Paul Anderson, review of The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920 by James Eaden and David Renton (Palgrave, £45), Tribune, 1 July 2002
The Communist Party of Great Britain was not one of the success stories of the 20th century. Founded in 1920, it struggled through the next 15 years as a tiny sect reliant for survival upon subsidies from Moscow, briefly caught the popular mood of the left in the late 1930s and 1940s (with a gap between 1939 and 1941 when Stalin was Hitler’s ally), then lived a life of fitful but inexorable decline through the cold war until its death, unmourned, in 1991.
The facts of the story are well known. During its lifetime — partly because its protagonists thought they had a world-historical role, partly because its antagonists half-believed them — the British CP always received far more attention than its rather limited impact appeared to warrant. And since its demise its entrails have been picked over relentlessly by historians, both specialists, writing about key communist personalities and campaigns, and generalists taking the broad view of the party’s rise and fall.
Since 1991, there have been three overview post mortems: one by a critical old CPer, Willie Thompson; one from a Tribune democratic socialist, the journalist Francis Beckett; and one (a shabby job) by two academics, Keith Laybourn and Dylan Murphy. So why do we need another? Well, what’s missing is the Trotskyist version, and that’s what Eaden and Renton provide, building on the pioneering work on the early years of the CP by Brian Pearce and Michael Woodhouse published back in the 1950s and 1960s.
Eaden and Renton are sophisticated Trots, and their book is extremely well researched – they have read all the secondary literature and lots more besides. They make telling points against the revisionist school of CP history that tries to minimise the role of Moscow’s diktats in the everyday life of the party — and there is much else in their account that is praiseworthy, in particular the material on the CP’s strangely ambiguous role in the industrial militancy of the 1960s and 1970s.
The problem, however, is their unyielding belief that all would have been for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only the correct Leninist line had been consistently applied. According to Eaden and Renton, the CP was fine until the degeneration of the first workers’ state but lost its way because from the late 1920s it followed Stalin into abandoning the perspective of world proletarian revolution. The CP became a tool of a revisionist Soviet foreign policy that (after a tragic and quixotic ultra-Leftist phase of attacking socialists as “social fascists”) sought coexistence with capitalism – advocating a “popular front” against fascism with liberals and “progressive” conservatives rather than a “united front” with other workers’ parties. After that, it was downhill all the way except for brief spells when the CP rediscovered the delights of the proletarian united front — particularly in 1939-41, when all true socialists were against the war effort . . .
I’m sorry, but this is too much to swallow. For starters, it ignores the brutal fact that throughout the 1920s the CP was a tiny militant sect, massively outnumbered and outpowered intellectually by the Independent Labour Party. Then there’s the small problem that it was only when the CP shifted to the Right in the 1930s and again between 1941 and 1945 that it came close to becoming a mass party. As for the claim that 1939-41 marks some temporary respite from political degeneration, well, that’s not the way it seemed to the majority of the Labour Left, which saw the Hitler-Stalin pact and the CP’s subsequent defeatism as a great betrayal.
I could go on. On more recent history, Eaden and Renton are weak on the crisis in the CP that followed Khruschev’s secret speech and the Hungarian revolution in 1956; and they have little of interest to say on the role of the CP in the early-1980s Bennite Labour Left or in the second wave of CND. They take a peculiarly superficial view of the arguments that attended the collapse of the CP in the mid-1980s — were the Eurocommunists really no more than opportunists of the worst kind? — and add nothing to our understanding of the momentous events of 1989.
All the same, I recommend this book. I thoroughly enjoyed disagreeing with it.
