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DEVIOUSNESS WITH A PURPOSE - THE LEFT CAUCUS
After Bevin's death, there were still people in Labour's leadership who knew what they were for and what they were against. Belief in Labour's own purpose was strong and gave Labour politicians the will to resist CP disruption and scotch it. This will was incarnated, in the working class element of the Labour Party, in people like Bessie Braddock in Liverpool, and it was also present in the middle class element and was expressed with particular vigour by Hugh Gaitskell at Scarborough in 1960. But, with the increasing demoralisation of the Labour Party under Harold Wilson, it declined rapidly during the 1960s and disappeared altogether in the course of the 1970s.
But, if the will to resist Communist disruption of Labour's politics evaporated in the 1970s, this was in part because the nature of this disruption had become harder and harder to identify and stigmatise. For, while the deviousness involved in the adoption of the CP's new strategy in 1951 greatly exceeded the deviousness involved in the pre-1951 period, it was nothing to the deviousness involved in adhering to the traditional ideal and its strategy in 1971.This was not only because the strategy itself involved deviousness. It was also because, within the CPGB after 1968, the element which sincerely subscribed to the original ideal was in a minority and the majority of the Party, while continuing to operate the routines of the British Road strategy, no longer knew what they believed in in respect of ideals, but knew that they did not subscribe to the Soviet ideal any more.
The fundamental deviousness of the post-1951 strategy lay in the fact that it involved the CPGB in posing as the most principled champions of traditional British trade unionism as a tactic in a grand strategy designed to secure the definitive destruction of free trade unionism by a triumphant proletarian dictatorship, in which trade unions would be reduced to mere 'transmission belts' of the ruling Communist Party. (That this was the true state of mind of the CP's industrial cadres was made graphically clear by the moral support given by the CP-dominated National Union of Mineworkers to the Communist regime in Poland against the dissidence of Solidarnosc in the early 1980s.) But of almost equal importance was the fact that this pose entailed the systematic confusion of the terms 'Left' and 'Right'. Under the CPGB's leadership, the opposition to incomes policy and industrial democracy became identified as 'Left', when it actually implied the preservation of the labour market and of management responsible only to shareholders, and thus the capitalist system, and was as such unequivocally 'Right' in character, if the terms 'Left' and 'Right' are given their normal 20th century meanings of 'socialist' and 'anti-socialist'.
The Communist cadres who operated this strategy could tell themselves that they were still really 'Left' in so far as the defence of capitalist relations of production in British industry was a piece of hard-nosed revolutionary realpolitik designed to facilitate the definitive suppression of British capitalism in due course. But the Communist cadres who had abandoned their adoration of the Soviet Union, that is, of the deus ex machina of the revolutionary scenario they had previously fantasised about – what could they tell themselves?
The deviousness at the heart of the Left Caucus up to Easter 1973 was the deviousness of Surrey faction Communists who were operating a strategy which involved them, once they had seen off the old 'Right', in fighting on three fronts at once: against those elements of the Labour Left and the working class who were responsive to the case for incomes policy and industrial democracy on socialist grounds; against those elements of the student Left whose idealistic impulses inclined them to get involved in the industrial class struggle when this was the last thing the CPGB required of them; and against those elements of the CPGB itself who were desperate to distance the Party from all things Soviet and regarded the Surrey faction as an embarrassing encumbrance.
DEVIOUSNESS FOR ITS OWN SAKE - THE 'BROAD LEFT'
The deviousness at the heart of the Broad Left was a significantly different affair. By mid-summer 1973, the Surrey faction had lost control of the CPGB's student strategy. The Frenchite, Fergus Nicholson, had been replaced by the anti-Frenchite, Dave Cook, as National Student Organiser in 1972. And the role of Digby Jacks came to an end with his departure from the NUS presidency at Easter 1973.Thereafter, the secret purpose at the core of the CPGB's student strategy became something else altogether.
The removal of secret pro-Sovietism as the ultimate motivation of the CP's activity in student politics, as in British politics in general, created a vacuum at the spiritual heart of this activity. The way in which this vacuum was filled determined the character of the Broad Left and ensured that the influence which Broad Leftism later exerted on the Labour Party would be destructive in the extreme.
The majority of the CPGB which no longer believed in the Soviet model in the early 1970s did not know what it believed in. A welter of different positions co-existed in the political space made vacant by the evaporation of the old certainties. A few activists took refuge in a discreet pro-Chinese orientation; a larger number were attracted by the model demonstrated in Italy by the PCI and described themselves as 'Togliatti-ists' at this point, since Gramsci was not yet a cult figure and the term 'Euro-communism' was still to be invented. A substantial minority were simply for winding up the Party as a whole and throwing in their lot properly with the Labour Left, but this position, by far the most lucid of them all, was never advocated openly, any more than the other positions were. If it had been, it is conceivable that British Communism might at last have genuinely come to terms with British democracy. But the CPGB was incapable of having a proper debate over its political options, because such a debate was bound to threaten one or another set of vested interests in the Party's apparatus. And so the confusion was eventually resolved in favour of the one tendency within the anti-Soviet majority which had both a clear vision and one which was consistent in the short term with the undisturbed survival of the Party's apparatus.
This vision was that of a Communist academic called Martin Jacques.
I met Martin Jacques twice during my time in the CP and the thing that impresses me most in retrospect is how little an impression he made on me. The first time was in November 1972, when he came to deliver the Political Report on King's Street's behalf at the South Midlands District Party Congress in Oxford. I can remember being very impressed at the time by the fluency and eloquence of his speech, but I can't for the life of me remember a single element of its political content, and I think this amnesia set in within hours of listening to him. The second time was on my way to Exeter at Easter 1973. I was in a group of CP members travelling there together, and we stopped briefly, for reasons which were never explained to me, to see Jacques at his home in Bristol, where he was then a sociology lecturer at the university. And I can't for the life of me remember a single element of what was discussed on that occasion either.
Before moving to Bristol, Jacques had been the leading light of the Communist Party branch in Cambridge. I am not sure why this should have been so; perhaps it was connected with the fact that there was little or no industry in Cambridge and the academic element in the party could naturally dominate it; and perhaps the particular outlook of the academic element of Jacques's generation was influenced by the particular outlook of the older generation of Cambridge Communists; it was Maurice Dobb, after all, Fellow in Economics at Trinity, who was the High Priest of Market Socialist revisionism within the CPGB from the mid-1950s onwards. But, whatever the reason, I have little hesitation in saying that the Cambridge CP was dominated by Jacques's outlook and that it subsequently played a role out of all proportion to its size in transmitting this outlook to the wider Party and, through the Broad Left, to the British Labour movement as a whole.
Dave Cook, a Yorkshireman of working class origins, was a transitional figure in the role of National Student Organiser. I think that he was appointed by King Street as part of a drive against the Surrey faction, but that his background (as well as his fundamentally decent character) made him acceptable to a wide spectrum within the Party. But he lasted only two years in the role. By the autumn of 1974 he had been succeeded by Jon Bloomfield, a middle-class Communist from Cambridge and a faithful disciple of Martin Jacques.