Bolshevization, Stalinization, and Party Ritual: The Congresses of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920–1943

Abstract

This paper examines the national congresses of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the period of the Communist International (1919- 43). Both in Britain and internationally, communist party congresses in this period lost any independent decision-making role and became a mechanism activated and controlled from above. Not surprisingly, they have attracted little serious scholarly notice in their own right, but this paper identifies three themes deserving consideration: first, that of the congress as a field of tension between inherited notions of delegatory democracy and the Comintern’s top-down version of democratic centralism; second, that of its growing importance as a site of symbolic demonstration and ritualized group action; and third, that of bolshevization and Stalinization as processes that can be traced through these changing conceptions of the congress’s role. Each theme is considered here in a separate section. These employ a three-party periodization that supports an argument of the CPGB’s early but protracted bolshevization. Further watershed moments in the late 1920s and the mid-1930s can both in different ways be identified with Stalinization. These, however, did not so much resolve as displace the tensions with wider labour movement practices.