Revolutionaries (3 page)

Its activities did not and do not conform to the sociologist's pattern of ‘mass movement' (‘direct and activistic modes of response' in which ‘the focus of attention was remote from personal experience and everyday life'). Whatever the ultimate aims of the party, its militants, in the unions or the unemployed movements between the wars, were passionately concerned with practical matters such as improving the condition of the workers here and now. There is not even evidence that the
CP
is any more oligarchic than other British parties, that its members pay less attention to inner-party democracy, or have a notably different attitude to their leaders.

In brief, Mr Newton establishes at some length what everyone who has actual experience of British communists knows. They are, sociologically speaking, much what one would expect an activist working-class elite to be, sharing notably ‘the persistent attempt at self-improvement through self-education' which is familiar to any student of the cadre of working-class leadership at all periods of British history. They are the kinds of people who have provided labour movements with leadership and a cutting edge at most times. Mr Newton implies that they are in this very like the Labour Party activists, and that the chief reason for the unusual smallness of the British
CP
is that (until recently) the Labour Party expressed the views of most politically conscious British workers quite satisfactorily. In this he is almost certainly right, though there has always been a working-class left which found it inadequate. This ultra-left is the subject of Mr Kendall's book.

The real question is whether it has constituted or constitutes a ‘revolutionary' movement. In so far as the
CP
is concerned, what is at issue is not its subjective commitment to a fundamental social change, but the nature of the society in which it pursued and pursues its objectives, and the political context of its activities. For the young ultras of 1969, whose idea of revolution is, if not actually to stand on a barricade, then at least to make the same sort of noise as though standing on one, it is plainly not revolutionary and has long ceased to be so. But the question is more serious than that. How far can any party be functionally revolutionary in a country in which a classical revolution is simply not on the agenda, and which lacks even a living tradition of past revolution?

Walter Kendall's enquiry into the left of 1900–21 raises this question in an acute form.
²
The author himself sometimes appears to get lost in the intricacies of sectarian history and spends too much time on the argument that the
CP
grew not out of the past of the British radical left but out of the international requirements of the Russian bolsheviks. This argument can be briefly dismissed. If anything is clear about the period 1917–21 it is (
a
) that the ultra-left passionately identified itself with the bolsheviks, (
b
) that it consisted of squabbling small groups, (
c
) that most of them wanted nothing more than to become the Communist Party, whatever the Russians wanted, and (
d
) that the natural and sensible course for the Russians was to see that a single unified party emerged. In fact, what happened was pretty much what might have been expected. The largest and most lasting of the independent marxist organizations of the British left, the British Socialist Party, became the main nucleus of the
CP
, absorbing politically important but numerically small groups of other left-wingers. The Russians used their prestige to knock some of the extreme anti-political sectarianism out of it, though the process of turning it into a ‘bolshevik' party did not seriously begin until after Mr Kendall's book ends.

But how far was this radical left revolutionary? How far could it be revolutionary? It is evident from Kendall's very full and scholarly account that only a tiny fraction of the smallish pre–1914 radical left consisted of revolutionaries in the Russian or Irish sense: mostly in Scotland, the East End of London (with its Russian connections) and perhaps south Wales. These few score, or at best few hundred, militants played a disproportionately large part in the years 1911–20, when the British labour movement, probably for the first time since the Chartists, showed signs of genuinely rejecting ‘the system', including ‘politics', the Labour Party and the trade union leadership. To say that it was revolutionary would be misleading.

The immediate reason for failure was that the British left had neither a sense of power nor organizations capable of thinking in terms of power. The rebels merely faced the more modest choice of either capturing the traditional mass organizations of labour
from the reformist leadership or refusing to have any truck with them. But the one course, though more fruitful in the long term, lowered the temperature of militancy in the immediate crisis; the other maintained it at the sacrifice of effectiveness.

The south Wales miners – their union was essentially the produce of rank-and-file rebellion – chose the first, with the result that after the great 1915 strike there was no widespread unofficial movement in the pits which could link up with that in industry. But the miners held together, were radicalized
en bloc
(the South Wales Federation even thought of affiliating to the Comintern at one point), elected A.J.Cook in 1924 and pushed the whole of labour into the General Strike – at a time when this had ceased to have much political significance. As Kendall notes rightly, their success ‘staved off radical action during the war only to cause it to break out once the war was over'.

The shop stewards, on the other hand, by their very grass roots syndicalism, their distrust of any politics and officialdom, wasted their efforts and produced – as Kendall also points out – a mere supplement to official trade unionism. They expressed rather than led a genuine revolt, though unable to give it effectiveness or even permanence. Hence their movement melted away, leaving behind only a few score valuable recruits to the new
CP
. ‘In 1918', wrote Gallacher, ‘we had marched through Glasgow a hundred thousand strong. On 1 May 1924 I led a demonstration through the streets. A hundred was our full muster.'

The trouble about the revolutionary left in stable industrial societies is not that its opportunities never come, but that the normal conditions in which it must operate prevent it from developing the movements likely to seize the rare moments when they are called upon to behave as revolutionaries. The discouraging conclusion to be drawn from Mr Kendall's book is that there is no simple way out of this dilemma; it is built into the situation. A self-sealing sectarianism is no solution. Nor is a
reaction of simple rebellious rejection of all politics and ‘bureaucracy'. Being a revolutionary in countries such as ours just happens to be difficult. There is no reason to believe that it will be less difficult in future than it has been in the past.

¹
Kenneth Newton,
The Sociology of British Communism
, London, 1969.

²
Walter Kendall,
The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900–21
, London, 1969.

The history of communism in the developed economies of the west has been the history of revolutionary parties in countries without insurrectionary prospects. Such countries may be, and at various times in our century have been, involved in revolutionary activities arising out of the international contradictions of capitalism (e.g. Nazi occupation), or reflecting the glow of fires elsewhere (e.g. in eastern Europe), but their own political roads have not led, or ever looked like leading for more than a fleeting moment, towards the barricades. Neither the two world wars nor the intervening great slump, seriously shook the social basis of any regime between the Pyrenees, the southern border of the Alps, and the North Cape: and it is not easy to imagine more massive blows hitting such a region in the relatively short period of half a century. In eastern Europe – to take the nearest example – the situation has been very different. Here we have in the same period at least four and perhaps five cases of endogenous social revolutions (Russia, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece,
¹
perhaps Bulgaria), not counting temporary but serious upheavals.

Spontaneously or deliberately, the labour movements of the west have had to adapt themselves to this situation, and in doing so they have always run the grave risk of adapting themselves to a permanent and subordinate existence within capitalism. In the period up to 1914 this predicament was to some extent obscured by the refusal of bourgeois regimes to admit them formally or completely into their system of political and economic relations, by the miserable conditions of existence in which most workers lived and the self-contained social universe of an outlaw proletariat, and by the strength of the revolutionary traditions – mainly marxist, but also anarchist – which had formed most labour movements and still powerfully imbued them. In the generation after 1917 it was also partially obscured by the collapse of capitalism into mutual massacre, slump and barbarism, and more specifically by the bolshevik revolution, which was (correctly) seen as the herald of world revolution. In our generation it has emerged with much greater clarity, because of a combination of three factors: the remarkable and unprecedented economic prosperity of the ‘west' (including the bulk of its working classes), the disintegration of the Third International – whether in its formal or its informal versions – and the remoteness – both geographical, social and political – of the post–1945 phase of the world revolution from the problems of the developed western countries.
²

The period before 1914 has passed into history. The Second International collapsed totally, and beyond any chance of revival, and so did the part-rival, part-complementary movement of anarchizing revolutionary trade unionism (‘syndicalism'). If we study that period at all for any reason other than academic curiosity, it is simply to help to explain what happened later, and perhaps to seek some clues about the operation of what was then usual, but is now rare, namely single national socialist movements organizationally united but ideologically pluralist. The period of the Third International is still with us, at least in the form of the permanent schism between communist and social-democratic parties, neither of whose patterns of behaviour or traditions can be understood without constant reference to the October revolution. Hence the importance of studies like Annie Kriegel's massive
Origins of French Communism, 1914–20
³
.

The French Communist Party is in many respects unique. It is one of the few mass communist parties in the ‘advanced' economies of the west, and, with the exception of the Italian
CP
(which operates in a country that came late and incompletely into the ‘advanced' sector of the world economy), the only one to have become the majority party within its labour movement. At first sight this poses no great problem. France is the classical country of west European revolution, and if the traditions of 1789–94, 1830, 1848 and 1871 will not attract a nation to revolutionary parties, nothing will. Yet on second thoughts the rise of the
CP
is rather more puzzling. The classical traditions of French revolutionism – even that of the working class – were not marxist and even less leninist, but Jacobin, Blanquist and Proudhonist. The socialist movement of before 1914 was already a German graft on the French tree, and one which took only incompletely in politics and even less in the trade unions. Guesdism, the nearest thing to social democratic orthodoxy, though still some way from it, remained a regional or minority phenomenon. The French
CP
marked a much more radical ‘bolshevization' or russification of the native movement, and one for which there was little foundation in it. Yet this time the graft took. The French Communist Party became and has remained not merely the mass party of most French workers, the main force on the French left, but also a classically ‘bolshevik' party. This poses the major problem of its history. Mrs Kriegel does not set out to answer it directly – her two volumes end with the Congress of Tours which founded the party – but she does answer it indirectly, as it were, by a process of eliminating alternative possibilities. The history of the years she has taken as her subject did not complete this elimination. Indeed, one of the main points of her argument is, that the subsequent development of the
CP
was by no means readily predictable in 1920. Nevertheless, war and postwar cleared a very large area of historically accumulated, but obsolete or impracticable politics.

The impact of the war and the Russian revolution must be traced by parallel enquiries into the evolution of the working class and the loosely organized and sometimes unrepresentative minority which made up the French labour movement. The distinction is important, because the very fragility, instability or narrowness of the French movement may, as she argues, have made the appeal of revolutionary parties after the war greater than in countries in which the labour movement was more representative of the masses. Mrs Kriegel's book tells us comparatively little about this evolution, though it clearly passed through four major phases: a solid reversion to nationalism in 1914, a rapidly growing war weariness from the end of 1916, culminating in the abortive strikes and army mutinies of the spring of 1917, a relapse into inactivity after their failure (but one combined with an increasing influx of workers into labour organizations), and after the end of the war, a rapid and cumulative radicalization, which almost certainly ran
ahead
of the formal labour organizations. Its chief carriers were the demobilized soldiers – the rhythm of gradual demobilization maintained the momentum of radicalization – and the industries (metals and railways) which combined a record of wartime importance with the return of ex-servicemen to their old occupations. Nevertheless, until the end of the war the deep-seated nationalism which is the oldest and strongest tradition of the French left, kept the masses remote from a revolution
(including the Russian revolution) which seemed to imply a German victory. Compared with Britain, for instance, the movement of sympathy for the soviets in 1917, was strikingly weak. Only after the armistice had eliminated the choice between patriotism and revolution, could the political radicalization of the French workers proceed unhampered. And when it did, it was dissipated by the failure of their labour movement.