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THE NATURE OF CPGB IDEALISM
In the Labour Party, a characteristic Broad Left campaign was the 'Labour Listens' campaign, which, far from mobilising the party membership, by-passed it altogether – indeed, implicitly stigmatised the membership as an obstacle which had to be by-passed if Labour's leaders were to get in touch with public opinion. And the campaign to boost party membership was, of course, a manœuvre to increase the leadership's control over the existing membership. Far from achieving its avowed objective, it led to a fall in membership as the role of Membership Secretary at ward and constituency level was abolished. But it achieved its real objective by making the remaining membership a dependent extension of Walworth Road and thus prostrate before Kinnock and Clarke.
Broad Left campaigning has invariably been a form of displacement activity functioning as a surrogate for representative agitation, or a tactic to render an ill-served and potentially restive membership more malleable.
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But what needs to be understood, if what the Kinnock-Clarke leadership has done to the Labour party is to be understood, is that the cynicism that underlay the politics of the Left Caucus gave way, in the course of the mutation which produced the Broad Left, to something far worse.
Cynicism - as opposed to the shallow opportunism of the mere careerist – is the perverted expression of an idealism which has been suppressed for one reason or another but not abandoned or replaced by commitment to another ideal. The depth of the cynicism of Digby Jacks and Jeff Staniforth & Co. was in proportion to the idealism at the origin of their political outlook.
The CPGB members who originally formed and ran the Left Caucus nearly all came from the unashamedly pro-Moscow wing of the CPGB. By 1969-70, the main division within the Party was between those who, especially in the wake of the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968, were disposed to distance the Party from Moscow and those who adhered to the traditional line of unconditional loyalty to the USSR and its leadership. The latter were led by Sid French, the Secretary of the Surrey District of the Party, and were accordingly known as the 'Frenchites' or the 'Surrey faction'. To outsiders, especially the Trotskyists, the Frenchites were 'Stalinists'. But this is quite mistaken. Their unconditional loyalty to the USSR made them pro-Soviet irrespective of the vicissitudes of Kremlin politics. They were certainly 'hard-liners', in that they approved of the suppression of the Prague Spring and of the Hungarian uprising 12 years earlier. But they had no coherent critique of the revisionist policies which had fomented the unrest which it had then taken tanks to suppress on both of these occasions. They most certainly did not defend Stalin's policies against the criticisms and departures of his successors. They merely supported whatever the USSR decided to do to preserve its power. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the term which accurately described them was 'Brezhnevites', in view of their willingness to defend whatever Brezhnev did and the essentially conservative attitude which underlay Brezhnev's policies and their own activities alike.
In 1969-71, the Surrey faction, while in a minority within the Party as a whole, was the dominant influence on the Party's industrial cadres and controlled the Young Communist League. And the National Student Organiser, Fergus Nicholson, was a Frenchite and used his influence to promote the right sort of Communist (preferably YCL graduates) in the Party's student work. The latter were characteristically second-generation Communists of working class backgrounds who had inherited their unconditional pro-Sovietism from their parents and, while rising in the world through access to higher education, remained loyal to these backgrounds and were inclined to express this complex of attitudes in the student political arena by militantly asserting the political (and, one might add, moral) primacy of the industrial class struggle and the duty of the student Left to subordinate itself to 'the working class movement'.
'The working class movement' was, of course, that element of British trade unionism which was susceptible to being stimulated to political movement by CP influence. And the general purpose of CP influence was to maintain as large a part of British trade unionism as possible in a state of militant alienation from the state in readiness for the great day when capitalism and bourgeois democracy in Britain would at last be overthrown.
DID THE CPGB CHANGE IN 1951?
It is often supposed that, with the adoption of The British Road to Socialism in 1951, the CPGB was converted to a democratic perspective for the transition to socialism in Britain. Nothing could be further from the truth. It may conceivably have been Stalin's intention to convert the CPGB to such a perspective. I doubt it, but who knows? Stalin died in 1953 and took a lot of secrets with him. But there is no doubt whatever that, in the minds of the thoroughly Bolshevised British Communists of the early 1950s, the replacement of The Soviet Road for Britain by The British Road to Socialism was a change of strategy and not a change of ideology.
The success of Ernest Bevin and Clement Attlee in taking advantage of the exigencies of the war and its aftermath to engineer a massive social reform in the working class interest had given the Labour Party, which had seemed on its last legs in 1931-5, an entirely new lease of life and had made the straightforward canvassing of Bolshevik revolutionism by the CP a futile exercise after 1945. Because the CPGB leadership were intellectually and morally dependent on the Kremlin, it was Stalin who had to adjust their mind-sets for them, which he finally got around to doing in 1951 (he had had his hands full before then).
The new orientation presented itself as an acceptance of British liberal democracy. If it had been that, it would have represented the most fundamental ideological change, the abandonment of the Leninist principle of evaluating all states and forms of government in accordance with their class nature, the latter being read off directly (not to say mechanically) from the relations of production in the first instance and, after 1917, from their relations with Moscow in the second instance. In accordance with this principle, British democracy, being the democracy of a country in which capitalist relations of production still predominated and which was a pillar of the Atlantic alliance, was ipso facto bourgeois democracy, and there could be no question of accepting that.
From my own experience in the CP in 1971-5, I can say without hesitation that there was no principled acceptance of British liberal democracy in the minds of its members, quite the contrary. And I am therefore certain that no fundamental ideological change occurred in 1951 or at any point thereafter.
What The British Road to Socialism actually represented was the abandonment of the CPGB's original ambition to come to power by its own efforts, and a corresponding increase in its reliance on the massively enhanced power of the post-war Soviet Union to create the political conditions for the transition to socialism in Britain. The strategy of counter-posing Bolshevist revolutionism to the Labour Party's reformism was ditched and a strategy was adopted of functioning, within the formal procedures of the democratic constitution, as a disruptive presence on the Labour Party's left flank and within industry, and as a fifth column for Soviet power.
This strategy made sense on the assumption that Soviet power would continue to expand, that the USSR's strategic aim in Europe of neutralising Germany was feasible, and that it would thereafter be possible for Soviet power to exercise an ever-increasing influence on the internal political life of European democracies as it already did in the case of Finland. Within this strategy it was vital to preserve the CP's hegemony over trade union militancy and block off all influences liable to disrupt this hegemony, just as it was vital to sabotage all the Labour Party's attempts to effect movement towards socialism via incomes policy and industrial democracy, since such movement would subvert the CPGB's position by making it redundant and by undermining the Soviet Union's claim to provide the only valid model of socialist development.
It follows that at the heart of the politics of the guiding force within the Left Caucus was the traditional ideal of the dictatorship of the proletariat as defined by Lenin, that is the realisation of the destiny of the working class in its political mobilisation for, and subordination to, the construction of socialism under the firm guiding control of Communist leadership, with the political weakness of the home-grown Communist leadership being massively compensated for by the strength of Soviet influence operating from without. But this was an ideal that could no longer be admitted, much less proclaimed, by British Communists in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The operation of the CPGB's strategy required its agents to sustain a degree of deviousness which almost certainly far surpassed that required of their counterparts in most other countries. And it far surpassed the element of deviousness which had characterised the CPGB's behaviour in the old, comparatively straightforward, days of The Soviet Road. This earlier, relatively limited, deviousness had been understood by the old working class element in the Labour movement. Bevin knew all about the CP and how to deal with it in the '20s and '30s and '40s. But Bevin died in 1951. Was it this which explained the timing of The British Road? Did Stalin, who knew that Bevin was the one figure in British socialism that he could not hope to put things past, wait till Ernie was out of the way before getting Dutt and Pollitt and Gollan & Co. to adopt a new tack?