Revolutionaries Read Free Page A

– including those in Moscow – when the
only
precise references to contemporary unpublished CP sources – give or take one or two – appear to number seven and the
only
references even to printed Communist International sources (including Inprecorr) number less than a dozen in a volume of 370 pages. The. rest are substantially references to the published reports, pamphlets and especially periodicals of the CP in this period. In 1921–2 the Presidium of the Comintern discussed Britain thirteen times – more often than any country other than the French, Italian, Hungarian and German parties. One would not have known it from Klugmann’s book, whose index lacks all reference to Zinoviev (except in connection with the forged letter bearing his name), Borodin, Petrovsky-Bennet, or, for that matter, so purely British a field of party activity as the Labour Research Department.
    An adequate history of the CP cannot be written by systematically avoiding or fudging genuinely controversial issues and matter likely to be regarded as indiscreet or bad public relations within the organization. It cannot even be offset by describing and documenting, more fully than ever before, the activities of the militants. It is interesting to have 160 or so pages on the party’s work from 1920 to 1923, but the basic fact about this period is that recorded in Zinoviev’s report to the Fourth World Congress at the end of 1922, namely that ‘In no other country, perhaps, does the communist movement make such slow progress’, and this fact is not really faced. Even the popular contemporary explanation that this was due to mass unemployment is not seriously discussed. In brief, Klugmann has done some justice to the devoted and often forgotten militants who served the British working class as best they knew how. He has written a textbook for their successors in party schools, with all the clarity and ability which have made his high reputation as a teacher in such courses. He has provided a fair amount of new information, some of which will only be recognized by those very expert at deciphering careful formulations, and little of which – on important matters – is documented. But he has neither written a satisfactory history of the CP nor of the role of the CP in British politics.
(1969)
    1 James Klugmann,
History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Formation and Early Years
, London, 1966.
    2 Paolo Spriano,
Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano
, vol. 1,
Da Bordiga a Gramsci
, Turin, 1967.

CHAPTER 2
Radicalism and
Revolution in Britain
    The learned study of communist movements, an academic industry with a large but on the whole disappointing output, has generally been practised by members of two schools, the sectarian and the witch-hunting. They have tended to overlap, thanks to the tendency of many ex-communists to progress from disagreement to total rejection. Broadly speaking, the sectarian historians have been revolutionaries, or at least left-wingers, mostly dissident communists. (The contribution of communist parties to their own history has been muffled and until recent years negligible.) The main purpose of their enquiry has been to discover why communist parties failed to make revolutions, or produced such disconcerting results when they did. Their main occupational weakness has been an inability to stand at a sufficient distance from the polemics and schisms within the movement.
    The witch-hunting scholars, whose orthodoxy was not fully formulated until the years of the cold war, saw communist parties as sinister, compulsive, potentially omnipresent bodies, half religion and half plot, which could not be rationally explained because there was no sensible reason for wishing to overthrow the pluralist-liberal society. Consequently they had to be analyzed in terms of the social psychology of deviant individuals and a conspiracy theory of history. The mainoccupational weakness of this school