Revolutionaries Read Free

Labour Party was the only – and still growing – party likely to win the support of the politically conscious workers on a national scale, in practice there was only one realistically conceivable road of socialist advance. The disarray of the left today (inside and outside the Labour Party) is due largely to the fact that these things can no longer be taken for granted and that there are no generally accepted alternative strategies.
    Nevertheless, this apparent simplicity of the British communists’ situation conceals a number of questions. In the first place, what exactly did the International expect of the British, other than that they should turn themselves into a proper communist party, and – from a not entirely certain date – that they should assist the communist movements in the empire? What precisely was the role of Britain in its general strategy and how did it change? This is by no means clear from the existing historical literature, which is admittedly not of high quality, with rare exceptions.
    In the second place, why was the impact of the CP in the 1920s so modest, even by unexacting standards? Its membership was tiny and fluctuating, its successes the reflection partly of the radical and militant mood of the labour movement, partly of the fact that communists still operated largely within the Labour Party or at least with its local support. Not until the 1930s did the CP become, in spite of its modest but growing membership, its electoral weakness and the systematic hostility of the Labour leadership, the effective national left.
    Thirdly, what was the base of communist support? Why did it fail, again before the 1930s, to attract any significant body of support among intellectuals, and rapidly shed most of the relatively few it attracted (mostly from the ex-Fabian and guild socialist left)? What was the nature of its unusually strong influence – though not necessarily membership – in Scotland and Wales? What happened in the 1930s to turn the party into what it had not previously been, a body of factory militants?
    And of course, there are all the questions which will inevitably be asked about the rightness or wrongness of the party’s changing line, and more fundamentally, of this particular type of organization in the context of interwar and post–1945 Britain.
    James Klugmann 1 has not seriously tackled any of them. This extremely able and lucid man is clearly capable of writing a satisfactory history of the communist party, and where he feels unconstrained, he does so. Thus he provides the best and clearest account of the formation of the party at present available. Unfortunately he is paralyzed by the impossibility of being both a good historian and a loyal functionary. The only way yet discovered to write a public ‘official’ history of any organization is to hand the material over to one or more professional historians who are sufficiently in sympathy not to do a hatchet job, sufficiently uninvolved not to mind opening cupboards for fear of possible skeletons, and who can, if the worst come to the worst, be officially disavowed. That is, essentially, what the British government did with the official history of the second world war, and the result has been that Webster and Frankland were able to produce a history of the air war which destroys many familiar myths and treads on many service and political toes, but is both scholarly and useful – not least to anyone who wishes to judge or plan strategy. The Italian CP is the only one which has so far chosen this sensible, but to most politicians almost unthinkable, course. Paolo Spriano has therefore been able to write a debatable, but serious and scholarly work. 2 James Klugmann has been able to do neither. He has merely used his considerable gifts to avoid writing a disreputable one.
    In doing so he has, I am afraid, wasted much of his time. What, after all, is the use of spending ten years on the sources