British Communist Party Research Articles

‘For peace and defence of the Soviet Union’: the leadership of British Communism in the Popular Front era, 1935–1939

ABSTRACT This prosopographical investigation of the Central Committee (CC) of the British Communist Party during the Popular Front era analyses the origins, occupations, political careers and destinations of the 47 Communists who served on the CC in these years. The transition from Third Period leftism to class collaboration found minimal reflection in the characteristics of the Communist leadership, which remained in line with those of the preceding cohort. The Popular Front group was slightly older, the percentage of women declined and attention to the middle class saw only marginal increase in the numbers that experienced higher education. There were more Scots, fewer English while turnover remained high. ‘Debutantes’ were younger and relatively raw compared with the ‘Continuation Group’ − 40% of newcomers had joined the CPGB during the Third Period. However, a ‘core’ whose CC service stretched back to the early 1920s and a ‘core of the core’ who endured into the 1950s ensured continuity. The integration of CC members into the party bureaucracy observed in earlier years was maintained: 75% of CC representatives occupied full-time posts. Previous articles provided life histories of the ‘Continuation Group’; the biographical focus here is on the ‘Debutantes’. But the majority of committee members were ‘practical’ working-class activists. Executors of policy, in the end they left theory and strategy to the Comintern and the Soviet elite.

The leadership of British Communism, 1923–1928: pages from a prosopographical project

ABSTRACT The importance of leadership in awakening and guiding the working class was emphasised at all levels within the parties which saw themselves as indispensable to socialist revolution. It was fundamental to the philosophy of the Bolsheviks, the Comintern and the early British Communist Party (CPGB). The executive committee (EC) which directed the work of members was broadly representative of the CPGB leadership. The 39 activists who served on the EC between 1923 and 1928 are examined in relation to their origin, age, ethnicity, gender, education, occupation, political antecedents and future destination. Attention is paid to their partners, who were also relevant actors, if frequently marginal to the historiography. The leadership cohort was overwhelmingly British-born, half were English, a third Scottish, male and white. It was predominantly proletarian, 75% of the group were manual workers, although 20% came from middle-class backgrounds and 12.8% were classified as intellectuals compared with 5% of party members. Over 46% of party leaders worked in skilled trades and more than 35% had a background in metalworking. This contrasted with the CPGB as a whole where colliery workers predominated; only a little over 10% of leaders were miners. The mean age was 36.4 years and most had received only an elementary education. Almost 90% joined the CPGB in 1920–1921 with former members of the Socialist Labour Party disproportionately represented in the leadership. Turnover was significant: over 40% served on only one or two committees. Conversely almost 50% sat on four or five. Their partners were more ethnically diverse and like other family members benefitted from Soviet and party patronage in employment. This pioneering prosopography concludes with biographical profiles of the 20 leaders who were not part of the ‘core’ of representatives who registered four or five appearances on the executive from 1923 to 1928. More than half of this ‘peripheral’ group subsequently departed not only the EC but the CPGB itself.

Letters of Solidarity and Friendship: Czechoslovakia 1968–71 by Parker David (review)

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 388 technocratic future — the ‘combat readiness’ of East European states in case of Western attack was open to doubt. And military defence of frontline borders with NATO had, after all, been the very purpose behind the Warsaw Pact, from 1955 onwards. Department of Humanities Matthew Stibbe Sheffield Hallam University Parker, David (ed.). Letters of Solidarity and Friendship: Czechoslovakia 1968– 71. Bacquier Books, Holmfirth, 2017. 436 pp. Illustrations. Timeline. Notes. Index of letters. £14.99 (paperback). David Parker, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Leeds, presents us with a collection of correspondence between his late father, Leslie Parker, and a doctor in Czechoslovakia, Paul Žalud, who spent the Second World War in the United Kingdom but subsequently returned to Communist Czechoslovakia out of a sense of duty. Although the two never met one another, they developed an intimate correspondence lasting from 1968 until 1971, the year that Leslie Parker passed away. The letters exchanged between the men represent a valuable contribution to our understanding of life in Communist Czechoslovakia during the first years of Soviet occupation and the onset of so-called ‘normalization’. In addition, Parker’s criticisms of capitalist society and injustices are insightful. Parker was a veteran member and functionary of the British Communist Party, whereas Žalud was a disillusioned Czechoslovak ex-Communist doctor (he left the Party in 1941) struggling to salvage his career and provide for his family in the provincial city of Ústí nad Labem. Their letters are reprinted here largely in their original format, and organized chronologically. There is a short introduction at the beginning and some reflections by the editor at the end of the volume. The exchange of letters was initiated by Parker after Žalud published a letter in The Times dated 14 July 1968 (published 19 July 1968) in reaction to their coverage of the pre-occupation Prague Spring. Žalud disagreed with The Times on why hard-line Communists in the Soviet Union persisted in their belief that the liberalization measures adopted by Czechoslovak party leader, Alexander Dubček, during the first half of 1968 were part of an imperialist Western conspiracy to undermine the Soviet bloc. Žalud referred to Karl Popper’s ‘conspiracy theory of society’ in order to explain Soviet thinking in his attempt to correct the impression made by The Times that the Soviet leaders felt the way they did because they were ‘prisoners of Marxist doctrine’. The point made by Žalud was that Soviet thinking had nothing in common with true Marxist REVIEWS 389 doctrine. The editor refers to some unpreserved initial correspondence initiated by Parker criticizing Žalud’s stance. When Žalud responded in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion, which occurred in August, Parker apologized and the friendly correspondence began. The first letter in the volume was sent from Žalud to Parker on 28 October 1968. Žalud mentioned that thirty thousand Czechoslovaks had already left for the West and that the Czechoslovak Communist Party was still struggling to preserve the sovereignty of the occupied country, but that the Soviets were interfering wherever possible. In his reply, Parker wrote of the social ills facing Britain and other Western countries. He also mentioned that Communists in Britain and other Western countries were torn by the question of whether antiimperialism meant always agreeing with Soviet foreign policy. Finally, Parker stated that the existence of the Communist countries in Europe was a good thing because ‘if they were to go, the salvation of humanity would be put back possiblycenturies’.Žalud’sreply(thefinalletterof1968inthevolume)tookissue with Parker’s notion that the success of the socialist revolution was sufficient to end ‘man’s exploitation by man’ by stating: ‘The expropriation of the means of production and the verbal declaration that the proletariat has been raised to the position of the ruling class is by no means a fool-proof device to do away with exploitation.’ The letters exchanged in 1968 demonstrate the differences in perception between Parker, an individual with Communist beliefs in a free country, and Žalud, who lived in Communist Czechoslovakia and experienced first-hand difference between Communist theory and practice. Over the course of 1969, twenty letters were exchanged. Parker initially wrote with the...

Some lost worlds of Eric Hobsbawm: interviews with a communist historian: 1990-2001

By common consent one of the finest historians of his generation, Eric Hobsbawm was also a longstanding member of the British Communist Party. In particular, his formative years as a historian spanned the period from the popular front communism of the 1930s to the post-war Communist Party Historians' Group. The background and activities of the Historians' Group have been described many times, including by Hobsbawm himself. Nevertheless, in these interviews recorded between 1990 and 2001 Hobsbawm opened up regarding the role of key networks and personalities that did not always figure in accounts like his autobiography Interesting Times. Notably among them are Dona Torr and John Morris, the historian of the classical world with whom Hobsbawm launched the journal Past and Present at the height of the Cold War.

Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern: a historical controversy revisited

ABSTRACT‘Bolshevization’ and ‘Stalinization’ have been used variously by historians of American and British Communism to designate and date the processes by which the Comintern and national parties were subordinated to Soviet policy. Despite their pervasive influence on the American and British left, this literature reveals little curiosity or consensus about the politics of Bolshevism and Stalinism, their history and relationship, indeed, these labels have sometimes been employed inexactly and interchangeably. In some narratives, Bolshevization dates from 1924 and was completed from 1929. In others, the Comintern and its affiliates were Stalinized from 1924, in still others, from 1929. The historiography of the Soviet Union, in contrast, includes forensic interrogation of Bolshevism and Stalinism, their meaning, periodization and consequences as well as the continuities and disjunctures between them. This work has been overlooked by historians of the American Workers’ Party and the British Communist Party. The present article assesses both literatures. It utilizes insights from Sovietologists to argue that Stalinism constituted a politics and practice connected with but distinct from Bolshevism. Reviewing Comintern and party history, it proposes a specific periodization. State Bolshevism, 1919–1923, saw subjugation of the American and British parties to Russian imperatives. Incipient Stalinism, 1924–1928, witnessed restructuring of the politics of subordination. From 1929, Stalinization accomplished a distinctive subordination. It enthroned a politics and practice foreign to that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks which endured, through different phases, until the 1950s.

Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, socialist, anti-imperialist … and social worker?

Sylvia Pankhurst was a well-known Suffragette from the period prior to the First World War. It is less well known that she was also a socialist activist, an anti-racist and a founding member of the British Communist Party. However, can we consider her a social worker? This piece looks at Sylvia’s early life and argues that her radical welfare interventions between 1912 and 1917 mark her out as a pioneer of radical social work interventions.

No Friends to the Left: The British Communist Party's Surveillance of the Far Left, c.1932–1980

Influenced by developments in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the British Communist Party (CP) began to treat its rivals on the far left, principally the Trotskyists, as class rather than political enemies. Surveillance, including the maintenance of dossiers, began in 1932, but was greatly heightened in the late 1930s, as international tensions, notably the Nazi threat to the Soviet Union, increased. Less attention was paid to the Trotskyists in the later years of the Second World War and in the immediate post-war period, but was intensified during the Party crisis which followed the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party. Later, the CP was faced with additional rivals, the Maoists, to monitor. Surveillance came to an end in the 1970s as sectarian attitudes abated and the CP entered its terminal decline.

The Golden Notebook: Doris Lessing’s Rendezvous with the Zeitgeist

They’re almost all dead now, the renowned intellectuals who once belonged to the British Communist Party: Eric Hobsbawm most recently, along with Christopher Hill, George Rudé, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Donna Torr. Although they did much to change the way history and literature came to be written in the twentieth century, most are largely forgotten, except by academics and their students. The one survivor from the heyday of the British radical Left is Doris Lessing, ninety-three years old as of this writing in the fall of 2012. Long ago, Lessing moved on from Marxism and communism, turned to Sufi Islam for wisdom, wrote “space fiction,” as she called it, and won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. The award recognized a complex body of work—more than sixty books—that spoke to readers all over the world about the life and the death of the earth itself.

The Influence of Christopher Caudwell on Alan Bush’s Early Response to Socialist Realism

The ideas and music of British composer Alan Bush (1900–1995)—a lifelong member of the British Communist Party—were significantly shaped by the doctrine of socialist realism. His defence of the Zhdanov Decree identified him publically with Soviet aesthetics. However, little is known of his attempts to develop a Marxist aesthetic by drawing on a radical tradition closer to home, namely, the theories of the English Marxist writer Christopher Caudwell. Utilising a range of sources, including Bush’s lecture in 1948 to the Second International Congress of Composers and Musicologists at Prague, the paper explores Caudwell’s seminal influence on Bush.

Introduction to a 1995 Conversation with Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm, who died on October 1, 2012, was one of a handful of extraordinary labor historians who emerged from the British Communist Party Historians' Group in the 1940s and 1950s. Today he is widely acknowledged as one of the great historians of our era. His influence is truly international. For a long time, a significant limitation on the extent of his renown was the USSR where, during the era of “actually-existing socialism,” his works were never translated or published. This was ironic since he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from 1936 until its dissolution in 1991.

From Folk to Jazz: Eric Hobsbawm, British Communism and Cultural Studies

Eric Hobsbawm's book The Jazz Scene (1959) is rarely mentioned by scholars in cultural studies and related disciplines. This article argues that the book has been neglected for too long, not least because it played an important transitional role in the development of British Marxist writing on popular culture. It can essentially be seen as a critical response to the cultural politics of the British Communist Party in the late 1940s and 1950s. In seeking to prove that jazz was a form to which serious people ought to pay attention, Hobsbawm drew freely but largely implicitly on the ideas of the numerous British communists who had (1) provided the so-called Second Folk Revival with its founding principles, and (2) resisted the post-war influence of American popular culture. Hobsbawm's attitude to the work of his communist contemporaries was a strikingly ambiguous one. Aware that the Communist Party's cultural line was at once illiberal and unrealistic, he nevertheless tried to build on some of its main principles while calling others into question. The result was a book that refused to break entirely with communist orthodoxy but which also foreshadowed some of the main theoretical insights developed by later Marxist writers in cultural studies. Section One of the article examines the main ideas about popular culture to which British communists subscribed in the 1940s and 1950s. Section two identifies the theoretical principles on which The Jazz Scene was based. Section Three speculates briefly about Hobsbawm's influence on cultural studies in the 1960s and after.

Alan Bush, the Byron Symphony and the German Democratic Republic: A Cold War Musical Collaboration

British composer Alan Bush (1900–1995) was a committed Marxist and member of the British Communist Party. In 1958 Radio DDR, an organ of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), commissioned Bush to compose the Byron Symphony. At this time Britain had no diplomatic relations withthe GDR. Bush was given generous terms and a relatively free hand to create an ambitious large-scale work with a choral finale. Consistent with his Marxist convictions, he presented Lord Byron as a politically ‘progressive’ hero on the national and international stage. The symphony received its Leipzig premiere in 1962, a year of heightened Cold War tension. How did this musical collaboration between British composer and communist state come about, and what did each party gain from it? To what extent was the commission politically driven? My article addresses these issues in the context of Bush's association with important musical figures in the GDR, his Marxist beliefs, and the GDR's desire to establish legitimacy post-partition and build cultural bridges with Britain, in part by celebrating and reconstructing iconic English figures.

What Marx Forgot

Eric Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of the past century. His books and essays are beautifully written, full of stimulating insights, and able to capture the big patterns and tragic flow of events. Many of his works are justly considered classics, particularly his tetralogy on the "long" nineteenth and "short" twentieth centuries (The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes). Hobsbawm is also one of the premier Marxist intellectuals of the past century—something that has been a source of disappointment and even anger to many. Hobsbawm's long-standing membership in the British Communist Party and his belated, tepid criticism of the Soviet Union have marred his reputation and called his judgment into question. Yet these two aspects of Hobsbawm's mind are harder to separate than non-Marxist fans of his histories would like, because it is Marxist methods and arguments that provide the armature upon which the clarity, consistency, and force of his writings are constructed.

A people’s history of education: Brian Simon, the British Communist Party and Studies in the History of Education, 1780–1870

Brian Simon’s Studies in the History of Education, 1780–1870, published in 1960, set out to counter nearly all work previously produced on the history of education in Britain in this period, and to direct the field towards a new course. It provided a Marxist perspective that drew upon Simon’s involvement in campaigns for educational reform over the previous decade. It also reflected the character of the Cold War in the academy in Britain at this time. Overall, it produced a form of people’s history that was shaped by politics and ideology and informed by Simon’s leading position in the British Communist Party. His work in this period marks him out as a highly significant Marxist historian, as well as one of the leading Marxist educators of his generation.

The Hon. Ivor Montagu (1904-1984): Founding Father of Table Tennis

Conventionally educated at preparatory school, Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge, Ivor Montagu (1904-1984) was the youngest son of Lord Swaythling, the Jewish financier and Liberal peer. But he rebelled against the conventional expectations of his class background by becoming a film director, writer, producer and critic, and by being an active member of first the British Socialist Party and then the British Communist Party. Montagu was no fan of upper-class field sports, but as a young man played a range of sports, including cricket and tennis, and was a keen follower of soccer. In the 1920s he played a leading role in playing and popularizing table tennis, a role in which his upper-class background was an advantage. He was the founding chairman of the English Table Tennis Association in 1923, wrote and published its rules, and was the first chairman and then president of the International Table Tennis Association from 1927 to 1931, and from 1958 to 1966.

Tom Buchanan.The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain: War, Loss and Memory.:The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain: War, Loss and Memory.(Sussex Studies in Spanish History.)

While at work on The Spanish Civil War and the British Labour Movement (1991), Tom Buchanan was chided by a colleague “that nothing new could be found to be said on this subject.” Since then, his work on the Spanish Civil War's impact on Great Britain, particularly on the left, has expanded a new seam of historical inquiry, first opened by Hywel Francis's Miners against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War (1984). Buchanan has scrupulously explored and illuminated the hidden corners of party, policy, suffering, and sorrow that were inevitably part of the quotidian details of the lives of those who remained at home or volunteered to fight in Spain. Two of his earlier books, and a number of important articles and reviews, have now received their coda in his sparkling new set of essays. In this collection, all of Buchanan's strengths as a historian are on display: tightly woven prose, clear argument, and relentless research. He has the ability to take a fresh and challenging look at issues over which the smoke long ago cleared, leaving a landscape of formidable clichés, most often mapped by the British Communist Party.

E. P. Thompson and Redical Romanticism

As I have reread The Making of English Working Class and numerous other texts by Thompson, I find myself thinking in terms of blindness and insight, not in absolute deconstructive binaries employed by Paul de Man, but rather to signify inescapable process in which insights we manage to gain are purchased at price of being blind to other aspects of reality they do not permit us to see. Thompson's The Making of English Working Class is incalculably rich in narrative, with vivid, novelistic characterization and description, but, as many have noted, it is poor in historically relevant statistics. Thompson's handling of Romanticism from his 1955 book on William Morris to his later work on Thelwall and Blake consistently mined a vein of radical Romanticism that he called Romantic revolt, thereby neglecting more nationalistic and counter-revolutionary areas of Romanticism. Thompson's eloquent and passionate opposition to Stalinism and what he called variously Marxist Platonism, idealism, and theoreticism produced some of best political writing since George Orwell, but perhaps because of events of his own life--the tragic death of his brother, a Communist, at hands of Bulgarian fascists in 1944; personally satisfying experience he enjoyed working with fellow Communists on construction of a Yugoslavian railroad in 1947; and his leaving British Communist Party in 1956 after suppression of Hungarian Revolution--he was ungenerous and unsympathetic to anarchist and opponents of Stalinism who repudiated Stalin and sometimes even entire Bolshevik Revolution much earlier than 1956. Premature anti-Stalinists found little favor in Thompson's writing, which harshly criticized Orwell himself in interesting but not wholly persuasive essay, Outside Whale (1960). Before I go any further, however, I must say, first, blindness/insight dialectic applies to everyone, including myself, and, second, my recent review of Thompson's work has convinced me that he is a great writer who still has much to teach us about Romanticism, history, and politics. Thompson's The Making of English Working Class (1963), one of founding texts of British cultural (Stevenson 2), made an important mark in Romantic studies in two ways: by supplying a unique historical context for and by linking Romanticism with process of working class's own making. Near very of The Making of English Working Class, Thompson concludes that working-class political culture countered laissez-faire policies with intelligence and moral passion in ways parallel with but separate from the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism. The Romantics and Radical craftsmen who opposed annunciation of Acquisitive comprise an early 19th-century (832). In a later writing he linked working-class movement with Romantic critique as a revolutionary resistance to economic man (Poverty of Theory 294). According to Thompson, then, at moment of Industrial Revolution working class did two things: it registered a Romantic, ultimately utopian protest against utilitarian cash-nexus governed by naked instrumental reason, and it created strong organizations and a tough-minded political culture capable of struggling against capitalism on numerous fronts and for long haul. In replying to New Left Review editors who found working class insufficiently revolutionary, Thompson countered that the workers, having failed to overthrow capitalist society, proceeded to warren it from to end with unions, cooperatives, political associations, and other institutions that survived and produced meaningful reforms (Poverty of Theory 281). The radical Romanticism that Thompson links with working-class culture shares utopian protest against Economic Man that The Making of English Working Class describes in such moving detail. …

Studying Their Own Nation Without Insularity? The British Marxist Historians Reconsidered

Contemporary interest in social history owes much to the work of a generation of British Marxist historians, including Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton, who popularized the idea of history from below. A key concept in their work was that of the “people.” The populism was no accident, but can be explained in terms of debates within interwar Marxism, and the adoption by the British Communist Party after 1935 of the Popular Front tactic. It was also no single strand but a family of rhetorical devices. Populism was employed differently by Thompson and Hobsbawm, let alone by the other members of the group.

Maurice Wilkins (1916–2004)

Maurice Wilkins (1916–2004)

What is the purpose or goal of a presidential address?

What is the purpose or goal of a presidential address?