with at least the political method and structure whereby we can forge a party which has both the program and possibly the capacity to make the rapid changes and adjustments necessary to lead to the revolutionary victory of the workers over the bourgeoisie.
I'd like to begin discussing the book by reading a quote from James Cannon, pioneer American Communist and Trotskyist, which 1 think sets this book in its context. And the quote is from Cannon's review of The Roots of American Communism by Theodore Draper. You'll find it in the book The First Ten Years of American Communism. Cannon says:
"The traditional sectarianism of the Americans was expressed most glaringly in their attempt to construct revolutionary unions outside the existing labor movement; their refusal to fight for’ immediate demands' in the course of the class struggle for the socialist goal; and their strongly entrenched anti-parliamentarism, which was only slightly modified in the first program of the Communist Party. All that hodgepodge of ultra-radicalism was practically wiped out of the American movement in 1920-21 by Lenin. He did it, not by an administrative order backed up by police powers, but by the simple device of publishing a pamphlet called "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. (This famous pamphlet was directed in part against the Dutch theoreticians who had exerted such a strong influence on the Americans and a section of the Germans.)"
Cannon goes on:
"The 'Theses and Resolutions' of the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 also cleared up the thinking of the American communists over a wide range of theoretical and political problems, and virtually eliminated the previously dominating influence exerted by the sectarian conceptions of De Leon and the Dutch leaders."
That is to say, whatever the particularities of the fate of the British Socialist Labour Party (SLP) and the impact of that on the viability of the Communist Party of Britain as it was constituted, its importance is far less of a factor than Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Lenin's work is literally a handbook of communist tactics which solved many of the problems of the American movement—the question of "boring from within," the question of the connection between parliamentarism and industrial action, the question of industrial unions, the question of conservative-dominated craft unions, the question of dual unionism. Unfortunately for most militants of the British SLP, afflicted with many of the very same political diseases, the lessons of Bolshevism were not assimilated. This was not, as Challinor maintains, a consequence of a misinformed Lenin's attempt to arrange a shotgun wedding of unsuitable partners to found the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), but rather a consequence of the SLP's parochial failure to grasp the world-historic significance of the 1917 October Revolution.
Roots of SLP: Britain and America
Now, the British SLP, as comrades read, arose out of a split with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) (later to become the British Socialist Party). And the split was a good split. It entailed the question of Millerandism, of Ireland, and of the SDF's very opportunistic courting of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). In the first section of his book Challinor lays out the political issues very clearly. The SDF was a rotten creation of a man named H.M. Hyndman who was not one of Marx's favorite people. Comrades, if they've read the book by Pelling on the origins of the British Labour Party [Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party}, know that Hyndman started out as a Tory radical. He was a fervid supporter of British imperialism, the monarchy and parliamentarism. He was also an anti-Semite and a dedicated opponent of militant class struggle, especially strikes. Himself a wealthy businessman, he and his cronies owned the SDF's newspaper, Justice. It was not until April 1916, under the bloody impact of the imperialist war, that the BSP— the product of a 1912 fusion of the SDF with the small left rump of the Independent Labour Party—got rid of Hyndman. Hyndman and his cohorts then formed a group called the National Socialist Party! A man before his time!
The U.S. SLP played a very big role, of course, in the formation of the British SLP. The American SLP was founded by immigrants of German and Jewish origin. Following Daniel De Leon's rise to leadership the party grew rapidly—controlling over 70 trade unions in the New York Central Labor Federation. The SLP wielded sufficient influence to secure (in 1893) adoption by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) of an eleven-point socialist program. By 1894 it had ousted Samuel Gompers from the presidency of the AFL. Gompers was not pleased. Within a year he was back in office and the SLP was out.
Which caused De Leon to renounce the tactic of "boring from within." As he put it, "the hole you're likely to bore from within is the one you're going to exit through." [Laughter.] And from these experiences came his hostility both to craft unionism and his very strong adherence to industrial unionism. The SLP attempted to set up their own industrial union federation which was called the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, which had 13,000 members. This formation rapidly disintegrated.
De Leon later refined his conceptions of industrial unionism and actually foreshadowed, in aspects at least, the idea of soviet rule of society—rule based on industrial workers organized in industrial enterprises, i.e., Soviets. And as comrades know, De Leon played an important role, along with Debs, in forging the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW.
The British SLP when it arose was concentrated overwhelmingly in Scotland and comrades may wonder why that was the case. Why was it that Glasgow, and in particular the Clydeside industrial belt, was the scene of the SLP's greatest strength and most influence in the proletariat? In his very detailed and interesting book called The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21, Walter Kendall aptly observes:
"Scottish radicalism also had its roots deep in a separate native cultural tradition. At the time of Charles I Scottish nobles and Calvinist clergy had combined to prevent the re-imposition of episcopacy in Scotland. In ensuing centuries the Church of Scotland retained a narrow, rigid theology, continually in conflict with English orthodoxy, a factor which gave a specifically different outlook and flavour to Scottish intellectual life. The Scottish educational system, given an initial impetus by the teachings of John Knox. remained in advance of the English until well into the twentieth century. Religion, the ideology of the establishment in Britain, had in Scotland a more striking record of national struggle. Penetrating deeper into the culture of the people, it gave them a penchant for the cut and thrust of logical argument, an appreciation and enthusiasm for dialectics not to be found in England. As John Knox was acolyte to Calvin, as John Carstairs Matheson to de Leon. So, in later years, Campbell and Gallacher were first to Lenin and then to his successor Stalin."
This is a polite way of presenting the Scottish psyche. [Laughter.]
There were other factors also ably cited by Kendall. There were a very large number of Irish immigrants in the Clydeside area, many of whom were active supporters of Sinn Fein. And as comrades know, the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly was indeed one of the founders of the SLP. Large-scale capitalism came late to Scotland and a large proportion of the proletariat of Glasgow had been uprooted from the countryside and pushed into the city, which like Petrograd had enormous engineering plants. So for a number of reasons the SLP sank its roots very deeply into Scotland and had very close links with the Irish struggle, and also, because of the large Scottish and Irish emigrations to North America, with the class struggle in the United States.
Impact of 1905 Russian Revolution
One of the enormous international impacts of the 1905 Russian Revolution was to turn the attention of socialists to the power of mass political strikes. In Germany Rosa Luxemburg and her followers seized upon the weapon of the mass strike as an answer to the social-reformist passivity of SPD [Social Democratic Party] tops, while failing to grasp the critical differences between the activities of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the 1905 upheavals in Russia [see "The Russian Revolution of 1905," Workers Vanguard Nos. 288 and 289, 11 and 25 September 1981]. The experience of 1905 was very directly connected with the founding of the IWW in the United States in that same year. This inspired subsequently similar efforts on the part of the British SLP.
However, the British SLP's Advocates of Industrial Unionism (AIU) never managed to rise to the level of the IWW despite a very strong swing toward syndicalism on the part of the British proletariat in the period from 1905 through 1913. In those years of stormy class conflict, a response to a massive rationalization and further concentration of British capital at the expense of the workers, trade unions in Britain grew enormously. This upsurge hit its high point in 1912 with the great miners strike.
During this period the AIU managed to only hitch a ride on this elemental wave of class struggle. But this was sufficient to blood its militants in the class struggle, and root them deeply in the militant proletariat in the sprawling Clyde engineering plants. This was to place them in a strategic position during the tumultuous strikes that ripped the region both in 1915-16 and early 1919.
In comparison with its British competitors, e.g., Hyndman's BSP and the ILP, the British SLP was impressive. Indeed it compares favorably to the American SLP of De Leon. The British SLP rejected De Leon's sectarian disavowal of "immediate demands," and played an important role in the class struggle. De Leon found himself isolated from the labor movement with his split with the IWW in 1908. Already in 1900 Hillquit, Berger and Debs had led a split out of the SLP to found the Socialist Party (SP). Cannon asserts in The First Ten Years that the SLP even before 1905 was well on its way to becoming a sect, noting the SP not only pulled in all the reformists, but also most of the left, vital revolutionary elements of the American proletariat.
Forging a Bolshevik Party
Challinor definitely misleads his readers by implying that the De Leonist SLP was two-thirds or three-quarters of the way to being a Bolshevik-type party. He says, "Clearly, the SLP was among the first to see the need for an organisational and ideological split from social democracy." In discussing this matter it's particularly useful to look at the SLP through the lens of Lenin's What Is To Be Done? About a year before the SLP was born,
Lenin wrote his work. If "Left- Wing" Communism constitutes a handbook on communist tactics, What Is To Be Done? contains the blueprints for the construction of a party and a cadre. So that the whole struggle against economism, the struggle for a party of professional revolutionaries, the struggle which Lenin talks about at great length in "Left-Wing" Communism—for a political party to be a tribune of the people, to master politics in many arenas—all this is laid out of course in What Is To Be Done? You don't see anything at all like this in the SLP.
On everything from press questions to forms of organization the differences are clear. In particular they are clear on the necessity of constructing a cadre of full-time professional revolutionaries. The British SLP had difficulty keeping a full-timer and a lot of the time didn't have one. I found it a source of great irritation that Challinor holds this up as a virtue. Referring to the valiant work of SLP leader MacManus during the war, he says:
"It is hard to imagine how great the strain upon certain individuals must have been. For example. Arthur MacManus was editor of The Socialist, and in I9l5,when the Clyde Workers' Committee was formed, he became its chairman. As spokesman for this rank-and-file organization, the most powerful of its kind in the country, he played a leading role in the creation of a National Workers' & Shop Stewards' Movement. All this was done in his spare time: he also had a full-time job as an engineer at G. & J. Weir's Cathcart works, where he was the most well-known militant. Besides these commitments, which would have been more than enough for half a do/en men with only a normal amount of energy. MacManus found time to help in the struggle in Ireland. In 1915, James Connolly visited Glasgow and told his old SLP comrades that the authorities had suppressed their journal, the Irish Worker. So the SLP undertook to print it clandestinely on the Party's press at Renfrew Street. In his autobiography Tom Bell stated, 'Comrade Arthur MacManus was especially keen on doing this; working night and day to get it out, and arranged for the shipment of the paper, which he took over personally to Dublin'."
Heroic MacManus indeed was. But the inability of the SLP to provide for full-time party workers was a source of abiding weakness. It prevented the cohering of a cadre around a program, and prevented that leadership from jelling. One gets the impression of a lot of very talented, capable, tough-minded, experienced propagandists and trade-union agitators who tended to be more an association than a party. I think this explains one of the big questions that this book raises. Why was it that those elements of the SLP who were for a fusion with the Third International, who wanted to bring the SLP in as part of the Communist Party of Britain and who themselves were among the most pre-eminent of the SLP leaders, actually had the organization taken away from them and were incapable of effecting any significant split for Leninism? The answer is to be found in their inability to construct a party with the resources, but above all the perspective, of maintaining a cadre of professional revolutionists.
If the SLP started out as a good split from the SDF, on the eve of World War 1 it had a very murky split, reflecting above all the political incapacity of De Leonism to serve as a guide for revolutionary action. In 1912 the SLP lost over half its members in a dispute over whether or not it was permissible for the party to support reforms—e.g., should an SLP councillor in Glasgow cast a vote for more money to the unemployed. Defeated at the Manchester conference, the anti-reform "impossibilists" walked out of the party, taking a majority of the membership with them.
The SLP had a good line on the first imperialist war, but its activities in the unions during the war revealed weakness in the party. In short the SLP did not carry its line against the war in a way that counted into the massive Clyde strikes of 1915-1916—strikes in which the SLP played a leading role. Challinor excuses this on the grounds that for the SLP to insist that the Clyde Workers' Committee—which was running this massive strike against the Munitions Act— adopt the SLP's line on the war would have split the Workers' Committee. Again you see here a failure to grasp what Lenin later was to try to teach the British workers movement—which was that they were obligated to have their people who were working in that arena attempt to transform this strike, to agitate to infuse the strike with a political content aimed against the imperialist war and the British government. The strike was a strike against key munitions industries in wartime, and against the M munitions Act. Objectively it was a political strike against war par excellence.
Instead the behavior of SLP strike leader John Muir dragged the SLP's antiwar banner in the mud. Dragged before the bosses' court for his role in the strike, Muir cravenly swore that the strike was a purely economic struggle over shop issues and that he was for the war and war production! And the SLP tolerated this renegade remaining in its ranks! The honor of the Clyde Workers' Committee was upheld by John Maclean, the representative of the left internationalist wing of the BSP, who turned his trial into a political indictment of the bourgeoisie and its imperialist war.
British capitalism emerged from World War I profoundly shaken. Under the impact of the October Revolution the class antagonisms generated by war exploded in a massive postwar strike wave accompanied by episodic strikes and mutinies in the armband navy. In January 1919 the Clyde workers went out in a massive general strike for a 40-hour week. The government responded with armed troops. Unfortunately the strike did not spread and the strikers did not test the troops. At the time the government had only two battalions of reserves.
Challinor quotes from Aneurin Sevan's In Place of Fear, which described the famous 1919 meeting between the prime minister, Lloyd George, and the leaders of the Triple
Alliance. All I can say is, Lloyd George knew his Labour leaders [laughter]—which he ought to, since the Liberal Party and the ILP and the trade unions were very closely
linked. It reminds me of the German events of the autumn of 1918, when the troops were mutinying and forming Soviets. The German general staff pulled the same act on
the German soldiers' Soviets on the Western Front, saying, "Well, fine. You soldiers' Soviets have to withdraw two million people from France and Belgium. Here, you do it.
Are you ready?" Nope, they weren't. But that was a gamble[laughs]. In Britain a couple of the right guys in there and one might have had something approaching a 1905
situation, or at least a very big, much more massive wave ofpolitical strikes—which would have put the British workers in a lot better position both objectively and from a
standpoint of cohering a communist party. The whole incident both highlights the counterrevolutionary role of the trade-union tops, and exposes the political incapacity
of the SLP which had no idea how to overcome these roadblocks to revolution. ,
Challinor plays up the very real strengths of the SLP, while downplaying its De Leonist weaknesses—indeed, treating them as virtues. Meanwhile he presents such a compelling picture of the wretchedness of the BSP that one wonders how any chunk of this party made it into the Comintern. In fact the BSP was a heterogeneous organization that underwent a series of left-right polarizations under the impact of the war and the Russian Revolutions of 1917.
Affiliation to the Communist International
Following the 1916 split between Hyndman and E.G. Fairchild, who had a Kautskyite position on the war, the BSP moved leftward. At its April 1919 Conference the BSP declared itself for soviet rule and polled its branches on affiliation to the Communist International (Cl). Fairchild supported the Russian Revolution, but didn't consider a soviet-type revolution in Britain a serious possibility. The left majority, including John Maclean who maintained a consistent internationalist position as a BSPer throughout the war, believed the British revolution was on the order of the day and that they should link up with the Third International. The result of the ballot on affiliation to the Communist International, announced in October, was 98 to 4 in favor of affiliation.
Undoubtedly among those for the CI were a goodly number of "November Bolsheviks." Theodore Rothstein, a rotten apple, was perhaps the leading example of this layer. His trajectory was parallel to that of many left social-democratic sharpies in Europe, who thought that the Third International was the wave of the future. You had the Frossards and Cachins and scads of social democrats in the French party who went over to the Third International but didn't belong there. The main aim of the 21 Conditions was to filter such people out, and also to filter out the practices they brought with them.
The Russians were, I think, much more familiar with the BSP than SLP. All of the Bolshevik congresses except the one held in Stockholm—from 1903 to the Revolution— were held in London. Lenin himself lived for a time in London, as did some 30,000 other Russian emigres. And of those that were leftists—adherents to socialism—many belonged to the BSP. They constituted a large portion of the left wing of that organization. During the war a very large number of them were supporters of Trotsky's Nashe Slovo which was printed in Paris. Challinor makes the point that half of the circulation of that journal took place in Britain, .and the overwhelming proportion of that in London. There was also a colony of Russian exiles—and that too swelled enormously after the 1905Revolution—in Scotland, again associated with the SDF/BSP.
Litvinov and Chicherin and a number of others were associated with and had links with the BSP in London. Further, SDF members both in England and Scotland ran guns to the Russian revolutionaries from 1905 through 1907—quite a lot of them, hundreds of Brownings, millions of rounds of ammo. They would buy them in Europe, smuggle them to Newcastle, get them to Scotland, and then on to tsarist ships to smuggle them into Russia.
So not all BSPers were clones of the top-hatted and corpulent H.M. Hyndman! As with the SLP, a significant part of the BSP far left was located in Scotland. Most noteworthy was John Maclean, who as earlier indicated maintained a consistent internationalist position on the war, and played an important role in the Clyde strikes. The formidable Maclean was arguably the most capable proletarian revolutionist in Britain and a close associate of BSPer Peter Petroff, a hero of the 1905 Russian Revolution.
The Communist unity negotiations in Britain are very confusing, above all a reflection of the political confusion of the participants in the negotiations. There were three main groups and a couple of subsidiary ones. You had the SLP, Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation, the South Wales Socialist Society and the ILP left, and they all hailed the Russian Revolution—both revolutions. And some of them genuinely hailed the second one too. [Laughter.] It does strike you in reading the SLP's writings on the Russian Revolution that on the one hand, yes, they're happy it happened and... its real, main and key significance was it vindicates the SLP and its line in Britain! [Laughs.] In short, to repeat, the SLP failed to appreciate the world-historic significance of the October Revolution both in the broad sense and also in the particular communist sense that Lenin outlined in "Left- Wing" Communism.
I think Challinor makes a very good case that Lenin did not have clear ideas on everything that was going on in Britain. How could he? He was at some distance from the events, and certainly had other things occupying his mind in the immediate period after the October Revolution. Further, revolutionary Russia was blockaded by the imperialists. His information was partial.
However, Lenin did recognize something very important: that there needed to be a unified Communist party in Britain. You had all these groups claiming adherence to the October Revolution, to soviet government and for the Third International. There was an objective requirement for a Bolshevik-type party in Britain. But if there was to be such a party it had to have a policy toward the Labour Party. What gets omitted in Challinor is any policy toward the Labour Party except throwing rocks at it.
Was Britain going through a revolutionary period in 1918-1920? No. But if the Triple Alliance had decided to tell Lloyd George to shove it, we might have had something
break. But that didn't happen, and a lot of people voted Labour. There were 4 million workers affiliated to the Labour Party. The Labour Party in 1918 became socialist. You better believe that had something to do with the October Revolution and the Labour Party covering its ass. For communists the question was how to deal with this obstacle.
The most striking failure was, as I mentioned earlier, the failure of the pro-fusion wing of the SLP, the Communist Unity Group of MacManus and Bell, to carry the majority of the SLP into the CPGB. They had no conception of factional struggle for their particular position. Thus the best of the SLP, who could not understand how to conduct a faction fight in their own party, certainly could not understand what Lenin was talking about at all regarding the Labour Party. Challinor drags out J.T. Murphy's "cogent arguments" against Labour Party affiliation. These are not very cogent at all and have been answered dozens of times. Reading Murphy what comes through is: we'll either be swamped in the Labour Party or we have to destroy it. There's no conception of using class-struggle means to polarize and gut it—i.e., no conception therefore of political struggle for a political line and program. Behind that is the conception of the party as the worst sort of a passive propaganda society.
This was a fatal flaw of De Leonism, its social-democratic underbelly. The party through patient propaganda and education was to win the proletariat to its side. In the U.S. De Leon projected the SLP would eventually win at the polls and dissolve the capitalist government. Should the bourgeoisie resist, they would be "locked out" by the socialist industrial unions, which would then proceed to administer socialism. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of a transition period and of the role of the party in that transition are absent.
So the SLP had a pretty good party in terms of—not the party that made the October Revolution—but of what was floating around in England or even the U.S. in that period. They didn't make it. What stands out is their parochialism. In the U.S. out of the left wing of the SP came the Haywood wing of the IWW, Cannon. Swabeck, John Reed, the foreign-language federations and a few of the native American workers. And out of that was forged a viable Communist Party—a little too viable in its early period. Like Cannon said, they fought like hell all the time. It was the Comintern that came in and provided the lessons and the correctives to teach the young American CP how to become a Leninist party—how to solve a lot of the problems that had tied up the American party and British and German and pre-war social democracy.
The party issuing out of the 1920 Communist Unity Convention was stillborn. And the indication of that was— no fights. The recent Euro/tankie fight is the CPGB's first serious faction fight. Very early on the British party acquired a set of leaders who seemed to live forever [laughs] and didn't get any better. The congenital incapacity of the CPGB was evident during the 1926 General Strike and since, and has also had negative impact on Trotskyism in Britain. Cannon and a section of the American CP were forged into genuine Leninists who, when the degeneration of the Comintern came, were able to pick up the banner. This was not the case in Britain. Gerry Healy tries to suck glorious origins of British Trotskyism out of his thumb, but it's a fact that Trotskyism had to be imported.
The SLP in Britain disappeared very quickly after it stood aside from the Third International, in many ways like the syndicalist wing of the IWW did in the U.S. Cannon made the point that one would have thought, on the face of it, given the history of the IWW during the war which was as a semi-party, certainly revolutionary-minded and with many experienced militants, that a large number of them would have made it to the Communist Party. But, as he put it, it was the foreigners, the callow youth, only some fragments of the IWW that actually came to be the core of the American Communist Party. They didn't have the experience of many of the IWW, but in the end program was decisive. But there at least you had a germ cell that was fertilized and grew. I think in Britain what you had was a miscarriage; Challinor might more aptly have titled his book "The Abortion of British Bolshevism."
For Challinor, himself a supporter of the anti-Soviet and social-democratic Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of Britain, the abortionists are Lenin and the Communist International. Clearly he feels that it was erroneous to insist that the new CPGB affiliate to the Labour Party, as this blocked the majority of the SLP, whom he wrongly considers the "native Bolsheviks," from entering that CP.
Challinor's position should be contrasted with that of Lenin at the Second Congress. Lenin insisted that the question of the Labour Party be debated before the International. He insisted that the new International not repeat the experience of the Second International and let the British comrades get into a room and decide the question among themselves. The Labour Party question was not simply a British question but an international problem. It was the obligation of the Cl to come up with a policy and pursue it. If this led to some splits, so be it, but it would be good experience for the British party to try to implement these tactics.
Challinor does not take up the real difficulty in implementing the CIs policy. To carry it off successfully you needed a hard, cohesive, ideologically tested formation. And that certainly was not what the British CP was. We have a contradiction. If the CPGB had successfully affiliated, they probably would very likely have capitulated in just the way many of the SLPers feared they would. [Interjection: Adopt a position in favor of entry, and don't enter!] Right, right! A zero approximation of a position of shallow entry! [Laughter.] What you needed were Comintern reps on the scene to take these various would-be Bolsheviks by the political scruff of the neck, to teach them and fight with them. Lenin was very aware that a policy of affiliation was no automatic recipe for success. He thought this would be a good school for the CPGB, a school of political struggle, leading very possibly to splits and a fusion on a higher order.
Challinor, like all anti-Leninist centrists, invokes Lenin against Lenin. He quotes Lenin's criticism of the Third Congress Org Resolution that it was "too Russian." We've made the point numerous times but it bears repeating. Lenin thought that resolution was "too Russian" in the sense that it was too long and no one would read or understand it. But if you read on, he remarks (and this was his last speech to the Communist International):
"We Russians must also find ways and means to explaining the principles of this resolution to the foreigners. Unless we do that, it will be absolutely impossible for them to carry it out. I am sure that in this connection we must tell not only the Russians, but the foreign comrades as well, that the most important thing in the period we are now entering is to study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense, in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that, I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will be not only good, but excellent." —Collected Works Vol. 33
Better the road of Lenin than that of Challinor!
Summary
A question was raised about the attitude of the SLP to the colonial question, and in particular to the Amritsar massacre. Regarding this a British comrade has handed me a note stating that a reading of The Socialist, the SLP's newspaper, and also The Call, which was the BSP's, indicates that in fact they did take it up. He observes: "If it's possible to differentiate active internationalism in the building of the party from the tribune of the people, I think they were pretty good on the latter." In that sense I think they would therefore be with the best of the Second International. Comrades recall that last year we printed the following quote from Trotsky on this question from his 1932 essay "What Next?" He was referring to the German centrists, and Ledebour in particular:
"Ledebour demands that a battle be waged against colonial oppression: he is ready to vote in parliament against colonial credits: he is ready to take upon himself fearless defense of the victims of a crushed colonial insurrection. But Ledebour will not participate in preparing a colonial insurrection. Such work he considers putschism. adventurism. Bolshevism. And therein is the whole gist of the matter."
The American SLP hung on for years, and it's a question as to how this happened. It's not the same people who founded the party in the 1860s or the 1870s although, to look at them, sometimes you think so. [Laughter.] They became a sect, but some sects don't make it. The American SLP made it because they did have a base among some of the foreign-language groups. They stopped publication of their Bulgarian-language paper only a short while ago. It's been pointed out that the SLP probably got the Bulgarians in the U.S. because they were the closest thing to the Narrows [Bulgarian Narrow Socialist Party]. [Laughter.] Shachtman in '46 decided the Workers Party would become a small mass party in a very big country. The Bulgarians tried to be a small party in a small country and wound up a mass party.
As I said, John Maclean was probably the best of the BSP. Indeed Lenin singled him out as representing the best far-left, internationalist wing of British socialism. And he also didn't make it. He spiraled into creating a nationalist party, i.e., the Scottish Communist Party. He thought that the axis of a workers revolution in Britain would be an Irish/Scottish revolution. And London would follow—which is just plain wrong. You have to get the capital. In other times, from a very different class standpoint, this strategy was tried and didn't succeed. [Laughter.]
When the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee were being formed it was not at all clear that they would forge a labor party which would capture the allegiance of the British proletariat. But indeed it did succeed, and by 1918 had become a formidable obstacle to proletarian revolution. Remember the Leeds Conference, where you had people like Snowden and Henderson coming out for "soviets" in Britain... adopting the protective coloration of pink.
In closing, to reiterate Cannon's point: the October Revolution marked a watershed not only in the broad international sense but also in the specific, communist sense. It was the Bolsheviks who taught us how to forge parties of a new type—vanguard parties, Leninist parties, combat parties. The experience of Bolshevism solved all the dilemmas that had arisen in the preceding period: the questions of "boring from within," parliamentary action, industrial action, etc. So that we stand far higher than the SLP did, but on the shoulders of the Russian Revolution. If we can see these things it's because we're the continuators. As Cannon said, "We are the party of the Russian Revolution"—our teachers.
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Are You Ready to Take the Power?
We reprint below an excerpt from In Place of Fear, the autobiography of the late Aneurin Bevan.
I remember vividly Robert Smillie describing to me an interview the leaders of the Triple Alliance had with David Lloyd George in 1919. The strategy of the leaders was clear. The miners under Robert Smillie, the transport workers under Robert Williams, and the National Union of Railwaymen under James Henry Thomas, formed the most formidable combination of industrial workers-in the history of Great Britain. They had agreed on the demands that were to be made on the employers, knowing well that the government would be bound to be involved at an early stage. And so it happened. A great deal of industry was still under government wartime control and so the state power was immediately implicated.
Lloyd George sent for the Labour leaders, and they went, so Robert told me, "truculently determined they would not be talked over by the seductive and eloquent Welshman." At this Bob's eyes twinkled in his grave, strong face. "He was quite frank with us from the outset," Bob went on. "He said to us: 'Gentlemen, you have fashioned, in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has occurred already in a number of camps. We have just emerged from a great war and the people are eager for the reward of their sacrifices, and we are in no position to satisfy them. In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us.
"'But if you do so,' went on Mr. Lloyd George, 'have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the Government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the State which is stronger than the State itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the State, or withdraw and accept the authority of the State. Gentlemen,' asked the Prime Minister quietly, 'have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?' From that moment on," said Robert Smillie, "we were beaten and we knew we were."
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