British Communist Research Articles

Всеобщие выборы 1935 г. в Великобритании и английские коммунисты

Всеобщие выборы 1935 г. в Великобритании и английские коммунисты

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.

Another look at E. P. Thompson and British Communism, 1937–1955

Examination of E. P. Thompson’s activism in the Communist Party (CPGB) has been limited. Some historians, basing themselves on his memories and interpretations of his 1955 biography of William Morris, have portrayed him as a dissenter, at best a loyal critic of CPGB policy. Others have deduced political conformity from his fourteen years membership of a declining organisation. This article reappraises the literature and reassesses the making and unmaking of a Communist intellectual. It explores Thompson’s contemporary writings – rarely exposed to critical scrutiny – and employs recently released security files to reconstruct the historian’s ideas and activity across the post-war decade. The article concludes that in these years Thompson remained a faithful supporter of the Soviet Union, the party line and ‘high Stalinism’. Khruschev’s ‘Secret Speech’ and the Russian invasion of Hungary did not validate pre-existing dissent. They were the pivotal factors provoking a rupture with the Stalinism Thompson had championed from 1942 to 1955.

Abe Lazarus and the Lost World of British Communism

Researching the life of Abe Lazarus, a leading Communist Party figure in 1930s Britain, raises important wider questions about how to investigate ‘mass leaders’ in the era after the Cold War. With the availability of more archives, including ‘official’ Security Service (MI5) files and ‘unofficial’ personal memoirs, there is now the possibility of exploring past communist lives in greater depth and free from traditional orthodoxies. In the case of Lazarus, while there has been some recognition of the leading role he played in the Pressed Steel and Cutteslowe Walls disputes and anti-fascist politics in interwar Oxford, the later period of his political career has remained something of a mystery. Arthur Exell, former Morris Motors worker and Communist Party comrade of Lazarus, began a biography in the early 1980s under the supervision of Raphael Samuel, who prompted him to consider not only what Lazarus’s political activism achieved in the thirties but also more difficult times later and the ways in which Lazarus’s later life might be said to reflect the wider predicaments of the Communist Party. Exell never completed his work. This article addresses those questions with the aid of new material and, with the purpose of exploring Lazarus’s political life in its widest context, it draws on Samuel’s The Lost World of British Communism.

BeforePride: The Struggle for the Recognition of Gay Rights in the British Communist Movement, 1973–85

BeforePride: The Struggle for the Recognition of Gay Rights in the British Communist Movement, 1973–85

Jack Lindsay's Alienation

Abstract Posterity has not been kind to the Australian-born polymath Jack Lindsay (1900–1990), a self-confessed ‘odd man out’ who published over one hundred and seventy books across a range of genres. This article asks what Lindsay wrote, why it has been forgotten and why we should care. It restores to view Lindsay's politico-cultural trajectory from his conversion to Marxism in 1936. It argues that Lindsay's searching and sceptical Marxism was a source of his prolific creativity and that he evolved a distinct and sometimes eccentric Marxist theoretical framework – a system with the concept of alienation at its core – within which his individual works are most legible. It argues that Lindsay's theoretical Marxism is not reducible to that of ‘British Communism’ or the ‘Old Left’, but exceeded and was mostly in tension with the Marxism of his party and its Soviet models, despite his political affiliation. It explains that Lindsay's oeuvre sank gradually from mainstream cultural visibility through the Cold War and that his conflicted but ongoing CP and Soviet-facing alignment alienated him from an emerging New Left with which he actually shared much theoretical ground. Estranged from his own party and largely dismissed by the New Left, his project disappeared through the cracks that opened during the traumatic realignments of the British Left in the post-1956 decade and remains largely absent from accounts of Marxist thought in Britain today. But though in many ways flawed, Lindsay's central project – tracing the processes of alienation through social formations, sifting human history for moments of resistance to that alienation, and attempting to prefigure a society in which values of creative production and communication are generalized across society as a whole – speaks loudly to ever-sharpening problems and deserves revisiting now.

E.P. Thompson, the Early New Left and the Fife Socialist League

This article analyses the role of the early New Left, and especially Edward Palmer Thompson, in the formation and political development of the Fife Socialist League in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The focus is on the attempts of The New Reasoner group to become affiliated with the Fife Socialist League and its leader, Lawrence Daly. This article outlines how both The New Reasoner group and the League initially understood their dissident stance inside the British Communist camp. It places them in the historical context of the early British New Left and reveals how a New Leftist presence in the case of Fife was demonstrated in practice. The final section attempts to explain the reasons behind the limited influence of the New Leftists within the labour movement and how this affected the development of the League.

British Palestine, British Communists, and the Ideo-Logical System of Labour Monthly

British Palestine, British Communists, and the Ideo-Logical System of Labour Monthly

British Communists and the 1932 turn to the trade unions

The Comintern’s Third Period, 1928–1934, based on Stalin’s ‘second revolution’ in Russia, capitalist crisis and the claim that social democracy and fascism were twins, generated sectarian, ultra-left politics which proved inimical to Communist activity in trade unions. This article sheds new light on that issue by exploring three connected episodes: the British party’s (CPGB) renewed turn to the unions, heralded in the January resolution of 1932; the roles the Comintern and CPGB leader Harry Pollitt played in this initiative; and the subsequent attempt by Pollitt to revise the politics of union work. This triptych reviews both primary sources and recent historiography. It argues that some accounts have overestimated the novelty of the January resolution, blurred its meaning and exaggerated Pollitt’s part in it. The resolution did not attempt to change the line but its application. Its impact was limited. Bids to go beyond it were muddled and unsuccessful. The 1933 move towards the united front, and subsequently the popular front, was of greater significance in creating an effective Communist presence in trade unions than the events of 1931–1932.

Internal Party Bulletin or Paper of the Working Class Movement?

On 1 January 1930 the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) new daily newspaper, the Daily Worker, was published for the first time. It was heralded by the CPGB as a maturing of the British Communist movement, and an opportunity for the Party to spread its message to a much wider audience than previous weekly newspapers would allow. With leading Party members in control of the paper, the Daily Worker was very much a Party newspaper; however, the CPGB wanted it to be much more than an internal bulletin. This paper examines the attempts by the CPGB to create a newspaper that spoke both for and with the voice of the working-classes, whilst also spreading the Party's message. It will ultimately conclude that the CPGB's depiction of it as a paper ‘by the working-classes, for the working-classes’ reflected the Party's efforts at locating its own place within the working-class movement.

Division British communism? Televising the decline of the Communist Party of Great Britain

In June 1976 George Matthews, the Communist Party of Great Britain’s head of press and publicity, received a letter from Gordon McLennan, the party’s general secretary, in which Matthews was invited to meet with a film maker from Granada Television, Roger Graef. The point of the meeting, which Matthews agreed to, was to film the Communist Party during preparations for its 35th Congress in 1977, where it would debate an important change of rule. The resultant television programme, ‘Decision British Communism’, a three-part series that aired in Summer 1978, has received scant historical attention. Drawing on the party’s own archives, this article places the ‘Decision’ programme in the broader historical context of the party’s decline. It argues that in allowing a TV crew inside its clandestine world, the Communist Party actually demonstrated the very reasons for its own marginality.

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.

‘Against fascism, war and economies’: the Communist Party of Great Britain’s schoolteachers during the Popular Front, 1935–1939

The Popular Front line made the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) a more hospitable place for ‘brain workers’. The emphasis the line placed on mass ideological and cultural struggle against fascism meant that they became important allies to be won for the working class. As the principal transmitters of ideology and culture to the masses, schoolteachers could be perceived as being at the forefront of the anti-fascist effort, just as important as the academics, artists, writers and musicians more traditionally associated with the pull of British communism in this period. But communist schoolteachers on the whole avoided the exploration of socialist ideas in their professional practice. Rather, their primary focus was on achieving the greatest possible unity against fascism in their profession. This stance largely excluded critical discussion of the theory or practice of the education of children under capitalism, such as combating imperialist bias in textbooks; ending corporal punishment; advocating secular education; promoting workers’ control of schools and ameliorating the capitalistic nature of competitive examinations, all of which had been debated by communist teachers at various points during the 1920s. But as well as the tactical considerations of the Popular Front line, this avoidance of a qualitative critique of British schooling was encouraged by Soviet educational conservatism, and often overlooked continuities between the Popular Front line and its predecessor, ‘Class Against Class’. Drawing on the personal papers of British communist schoolteachers, contemporary newspapers and periodicals, and policy statements of the CPGB in the period, this article seeks to shed light upon the communist contribution to the teacher politics of the labour movement in England and Wales during the late 1930s, an input hitherto unexplored in detail.

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.

Meerut and a Hanging

The Meerut Conspiracy Case was directed largely at the emerging radical trade union and workers’ and peasants’ movements in India, while aiming its blow more specifically at an internationalist communism or socialism. The public impact of Meerut, however, was not unidirectional or confined to leftists, and it came to epitomize the arbitrariness of imperial authority. It was part of a larger process that created divisions and solidarities at the same time. Roy and Zachariah’s essay traces the new divides and solidarities that the case facilitated and its impact on a wider popular political imagination as seen, in particular, through the lens of the Indian youth movement. In many ways, the authors contend, Indian communists’ responses to Meerut, backed in part by their British communist comrades, showed that a top-down directive from Moscow did not in fact have the impact that it was supposed to. Meerut was thus the pivotal point that went a long way toward defining the politics of the 1930s, both within and outside India.

John Callaghan and Ben Harker, British Communism: A Documentary History

John Callaghan and Ben Harker, <i>British Communism: A Documentary History</i>

State surveillance and communist lives: Rose Cohen and the Early British Communist Milieu1

Rose Cohen was a prominent member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the 1920s. She relocated to Moscow with her husband Max Petrovsky, the Comintern's UK representative, in 1927. Both were arrested and shot in 1937 during the Stalinist Great Terror. Drawing on information contained in MI5 personal files on Cohen and her closest friends and associates, this article has two aims: first, to use her case to illuminate the intelligence environment in which the CPGB operated in the 1920s, highlighting the extent to which this should be seen in terms of a contest; second, to use these files to develop our understanding of what it meant to be a Communist at this time, including the clandestine dimension, and the tensions and compromises that accompanied a Communist identity. In relation to this, the article uses the MI5 record as a basis for explaining the CPGB leadership's reaction to Cohen's death.

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.