Walter Kendall was born in East Ham, an inner-city area of London, three days before Christmas, 1926. He was not from a conventional working-class background: his father, William Kendall, was a sergeant in the police force, later promoted to inspector, his mother, Edith, a housewife. He was the youngest of three children, and when he was ten years of age the family moved out to suburban Wimbledon where he âpassed the scholarshipâ and attended the respected Kings College. He left at 17 with his School Certificate and the Matriculation Exemption which qualified him for university entrance, a course he never pursued. Rejected for military service because of poor eyesight, he worked in the Civil Service at the Ministry of Economic Warfare and subsequently the London office of the Control Commission for Germany. In the late 1940s, he travelled the country, taking a variety of temporary jobs before returning to the metropolis. During the early 1950s, he worked as a manager in a paper company, the Export Department of Amalgamated Dairies and the Export Credit Section of a firm of merchant bankers.1
His initial experience of the trade unionism he championed all his life came as a member of the Civil Service Clerical Association (CSCA). Years later, he recalled â1944, when at the age of 18, I joined the ranks of organised labourâ.2 He was a branch secretary in the CSCA, which organised the lower grades, pursued radical policies â there was an influential Communist presence in its leadership, the President, E.J. Hicks, was a Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) activist, and the General Secretary, Len White, a sympathiser â and from 1948 faced attempts by the Attlee government to remove Communists and their associates from the Civil Service. However, his first experience of militant action occurred when he attempted to organise warehouse workers at the US Army base in Burtonwood, near Warrington, into the Transport and General Workersâ Union â the project failed when union officials ordered the strikers back to work.
Kendallâs initiation into politics came via the Labour Party and its League of Youth (LLOY) of which he was an early member.3 Like many activists in the youth section, where he was elected to the editorial board of its paper, Socialist Advance, he was dissatisfied with the achievements of the Labour Governments of 1945 and 1950. Attracted to Marxist ideas, he remained unimpressed by the Stalinism of the CPGB; its switch from wartime collaboration to Cold War militancy; the Cold War âtheory of two campsâ; and The British Road to Socialism. A critic of the Soviet Union and its British satellite, he remained sceptical about the myriad currents of dissident socialists that swirled around the âSocialist Fellowshipâ sponsored by left MPâ¯s and found expression in the LLOY.4 He saw no answer in the Trotskyism on offer from the âClubâ led by Gerry Healy and John Lawrence around Socialist Outlook or the âstate capitalistâ current inspired by Tony Cliff.5 Involved in discussions with these and other tendencies, he resisted all attempts to recruit him. He was close to the Third Camp ideas propagated at the time in the Independent Labour Partyâs (ILP) Socialist Leader which resembled in some aspects the politics of the dissident American Trotskyist, Max Shachtman, and he became the mainstay of a circle of Labour Party activists who formed a discussion group and published occasional âVanguardâ pamphlets on problems of the day. Labour was still a broad church with an influential left wing in the constituencies, and he served as Chair of the Wimbledon party and an electoral agent.6
He was an active cooperator. His work on the Political Committee of the London Cooperative Society overlapped with his activity in the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW) â he remained a lifelong member, although subsequently employed outside its conventional membership catchment area â whose main base was in Cooperative Retail. The union remained marked by the cooperative ideal and the evolutionary socialism associated with the early ILP. USDAW frequently supported the Bevanite current in the Labour Party, although the Gaitskellite âProgressive Labour Groupâ had been launched in 1949 and there was a CPGB faction.7 He was a regular delegate to USDAWâs 1000-strong annual conference, the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party through the 1950s and 1960s and prominent on the left over Suez and the Russian invasion of Hungary, CND and the controversy over Gaitskellâs attempt to ditch Clause 4. He collaborated with a broad group including the former ILP leader, by then Labour MP, Walter Padley, and veteran Trotskyist, Sam Bornstein, and was involved in planning recruitment drives in an industry of small, scattered workplaces and high turnover where USDAW initially faced the challenge of recruiting thousands of new members each year to stand still and later problems with the new supermarkets.8
In 1954, he married Pamela Browning whom he had met through the Labour Party. It was a happy marriage which endured until his death. Pamela worked for a time at Labour Party headquarters in the office of Len Williams, the partyâs National Agent who succeeded Morgan Phillips as General Secretary in 1962. Somewhat ironically, Williams, who was charged with maintaining party discipline, kept a keen eye on the activities of Labourâs left wing.9 The same year, 1954, the Socialist Educational Group in Liverpool, which consisted of a small number of activists disillusioned with both Labour and the CPGB, led by the former Communist, Eric Heffer, and ex-Communist and Trotskyist, I.P. Hughes, came together with a group in Glasgow, which included the long-standing Communist Harry McShane and the future folk singer Matt McGinn, expelled by the CPGB in 1953. Additional groupuscules such as âthe Oehleritesâ, heretical Trotskyists led by Tom Cowan and Jack and Lou Britz, adhered to establish the Federation of Marxist Groups.
Kendall joined this loose coalition, which subsequently became the Socialist Workersâ Federation (SWF) and published Socialist Revolt, although Heffer, who had resigned from Labour, was concerned that Kendall persisted with his Labour Party membership. In its brief life, the SWF made contact with European socialists, notably the former Communist leader André Marty in France. Kendall was particularly interested in Italian socialism. He formed a long-term friendship with Giulio Seniga, doyen of a dissident Communist faction, Azione Communista, and visited Italy on several occasions.10 These years, and the contacts he made among continental socialists, crystallised his concerns about the insularity of much of the British left; the need to root any rebirth of socialism internationally; and the importance of critically engaging with innovations such as the European Common Market, rather than sniping from the side-lines.11
Khrushchevâs âSecret Speechâ, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the ensuing crisis of British Stalinism in 1956 extended his antipathy to the Leninist tradition. He was prominent in the Socialist Forum Movement, which sought to regroup dissident CPGB members and independent left-wingers in an attempt to rediscover a purer socialism. Together with SWF members Heffer and Jack Britz, he attended the conference of Forums at Wortley Hall â remembered as launching the New Left of the late 1950s and early 1960s â and criticised CPGB intellectuals like Hyman Levy who like so many âseemed to have adopted a kind of double standard which allowed him under no circumstances to attack what was wrong in the Soviet Union when it was wrong but only afterwardsâ.12 He was involved in organising demonstrations around Khrushchev and Bulganinâs visit to Britain and the campaign to secure the release of the Invergordon naval mutineer, Len Wincott, who had sought refuge in Russia and was subsequently imprisoned in Vorkuta. The disparate and by now disputatious SWF folded in 1957. Hopes of a new initiative unrealised, Heffer returned to Labour, becoming MP for Liverpool Walton in 1964 and a junior minister in the 1974 Labour governments, McShane embraced the Marxist Humanist ideas of Raya Dunayevskaya, Hughes ended his political life in the International Socialists, while Kendall persevered with the Labour Party. The years 1956â57 seem to have constituted a turning point when his interest in where the British left had gone wrong led him to pursue the question to its roots.
He began to gather material on the period between 1917 and 1921 when the Bolshevik Revolution, the creation of the Comintern and the division of the labour movement it fostered, stimulated the formation of the CPGB in 1920â21. This epochal fracture, he believed, had left succeeding generations trapped between a compromised reformism and a sterile Stalinism. This prompted him to study the preceding period in Britain, âthe Great Unrestâ of 1910â14 and the socialist and syndicalist movements of the early twentieth century which found their terminus in the CPGB. Here he encountered what he saw as a host of fruitful ideas: many, he felt, demanded rehabilitation as they were based on Marxâs central insight, long neglected on the left and corrupted by Labour and the Communists, that workers must make their own revolution. Reflection reinforced his conviction that it was both imperative and possible to organise politically in an open and direct democratic fashion; that socialist advance in the workplace was as important as progress in the polity; and that the two needed to be combined to achieve a system of grassroots workersâ control of industry, economy and society.13 His research and his contributions to left-wing periodicals boosted his confidence in his ability to write, and to generate more time for study he left his job with the merchant bank and became a guide with the British Tourist Association. A contract for a book was jeopardised when the publishers became concerned at his lack of academic qualifications, and, approaching 40, in 1962 he applied for a Labour Party Scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, the working-class adult education body supported by the labour movement.
His studies at Ruskin, an institution which nurtured self-discovery and stimulated unfettered political debate, discussion inside and outside the classroom, with a wide spectrum of experienced trade-union students and scholars, and immersion in research in the hospitable environment of Oxford, extended his contacts in the trade-union and academic fields and confirmed his interest in both labour history and his political direction.14 By the time he was awarded the University Diploma in Social Science with distinction in 1964, he was cutting with the grain of an iconoclastic decade which witnessed the emergence of a new current in left politics. It rejected both Labourismâs nationalisation and the Morrisonian corporation which excluded workers from decision-making, and the Soviet Union and its satellites whose bureaucratic elites mismanaged production, exploited the producers and violated human rights. Labour with its mass membership and relatively decentralised structure remained for Kendall, despite all its deficiencies, the optimal site for education and agitation â certainly in comparison with the CPGB with its mis-named âdemocratic centralismâ and defence of the Russian and East European dystopia. Or the Trotskyist groups which defended the Soviet Union and its satellites as âdegeneratedâ and âdeformed workersâ statesâ which, like state capitalism, he saw as a contradiction in terms, and tolerated undemocratic internal regimes inherited from the authoritarian Comintern.15 But Labourâs ideas needed reinfusing with ancient verities. As Kendall frequently observed: âWe donât want to bake a bigger cake ⦠we donât want a bigger slice of the cake ⦠we want control of the bakery.â16
The workersâ control movement which developed from the mid-1960s reflected his politics. Its central thrust was different from the contemporary emphases of the mainstream Labour left, the Communists and most of the Trotskyist groups.17 It aspired to buttress yet transform industrial militancy by infusing it with pursuit of workersâ plans which would prefigure alternatives to the capitalist organisation of production and blaze the trail to socialist advance. The movement was marked by rejection of âsocialism from aboveâ and driven by a diversity of influences â rediscovery of the young Marx; attempts to operationalise his emphasis on alienated labour relevant to an age of increasing material prosperity; renewed attention to the ideas of the syndicalists and Guild Socialists, James Connolly, Tom Mann, S.G. Hobson and G.D.H. Cole; resurrection of strands in Comintern and Trotskyist thinking around the slogan âopen the booksâ; interest in Yugoslavian self-management; revival of struggle at the point of production; and the growth of the shop steward system, seen as an exemplar of direct democracy and a challenge to the official union leadership. It was enhanced by the intervention of the state to control workersâ self-assertion via incomes policies, wage freezes and anti-union legislation.18
Kendall was a pioneer of the new movement of which Ken Coates and Tony Topham â who ran courses for trade-union activists in university departments of adult education and were, at its inception, supporters of Ernest Mandelâs United Secretariat of the Fourth International â became the best-known spokesmen.19 In 1963, along with Richard Fletcher, who like Kendall was a staunch advocate for the Cooperative movement with a background in nuclear physics and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he launched a monthly paper, the Voice of the Unions, after discussion with the left-wing Labour MP Frank Allaun, who published the longstanding Labourâs Northern Voice. The new periodical was aimed at trade-union and Labour Party activists âwho were storming the citadels of capitalâ, in the context of a predicted Labour government. The paper popularised Kendallâs credo: the path to workersâ power must begin in the workshops; workers must begin to control their destiny in the process of production; collective bargaining must transcend economic issues and engage with the management of production; this entailed members restoring control over their trade unions to ensure that the democratic rights which existed beyond the factory gates would be applied inside them.20 The democracy and independence of shop steward organisation, values he cherished, provided a means for developing this strategy.
Voice of the Unions profited from the problems the CPGB was encountering in industry in the aftermath of the scandal over ballot rigging in the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) and the demise of the partyâs Engineering and Allied Trades Committee and its journal, The Metal Worker. The new paper went on to publish a number of editions tailored to particular industries. The most successful, Engineering Voice, was instrumental as part of the Broad Left in organising the radical turn in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU)21 which culminated in the election of Hugh Scanlon to the Presidency in 1967.
In April 1964, Voice of the Unions convened the first National Workersâ Control Conference. Others followed, increasing in size and coverage, and in March 1968 the Sixth Conference established the Institute for Workersâ Control (IWC). In the early 1970s, attendances rose to over 1000, attracting shop stewards, union officials, political activists, journalists and academics. There was backing from union leaders, such as Scanlon, Ernie Roberts of the AEU and Jack Jones of the Transport Workers as well as many other left officials, and the movement gained impetus from the radical mood of the times â âthe student revoltâ, âthe Paris eventsâ, and the continuing militancy across Britain expressed in workplace occupations and âsit-insâ. In pamphlets and articles, Kendall set out his position. Despite nationalisation:
The status of the worker as a âhired handâ has in no way changed. Faceless bureaucracy has replaced the private employer. Twenty years of state ownership in Eastern Europe, 50 years in the Soviet Union, while bringing greater economic progress, has yet to create the conditions of wide and healthy freedom.22
Workersâ control was increasingly relevant to workers East and West:
To nationalisation because it proposes self-administration of the workplace instead of control from above; to give men in the plant the civil rights and privileges he [sic] enjoys outside. To Eastern Europe because it proposes that the workers themselves in the plants shall decide issues and thus end forever the claim of any self-appointed atheistic hierarchy laying claim to papal infallibility to rule on their behalf. Socialism requires workersâ rule, and this must begin in the workplace if it is to exist in society as a whole.23
It would remain utopian unless its advocates created the programmes and plans necessary for a combined struggle against capitalism and Stalinism which would rekindle in workers a compelling version of a realisable future. In the West, Kendall argued, some steps forward could proceed through trade-union bargaining, âothers require social, political even revolutionary change ⦠Workersâ control plans to put the flesh and blood into the economic structure of socialism; it is nothing more or less than socialism with its working clothes onâ.24 There were intimations of revolutionary politics in some of its publications. But the IWC was essentially a pedagogical network, an educational, research and propaganda body, an information exchange and think-tank for trade-union representatives; there was no party âlineâ or fixed set of ideas beyond the basics. It provided a platform for left-wing union leaders and MPâ¯s, a forum for debate and an arena in which a variety of tendencies could advertise their wares. Its pamphlets and policy statements publicised plans for beginning to transform relations in various industries. It supported industrial struggles, from the fight against incomes policy and anti-union legislation in the 1960s to the factory occupations and âwork-insâ of the 1970s and beyond. But elaboration, at least detailed and convincing elaboration, of the strategies and tactics necessary for moving beyond capitalism and developing the mobilisation advance would require was sporadic and frequently vague.25
Matters were complicated by the determination of Coates and Topham and their circle not to alienate trade-union leaders. This became an increasing problem as Jones and Scanlon and other union officials whose practical idea of workersâ control was ameliorative, collaborative with management, largely restricted to the extension of collective bargaining and advances in workersâ participation via the Labour Party and legislation to that end, moved rightwards, embraced a diluted corporatism, backed the wage controls embodied in the 1974 Labour Governmentâs âSocial Contractâ, criticised strikes and restrained militants. Coates oscillated between variants of revolutionary scenarios â the struggle for workersâ control would collide with the limits of capitalism and ignite a situation of dual power â and insistence that progress through Parliament and the Labour Party was central.26
For his part, Kendall perceived that without the motor of industrial struggle, workersâ control was going nowhere. His efforts were directed to the union leadership but to a greater degree at the grassroots: IWC pamphlets, he urged, should have more of an agitational edge, aimed at shop stewards, the people with leverage, and link theory with practice. Local groups should be formed, armed with âgive awayâ materials as a means of extending membership and affiliations, together with conferences aimed at specific industries and unions. But the orientation towards the official labour movement, the trade unions and Labour Party, he felt, was the right one, and he counselled against the overtures of the revolutionary âsectsâ anxious to gain purchase among shop stewards. He emphasised a need to clarify what the IWCâs rejection of the Morrisonian and Stalinist models entailed in practice and give more meaningful content to its calls for ânationalisationâ. Kendall grappled with the problem. Ultimately, he was no more successful than many others in providing a compelling account of how âa socialist marketâ would operate.27
There were frictions with Coates and Topham, whose model of the IWC was as a generator of ideas and advice, a service for shop stewards supported by union officialdom. Kendall concurred in this conception, but placed greater stress on encouraging an independent movement in the factories through a more agitational approach â although the Voice itself sometimes seemed an imperfect medium for this.28 Tensions also surfaced over the IWCâs finances and their reliance on subventions from the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, of which Coates was a director. Kendallâs scrupulousness and dedication to the democracy and autonomy of working-class organisations came into play, and he argued the IWC should raise its own revenues and reiterated his well-established concern that âhe who pays the piper calls the tuneâ:
Organisations which are not dependent on the efforts of their members for survival lack the whip of necessity to drive them to raise funds, step up membership ⦠[External funding] ⦠corrupts organisations. Makes them independent of their base ⦠The IWC should clearly establish its autonomy in regard to the Russell Foundation.29
However, he had neither the inclination nor resources to go beyond the IWC and was critical of the rank-and-file movements of shop stewards that did emerge, fostered by â he felt often manipulated by â the CPGB and the Trotskyist groups, while he maintained his suspicion of more disciplined political organisation. If, as he held, Classical Marxism had placed too much weight on objective factors, âthe Leninist emendation with its strictly âidealistâ view of the party as a voluntaristic organisation able to overcome all obstacles, reversed the balance in the opposite directionâ.30 But he had few answers to the problem of how to extend, deepen and politicise the existing militancy. As it subsided in the later 1970s, the movement for workersâ control lost much of its earlier élan. The attention of union officialdom switched to the policy of the Labour governments, to legislative reforms and support for a corporatist-inflected âindustrial democracyâ embodied in the proposals for worker representatives on company boards recommended in the aborted 1977 Bullock Report and the workersâ participation structures introduced in companies like British Leyland to coopt shopfloor organisation. With the advent of Thatcherism, the terrain shifted again. The IWC continued its activities into the 1980s, but gradually faded from the scene.
On graduating from Ruskin, he was accepted to undertake research for a thesis on the formation of the CPGB at St Catherineâs College, Oxford, which he successfully submitted in 1966. In 1969, Weidenfeld and Nicholson published his monograph, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900â1921. Armed with academic credentials, he held a number of appointments in Britainâs expanding university system through the following decade. From 1968 to 1970, he was a Fellow of the Centre for Contemporary European Studies at Sussex University and between 1970 and 1973 a Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.31 He was also a Visiting Professor at Wayne State University, Detroit. He pursued a hectic schedule of academic and political activity. He had been involved in the Society for the Study of Labour History (SSLH) since the early 1960s, and in 1971 he succeeded Eric Hobsbawm as its Chair. Since its creation in 1960, it had evolved in an academic direction. It was now time, he argued, to try to broaden its appeal and membership by recruiting trade-union and political activists interested in the working-class past as well as professional historians. To build bridges, leading personnel of the Labour Party and the TUC should be coopted as honorary officers of the SSLH, the Societyâs international connections should be expanded, and specialist groups should be established to focus on neglected areas such as trade unionism and womenâs history. As so often in learned societies dominated by professionals, there was much talk but little action; in ensuing years, the Society continued on its academic trajectory.32
In 1975, he returned to Sussex as a Fellow of the Institute of Manpower Studies. In the same year, his book The Labour Movement in Europe was published.33 It reflected the pan-Europeanism that he considered to be an essential ingredient of a broader internationalism. It was the fruit of wide reading in labour history and research into trade unions and union federations across Europe and in the USA, informed by discussion with practitioners of international trade unionism. The book provided synoptic overviews of the history and contemporary condition of trade unionism in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Holland and Italy as well as contextual essays on the Industrial Revolution, trade-union initiatives at European level and a case study of the car industry. The use of âlabour movementsâ signalled the breadth of a text which, unlike the institutional accounts of trade unions and collective bargaining which dominated the literature, placed organised labour in its society, economic context, polity and culture. Unlike most studies in the field of industrial relations, Kendall exhibited a proper regard for history; his work transcended conventional approaches which considered workersâ self-assertion as a problem for âpublic policyâ to be resolved by state intervention to reform industrial relations. On the contrary, he looked at matters from the viewpoint of workers determined to combat exploitation in an attempt to shed light on the difficulties and opportunities currently confronting collective organisation and action. Kendall observed:
⦠in the past, despite labourâs ideology of internationalism, the large part of labourâs practical activity has not extended beyond the boundaries of separate national states. Only now, with the rise of the giant international corporation, the emergence of transnational bodies such as the European Economic Community, have the practical questions of international labour organisation and behaviour begun to come seriously to the fore.34
As capital pursued its innate international dynamic, there was a danger labour would remain confined within the straitjacket of nationalism. An obstacle to progress was fragmentation and rivalry between trade unions affiliated to the Anglo-American-dominated International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the Communist World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), and the International Federation of Christian Unions. Seeded in the split in the international socialist movement that followed the 1917 revolution, partially healed from the late 1930s, revived by the Cold War, the ICFTU and WFTU remained tied to American imperialism and the Soviet power bloc, respectively. The development of the EEC held the promise of change and sharpened and focused the potential for united action on a European scale:
The need to raise trade unions to the level of the Common Market and the existing capitalist institutions questions the legitimacy of the confessional and political divisions which continue to divide organised workers within Europe, one from another.35
But divisions could not be dissipated overnight, and central to the book was Kendallâs insistence that, far from being inherent, they were the product of history and could be eroded by history. Anglo-American exceptionalism was neither inevitable nor virtuous. British unions were different but not necessarily more effective than their European counterparts: British activists had much to teach them and much to learn from them. Parochialism and sometimes a sense of superiority â The Labour Movement was written and appeared against the background of the hostility of sections of the left around Tribune and the CPGB to Britainâs entry to the EEC â was misplaced, counterproductive and restrictive of solidarity. Moving forward across artificial national boundaries through such institutions as the European Confederation of Trade Unions and works councils, utilising links between shop stewardsâ committees in trans-European companies, pushing Europe-wide framework bargaining, these and other measures could assist in reshaping consciousness and challenging bureaucratic tendencies in EEC institutions â instead of ignoring them and the opportunities they presented for workers. Working towards a European trade unionism could provide an antidote to isolationism and generate real rather than rhetorical internationalism. Kendall was convinced that history was on the side of the working class, and his text was impregnated with the expectation of an impending regeneration of authentic internationalism across Europe:
The events of May 1968 in France, Italyâs âhot autumnâ of 1969, widespread unofficial strikes in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands in 1969â72, the rise in industrial militancy in Britain, all suggest that a new spirit is afoot in the world.36
Moreover, âthe sclerotic hold of the Communist parties over some of the best elements of the working population is in serious declineâ.37 The Communists had presided over a process by which âinternationalism was redefined as Great Russian chauvinismâ; but they were âbecoming so discredited it is difficult to see anything but an era of gradual decline aheadâ.38 This would help break a historic roadblock where:
The failures of Social-Democracy are used to justify the crimes of Stalinism. The crimes of Stalinism are used to justify the failure of Social-Democracy fundamentally to transform the status quo. Clearly something new, different from both, is urgently required.39
The Labour Movement in Europe concluded on a note of optimism; it affirmed the potential of the movement for workersâ control:
Aggressive bargaining and encroaching control, backed and supported by legislative measures may indeed in the next decades begin radically to transform our society. To the extent that the workforce challenges entrepreneurial decision, beginning a shift from autocracy to democracy in the plant, so it prepares the workers themselves to assume the responsibility of entrepreneurial decisions.
⦠the advance in socio-economic power achieved by the labour movement in this century has been nothing less than stupendous. Given the use of intelligence and foresight, the transformation in the course of the next half century is likely to be no less.40
Kendallâs enduring vision was of a pan-European labour movement driven by anti-capitalist militancy and independent socialist politics, which rejected both Washington and Moscow. Like most of us, he did not foresee the neo-liberal future and the state offensive which relentlessly rolled back trade unionism in the decades after 1979. In the present, he continued to work on the Voice papers and to publicise the ideas of the Workersâ Control movement. But as the militancy of 1968â75 exhausted itself, the electoral fortunes of the left went into reverse in the AUEW. The independent stance Engineering Voice took caused concern among some who wanted a greater accent on elections, and Kendallâs expounding of his critical position on the Soviet Union in the paper evoked hostility from Communists.41 In 1975, they sponsored an alternative periodical, Engineering Gazette, which under the guiding hand of the CPGB adopted a strong, if unavailing, orientation to winning positions. Kendallâs problems were exacerbated by a lawsuit brought against Voice Newspapers by the right-wing leadership of the EETPU whose appetite for trenchant criticism was not balanced by a penchant for taking it. After unsuccessful attempts to secure additional finance, the papers closed after a decade-long experiment in building grassroots independence outside the organised orthodoxies.42
Apart from spells teaching at Ruskin and a Visiting Fellowship at Trinity College, Dublin, Sussex, which he left in 1977, was his final academic appointment. His writing and campaigning continued unabated. From 1979, his major activity was in what became the Polish Solidarity Campaign (PSC). Formed to support the strikers in the GdaÅsk shipyards, the PSC broadened into a campaign for free trade unions in Poland. He was its Chair from 1983 and wrote frequently, particularly in Tribune, to extend support for its cause while employing this popular struggle for freedom from âactually existing socialismâ to exemplify his analysis of the USSR and its client states as aberrations of history, cul de sacs on the road to socialism which were doomed to collapse.43
He predicted the same fate for the Communist parties. Their latest reinvention of reformism, the Euro-Communism of the 1970s and 1980s, signalled not, as advertised, renaissance but a further chapter in a prolonged saga of decline and disintegration.44 Increasingly dogged by illness, he persisted with his research into the Comintern and the history of British Communism. The typescript of The World Revolution: The Russian Revolution and the Communist International, 1898â1935 grew to monumental proportions and failed to find a publisher. Hampered by inability to travel and explore new sources, he also completed a draft on the interaction between the Comintern and its British affiliate.45 He welcomed the demise of the Soviet Union as removing an obstacle to socialist progress and continued to raise questions about its history. Through his old friend, Sam Bornstein, he renewed his acquaintance with Al Richardson, whom he knew in the 1960s, and came into contact with the circle around the journal Revolutionary History: it maintained what one right-wing critic of Stalinism and its recent revisionist chroniclers, Robert Conquest, described as âa tradition of veridical scholarshipâ.46 Here he found a congenial forum for discussion and mutual education.47
In 1992, Michael Leesâ book, The Rape of Serbia, returned the Communist functionary, official historian of the CPGB and author of the notorious screed From Trotsky to Tito, James Klugmann, to public attention. Klugmann, Lees claimed, when an officer of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Cairo advising on wartime Yugoslavia, had exploited his position to influence Churchillâs decision to back Titoâs Communist partisans against MihailoviÄâs Chetniks.48 Reviewing Leesâ volume, Kendall recalled the obituary of Klugmann that the CPGBâs Monty Johnstone had contributed to the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History some years earlier. Johnstone made no reference to Klugmannâs activities in relation to the Balkans. He passed over the details of what Kendall termed the âparticularly vile volumeâ which demonised Tito, recording only Klugmannâs regret that âhe had allowed his faith in the Soviet leadership to obscure his critical judgementâ.49 Writing to the Bulletin, Kendall drew attention to Leesâ findings. He went on to assert that in his 1951 book, Klugmann, who had first-hand knowledge of Tito and Yugoslavia, was âconsciously writing what he knew to be untrueâ when he claimed Tito was an agent of Hitler and Western intelligence agencies, a fascist and a Trotskyist.50
Kendallâs distaste for what he considered the institutionalised mendacity and hagiography of the CPGB tradition sparked extended debate. A dismissive response from Basil Davidson â who had also worked for SOE, favoured the partisans and had been close to the Communists â questioned Kendallâs conscientiousness as a historian.51 Davidson in turn was taken to task by Jean Howard, who had worked at Bletchley Park; Archibald Jack and Ian Smith, respectively members of the British Missions to the Partisans and Chetniks; as well as Richard Lamb and Stanislav VlahoviÄ, who had consulted the documentation and written on Anglo-Yugoslav relations. All were generally supportive of Lees and critical of Klugmann and Davidson, who, they insisted, were responsible in various ways for delaying decoding signals, manipulating documents and briefing government advisors against MihailoviÄ, exaggerating Chetnik collaboration with the Germans and amplifying Titoâs successes.52
In a rejoinder, Kendall criticised Davidsonâs âchildrenâs historyâ, questioned his impartiality and urged Johnstone to accept that Klugmann was a liar.53 Johnstone refused to retreat from his âde mortuis nil nisi bonumâ stance. He explained an âuncharacteristically bad bookâ written against Klugmannâs better judgement by reference to iron necessity: in a world divided into two camps âyou had to decide which of the two sides (tertium non datur) you were unreservedly onâ.54
The Yugoslav controversy was difficult to resolve given the absence of agreed standards of proof â plausibility, âon the balance of probabilitiesâ or âbeyond a reasonable doubtâ. In his biography of Klugmann, Geoff Andrews, a former CPGB member and official party historian, recorded that Klugmann had been recruited by the Soviet secret service in 1937 and was instrumental in enrolling the Cambridge spy, John Cairncross. While working for SOE he was not in contact with his Soviet controllers, and it was inconceivable Churchillâs decision could have been swayed by Klugmann alone; but he âplayed an important partâ in it, although his actions were not the deciding factor. On his subsequent admission to Bob Stewart, the CPGBâs link with the Soviets, Klugmannâs âpolitical aimâ was to promote formal recognition of Tito at the expense of MihailoviÄ: âThis work was much valued by his Party as it was no doubt by the Cominternâ.55
Despite the infirmities of age and illness, Kendall continued to be active. He enjoyed a mutually productive relationship with the Japanese trade unions and lectured for many years to their representatives. He was not impressed by the writing about the CPGB that appeared in the aftermath of its 1991 collapse and the opening of the archives. He castigated âthe shoddy methodology and tawdry misuse of facts by the present day apologists for the late, unlamented, now self-dissolved Communist Party of Great Britain, formerly the British Section of the Communist Internationalâ.56 Its creation, he insisted to the end, had been a mistake which had damaged the working class and the revolutionary movement in Britain. He died after a long battle with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy on 27Â October 2003.
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A libertarian socialist and ultra-democrat, an antagonist of all forms of political manipulation, a self-professed Marxist but an opponent of most contemporary protagonists of Marxism; a critic of âalready existingâ reformism who in the context of the loyalty the Labour Party commanded from the working class and its organic links with the unions, considered this enduringly top-down organisation to be the only realistic forum for mustering a grassroots movement capable of developing âsocialism from belowâ; and a scholar often uncomfortable in the academy, Kendall did not fit easily into conventional categories or left-wing organisations. He was a contrarian. He enjoyed the company of heretics, at least those who pondered their past and sought to learn from it, such as Murphy; McShane; another disillusioned Communist, George Aitken; and the former Trotskyist leader, raconteur and Marxist savant, Jock Haston, who worked for the National Council of Labour Colleges before becoming the ideological amanuensis of the right-wing ETU leaders. Passionately interested in ideas, Kendall was fascinated by iconoclastic thinkers such as the former Italian Communist Bruno Rizzi. Author of La Bureaucratisation du Monde and a correspondent of Trotsky in the 1930s, Rizzi was a pioneer of attempts to comprehend the Soviet Union which he saw as a new class society distinct from capitalism and socialism.57 Yet Kendall expressed little interest in the academic Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s, and his writings paid little attention to problems such as socialist transition or the state as an obstacle to it â as distinct from his strong views on its unsuitability as a vehicle for social transformation,58 or the much debated distinctions between Leninism and Stalinism. A political historian in all senses of the word, he wrote history to enrich understanding of the past and educate activists in the present and considered it intrinsic to his political practice. In this and his adamantine socialist anti-Communism,59 he was different from most twenty-first-century historians whose interest in Communism has been largely academic and allegedly âvalue-freeâ.
The Revolutionary Movement in Britain was his most important work. It spans the first 21 years of the twentieth century, a period of extensive political and social upheaval and working-class struggle not seen since the Chartist era. For workers, this was a time of hope which ended with anticipations of transformative advance shattered in the aftermath of âthe Great Warâ. The first phase of Kendallâs story reminds us of L.P. Hartleyâs novel, The Go Between, set in the summer of 1900: âThe past is a foreign country, they do things differently thereâ.60 In comparison with Kendallâs world of 1969, let alone today, there was no radio, talking pictures, television or telephones. Cars were a bourgeois novelty. Despite the crumbs of imperialism, the working class endured levels of exploitation and oppression gradually and unevenly ameliorated, but only quantitatively, in the second half of the century. Poverty was embedded, unemployment endemic, education rationed, inequality entrenched, racism and sexism conventional. A restricted franchise meant that many men and not any women were eligible to vote in Parliamentary elections and the vast majority, some 75 per cent, were not in trade unions.
The working class was deeply divided by gender, occupation, region, religion and consciousness. The ideology and practice of the âfamily wageâ and âthe male breadwinnerâ remained pivotal. The four million females in the labour force were frequently confined to part-time and seasonal working or employment in small workshops outside textiles, in clothing and the light metal trades. Trade unionism was largely restricted to the skilled trades, heavy industry, railways, textiles and mining. The challenge to Britainâs erstwhile domination of world markets from Germany and the USA put pressure on profits and productivity and encouraged intensification of labour in the autocratic workplace. Real wages were falling while judicial attacks on trade unionism, culminating in the Taff Vale judgement (1901), threatened the efforts of politicians and labour leaders to integrate workers into the status quo through extension of collective bargaining, conciliation and arbitration.
The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) established by the ILP and trade unionists in 1900 received a fillip from legal incursion. But the Labour Party in Parliament remained within the orbit of Liberalism â albeit a welfare Liberalism which in the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 legitimised within limits trade-union activity. Despite its inception in the 1880s, the Social-Democratic Federation (SDF), dominated by the propagandist Marxism and social chauvinism of Henry Hyndman, and its successor, the Social-Democratic Party (SDP), remained peripheral. Their proselytisation converted thousands to socialist ideas. But they failed to penetrate the labour movement and rarely exceeded 10,000 members. The Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which broke away in 1903 to embrace the quasi-syndicalist politics of Daniel De Leon, had around 300 members by 1910. The contrast with Social-Democracy in Germany was stark. The 1905 revolution in Russia did not change things.61
The class tensions simmering beneath the surface in Hartleyâs deceptive pastoral idyll exploded in the âGreat Unrestâ of 1910â14. As the tectonic plates shifted, trade-union membership rose to double the figure of 1900 and spread to the unskilled and women. Militancy swept the labour force. Stoppages increased from 872 in 1911 to 1459 in 1913, working days lost peaked at 40.9 million in 1912. Unemployment was lower than in previous decades although, chasing rising prices, wages were falling in real terms. The unofficial strike led by rank-and-file leaders rebelling against âresponsibleâ officials blossomed and the success rate of industrial action increased. The shop steward system which had stimulated workshop bargaining in engineering was extended to other industries. Strikes such as the Cambrian Combine dispute in 1910 and the transport stoppages of 1911 engendered mass participation and took on a militant, sometimes an insurgent, character. The following year saw the first national strike by miners.
Direct action accompanied disillusion with Labourâs timidity, rejection of state socialism and the resonance of syndicalist ideas and industrial unionism as more effective means of defeating employers in the present and constructing socialism in the future. Interest in Marxism was reflected in the development of Independent Working-Class Education (IWCE), the Ruskin College strike and the foundation of the Plebs League and the Central Labour College as instruments for training in revolutionary leadership. The ferment found only a small echo in the SDP, although in retrospect it helped set in train changes which would culminate in 1916. Its fusion with ILP dissidents in 1911â12 produced a British Socialist Party (BSP) ephemerally 40,000 strong. By 1914, it had declined to 13,755 members. Despite the engagement of its activists in trade unions, BSP leaders remained less than enthusiastic about the potential of strikes, maintained the political/industrial divide and lacked any strategy for party intervention in the labour revolt. The SLPâs attempts to propagate industrial unionism brought their activists into the industrial struggle and shop steward positions, and they championed the IWCE. Nonetheless, it remained a small, fringe organisation. Industrial unrest combined with the radicalisation of women, the suffrage movement and the crisis over Irish Home Rule to generate alarm among the ruling class. It failed qualitatively to augment the forces or progress of revolution.
This was underlined at the commencement of the third phase of Kendallâs chronicle. In 1914, in a national wave of patriotism, militants and Marxists joined up. The Second Internationalâs earlier injunctions were ignored; the left, reformist and revolutionary, failed to mount any principled or effective opposition to the war. State involvement in management of the economy and the impetus to draw the union leadership into managing their members affirmed the corporate bias of the British state. These tendencies, as well as full employment, fuelled continued growth of trade unionism. Membership increased from 4.3 million in 1915 to 6.4 million in 1918Â â some 38 per cent of the labour force compared with under 25 per cent in 1914. Women entered industry and trade unions in greater numbers than ever before. Militancy was maintained as stoppages increased from 672 in 1915 to 1165 in 1918, with days lost increasing from 2.9 million in 1915 to 5.8 million in 1918. Cleavages between activists and officials deepened. Rank-and-file movements developed in the mines, on the railways and most notably in engineering, based on workersâ committees in the armaments industry, culminating in the formation in 1916 of the National Shop Stewards and Workersâ Committee Movement. Despite the death toll, war fatigue, hostility to profiteering, inflation and work intensification, opposition against the war remained largely pacifist and limited to conscientious objectors.
Labour entered the Lloyd George War Cabinet without any real concessions. But it began to lay the foundations for increased popularity with a reconstruction programme, Labour and the New Social Order, a War Aims Memorandum and plans for remoulding its constitution. The year of 1916 witnessed decisive change in the BSP: it reaffiliated to Labour and dislodged Hyndman and his supporters from the leadership and the party. The Bolshevik revolution galvanised the revolutionary left and animated ambition to emulate it. The BSP, the SLP, even sections of the ILP, embraced Bolshevik ideas and actively considered unity in a new party on the Russian model.
The fourth sub-period covered in this book witnessed first advance and then defeat. The working class came out of the war with its attachment to protest, militancy and chauvinism intact. The refurbished Labour Party, armed with individual membership, the new Clause 4 and a firm stance against revolution, failed to progress qualitatively in the 1918 âKhakiâ election. But the extension of the franchise to all male workers and women over 30 and the tribulations of the Liberals held promise for the future. Having broken with the centrist current around Edwin Fairchild, the new BSP leadership was determined to switch allegiance from the Second to the Third International, founded in 1919. The SLP deserted industrial unionism in favour of soviets and joined the BSP in negotiations to create a united Communist Party. Its foundation in 1920â21, which united the majority of British Marxists, occurred just as the radical tide and the strength of organised labour was receding. With 8.2 million members â double the 1914 figure â and 48 per cent of the labour force, trade unionism came out of the war as a major force. There were 1352 stoppages in 1919 with 34.9 million days lost and 1607 stoppages with 26,568 days lost in 1920 â the average of days lost 1919â21 was 49 million.
Yet in the big strikes which stimulated stand-offs with the state, the union leaders proved no match for its personnel. The Lloyd George administration employed procrastination, compromise and intransigence to evade confrontation with the railway unions and the miners, culminating in the refusal of the transport workers to solidarise with the miners on âBlack Fridayâ in April 1921. Union leaders had no answer to the blend of coercion and conciliation, the Emergency Powers Act 1920 on the one hand, Whitleyism and the National Industrial Conference on the other. The hold of reformism played a major part. What proved decisive was economic collapse. As unemployment soared from 3.9 per cent to 17.1 per cent of insured workers in 1921, union membership plummeted from 48.2 per cent of the labour force in 1920 to 38.1 per cent in 1921 and 32 per cent the following year. The downward spiral continued. In the factories and workshops, shop stewards and militants were the first to face the sack and workplace organisation was uprooted or domesticated. The âDays of Hopeâ depicted in Jim Allen and Ken Loachâs 1975 television series darkened and moved towards the endgame of the 1926 General Strike.62 The first two decades of the twentieth century ended with little progress towards the transformative change many had aspired to. Hope in the future remained. But its trajectory was signalled by the establishment of a Communist Party some few thousand strong and a Labour Party which gained 142 seats in the 1922 general election and displaced the Liberals as His Majestyâs Opposition.
Suitably simplified, such are the bare bones of the events that Kendall reconstructed, amplified and analysed in this pathbreaking book which bears the hallmark of intensive research and the imprint of his passion to understand the movement he had joined in 1944. Part 2, which deals with the foundation of the CPGB, the climax of his narrative, is based on the thesis he submitted for the B Litt degree supervised by Hugh Clegg, Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, subsequently Professor of Industrial Relations at Warwick University and a major player in Labourâs project to reform the unions in the 1960s. But both sections of the text incorporated material gleaned from a wide variety of libraries and archives over twenty years. In addition, he conducted interviews and correspondence with activists who lived through the events he chronicled. The study benefitted immensely from his first-hand experience of the labour movement. But he recorded scholarly debts to Asa Briggs, Vice-Chancellor of Sussex University, previously Professor of Modern History at Leeds University and a pioneer of the second wave of labour history in Britain; Alan Bullock, a Fellow of St Catherineâs College, Oxford, and biographer of Ernest Bevin who subsequently chaired the Inquiry into Industrial Democracy in the 1970s; and Billy Hughes, former Labour MP and Principal of Ruskin College.63
It is important to remember the limited amount of scholarly investigation of twentieth-century revolutionaries published before this book appeared in 1969. Chushichi Tsuzukiâs biography of H.M. Hyndman focussed strongly on that fascinating but flawed individual rather than the organisations he founded and led, while Douglas Chewterâs valuable research into the Socialist Labour Party remained unpublished.64 The slim volume by the Yugoslav scholar Branko PribiÄeviÄ, published in 1959, which discussed the shop stewards and workersâ control was restricted in scope and detail;65 similar considerations applied to general surveys of labour history.66 Henry Pellingâs work on British Communism provided only a skeletal account of events leading to its formation and had little to say about the Comintern.67 A CPGB member in the 1940s, latterly a tutor at Ruskin, Leslie Macfarlaneâs history of British Communism in the 1920s attempted with some success to do justice to the role of the Comintern and the Soviet Union in the partyâs development after its foundation.68 He concluded that âwithout Russian pressure, it is doubtful whether the various revolutionary Marxist groups would have opened up negotiations to form a united Communist Partyâ.69 But the 72 pages he devoted to the partyâs nativity told readers little about the specifics of Comintern intervention and its impact.
In contrast to Macfarlane and Pelling, Klugmann, whose first volume of the official Communist Party history appeared in 1968, had access to the British and Russian archives and cooperation from party leaders.70 As his fellow Communist Eric Hobsbawm observed, evaluating a text that he deemed neither âseriousâ nor âscholarlyâ, Klugmann had hardly used them.71 His official and uncritical account of the creation of the CPGB records that Leninâs authority and writings were a powerful influence on the partyâs genesis. But the Comintern and the detail of its activities remain a ghostly presence. Its emissaries and their dispensation of ideological and financial support are absent from a text which emphasises: âThe Communist Party was not in any sense a foreign creation. It arose out of long struggles within Britain answering the needs of the British working class.â72
The Revolutionary Movement thus broke new ground. It repaired absences in the existing literature and shed further light on subjects previously explored. Using the birth of the CPGB as an integrative focus, the volume linked what had hitherto been treated as discrete issues and wove together what had sometimes been presented as disparate strands in working-class experience. It reached for totality in contrast with the specialisation and fragmentation which has marked more recent historiography. Unlike most academic writing, Kendallâs burning concern for what events, forces and personalities had held for socialists in the past, and remained pertinent in the present, pervaded his text. Unlike some socialist writing, it met exacting standards of scholarship. The first section of the book consists of nine chapters. They examine the history of the major forerunners of the CPGB, the SDF/SDP/BSP and the SLP, as well as the shop stewardsâ movement. The emphasis is on political evolution in response to events and eventual rupture with the past â in the case of the BSP with Hyndman, his supporters and their politics, in the case of the SLP with the dominance of DeLeonâs ideas. The analysis combines detail with readability and does not sacrifice consideration of the changing context and its influence to scrutiny of the interiority of socialist organisations. Kendall never loses sight of âthe Great Unrestâ, the impact of war and the 1917 revolution in moulding the activists who would create British Communism.
His range of reference is wide: there are allusions to the Bolshevik congresses in London; the printing of Iskra by the SDFâs Twentieth Century Press; socialist politics in the USA; the biography of DeLeon; Trotskyâs Nashe Slovo in Paris; and the significance of Brest-Litovsk. Due attention is paid to the Labour Party and the ILP and chapters are devoted to âClydeside in Wartimeâ, which Kendall considers the cockpit of the struggle, and âThe Russian Ãmigrésâ whom he depicts as introducing British socialists to the ideas of the mainstream of Marxism and crucial to the rejection of social chauvinist attitudes. Decades before globalisation became a popular theme for historians, he highlights the international circulation of revolutionaries and revolutionary ideas embodied and strengthened in Britain by the Russian diaspora and reflected in the bookâs account of the International Congresses, the creation of the SLP, the remaking of the BSP and its adhesion to the Comintern.
A similar approach, always alert to internationalism and the importance of individuals and their life histories and never afraid of controversy, informs the eight substantive chapters which make up Part 2. âThe British and European Scene 1918â1920â succinctly analyses the conjuncture. What remains the best account of the Byzantine negotiations which preceded the Unity Conventions of 1920 and 1921 is complemented by a ground-breaking attempt to document the part played by the Comintern in accelerating, focussing and completing the process. Discussion of the political mosaic on the left and the array of forces which came together in 1920 in the new party is concluded with chapters on the ILP and the Guild Socialists and the Labour Research Department. The book is rounded off by Kendallâs rehabilitation of John Maclean, then a largely forgotten figure, whom he presents as the lost leader of a suppressed political alternative.
The argument is that the initial impetus for the merger of the British revolutionaries in a unified Communist Party stemmed from their accumulated experience over two decades which produced identification with 1917 and the Bolsheviks. The clinching factor impelling unity in the form it took was the role played by the Comintern. Although its focus is on Britain and the British socialist organisations, the Third International is the bookâs key actor. The creation of the Comintern in 1919 took forward the split with the Second International and carried it into the national labour movements. Kendall considers the Comintern a mistake. Replacing an earlier flawed but developing internationalism, it institutionalised dominance of the politics of its affiliates by the Soviet government and established an effective instrument of Russification and dissemination of a unitary world view (pp. 338â40). From 1919, Comintern agents were key players in pushing forward the Bolshevik agenda and financially lubricating it:
If the Communist International had not been backed by all the resources of a great nation-state, if there had been no couriers, no instructors, no forced timescale for the fusion, no travel to Congresses in Moscow and above all no subsidies on a large scale, it is impossible to believe that a Communist Party of any importance would have been created (p. 467).
Russian-induced unification suppressed the earlier more open, generous and democratic tradition of British socialism whose potential was exemplified in the advances the BSP had made from 1911, particularly from 1916. The creation of the CPGB displaced a tradition which âwhilst imperfect showed every sign of developing towards more realistic and effective forms whilst at the same time isolating the left wing of the labour movement from the mass party of the working classâ (p. 473). The BSPâs potential was illustrated by the triumph of its âinternationalistâ anti-war wing; the partyâs re-entry into the Labour Party, reversing its earlier sectarian withdrawal; its subsequent parting with the centrist supporters of Fairchild who had opposed Hyndman but favoured Parliament over Soviets and the Second over the Third International; and belated recognition that it needed to organise its members to intervene in the industrial struggle. The revolutionary left was in the process of transcending inauspicious beginnings. Hyndman deserved credit for introducing and popularising Marxism in Britain and giving it permanent organisational form. But by the dawn of the twentieth century, âthe SDF had acquired most of the characteristics of a sectâ (p. 23). Nonetheless, there was always a rich element of internal democracy, extensive debate and vocal opposition to the leadership. It blossomed with the onset of war. By 1916, and in advance of the Bolshevik revolution, âthe BSP had thrown over the sectarianism of Hyndman and its âold guardâ and asserted the primacy of its members over what Hyndman termed his âcontempt for the uneducated and undisciplined democracyââ¯â (p. 284). The SLP also experienced a diminution of doctrinal purity as key members engaged with the mass movement in industry.
The progress of BSP politics was not without problems. There was failure, even in the face of revolutionary opportunities on Clydeside, to generalise the moves in the direction of revolutionary defeatism, âthe revolutionary will to powerâ and the âdetermination to see a revolutionary end to the warâ that characterised John Maclean â and inability to agitate to develop the shop steward struggle in that direction (p. 280). The possibility that Macleanâs ideas and practice might gain ascendancy in the BSP was curtailed by his imprisonment in the Spring of 1918. This left the stage free for the leader of the internationalist wing, Theodore Rothstein, who brought the party firmly under the influence of the Comintern, aided and abetted by the group around Arthur MacManus and Tom Bell. In receipt of Soviet funding, they broke with the conservatism of the SLP leaders and proved effective instruments for executing the Russian brief: â⦠the SLPâs attitude of mind, its almost theological devotion to DeLeon, its fixation on the American SLP as a model, made it relatively easy for those members who joined the Communist Party to switch their allegianceâ (p. 471).
The consequence of Comintern initiatives ensured that the CPGB was âan almost wholly artificial creation which wrenched the whole course of the movementâs left wing out of one direction and set it off on anotherâ (p. 5). As one of the founders put it: âInstead of organising a body of opinion within the labour movement seeking to transform it in the process of evolution, the Communist Party became an oppositional bodyâ (p. 5). It split the British labour movement, subordinated one section of it to the Soviet state, and strengthened the hold of reformist Labour over workers: âThe CPGB withdrew from the Labour Party a key contingent of left-wing activists and thus shifted the balance within the party in favour of the rightâ (p. 473). The CPGB represented an unhealthy development in the history of British socialism. Despite great events and the self-sacrifice and commitment of able members, it remained âas small, as insignificant, as much or more a failure at the end as at the beginningâ (p. 4).
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The Revolutionary Movement received a favourable reception from respected commentators in the âqualityâ press, with reviews from A.J.P. Taylor in the Observer, Paul Foot in the Sunday Times and David Marquand in the Listener.73 Taylor concluded: âIt makes a wonderful story. Mr Kendall deserves much gratitude for giving these forgotten names a last airing.â74 Foot felt âfashionable Labour historiansâ had ignored the British revolutionary tradition: âWalter Kendall has filled this gap admirably. Several years research has resulted in a comprehensive early history of the socialist parties to the left of Labour.â75 He praised the chapters on the shop stewardsâ movement and Red Clydeside, although he remained unconvinced by Kendallâs argument about the desirability of forming the CPGB. The thesis was ânot provenâ but âhis book is not much the worse for itâ.76 That âit met with enthusiasmâ in these quarters was not in its favour, the veteran Stalinist, Andrew Rothstein, remarked in a hostile review in Rajani Palme Duttâs Labour Monthly. Soviet subsidies, he likened to the assistance provided by the Labour and Socialist International or the TUC to their affiliates. Rothstein claimed extravagantly that Kendall had added nothing but detail to the CPGB historians A.L. Morton and George Tateâs treatment of the issues in their general survey of the labour movement. Readers, he suggested, should consult Klugmann for the real story.77 In a more reasoned notice, Hobsbawm acknowledged Kendallâs âvery full and scholarly accountâ. But he emphasised that whatever the Cominternâs contribution in political authority and financial resources, British revolutionaries identified passionately with the Bolsheviks, âmost of them wanted nothing more than to become the Communist Party, whatever the Russians wantedâ.78
The bookâs reception was influenced by the new climate of industrial militancy, social rebelliousness and political radicalism which had developed by the end of the 1960s. Another student of Kendallâs period remarked a little later:
Today there is much to suggest that the era of accommodation may be coming to an end and when revolutionary politics again show signs of becoming a significant factor in the working-class movement there is good reason to re-examine the last great revolutionary period in British history.79
In that spirit, the libertarian Marxist and York University lecturer, Peter Sedgwick, greeted publication as âan outstanding eventâ. Kendall, he observed, âhas done a great service by ventilating some old traditions that deserve a fresh airingâ.80 The book had a practical importance which went beyond any academic or antiquarian interest. Sedgwick concurred with Kendallâs conclusion that âthe CP should not have been founded on the evidence he cites in convincing abundance, certainly the present one should not have been, it was completely under Moscowâs spell from the startâ.81 What was necessary was a new beginning and a new party rooted in the workplaces, âwhen it comes it will rediscover the thoughts and actions of the pre-Comintern pioneers that Walter Kendall has so splendidly describedâ.82
Writing in International Socialism, Jim Higgins greeted âa welcome additionâ and praised âits careful research and detailed expositionâ.83 He felt that âas an explanation of the development and history of the organisations that eventually coalesced (in part or whole) into the Communist Party, it fills a long-felt wantâ.84 Nonetheless, he judged the evidence for the influence of Comintern functionaries and funds was sometimes based on questionable sources, while the scale of subventions was exaggerated. The formation of the CPGB was out of line with the previous tendencies of revolutionary socialism in Britain. But this was positive, not negative, a healthy development â a fact which should not be obscured by the CPGBâs subsequent degeneration. The argument that it was all wrong from the start could lend validity to the lazy formula Leninism equals Stalinism. It was important to develop not ditch the tradition that flowed from 1917: âThere really is no other tradition of value and meaning ⦠The possibility of revolutionary change in the future lies with the inheritors of the early Communist movement.â85
In a lengthy review informed by his own research into the wartime shop stewardsâ movement, the labour historian James Hinton, then active in the International Socialists, parted company with Higgins over the Russiansâ role. He found Kendallâs âcareful collation of the evidenceâ that Comintern intervention was decisive convincing. While conceding much of it was circumstantial, âthere seems little reason to disagree with Kendallâs conclusionâ.86 But if there would have been no CPGB without the Comintern, the bookâs assertion of a potentially more fruitful alternative was questionable, dependent as it was on the intractable task of demonstrating potential. He was just as sceptical about Kendallâs personification of that potential in Maclean. An impressive figure, his influence was substantially limited to Scotland. Essentially a propagandist and educator, as a school-teacher he was an âoutsiderâ, unable to persuade munition workers to take action against the war and there was inadequate evidence to substantiate the belief that even with leadership from the shop stewards, Clydeside workers would have done so.87 In Hintonâs view, the objective situation, more than the subjective weaknesses of the shop stewardsâ leaders and their ideological inheritance from the SLP, was the primary cause of failure. The inability âto develop a political offensive against the war lies not in the consciousness of its leaders but in the consciousness of the rank and fileâ.88 The post-1916 BSP leadership took from the shop steward experience the need to work more closely with the industrially oriented SLP which prompted indigenous moves to fusion. But the collapse of the rank-and-file movement in 1918 and the unfavourable postwar conjuncture arrested and reversed the momentum of the revolutionary left, indeed the Cominternâs intervention probably saved it from greater fragmentation.89
A number of studies researched by socialist scholars in the 1970s supplemented Kendallâs work and disputed aspects of his analysis. Hintonâs monograph on the shop stewardsâ movement provided a more extensive treatment of trade unionism in munitions. The response of skilled metalworkers to the stateâs wartime attack on their security had both conservative and radical implications. The response of the stewards contained germs of sectional reassertion of their privileged position within the working class and a ârevolutionary spiritâ â although it was the former that won out. Hinton highlighted what Kendall had registered less explicitly. The shop steward leaders envisaged a revolutionary transition which rejected both the industrial unionism carried over from syndicalism and the SLP and the Parliamentary path espoused by many in the BSP. They identified the workersâ committees in the munitions factories with the Russian soviets as a bridge which could carry workers beyond capitalism. Sovietism, Hinton stressed, was not simply an alien creed. The workplace activists who entered the CPGB did not come to Communism purely through an intellectual appreciation of Bolshevik ideas. They became Communists because Bolshevik ideas resonated with their own recent experience.90
Ray Challinor contributed a more detailed account of the SLP from its birth in the SDF to its fracture during the Unity negotiations and demise by the mid-1920s. He placed greater emphasis than Kendall on the way its membersâ workplace activism, guided by its vision of industrial unionism, stimulated engagement with the struggles of the reformist unions and the emerging steward system. This prompted an unforeseen outcome: gradual movement away from dependence on the politics of DeLeon and the American SLP engendered a break from sectarianism. In contrast with Kendall, Challinor portrayed the SLP as at the centre of the regeneration of the British left after 1917 via its stress on both political and industrial activity; it was more of a model for future revolutionaries than the BSP.91 The short but seminal study of the first decade of British Communism in the trade-union arena published by Hinton and Hyman in 1975 took up the story where Kendall had left it. These authors took issue with his claim that the CPGB was an artificial creation and argued that the only alternative to the formation of the Communist Party in 1920â21 was âthe fragmentation and complete ineffectiveness of the revolutionary leftâ.92 The CPGB was not a failure at birth: it became a failure through the mistaken choices made by its leaders through the decade in response to the overwhelmingly hostile environment of the 1920s. The objective situation constrained progress towards the over-ambitious objective of a mass party rather than a cadre organisation. Ineffectual policy decisions, degeneration of theory and an inability to train cadres ensured that by 1929 it had dwindled into a marginal sect.93
Bob Holtonâs 1976 text, British Syndicalism, examined in detail workersâ self-activity in the industrial arena during âthe Great Unrestâ and confirmed the marginality of the Marxist parties to its direction,94 while the 1980s saw the publication of a number of general surveys of labour history which contained valuable information on the first years of the twentieth century,95 as well as impressive studies of trade unionism.96 In the following decade, Martin Crick produced the first history of the SDF and its successor organisations; Logie Barrow and Ian Bullock expanded on one of Kendallâs abiding concerns by exploring conceptions of democracy among SDF activists; and Karen Hunt discussed the predicament of women in the Hyndman organisations before 1914.97 The new century confirmed the historiographical turn away from research into the far left and towards greater attention to mainstream politics. Nonetheless, it saw Ralph Darlingtonâs reassessment of revolutionary syndicalism,98 while Martin Ivesâ work on the miners was particularly useful in assessing the potential for the domination of Labourism and the possibilities for revolution in the period immediately after the war.99 Lewis Matesâ case study of the Durham coalfield yielded fresh insights into syndicalism, the retreat of Liberalism, the growth of Labourism, its linkage to industrial militancy, the restricted resonance of revolutionaries, and the significance of the local in events frequently considered in composite fashion.100 Bullock focussed more specifically on British revolutionariesâ idealisation of the Soviets and sustained self-deception over their evolution into fig leaves for dictatorship rather than organs of democracy;101 and there have been a number of studies of workersâ and socialistsâ reactions to âthe Great Warâ.102 Other work of relevance is referred to throughout this Introduction.
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Sixty years after its first publication, The Revolutionary Movement remains indispensable and profitable reading for anyone wishing to comprehend the origins of the twentieth-century left. But like most historians, Kendall did not get everything right, and for students coming to the subject for the first time, critical engagement with many of the points raised above can only enhance their appreciation of the issues he addressed in this book and enrich their understanding of the period, the literature and the ways in which historiography develops.
The extent of Comintern involvement, particularly the issue of âRussian goldâ, probably provoked the most persistent controversy in the years after the book appeared. By the 1990s, most historians conceded that, as one Communist academic put it, âWalter Kendall has documented beyond any possible question the extent of the Cominternâs intervention and the very considerable funds which it supplied to attain its objectiveâ.103 The opening of the Comintern archives in Moscow towards the end of the century revealed further material which confirmed the conclusions Kendall had arrived at from the limited sources that were available to him in the 1960s. The new documentation offered conclusive evidence of the activities of the network of Soviet agents and the vast resources at their disposal.104 Accepting that âconsiderable amounts of Soviet funds were entering British revolutionary circlesâ, Andrew Thorpe, writing in 2000, continued to complain that âthe extent of the Russian subsidies can also be exaggeratedâ.105 Thorpe contested Kendallâs conviction that cash influenced attitudes, âacceptance of money did not necessarily bring obligation with it ⦠it is just as plausible to argue that the money, while gratefully received, made little real differenceâ.106 Such statements may be contrasted with what many will consider Kendallâs more realistic reading of proletarian materialism, working-class psychology and the individuals involved:
To suppose that the existence of such funds and the power which they conferred could have been without influence on the subsequent course of the negotiations for Communist Unity is to impose an unbearable burden on human credulity (p. 400).
The best view would seem to be that the vast majority of British revolutionaries who adhered to the Comintern did so first and foremost on the basis of its political ideas. Money was not their primary consideration. What attracted them was what they perceived, often dimly, as a new, successful set of integrated ideas, a unified theory, a practice superior to what they had known in the past, and the allure of being part of an exciting international movement which had overthrown an empire and promised to conquer the future. In that context, it is surely plausible to consider the provision of cash as a factor cementing and institutionalising allegiance in some cases and lubricating attachment in others. For an SLPer like Tom Bell, in receipt of a Comintern salary to campaign for unity, being paid to work at what he saw as a vocation yet had for many years to combine it with the necessity of work in foundries, the chance to be paid for proselytising was an opportunity to be seized and not easily relinquished.107 For many workers, a habituation to salary would go at least some way to strengthen loyalty to its providers, particularly when one shared their objectives and when the £â¯5 or £â¯4 benchmark, if sometimes insecure, was above average earnings. From 1920, the alternative, we should not forget, was often taking oneâs chance in a precarious and deteriorating labour market where known Communists were blacklisted. Cash intertwined with commitment.
There were some adventurers.108 For working-class activists serious about constructing an effective, enduring, professional organisation in hostile circumstances, money bought time to work on a cherished project. Moreover, the Comintern was the only source offering to provide sustained significant flows of the cash which constituted the sinews of the class war. There was little appetite for a return to the hand-to-mouth business models of the BSP and SLP, reliant as they were on membersâ dues and benefactorsâ donations. Soviet subsidy came to be seen, even by those like Palme Dutt who were initially critical of its impact, as necessary and normal. If it was reduced, Arthur MacManus and Fred Peet, both personal beneficiaries, informed the Comintern Executive as early as 1921, âit will cripple our efforts and spoil much of the good work that has been done. If it is stopped completely ⦠it will reduce the party here to the poverty-stricken and ineffective state of the socialist groups prior to the formation of the Communist Party.â109 In the considered view of J.T. Murphy, a conduit for funds who himself occupied paid positions in the CPGB for most of the period of 1920â32, âhad the Communist Party not received big financial shots in the arm it would have been reduced and have probably gone out of existence within a year or two of its formationâ.110 Certainly, Sylvia Pankhurstâs organisation and the SLP, both of which lacked external finance, faded away without it.
The conclusion that subsidy facilitated the Cominternâs goals does not resolve difficulties with The Revolutionary Movementâs insistence on the potential vigour and future fertility and traction of the political traditions that Communism superseded in Britain. Both the BSP and the SLP, it is true, demonstrated a capacity for political development, most markedly between 1916 and 1920.111 Other factors were in play, but perhaps the most significant aspects of that development took place as a result of the profound influence of the Russian revolution. If we consider the overall trajectory of the revolutionary left between 1917 and 1920, it reflected a voluntary move not towards a renewal of independent British politics but towards Bolshevism and the creation of a new International to replace the old on a novel political basis. It was a determination to emulate the Bolsheviks that fused with experience of the weaknesses of earlier socialist traditions in Britain to motivate the move away from industrial unionism in the SLP, and the split with Fairchild in the BSP. It remained a limited development. Even leading British revolutionaries were unclear about the specifics of Bolshevik politics. Given the sparsity of available literature, they possessed hazy, sometimes confused and often simplified ideas about the Leninist theory of the state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, democratic centralism, conceptions of unity between âthe politicalâ and âthe industrialâ, even about soviets. Nonetheless, they felt they knew enough to back Rothstein and Fineberg, MacManus and Bell, not their adversaries; and they welcomed Comintern clarification and leadership. If we accept that without the Comintern there would have been no united Communist Party, deleting its intervention means we are left with Hintonâs conjecture that without the Comintern, the fragmentation of the revolutionary left in 1920 would have persisted.
The suggestion that the advent of Communism diverted âinto sterile channels forces which if left to themselves might have made a far more positive contributionâ (p. 5) is, perforce, under-evidenced,112 and the claim that âthe BSP at the end of the war was in a position to play an important part in the policy dialectic of the Labour Partyâ (p. 460), over-optimistic. Exactly what politics it would have pursued and precisely how it would have organised remain unclear.113 Kendall quotes favourably Murphyâs later view that an alternative to Communism could have involved âorganising a body of opinion within the Labour movement ⦠seeking to transform it in the process of its evolutionâ (p. 5). âWithin the Labour movementâ â but within or without the Labour Party? Kendall implied the former and Murphyâs âorganised body of opinionâ does not sound greatly different in spirit from the ILP throughout much of its history or perhaps even the Socialist League which remained inside Labour when the ILP seceded and of which Murphy was a leader. It is sometimes surmised that the BSP could have simply maintained its affiliation to Labour which lapsed when it went out of existence in 1920. Unlike the National Left-Wing Movement (NWLM), the Communist-sponsored body which operated inside Labour in the mid-1920s, a âcontinuation BSPâ, untrammelled by the Comintern connection, the existence of the CPGB and consequent accusations of foreign control, Moscow Gold, divided loyalties and deception, might have formed an organic and effective left opposition, perhaps working together with elements of the ILP.
But the subjunctive brings us back to the fundamental question of the politics it would have practised. As noted earlier, the BSPâs direction of travel from 1917 to 1920 was towards Bolshevik politics and the Comintern; had this influence continued, then even without the formation of the Communist Party it may well have attracted the antipathy and the sanctions imposed on the NWLM by the MacDonald leadership.114 From 1922, Labourâs hierarchy and right wing were moving to redraw the line of what was politically acceptable in light of the new 1918 constitution, the development of constituency organisation, the increase in individual membership, and what they saw as disruptive activity; they were increasingly ready to discipline those who crossed the line.115 Any independent âcontinuation BSPâ current would still have been forced to confront the perennial dilemma of Labour lefts: whether to placate the right by acting as a loyal and thus relatively tame opposition; or embarking on the path of struggle against the right. In all likelihood, the latter would have ended in tears, the former in de-radicalisation. The fate of the Socialist League and Labourâs subsequent oppositions, different as they and the times were, does not hold out a great deal of hope for a transformative internal current based on the BSP of 1920. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. In the circumstances prevailing between 1919 and 1921, the forces necessary to forge such a current as an alternative to the CPGB simply did not exist. As Paul Foot observed: âKendallâs thesis is not proven but his book is not much worse for it.â116
Synchrony of action between a revolutionary party imbricated with a network of activists capable of mobilising workers in the factories and trade unions is typically essential to the development of effective revolutionary initiatives. In that context, the wartime shop stewardsâ movement assumed tremendous importance. Acknowledging its significance, Kendall took a realistic view of its strengths and limitations. As this book documents, it embodied, albeit in restricted fashion, workersâ drive to exercise greater control over the production process. But the shop stewardsâ movement was largely limited to the admittedly crucial munitions industry and to skilled men in certain localities and workshops within it. Its success in mobilising workers, particularly for solidarity action, was patchy, and direct action was typically confined to sectional, defensive trade-union issues. The revolutionaries in its leadership, whether members of the BSP or SLP, displayed a syndicalist distrust of leadership. As Kendall stresses, until almost the end of hostilities in 1918, they refused even to begin serious endeavours to link issues such as dilution of skilled work and conscription, which possessed wider resonance, with what was for most Marxists the strategic, political question of constructing a movement which opposed the war. There was no planning for this, leading stewards received no direction from their parties, and in practice they maintained a debilitating political/industrial divide.117
Hintonâs conclusion is a little misleading â at least from the perspective of building a revolutionary movement â when he states its growth point in Glasgow lay ânot as Kendall assumes in the struggles between chauvinism and internationalism, centrism and revolutionary defeatism within the SDFâBSP but in the dialogue between socialist groups and industrial militancyâ.118 Both were vital. What was necessary was connecting the two and ensuring at a minimum that from 1914 the question of the war became part of a dialogue between the socialist groups and factory militants. What was essential was an attempt to link discontent over rising food prices, profiteering, housing in the community, and the mounting death toll, with discontent in the workplace, âgeneral social conditionsâ with trade-union questions. Kendall is right on this, even if he is over-optimistic about the possibilities of transforming the situation in a revolutionary direction, given the context and its protagonists, the power of the state, the resolve of its functionaries, the limitations of the shop steward leaders who acted more like trade unionists than revolutionaries, and, what was, in the end, the determining influence on the outcome, the consciousness of rank-and-file workers.119
Sober scrutiny of events and most of what we know about workersâ consciousness, suggests there was no pre-revolutionary situation on Clydeside â still less across Britain â in 1915 or 1919.120 There were undoubtedly opportunities for revolutionaries to push the struggle forward but improbably to transform it. Kendall assigns this task to the heroic and tragic figure of Maclean.121 The Revolutionary Movement did history a service by rehabilitating this talented and indefatigable propagandist against the war. Kendallâs criticisms of the shop stewards, notably Willie Gallacher of the BSP and J.W. Muir of the SLP, who obstructed attempts by Gallacherâs BSP comrade Maclean and his supporters to raise the question of the war and take the arguments to the workers, to begin a dialogue, appear compelling. It is reasonable to surmise, as Howell put it, that âthere was no hope of persuading a majority [of the Clyde Workersâ Committee] to oppose munitions production. Even if such a decision had been taken, there is no evidence to suggest that it would have secured support in the workshops.â122 There was anti-war sentiment; on the evidence, it was insufficiently substantial.
This scarcely excuses attempts on the part of revolutionaries to impede leading party comradesâ attempts to start to build support in the factories, not just in their papers and on the street corners; or, albeit in the context of demands for state control, the collaboration of Gallacher, Muir and other revolutionaries with the employers to improve war production. Arguably, in their own small way, their attempts to quarantine the point of production legitimised the war effort. The issue immediately confronting serious revolutionaries was not winning a majority. It was to begin building a minority â to pose the former before the latter is, disablingly in terms of consciousness and action, to set the bar too intimidatingly high. The task was not to say âthat is the way things areâ, but to set about trying to change them. Nonetheless, the overall situation that the isolated, eloquent opponents of the war such as Maclean faced decisively curtailed their ability to transform the reformist consciousness of workers on Clydeside â let alone assume the role of John the Baptist for a British alternative to Soviet Communism.123
Gifted individuals such as Maclean are always important and sometimes crucial; so are the constraints that circumstance imposes on them. Leadership, moreover, works best when it is collective. Yet the post-Hyndman cadre of Kendallâs primary instrument for influencing events, the BSP, was not particularly impressive. In their earlier or subsequent careers, there is little to suggest that leaders like Fred Hodgson, A.A. Watts and Fred Willis â even if we cannot go simply on their performance in the BSP or the very different CPGB â had the ability to build an organisation of any significance without Comintern resources in the difficult climate of the 1920s. None were political architects, none were charismatic mass leaders, none had experience of heading workersâ action. The same went for the SLP leaders such as James Clunie and Thomas Mitchell who remained outside the CPGB and faded from the scene. To conclude this discussion: there is inadequate evidence to support the idea the BSP could have mobilised a meaningful combined political and industrial struggle against the war; thereafter, the downturn in the economy, the collapse of the shop stewardsâ movement, the growing ascendancy of Labourism, and the weaknesses of leadership, suggest there was little serious basis for a BSP independent of the Comintern to maintain itself in the early 1920s; or for its survival in the late 1920s.124
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The formation of the CPGB, Kendall notes, flowed from the Bolsheviksâ determination to purify and divide, if necessary, a movement hitherto dominated by the Second International which had been discredited by the political collapse of its major affiliates in 1914, and to thwart postwar attempts to resurrect it. The consequent split in the international labour movement provoked enduring controversy. A number of historians have suggested that the split was premature and conducted in an abrupt, ultimatistic fashion which proved counter-productive when it came to clarifying issues and winning adherents. Fernando ClaudÃn, for example, castigated the Cominternâs modus operandi as reflecting âa sectarian and dogmatic spiritâ; and he categorised the âTwenty-One Conditionsâ, the Charter for division which all prospective affiliates had to endorse, as âa model of sectarianism and bureaucratic methodâ.125 The divorce from reformism was carried through âin a mechanical way and not through a political and ideological process that would have enabled working people to convince themselves it was necessaryâ.126
If ClaudÃn is critical, Kendall is even more so, opposing the split and its consequences in Britain in principle as âan historic error on the grand scaleâ (p. 474). He justified his characterisation of it as âsectarianâ by reference to Marxâs description of the approach of Lasalle and Proudhon, who purveyed doctrinaire panaceas to the workers in a religious spirit: âThe sect looks for its âraison dâetreâ in its âpoint dâhonneurâ not in what it has in common with the movement but in the special shibboleth that separates it from itâ (p. 474, original emphasis). For Kendall, the CPGB fitted that description. In context, it is difficult to see what viable alternative it had. The shadow of sectarianism was certainly present at the founding conference â witness the close vote on affiliation to the Labour Party â but Lenin and the Comintern did their utmost to dispel it.
Three points are relevant here. First, the situation in Britain was distinctive. With its historical lack of a socialist programme, its enervating inheritance from Liberalism, its federal nature and organic connections with the trade unions â factors which provided major disadvantages but some advantages to revolutionaries, particularly in relation to its trade-union link, loose organisation and fluid politics â Labour was unlike many Social-Democratic parties in comparable countries. Lenin pronounced it a âbourgeois workersâ partyâ; it was dependent on the working class but dominated by bourgeois ideology, with its leadership tied to the state and the existing order. Second, in Britain, unlike elsewhere, the split did not take the form of anything resembling a major scission in the ranks of reformism, but in the lapse of the now defunct BSPâs 1916 affiliation to a changing Labour Party. Third, Lenin attempted to remedy problems flowing from this, counteract sectarian tendencies, and avoid the isolation from the labour movement the Hyndmanites and DeLeonists had experienced by prescribing that the CPGB should apply for affiliation to pave the path to Labourâs rank-and-file workers and undermine its bourgeois leadership â so long as Communists were guaranteed freedom of political expression in their Labour Party work. In Leninâs scheme of things, an independent Communist Party was necessary to act as an alternative pole of attraction to reformism and inspire and coordinate the activities of Communists and sympathisers within Labour. In this scenario, the die was not cast in 1920â21; a significant split might still occur as the new party exploited what Lenin depicted as the explosive tensions between bourgeois and proletarian elements within Labourism.
Leninâs schema underestimated the reformists. As Kendall observed (p. 333), he sometimes depended on unreliable information and was vague about Labour Party politics and structures. He assumed Labour would ultimately accept CPGB affiliation as it had accepted the adhesion of the BSP. But the BSPâs record of working within the Labour Party was brief and it seems slight.127 What is clear is that Henderson and Snowden believed, as did Lenin and Trotsky, as did anyone attentive to Left-Wing Communism or the statements of British Communists, that the BSP and CPGB were two very different animals. Labourâs leaders were determined that Communists could not have their cake and eat it, both independence and an oppositional presence in another party: they rejected all attempts at affiliation, and the CPGB had to fall back on those Communists who had retained their Labour Party membership, and upon pro-Soviet sentiment at the grassroots. Crucially, they were faced with restrictions Lenin had not foreseen on their freedom to agitate for Communist policies and they incurred administrative sanctions as Labour leaders denounced their conflicting loyalties and dual membership. In finding an effective means of relating to Labourâs working-class base, the infant CPGB was additionally handicapped by the recalcitrant conjuncture and its own inheritance. Belief in the proximity of revolution and the leftist strategy of the offensive as well as fears of Labourist contamination prevailed into 1922, accompanied by state repression and economic downturn. The CPGB remained disorganised and bore the stigmata of its origins as an amalgamation of, albeit evolving, sects. Only after the turn to the united front in 1922 did it begin to organise the support it enjoyed within Labour in a disciplined, Bolshevik fashion to win over the Labour left.128
For their part, the Bolsheviks had been impelled by urgency to insist on the split: they were convinced that revolution was imminent across Europe. Insurrections, if they were to succeed, required âiron disciplineâ and leadership from âparties of a new typeâ, divested of the reformist and centrist, opportunist and vacillating elements of the Second International. The latterâs record illustrated that indecision in a crisis would resolve itself in subservience to the bourgeoisie and capitulation to its imperatives. In Britain, debate and discussion took place not only between the revolutionary groups but with Labour Party and ILP leaders in order to win their organisations for Communism. The clear indication after key issues had been ventilated was that progress in that direction was impossible. The reformists and most of their members were opposed to a new Communist Party: they preferred accommodation and gradualism to revolution. Thus, in the context of 1919â20, the Comintern was determined to pursue a quick divorce. It favoured immediate action, âdeclare new organisations and the masses will comeâ, as against patience, âassemble viable forces firstâ.
The process of separation in Britain took place under the guidance of a Comintern which had already made up its mind, regardless of the slender size and weight of its following. For unity, like division, has its costs. Viewed from Moscow, a new revolutionary party had an overriding ideological and political rationale. For the Bolsheviks, their experience since 1914 had crystallised understanding that the right-wing leadership that dominated reformist parties and trade unions was tied materially and ideologically to the bourgeois state and wedded to capitalism and constitutionalism. As the role of Social-Democrats in crushing the 1918 German revolution, following on the heels of the debacle of August 1914, illustrated, opportunism had matured: when it came to the crunch, not only right-wing Social-Democrats but centrists would side with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, defend capitalism and trample on working-class democracy in the process. Revolutionaries required political and organisational independence if they were effectively to combat the subordination of working-class interests by reformists and centrists and the confusion that the latter would sow in the coming crisis. Unity on existing terms could only reinforce the hegemony of reformism over Social-Democratic parties and facilitate the stifling of Communists within them. A combat party could not tolerate a fifth column. Complementing the breach, the united front tactic, developed in Britain from 1922, attempted to initiate a qualitatively different unity, one which preserved Communist freedom of expression and initiative and catered for revolutionary goals, a partial, instrumental unity, unity in action over specific, consensual objectives which, while maintaining Communist autonomy and independence, could strengthen the anti-capitalist struggle.
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Finally, it is worth saying a word about Kendallâs conclusion, tersely rehearsed in The Revolutionary Movement and expanded elsewhere, that the CPGB was a failure (pp. 4â5). It is important to reiterate that in historiographical and political terms the partyâs nativity did not determine its future fate, although the manner of its birth undoubtedly influenced its later life. Its foundation was the outcome of the beliefs and actions of the majority of British revolutionaries who perceived the CPGB as the best vehicle for resolving the problems they had encountered in previous years. If we can discern the seeds of future development in the political precedence they accorded the Comintern and the Soviet Union, whether these seeds flourished or withered depended on what British Communists did in succeeding years. Kendallâs verdict that when this book was published in 1969 the CPGB remained âat less than nothing ⦠whilst the Labour Party ⦠remains unchallengeably and indisputably the mass party of the working classâ (p. 5), was based on conventional indices of political success â membership, support, electoral performance and parliamentary representation.129 Other historians, sometimes more sympathetic to the Communists, have focussed on different factors and reached more favourable value judgements â usually of particular periods which Kendall aggregated as part of an ultimate, overall failure.
Evaluating the Third Period of the Comintern 1929â35, traditionally considered to be a disaster by accepted political yardsticks, some academics have qualified negative verdicts by citing successes in the unemployed movement, the cultural field and the emergence of âLittle Moscowsâ in the localities.130 Despite the failure of the its pivotal policy, a Popular Front between Communists, Labour and âprogressiveâ Conservatives and Liberals and an Anglo-Soviet alliance, the CPGBâs record between 1935 and 1941 has been judged more favourably than that of Labour and other non-revolutionary parties. The criteria informing this conclusion are extremely selective. A benign assessment is arrived at by citing Communist activity among unemployed workers; trade unionists; agitation over rents; the partyâs defence of the Spanish Republic; its organisation of the Peopleâs Convention 1940â41; and its opposition to appeasement.131 A Communist historian questioned whether it was possible to pronounce the CPGB a failure by 1930, pointing to its possible influence on the Labour Party, the ILP and the National Government.132 A pervasive theme suggested by party intellectuals and inherited by academics is to focus not on policy and its results but on the activities of Communists at work and in the community. At times it is asserted âiron disciplineâ became relaxed and parties âmight protect certain areas of autonomyâ.133 Examples cited for Britain are again âLittle Moscowsâ where Communists âcould integrate collectively into the rhythms of local community lifeâ and âan array of innovations in theatre, film, the rest of the arts, activities for youth and children, sportsâ during the Third Period.134
Such approaches raise a number of questions about purpose, politics and proportion, integrated evaluation and analytical balance. The CPGBâs comprehensive failure as a political party during the Third Period, its assertion Britain was approaching revolution and the labour movement leaders were moving towards fascism, its prohibition of joint work with the Labour Party and the consequences, the reduction of membership to a core of 500 activists by 1930, the collapse of the Minority Movement, all this is surely on a quite different plane of significance to what were, eschewing magnification, no more than a handful of âLittle Moscowsâ and a somewhat exaggerated, in terms of quality and significance, âcreativityâ in the arts and sport.135 The latter should be recorded; so should its relative weight in any overall, integrated political balance sheet. No serious historian would evaluate the CPGBâs performance 1935â41 without bringing into the assessment the failure of its central objective: the Popular Front; its advocacy for the terror in the Soviet Union and Spain; its justification of the HitlerâStalin Pact; its about-turn over the war; and the pro-Nazi inclination of its subsequent policy. Selective approaches which emphasise the organising efforts and initiatives of activists rather than weighing their partyâs overall political achievement, privilege cultural and community work, and decentre pivotal policies, produce unbalanced judgements.
The same goes for consolatory, âat one removeâ narratives which cite the alleged influence Communists exercised on other parties: the CPGB was established to make progress towards revolution, not to act as a pressure group on reformist parties. The sprinkling of âLittle Moscowsâ were far from typical of Communist permeation of proletarian spaces across Britain, and it is doubtful if they constituted examples of âcertain areas of autonomyâ in any meaningful sense. What was âintegrated into the rhythms of community lifeâ was Communist politics which disablingly for the cause of socialism identified socialism with dictatorship and exploitation: âThe specifically Communist part of âLittle Moscowsâ oppositional culture included the USSRâs popularity as an idealised workersâ state.â136 What the non-Communist part was is unspecified in an account which concludes diminuendo that the potentials of an inadequately explained but textually inflated âcreative national popular politics an imaginative Communist Party could release ⦠were only ever fitfully realised. The Stalinist culture of the Third International was critical to how they were stifled.â137
In assessing the record of a bureaucratic centralist political party where the line was received, axial and enforced, it is more plausible and helpful to start, as Kendall did, from its politics and relate them to all significant levels of activity. It appears logical to assess success or failure in relation to a partyâs objectives, although in a country which disclosed no pre-revolutionary situation, making progress in building a party with significant implantation in the working class and instrumental in substantially eroding the influence of reformism, may be considered reasonable criteria for success. A qualitative yardstick is the degree to which the party successfully developed and applied the Marxism it formally embraced. Activity in civil society should be evaluated in relation to political goals, not analytically distanced from them. To apply this approach is to vindicate Kendallâs judgement. Until the 1960s, the CPGB systematically subordinated the interests of British workers to the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. Stalinism was hegemonic, âcreativityâ little more than its tactical dimension. British Communists had broken from Leninâs Marxism by 1930, a rupture affirmed in its turn away from revolutionary politics from the mid-1930s and its codification of a confused and unconvincing variant of the national reformism it was created to overcome, in The British Road to Socialism. If revising theory and practice is necessary in a changing world, this was a regressive and sterile revisionism. From the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s, the CPGBâs influence on trade unionism was real but uneven across industry. In terms of impact on trade-union policy it was secondary. Typically inflected with economism combined with propaganda for the Soviet state, it was on the whole politically unproductive. And British Communismâs frequently ephemeral cultural achievements have been exaggerated.
There is little reason to think that Kendall would have disagreed with any of the above, although of course he subscribed to his own interpretation of Marxism and condemned what he considered to be âLeninism-Stalinismâ tout court. The behaviour of European Communist parties, he insisted, âcould not be predicted on the basis of local causation but only by reference to the presumed interests of the ruling group in the Russian state ⦠That this development has done enormous harm to the development of the European labour movement, there can be no doubt.â138 The failure of British Communism in both its revolutionary and later reformist manifestations and the reasons for it, he observed, were reflected in its disintegration hot on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Thinking about how and why the CPGB was born, why it went wrong and how it proved incapable of realising the hopes of its founders, may help us to understand at least some aspects of how we arrived at the impasse of the British labour movement and international socialism in the twenty-first century and shed light on how we may transcend it. It remains as true today as it was in 1969 that, in Kendallâs words: âThe origins of the Communist Party are of interest not only to specialists and âextremistsâ but to all who are concerned with the future of British society and especially of the Labour movementâ (p. 5).
I would like to thank Sebastian Budgen; Barry Buitekant; Ian Bullock; Alan Campbell; Tony Carew; Paul Flewers; Victor Rabinovitch; John Rudge; and Alan Tuckman â all of whom have helped in various ways with this essay.
Unless otherwise indicated, this section is based on obituaries which appeared after Kendallâs death: Bullock 2004; Carew 2004; MacShane 2004; McIlroy and Carew 2004, pp. 235â39. And the fuller account in Bullock and Carew 2010, pp. 198â205; Richardson 2004.
Kendall 1975, âDedicationâ, no pagination.
Many of the references in documents and papers of this period are to âH. Kendallâ or âHarry Kendallâ. From the context, this is in all probability Walter. He worked in the Civil Service and other ârespectableâ employment and without adopting a fully-fledged nom-de-plume may have wished to permit for an element of confusion and deniability if his political activity presented him with problems. His full name was Walter Frank Harrison Kendall. In Michael Kidronâs Socialist Review file of correspondence, Harry Kendallâs address is the same as Walterâs and a subsequent article in the journal appears under Walterâs name.
See Hunter 1997, pp. 243â50, for the LLOY at this time.
He maintained an interest in Communism and Trotskyism throughout his life. He also studied the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg, then inspiring debate on the left â see the contributions from Kendall, John Eaton and Frank Ridley, Socialist Leader, 10 January, 25 April, 6, 13, 20, 27 June 1959; Birchall 2011, pp. 181â84; Richardson 2004.
See, for example, Anonymous 1956b; Kendall 1954. I am grateful to John Rudge for drawing my attention to these pamphlets; and see now
Minkin 1978, p. 104.
Minkin 1978, pp. 105â6.
Shaw 1988, p. 119 and passim. Williams, a former Birkenhead railwayman and National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC) organiser, was well versed in Stalinist and Trotskyist literature. He subsequently became governor of Mauritius. Kendall considered Williamsâ 1933 NCLC pamphlet What is Marxism? the best introduction to the subject for working-class students, and explored republication â e-mail from Tony Carew, 29 September 2022.
Forster 1995; Heffer 1991, pp. 20â24; Heffer 1992b, pp. 79â82; McShane and Smith 1978, pp. 250, 254; Savage 2006. There are some documents of the SWF in the Eric Heffer papers, Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Peopleâs History Museum, Manchester, LP/ESH/01 and 02.
Kendall 1954. He dated his interest in the international labour movement to his first encounter with trade unionism at the end of the war: Kendall 1975, âDedicationâ. Lou Britz subsequently joined the CPGB before switching support to the right-wing Les CannonâFrank Chapple leadership of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU), subsequently the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU), and becoming a full-time official.
Widgery 1976, p. 80; Anonymous 1956a; Kendall 1957. See Kendall 1962a, for his analysis of Stalinism. For his critique of the Trotskyism some disillusioned CPGB members turned to after 1956, see Kendall 1960.
This represents the gist of what he described as his long-term ideas about socialism in a number of conversations I had with Kendall in Oxford in the early 1970s when we were both involved in teaching University Extra-Mural courses for trade unionists.
An essay he wrote at Ruskin won the G.D.H. Cole History Prize and was subsequently published: Kendall 1963.
See note 12 above and Kendall 1993b.
Information from Tony Carew.
For some of the differences between the movement and the CPGB, see Ramelson 1968; Coates and Topham 1969. For issues in dispute between the IWC and sections of the revolutionary left, see Hyman 1974.
See, for example, Coates 1968; Coates and Topham 1968; Coates and Topham 1972; Roberts 1973. Kendall traced the movement back further to the âDiggersâ and âTrue Levellersâ of the Civil War period: Voice of the Unions, April 1973. Initially a distinction was drawn between âworkersâ controlâ to denote initiatives to intervene in the production process and restrict managerial prerogatives; and âworkersâ self-managementâ which referred to workersâ ownership and administration of a socialist economy. âWorkersâ controlâ passed into common usage to denote both.
Tate 2014. Mandelâs International Socialist Journal carried early articles on workersâ control. A previous organisation, the League for Workersâ Control, based on ILP supporters and other dissident socialist and anarchist currents, existed in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Kendall 1968; Kendall 1976 [1968]
From 1970, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW).
Kendall 1976 [1968], p. 300; and see Kendall 1972.
Kendall 1976 [1968] p. 301.
Kendall 1976 [1968] p. 301.
The most developed statement, Barratt Brown, Coates and Topham 1975, only appeared at the end of the period as a response to criticism from a revolutionary perspective elaborated in Hyman 1974.
Hyman 1974, pp. 253â54; Coates 1974, pp. 155â78.
Kendall 1970; Hyman 1974, p. 253, notes 44, 45.
Bill Jones of the Transport Workers and Ken Fleet of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, Chair and Secretary of the IWC, responded to Kendallâs criticism by arguing Voice was failing to reflect the diversity of opinion in the movement and was too often dominated by Kendallâs contributions and concerns: Letter dated 4Â April 1973 in IWC files. I am grateful to Alan Tuckman for providing me with copies of material from the IWC Archive.
Kendall 1970, p. 2, referred to the problems with âWashington silverâ and âMoscow Goldâ as well as Sir Stafford Cripps financing the Socialist League in the 1930s. For Coates and the Russell Foundation, see Tate 2014.
Kendall 1975, p. 33.
He took a keen interest not only in the work but the lives of research students, three of whom at Sussex, Ian Bullock, Tony Carew and Victor Rabinovitch, became long-term friends and assisted with the Voice newspapers. Bullock and Carew subsequently entered academic life in Britain and pursued their interest in labour history. Rabinovitch, who acted as Business Manager and Secretary of the Broad Left group that oversaw Engineering Voice, returned to Canada in 1974 and worked for the Canadian Labour Congress before playing an important role in the Federal governmentâs cultural policy. He recalled: âWalter tried to supervise my thesis [on the SDF and the trade unions] during the occasional hours when I wasnât doing Voice â Victor Voicovitch was a nickname.â â e-mail to author, 5 October 2022.
McIlroy 2010, pp. 53â54.
Kendall 1975.
Kendall 1975, p. xiii.
Kendall 1975, p. 328.
Kendall 1975, p. 34.
Kendall 1975, p. 34.
Kendall 1975, pp. 326, 330.
Kendall 1975, p. 331.
Kendall 1975, pp. 331â32.
Given the resulting tensions, Tony Carew, who was on the editorial board, and Victor Rabinovitch met with the AEU officials who liaised with the paper: e-mail from Tony Carew, 26 September 2022. Rabinovitch remembered that Scanlon and other officials affirmed the value of the paper as an educator and organiser. However, he recalled AUEW Assistant Secretary, Bob Wright, a Labour Party activist, remarking that operating in a Broad Left alliance with Communists, âwe were doing ourselves no good by stirring up the CPâ. Such advice did not commend itself to Kendall who found it difficult to resist tweaking Communist tails â e-mail, 14 October 2022.
Carew 2004; for background, see McIlroy 1997, pp. 234â36.
See, for example, Kendall 1980a; Kendall 1980b.
Kendall 1980c; Kendall 1981. He continued to criticise Trotskyism; see Kendall 1980d.
Drafts of World Revolution were deposited in the British Library and the library of Nuffield College. A chapter was published as Kendall 2001, pp. 143â64.
Conquest 1996. Richardson was the editor of the journal Revolutionary History.
Contributions to the journal included Kendall 1991; Kendall 1992a; Kendall 1992c; Kendall 1993; Kendall 2001; Kendall 2002.
Lees 1990.
Kendall 1992a, pp. 106â10; Johnstone 1978, p. 7.
Kendall 1992b, p. 4.
Davidson 1993, p. 5.
Howard 1993; Jack 1993; Smith 1993; VlahoviÄ 1993.
Kendall 1993a, p. 8.
Johnstone 1994, pp. 8â9; see also Matthews 1994, and a final comment criticising Klugmann, Flewers 1994.
Andrews 2015, quotes from pp. 131, 134, 135; pp. 116â26, 139â45.
Kendall 2002, p. 288, commenting on the critique of recent writing about British Communism in McIlroy 2001. He also continued to defend his position on Moscow Gold as new revelations and explanations about the Russiansâ long-term subsidisation of the CPGB appeared: Kendall 1994a; Kendall 1994b.
Kendall 1962b; Kendall 1992c. In his preface to the American edition of the book, Adam Westoby thanked Kendall for his assistance in piecing together Rizziâs life story: Rizzi, 1985, p. vi. The Italian highlighted similarities between Communist and fascist societies which he characterised as moving in the direction of a new âbureaucratic collectivistâ world order. Kendall was among several commentators who suggested James Burnham plagiarised some of Rizziâs ideas in The Managerial Revolution. Rizzi later judged his brief alignment with fascism aberrant, but his anti-Semitism seems to have been deep-rooted.
Kendall 1972; Kendall 1993b. Ian Bullock recalled in an e-mail to author, 3Â September 2022, that Kendall always insisted he was a Marxist.
Some sought to delete the âsocialistâ and assimilate his stance to mainstream anti-Communism. As he said â for example, p. xiii â it was nothing of the kind. It was, he held with justification, incumbent on democratic socialists to criticise Communism. He was happy to discuss his work with Zbigniew Brzezinski, later Dr Kissingerâs adviser and strategist of Americaâs imperialist ambitions; and publish in what the left considered a right-wing journal like Survey. It started life as Soviet Survey. And while its founding editor, Walter Laqueur, was a respected contemporary historian, at one stage the journal appears to have received funding from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which itself was financed by the CIA. As we have seen, Kendall wrote elsewhere about the debilitating impact such funding could exercise on independent bodies: Kendall 1970. For different views on the influence such sponsorship had in practice, see Stonor Saunders 1999; Wilford 2003.
Hartley 1997 [1953], p. 1.
This summary is based on The Revolutionary Movement and many of the sources cited in notes 86â102 below.
âDays of Hopeâ, which covered the years 1916â26 was screened in four parts on BBC television in SeptemberâOctober 1975.
Acknowledgements, p. vii. The list of those interviewed includes CPGB foundation or near foundation members George Deer, Winifred Horrabin, I.P. Hughes, Francis Meynell, J.T. Murphy, Raymond Postgate and Andrew Rothstein, as well as former activists in the BSP and SLP, the French syndicalist/Communist Alfred Rosmer, and John Macleanâs daughter Nan Milton. The book reflects some of the approach to British Communism of the later Murphy â see Murphy 1941, 1958â59 â and Miltonâs appreciation of her father.
Tsuzuki 1961; Chewter 1965.
PribiÄeviÄ 1957.
For example, Cole and Postgate 1966 [1938]; Morton and Tate 1979 [1956].
Pelling 1958, pp. 1â8.
Macfarlane 1966.
Macfarlane 1966, p. 276.
Klugmann 1968. Broader background on aspects of the period was provided in Dangerfield 1997 [1935]; Phelps Brown 1959.
Hobsbawm 1973a [1969].
Klugmann 1969 [1966], p. 70, emphasis added.
Taylor 1969; Foot 1969; Marquand 1969.
Taylor 1969.
Foot 1969.
Foot 1969.
Rothstein 1969, pp. 563â67.
Hobsbawm 1973b [1969], p. 15.
Hinton 1973, p. 13.
Sedgwick 1969.
Sedgwick 1969.
Sedgwick 1969.
Higgins 2004 [1969], pp. 17, 19.
Higgins 2004 [1969], p. 22.
Higgins 2004 [1969], p. 23.
Hinton 1970, p. 43.
Hinton 1970, pp. 43â44.
Hinton 1970, p. 46.
Hinton 1970, p. 48.
Hinton 1973.
Challinor 1977.
Hinton and Hyman 1975, p. 8.
Hinton and Hyman 1975, passim.
Holton 1976.
Hinton 1983, pp. 64â117, is particularly useful. See also Cronin 1984, pp. 19â34; Price 1986, pp. 93â171; Saville 1988, pp. 23â53.
Clegg 1985; Fox 1985; see also Cliff and Gluckstein 1986. For the state, see Middlemas 1979.
Barrow and Bullock 1996; Crick 1994; Hunt 1996.
Darlington 2013.
Ives 2017
Mates 2016.
Bullock 2011
For example, Woolacott 1994; Braybon 2012; Bullock 2020. For a recent general survey of the working class, see August 2007, particularly pp. 89â173.
Thompson 1992, p. 30. Echoed by Morgan 2006, p. 26.
McDermott and Agnew 1996, pp. 20â23.
Thorpe 2000, p. 29.
Thorpe 2000, p. 29. As Wimbourne, the sagacious family solicitor in Agatha Christieâs 4.50 From Paddington, put it: âIndeed? I am inclined myself to take statements of such a nature with what I might term a grain of salt. There are doubtless certain unworldly people who are indifferent to money. I myself have never met one.â â Christie 2010 [1957], p. 200.
See the comments in McIlroy and Campbell 2020a, pp. 423â65; McIlroy and Campbell 2020b, pp. 609â51.
For example, Edgar Whitehead. Others possessed a keen appetite for âprofessionalâ rates of remuneration for party officers, notably William Mellor who, like Whitehead, was middle-class â illustrating that a healthy regard for money was by no means confined to workers: see McIlroy and Campbell 2020a, pp. 423â65.
Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), 495/100/27, MacManus and Peet to Comintern Executive, 15Â November 1921.
Murphy 1958â59, p. 119.
Scrutiny of the preference for the SLP over the BSP as a superior representative of the revolutionary tradition as expressed in Challinor 1977 is beyond the scope of this essay. But see McIlroy 2011, McIlroy and Campbell 2020b.
This is not to minimise the Cominternâs monopolistic determination to subvert competing conceptions of Marxism. However, its attempts to displace IWCE suggest the complexities. They prompted a vigorous response from the forces regrouped around the NCLC. Unlike the SLP, although it was more broad-based, the NCLC survived, admittedly as a declining force, until the end of the 1950s, albeit at the price of attaching itself to the trade-union leadership and the Labour Party. It was thus arguably âdiverted into sterile channelsâ although economic and political change as much as the CPGB was responsible â see Macintyre 1980; Simon 1990.
If we look at what happened in practice, the record affords slender evidence, even before the intensification of âBolshevisationâ in 1924, of former BSPers who had joined the CPGB resisting the new politics of the Comintern in favour of the old politics of the BSP â or SLP. There was continued attachment to pre-1920 propaganda orientations. But this may be persuasively attributed, as it was at the time, to a lack of understanding of the Bolshevik conception of the relationship between agitation, propaganda and action. Critics also attributed softness towards the Labour Party to former BSPers, rooted in their former allegiance. But this could be explained, and was defended, by reference to the elasticity of a united front tactic which permitted a variety of responses to Labour. It was very different from any positive reassertion of the continuing potential of earlier traditions â see, for example, RGASPI, 495/8/1, Transcripts of Meetings of the English Commission of the ECCI, JuneâJuly 1923, particularly the contributions of Dutt and Inkpin. Little was heard from the former shop stewardsâ leaders of that movementâs earlier prioritising of grassroots democracy and suspicion of leadership. A gap in the literature is a study of the fate of those BSPers who supported the break with Hyndman in 1916 but faded away thereafter. Bullock 2022 examines the Hyndman âOld Guardâ.
For the Socialist League, see Pimlott 1977; Corthorn 2006; for the NWLM, see Parker 2018.
Shaw 1988, pp. 1â15.
Foot 1969. History, as E.H. Carr reiterated, is what happened, not what might have happened: Carr 1987 [1961], pp. 97â98. Nonetheless, problematising outcomes can remind us that for actors at the time they were not determined and may sharpen our analysis and understanding of what happened â so long as we relate the competing choices open to protagonists at each point to the circumstances which enabled and constrained those actors and weigh in the scales the forces at play facilitating or disabling the âmightsâ. The decisive elements in 1919â21 were primarily influenced by 1917 and the desire to emulate it, which they perceived as contingent on affiliation to the Comintern and a close connection with the Soviet state. They possessed superior weight to possible protagonists of alternatives. The main body which dissented from the Communist project, the SLP, was opposed to links with Labour, lost its industrial cadre to the CPGB and subsequently fell apart. The only apparent candidate for constructing a current of non-Communist radicalism from dissident BSPers, the supporters of Fairchild, were scarcely a credible alternative after 1918.
And see McIlroy 2016, pp. 44â48.
Hinton 1970, pp. 44â45.
For different views on the situation on Clydeside, see McLean 1983; Foster 1990, pp. 33â70; Melling 1990, pp. 3â32; Brotherstone 1992, pp. 52â80; see also Foster 1993; Melling 1983.
See Howell 1986, pp. 179â83, 195â98; Crick 1994, 284â87. Howell highlights the increasing purchase of Labourism in this period, sometimes avoided in the past by socialist writers.
For Maclean, see Bell 1944; Milton 1973; Milton 1978; McLean 1983, pp. 144â53; Howell 1986, pp. 158â225; Ripley and McHugh 1989; Pitt 1995.
Howell 1986, p. 178; Waites 1983.
The nature of Macleanâs critical attitude to a new Communist Party before its foundation has stimulated disputation. Hinton notes that his initial objections were based on the view that leading Communists were agents of the British state, not the Comintern: Hinton 1979, p. 38. Kendall defends his position in The Revolutionary Movement: Kendall 1979. Bob Pitt argues Maclean did not oppose Leninism per se and his broader critique of the CPGB was advanced after, not before, its foundation. He also discusses the controversies about the impact of Macleanâs health on his politics and his Scottish nationalism: Pitt 1995.
McIlroy and Campbell 2020a, passim.
ClaudÃn 1975, pp. 107â08. Magri makes a distinction between hardened Social-Democrats and more biddable centrists. He argues in relation to the latter, âit was sheer sectarianism to write off a broad and still fluid milieu with which serious discussion would seem to have been possible, to issue âtake it or leave itâ ultimatumsâ: Magri 2011, p. 11. In Britain, however, whatever we think of the CPGBâs pitch, it seems to have exhausted all efforts to convince centrists to embrace Communism. With the adhesion of the âILP Leftâ to the CPGB in Spring 1921, the potential for significant recruitment was largely dissipated. As Kendall points out (p. 431), the Twenty-One Conditions were simply unacceptable to the majority of ILP members.
ClaudÃn 1975, pp. 107â8.
So far as I am aware there is no systematic study of BSPersâ intervention in the Labour Party during 1916â20.
Macfarlane 1966, pp. 94â109; Thorpe 2000, pp. 35â60; McIlroy and Campbell 2020a, pp. 448â49.
For expanded comments, see Kendall 1974, pp. 118â31; Hinton notes that Kendallâs comments on the post-1921 CPGB are tangential to the book: Hinton 1970, p. 42. But his ascription of a failure inscribed at birth pervades his chronicle of a death foretold. It should be added that the CPGB would undergo a very slight numerical expansion and some successes in the trade unions between 1969 and 1975. By the early 1980s, its industrial base had collapsed and the party had entered its death throes.
Howkins 1980; Worley 2002.
Morgan 1989, p. 309.
Foster 1979, pp. 56â57.
Eley 2002, p. 256. See also Eley 1997, pp. 125â27, where, citing The Revolutionary Movement, he mounts an unevidenced attack on Kendallâs âobsessive monotones and exclusive foregrounding of Moscow loyalism and pro-Soviet dependencyâ, referring into the bargain to âhis characteristic attack on James Klugmannâ in Labour History Review, for which see above.
Eley 2002, p. 256.
See McIlroy and Campbell 2002, pp. 535â69.
Eley 2002, p. 256, original emphasis.
Eley 2002, p. 257. In light of Eleyâs eventual conclusion, it is difficult to see how historians with any sense of proportion can avoid âforegrounding Moscow loyalism and Soviet dependencyâ in analysing the CPGBâs political record; or, given the overwhelming disparity of weight between the partyâs sustained subordination to Soviet policy and Moscow loyalism compared with âcreative national popular politicsâ which were always dependent on it, avoid placing the former in its own âexclusiveâ hegemonic category in order to dispel any notion of false equivalence between the two: Eley 1997, p. 126.
Kendall 1975, p. 317.