James Eaden and Dave Renton, The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920

Drawing on a critical reading of specialist texts and original research, the authors present a sympathetic but critical account of the rise and fall of British Communism which examines the party's dependence on Moscow yet asserts its relevance to the development of the left in Britain. The end of the twentieth century, which saw the rise and fall of the British Communist Party, also witnessed the reemergence of anti-capitalist campaigns challenging the priorities of the globalized free market. Traditional parties of the left, such as New Labour, have embraced neo-liberal economics and social authoritarianism. The account of the history of Communism in Britain outlined in this book is an important addition to the debates in this field of historical writing, and will help a new generation of activists to learn from the past and avoid some of the pitfalls in the future.

This book was published in May 2002 by Palgrave, Houndmills. ISBN 0333949684. £45. The first chapter has been put on the web here.

Written from the broad standpoint of the Socialist Workers’ Party, this latest addition to the current stream of CPGB histories provides almost the first sustained re-evaluation of British communism from a Trotskyist perspective since the writings of Woodhouse, Pearce and Dewar over a quarter of a century ago. The passage of time makes for an interesting comparison. Back in the 1970s, the rationale underlying such accounts was not just that communist parties were flawed, bureaucratic and deeply entangled with the Soviet Union, but that they had stemmed the tide of workers’ revolt and betrayed the revolution itself. Now, the counter-factuals are on a more modest scale. Even on the test case of the General Strike, presented here as a vindication of the Trotskyist perspective, the robust supposition of an aborted revolution has given way to a vaguer prospect of a ‘different final outcome’ achieved by ‘more pressure … from below’ (p. 30).  The negative effects of Stalinism, though not of course of Leninism, provide a major theme, but the emphasis on ‘orders from Moscow’ is always underlain and gradually supplanted by a rank-and-fileist view of bureaucracy and careerism as the main cause of the party’s ills.  At the same time, the authors pay due regard to those periods and aspects of the CPGB’s history with which they, in common one suspects with many contemporary readers, find themselves most in sympathy.

Though the distinctiveness of a Trotskyist perspective has thus become blurred, the more than compensating advantage is that the account presented has a far greater interest and plausibility for the more general reader. Though SWP-approved authorities tend to be cited on all general matters, on the core subject of the CPGB itself Eaden and Renton draw on a wide literature that is fairly presented even on points of difference. They also flesh out the narrative with materials from the CPGB archives, and for the under-researched later years these provide the main basis of their account. There are quite a number of minor factual errors and mis-citations – this reviewer was especially dismayed to be cited referring to the ‘open, generous socialist culture that produced the First World War’ (!), and to be accused of overlooking Harry Pollitt’s supposed attendance at the International Lenin School. Invariably, though, these are a sign of carelessness rather than the desire to misrepresent either facts or the views of others. Indeed, given the tenor of some other recent contributions to the literature, so basic and mandatory a virtue needs emphasising.

Though not really intended for the specialist, this is therefore a book that one could rely on to engage the interest of students and others coming to the CPGB’s history for the first time. As such, I would definitely recommend it. Inevitably, however, there are key issues left unresolved. The causes and chronology of the party’s alleged degeneration are unclear – the key years of the mid-1920s are presented both positively and negatively depending on the point to be got across – and possible contributory factors like democratic centralism and Moscow funding are largely disregarded, one suspects because of their close association with the Lenin-Trotsky era. More generally, though Eaden and Renton (like the rest of us), would prefer to have Cable Street without the Show Trials, and grassroots struggle without Stalinism, some may find a little glib the counterposition of activism and bureaucracy by which conceptually that separation is achieved. Similarly, while they provide a conventional left-wing critique of the popular front as a form of ‘right-wing populism’, citing Orwell’s seemingly obligatory invocation of red duchesses and cocoa magnates, two chapters later they pay warm tribute to the CPGB’s pioneering cohort of Marxist historians – who in almost every case were recruited during, moulded by, and can hardly be imagined without, that same ‘nauseous’ period of cultural politics. However, the limitations of the format must also be recognised, and it may be that it is only the necessary compression of a textbook-style history that means that there is little attempt to untangle such complexities here.

One ends with a reflection. A quarter of a century ago, a CPGB history of a similar ideological provenance suggested that the prospects for a mass revolutionary party were better in the 1970s than in the 1920s (James Hinton and Richard Hyman, Trade Unions and Revolution: The Industrial Politics of the Early British Communist Party, London, 1975). Twenty-seven years on, Eaden and Renton conclude on a similarly optimistic note: with news of votes as high as seven per cent for Socialist Alliance parliamentary candidates, for whom the surprisingly modest claim is made of posing a ‘left electoral challenge’ unequalled since the seldom romanticised communist efforts of the 1950s. No doubt, another volume will explain what happened to the mass party of the 1970s. In the meantime, one is struck not only by the many curious analogies between the CPGB and its predecessors and inheritors, but by the fact that its achievements are not in most respects obviously overshadowed by theirs. Limited as its successes were, and despite the baleful influence of Stalinism, it is not by the standards of the British revolutionary left that the CPGB will be judged by historians the failure depicted here.

Review: John McIlroy, 'James Eaden and Dave Renton, The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2002, pp220, £40.00', Revolutionary History 2003.

Eaden and Renton are professional historians and socialist activists whose work on fascism will be well-known to many readers of this journal. Turning their attention to new fields they have set out to write a rigorous introductory text on British Communism, 'a committed socialist history of the party sympathetic to the views of the founders, critical of the husk that the Communist Party became' (pxvi). While their sampling of documentary sources in the Communist Party (CP) archive and the Public Record Office are sprinkled through the book, it is substantially based on a critical synthesis of secondary sources. The authors acknowledge its limitations: in the less than 190 pages that constitute the corpus of the text many aspects of party life must perforce go unexamined. Nonetheless, Eaden and Renton have largely achieved their objectives. For this reviewer, their book supersedes relatively recent work - Willie Thompson's The Good Old Cause (1992), Francis Beckett's Enemy Within (1995) and Keith Laybourn and Dylan Murphy's Under the Red Flag (1999) - as an accessible but scholarly one-volume history of the CP. The fundamental argument, scarcely novel but recently questioned by academics, is that the political development of the CP was inextricably bound up with the fate of 1917. Founded at a time when a vigorous, healthy workers' revolution acted as the beacon to the world's working class, the CP degenerated as Stalinism developed from 1924 and cumulatively consolidated its hold over the Russian party, the Soviet state and the Comintern into the 1930s.

For Eaden and Renton the Russian dimension is decisive; overwhelmingly negative, it moulded the party's development into the 1970s. Thus they take issue with the dominant trend in recent writing on the CP. This embodies what is essentially a 'Little Englander' historiography. As such it systematically deflates the Russian dimension, inflates the CP's autonomy and at best relegates Stalinism to the sidelines. One of the most prominent purveyors of this 'Rule Britannia' brand of Communist history, Nina Fishman, is taken to task with terse but convincing restraint: '… she underestimates the continued influence of the foreign policy concerns of the Soviet state, the Comintern and the British party leadership on the political culture of Communist activists' (pxiv). Andrew Thorpe's Anglo-centric assertion that the CP significantly determined its own political positions is demolished simply by putting the straightforward question which revisionists have never been able to answer: if that is so why did not just the British CP but every CP across the globe change its policies on the United Front, the Third Period, the Popular Front, the Second World War and the Cold War almost simultaneously? (pxix). Kevin Morgan's very British belief that, at least in the first twenty years of the CP, the Russian dimension was a subsidiary element in the lives of rank-and-file party members is compellingly answered by the authors' summation of their own studies: 'Support and admiration of the Soviet Union and everything Soviet ran like a thick red thread through the entire being of the British Communist Party' (p82). This verdict is substantiated by Eaden and Renton's highly readable, amply peopled, typically sharp and occasionally wry analysis.

They confirm incontrovertibly and elegantly that every strategic phase of CP policy originated in Moscow and was adopted in Britain. In distinction to revisionists who claim that important aspects of the Third Period had an English provenance, they conclude succinctly: 'Whatever the popularity of Class Against Class among some younger Communists, the fact remains that the introduction of the policy was decided by external factors … This Third Period line became policy across every Communist Party in the world' (p33). The same went for the introduction of the Popular Front phase of Stalinism in 1934-35: 'The policy may have reflected pressures from national sections of the Comintern but such demands were secondary in the minds of those who formulated it' (pxv, 50-2). Well aware of the futility of the sectarianism and ultra-leftism which they had embraced only a few short years earlier, CP leaders were frantically seeking an escape route from extinction. As Trotsky pointed out, the Comintern's national affiliates faced national pressures to adapt to their national polities and to make concessions to national reformism. After the locust years of isolation and revolutionary posturing such pressures were particularly intense. They were not the crucial explanatory factor: the CP could only change course when Stalin gave his consigliere Dimitroff the thumbs-up to change course. Eaden and Renton are particularly good on the Popular Front. They cite Hugh Macdiarmid's visceral class dismissal of the metropolitan bourgeois litterateurs who briefly embraced Stalinism. They join with Orwell in condemnation of 'the nauseous spectacle of bishops, Communists, cocoa-magnates, publishers, duchesses and Labour MPs marching arm in arm to the tune of Rule Britannia' (p55). Not to say Liberals and 'progressive' Tories.

The book emphasises how after 1934 the opportunism, nationalism and reformism inherent in a strategy based on Stalin's self-interested and supple anti-fascism and 'socialism in one country' permanently entered the soul of the CP. It blossomed after 1941, co-existed with Cold War leftism after 1947 and burgeoned once again in the pages of Marxism Today from the late 1970s, not to say in the partisan predilections of recent historians of the party. Unlike some of these authors Eaden and Renton refuse to construct a sanitised, decontextualised, English picture of the Popular Front based on uncomplicated anti-fascism, economic struggle in the factories, Merry England, John Ball, Wat Tyler, and, in direct descent, Harry Pollitt as your stereotypical British trade unionist. Their account is integrated in world politics, in Stalin's diplomatic manoeuvres, in opportunism towards Hitlerism, in the terrible terrain of Midnight in the Century and the physical and political dissolution of Bolshevism. The Moscow trials and Stalin's legalised murders as well as the approbation cordially accorded them by such CP leaders as Robin Page Arnot, Walter Holmes, Ivor Montagu and Pollitt - 'a new triumph in the history of progress' - are carefully and vividly recorded. While the first twenty-five years of the CP have attracted most attention from historians, a strength of this text is that it stays the sometimes exhausting pace. Eaden and Renton acknowledge that once the 'Uncle Joe levy' and those who had joined the CP largely on the basis of Russia's war effort, had peeled away and British workers had, in 1945, decisively rejected a grand coalition of the CP, Labour and assorted Tory 'progressives' - a coalition in which Pollitt stood to the right of Attlee - for the CP the game was up. Nonetheless, they attend carefully to the Cold War, Hungary, the party's role in the resurgence of industrial militancy from 1968 and finally to the ignominious collapse of the CP in 1991. As the great miners' strike of 1984-5 demonstrated, whatever its strength on paper, it staggered towards its quietus as a squabbling, impotent sect incapable of influencing the class struggle except, arguably, in justifying working-class retreat in both the unions and the Labour Party. Eaden and Renton's material on industrial politics and the activities of CP members in the trade unions from the 1950s to the 1980s is extremely useful if over-reliant on the press of the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) at the expense of more rigorous assessments.

Transcending 'on the one hand' and then 'on the other hand' accounts, over here is a credit while over there is a debit, approaches, historians need to engage with the difficult task of producing total histories which connect the CP's support for class struggle with its advocacy of Russian dictatorship, its members' support for the fight in workplace and union with the subordination of their party to politics based on the material interests of the rulers of Russia. Eaden and Renton powerfully evoke the power and élan of CP involvement in anti-fascist struggles, the campaign over Spain, the fight in the unions and mobilisation of the unemployed. They provide us with an understanding of why the CP attracted so many class-conscious militants. And at times they integrate the struggles of these militants with Stalinist politics. It was once fashionable to distance the CP from Stalinist popular frontism and terror in Spain on the grounds that the leadership of the small British party was not involved or did not know what was going on while even if some leaders had an inkling, the rank-and-file members remained ignorant. Today, work such as James Hopkins' Into the Heart of the Fire has extended our view of what happened. While it presents an over-rigid division between heroic rank and filers and Stalinist leaders, it suggests that more CP activists than many have conceived were involved and knew or certainly had the means to know what was going on. As Eaden and Renton conclude about the International Brigades in Spain: 'Yet for all the spirit of the volunteers, their's was a tarnished cause' (p61). Similarly, over time anti-fascism in Britain was facilitated or restricted by Stalinist policies. From 1929 to 1933 unemployed struggles bore the marks of the social fascism, self-imposed isolation from the labour movement, the crude leftism which held that the jobless were tout court more radical than the factory worker and the other debris of the Third Period. Similarly with industrial politics: if the London busmen's strikes of the 1930s are to be placed in the credit column (pxix), they have to be related to the subsequent antagonism of the CP to rank-and-file movements (p56).

Inevitably this wide-ranging survey provokes some disagreements of emphasis and interpretation. For example, I would question the extent to which the period between 1920 and 1924, when Stalinism commenced its grim march, was a golden age of British Communism. The extent and influence of the formative cadre of trade unionists should not be exaggerated while crucially, as Eaden and Renton point out, trade unionism commenced from 1921 a deep, progressive, if contested, decline. The CP's fortunes in the unions nearly always followed the general trend of trade unionism: the party's influence, whatever its quality, was stronger after 1934 in workplace and union than it was in the early 1920s. Moreover, after 1920 McManus, Murphy, Bell, Gallacher and Pollitt were all out of the industrial struggle. Without exception they evolved rapidly into functionaries and mould-setting subordinates of Moscow. x

While the relationship between the CP and the Comintern in the early 1920s was more open and democratic than it was later - as might be expected with both feeling their way in a novel situation - the willed political subservience of British Communists was there almost from the start. Eaden and Renton's perfunctory attempt to suggest some political reciprocity and their assertion that Murphy 'shaped' Comintern decisions (p21) are unconvincing. His role in the Comintern was always subsidiary and subordinate. I also have problems with the authors' interpretation of CP politics before and during the general strike. It is correct to attribute the CP's move to the right in 1925-6 and their sycophancy towards the TUC General Council left as a response to the party leaders' perception of Russian interests, with which they identified their own. Its provenance lay in Moscow's collapse of the United Front into politicking with the left-wing union leaders around the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. However, in the run-up to the general strike the advice from Moscow was that the union lefts would betray the workers and therefore should be criticised: it was the CP not the Comintern which soft pedalled. In the aftermath of the strike, Stalin took the position that full-blooded criticism of 'the left traitors' was necessary even if this led the British union leaders to withdraw from the committee. Of course, this was related to the Russian opposition's critique of the committee and the committee itself was a without question a disorienting factor. But from spring 1926 Russian advice was intended, against CP resistance, to take the party to the left not to the right. (See L. T. Lih et al, Stalin's Letters to Molotov). Some students have found Eaden and Renton's account of the birth of British Trotskyism (p45) confusing. This is partly because it was! As so often, the seeds of discontent in the oppositional Balham group were sown by the inability of the CP, armed with the new Third Period line, to make any progress while, at least in the case of Reg Groves, there was concern that the party was deviating from the pure milk of Comintern ultra-leftism by countenancing work in 'the lower organs' of the unions as well as the workplace. However, the group's position soon evolved into a critique of Class Against Class centred on the necessity of the United Front, particularly in relation to Germany. British Trotskyism thus emerged in reaction to domestic and international issues but ultimately in critical response to the ultra-leftism of the Comintern. The expulsion of oppositional groups from the Trotskyists in the 1930s to the Maoists in the 1960s and the enduring prohibition of faction draws attention to the CP's internal regime: despite its significance, the party's pervasive bureaucratic centralism is scarcely mentioned in this book. Moreover, the SWP, whose regime as well as its politics are far from above criticism, is unobtrusively present in the text, implicitly contrasted with the CP as the exemplar of the healthy revolutionary party.

In a volume devoted to a CP scarred by Stalinism, it is unfair, lacking in proportion and sometimes downright diversionary to demand a critique of the Trotskyist tradition. Any broader assessment of revolutionary politics in Britain must vigorously engage with its debilities. A number of small errors are scattered through the book. It was Palme Dutt not Pollitt who took charge of the Workers' Weekly in 1923 (p17). Pollitt never studied or worked at the Lenin School (p21). The United Clothing Workers did not expire when its leader Sam Elsbury was expelled from the CP in 1929 but lingered on until 1935 (p37). The CP breakaway in mining was the United Mineworkers of Scotland (p38). John Saville was not 'an adult education teacher' but a lecturer in the history department at Hull University (p122). It was Alex Moffat not his brother Abe who left the CP in 1956 while Bert Wynn was not a CP member in 1959 (p126). Reg Groves not Harry Wicks wrote The Balham Group (p195). There are far too many typographical errors and misspellings for a work of this quality. Nonetheless, that quality makes it an indispensable text for readers of Revolutionary History.

Review: Richard Cross, 'The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920', Communist History Newsletter 14, 2003

The authors of this - the fourth single volume history of the British Communist Party to have appeared since the CPGB's dissolution in 1991 - can legitimately claim to offer a different perspective on the life and work of the party than any of their three immediate predecessors. As trotskyist historians, Eaden and Renton offer what they describe as 'a committed socialist history of the party, sympathetic to the views of the founders, critical of the husk that the Communist Party became.' (pxvi) Yet while this account of the CPGB's loss of 'revolutionary' intent makes use of a fairly orthodox trotskyist model, this is far from being a narrowly didactic narrative - it eschews both the insistent accusatory tone of Pearce and Woodhouse, and the 'programmatic' critique of the erstwhile Newsline CPGB historian Alex Mitchell.

Rather this is a history which treats the agency of the CPGB seriously; that is willing to acknowledge what are seen as the party's successes; and that is sufficient aware of the debates within contemporary communist historiography to offer its own critique of the 'new revisionist' as well as the earlier 'heroic' treatments of the party. Indeed, the authors' interest in documenting the CPGB's 'merits' alongside its 'defects' will doubtless draw criticism from more 'orthodox' trotskyist analysts of 'British Stalinism'. Despite the occasional factual - and more frequent typographical - error, this is a scholarly work of an entirely different calibre to the most recent one-volume history of the party by Laybourn and Murphy.

It is, however, also a study with a pronounced set of priorities. From the discussion of the formation of the party, in the explosive aftermath of Red October, to its disintegration, in the wake of the CPSU's own demise, the authors concentrate their attention on what they consider the decisive aspects of the Communist Party's political life: the CPGB's industrial work; its relationship to other currents with the labour movement; its position relative to the Labour Party; and its perennial conflicts with rivals on the British far left. There are short discussions on aspects of party culture; of branch life, and of the work of CPGB writers, historians and theoreticians - but these appear as secondary concerns. There is scant coverage of the party's often-troubled engagement with the politics of feminism; and little appreciation of the changing position of women within the party. Treatment of the issue of race is subsumed within coverage of the party's anti-fascist work - although the CPGB's 'anti-colonial' activities are briefly addressed. Yet it is inevitable that concise histories offer selective coverage of their subject; and here the book's priorities reflect the authors' desire to scrutinise the agency of the CPGB through the prism of its traditional left critics.

The party is credited for its street-level anti-fascist work; involvement with the London squatting movement; support for the International Brigades; the mobilisation of the National Unemployed Workers Movement; the Kinder Scout trespass; the ambitions of the Daily Worker and more besides. Yet, corrupted by the 'sectarianism' of the Third Period; the 'collaborationism' of the Popular Front era; and occasional patriotic seizures, the ossification of the party's revolutionary vigour is seen as complete by the close of the War. In this history, there is little to celebrate after 1945.

Perhaps the strongest element of the book is its attempt to characterise the position of communists in the workplace. Eaden and Renton capture - in ways which have often eluded the party's trotskyist critics - many of the competing pressures and pulls of allegiance which communist militants on the shopfloor had somehow to reconcile. They describe convincingly the strained relationship which sometimes existed between factory branches and the party hierarchy; and attempt to unpack common conceptions of the CPGB's industrial 'reach'. There is still trenchant criticism of the caution and conservatism of the party's leading trade unionists, but there is recognition too that King Street's ability to 'instruct' its members on industrial questions was circumscribed for a whole range of reasons. There are also cogent discussions of the party's understanding of the role of the shop steward layer and of Communist Party's support for productivity drives in 'critical' economic times.

Throughout the text the authors make efforts to provide a 'populated', and not simply an institutional, history of the party - offering thumbnail sketches of party leaders and activists at all levels; and integrating original oral-testimony from party members gathered during an earlier period of research. Prudent use is made of materials from the official party archive, although this research is based principally on the existing secondary literature (much of which is drawn from the pages of Socialist Worker Party journals; or the work of SWP authors); integrated with extracts from the CPGB's own press.

Although all historians of the British party struggle with the same explanatory synthesis, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain the authors' view of the importance that should be afforded to the 'Soviet dimension' in understanding the party's 'degeneration'. Sometimes the diktats of the Kremlin are seen as wholly culpable; at other times it is the CPGB's own reluctance to 'seize the moment' that condemns it. There is an uncertainty here over the degree of the Communist Party's autonomy that this model affords - and about the interplay between 'inevitability' and 'subjectivity' that the authors see at work in the CPGB's departure from the revolutionary road. It is also notable, given the importance that Eaden and Renton place on the international determination of the CPGB's politics, that British trotskyism is here depicted as emerging in reaction to the domestic labour movement failures of the CPGB.

The counter-factuals on offer here are familiar ones - that the CPGB should have renounced reformism and embraced the 'politics of revolution'; resisted co-option into the bureaucracy of the labour movement and encouraged rank-and-file activism; and embraced the industrial and not the electoral route to socialist advance. It is through such rejoinders that this account reveals its own most orthodox face. It is perhaps not too surprising that the authors' political history of the British far-left outside the CPGB is less critical. Some readers may struggle to recognise the rather benign and selfless image of the International Socialists (IS) and SWP which emerges in fragments here - unsullied by any of the political or bureaucratic shortcomings for which the CPGB is condemned; unflinching in its defence of 'revolutionary' principle; and uniquely gifted with strategic foresight.

What this adds to the literature is a clear and, in the main, well reasoned general history of the party, summarising a sharp trotskyist case against the CPGB in a clear and accessible way. With so much contemporary writing on the British party now taking a cultural, biographical or literary approach, it is important that there are also studies which continue to take seriously the question of the CPGB's status as a political agency 'for socialism'.

Given the structure and format of the book, the publishers appear to hope that Eaden and Renton's work will become an approved teaching text for students of the British left. Few tutors could object to its inclusion on module reading lists - even those who would draft rather different lists of the 'lost opportunities' of British communism from those presented here.

Review: Cyrille Guiat (Herriot-Watt University), 'The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920', Extremism and Democracy, spring 2003

Eaden and Renton's book is a concise, single volume history of the CPGB from its creation in 1920 to its demise and eventual self-dissolution at its 43rd Congress in November 1991. In their introduction, the authors clearly state that they are sympathetic to the "original ideals" of the CPGB, but argue that one of the strengths of their account lies in their critical approach to the strategy of the Party. Thus, they mention the crucial role of the Comintern between 1920 and 1943, and of Soviet geopolitical interests thereafter, which sounds promising to any scholar interested in the international, teleological dimension which was so central in the history of all Communist parties in the world. Unfortunately, this self-proclaimed critical stance does not seem to extend much beyond their introduction, and the bulk of the analysis remains apologetic and undermined by a number of traditional Leninist clichés. For instance, one encounters the idea that, through the "negative influence of the Comintern", the CPGB "degenerated" in parallel with the October Revolution, which was originally a "real workers' revolution".. Similarly, the highly biased assertion that, in the 1940s, the CPGB was "the largest force on the British Left" (p. 103) ironically raises a question which rather befitted the 1990s: whatever happened to the Labour Party?

Overall, Eaden and Renton's study emphasizes the more "glorious" episodes of the CPGB (e.g. the "patriotic years" of WWII, the fight against British Fascism), but systematically tones down its irrevocable ideological, organisational and strategic ties to the totalitarian polity that was the "Motherland of Socialism". Therefore, a truly critical history of this party remains to be written.

Review: Roger Smith, 'The Bishops and the Brickies', Socialist Review, December 2002.

Why should we be interested in the history of a party which dissolved itself 11 years ago, shrouded among accusations of reformism, spying for the USSR and trousering the infamous 'Moscow Gold'? The most obvious reason is that the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) certainly 'punched above its weight'. Never a mass party, unlike the European comrades, the CPGB in 1920-21 welded together a disparate collection of organisations that were either pessimistically sectarian or triumphalistically over-optimistic, to forge a party that was to be predominant over the left beyond the Labour Party for nearly 70 years.

James Eaden and Dave Renton present a thorough historical narrative of the evolution of the CPGB from its origins in 1920 through to its dissolution in 1991. Theirs is a fastidiously researched volume of accessible history that is a splendid example of succinct research and engaging analysis. Their footnotes are particularly enjoyable - I did not know, for example, that while Khruschev was delivering the 'secret' speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin and the 'cult of the personality', the CPGB delegation was visiting a condom factory! Their textual references are also excellent. Here for example is Jimmy Reid of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and a Clydebank CPGB councillor: 'We are issuing this call today that in no circumstances will we implement this Tory Rent Act, whatever the consequences ... We are answerable to no courts - only the courts of the working class on Clydebank. I would rather sup on my porridge with my principles than dine on smoked salmon and caviar without them.' Great stuff, Jimmy, only as Renton and Eaden note, 'The following month the three Communist Clydebank councillors voted with the Labour majority to implement the rent increases.'

For a reader new to the zigzags of socialist politics this volume is illuminating. That it is both short (200 pages) and well informed with first person anecdotes plus the party's archive makes it a very enjoyable introduction to the subject. Most of all it provides us with a first class analysis of how the CPGB operated as the force on the revolutionary left, while crucially examining the failures and lost opportunities of that hegemony.

The CPGB was until the late 1970s among the poorest of the European CPs in terms of membership and finance, yet it was still loyal to the USSR and the Stalinist legacy. Its influence in parliamentary terms was always negligible, yet its trade union influence was considerable. In unions such as the NUM, the old ETU, the AUEW, the FBU and in the London socks and on the London buses, the CPGB attracted significant support. Likewise in campaigning organisations such as CND and the Anti-Apartheid Movement the party was prominent. How could such a party exercise such an influence? The main reason given by Eaden and Renton is its capacity to accommodate to 'mainstream reformism' while telling its members that it was still a Marxist party. He final 20 years exemplify this dual ideology - moving to the right of the Labour Party (and heralding 'New' abour), while posing as the socialist conscience of CND and AAM.

The CPGB vacillated between united and popular frontism, seeking to 'march together while striking separately' around unemployment in the 1920s and 1930s, and 'uniting the bishops and brickies' around the Second World War, anti-racism and peace. Popular frontism took over its approach in the 1980s in the struggles against unemployment and Thatcherism. 'People's Marches' once again united bishops and brickies - however there was a sectarian intolerance to united front work if that involved marching with the 'ultra-left'.

The continuing interest in the CP lies in political theory, strategy and tactics. From its inception in 1921 through to the mid 1980s, the CPGB was beholden to the USSR with all the schisms and line changes that involved. Furthermore, from Hungary in 1956, European CPs were exposed as willing agents of Soviet policy, and from the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, as simply out of date cheerleaders for a discredited state ideology. From 1968, the 'far left' which had advocated the genuine ideal of 'socialism form below' was able to begin the process of challenging and eclipsing the CPs, so that by 1978 the CPGB was forced to admit that is policy of popular frontism against the National Front was a disastrous failure. In 1991 Nina Temple the CPGB's last secretary admitted, 'the Trots [SWP] were right on question of Russia.'

Do we need another history of a dead party? The answer is a resounding 'yes' if it is as good as this one. In government we have the most right wing Labour Party since Ramsay MacDonald. The space once occupied by the CPGB can in future be occupied by socialists with a wholly different approach.

Review: John Charlton, Bookmarks Review of Books, autumn 2002.

This is a well researched and highly readable history of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1920 to its demise in the early 1990s.

The authors focus on the fatal error of the party always tying its fortunes to the vacillations of the Soviet leadership in Moscow. This meant that rank and file activists were repeatedly compromised in their day to day activity, not least in the party's attachment to the left wing full time officials in the trade union movement and in the pursuit of reformist policies.

The Communist Party's story is not just of historical interest. The issues raised are of importance today. The book is not a rant. Sharp criticism is tempered with proper recognition of the committed and often courageous activity of generations of former members. It deserves to provoke comradely discussion.

Review: Michael Herbert, North West Labour History 27 (2002).

Its a bare decade since the Communist Party of Great Britain voluntarily dissolved itself at its 43rd congress in November 1991, yet already the world in which it functioned and had its meaning is receding rapidly into popular oblivion. For the young the Cold War might as well as be the Crimean War and Reagan and Gorbachev the contemporaries of Disraeli and Gladstone. The great divide in the world is no longer between West and the East but between rich and poor. In that sense we have returned to the political landscape of the nineteenth but with the United States eagerly substituting for Great Britain. Yet for much of the twentieth century Communism seemed to offer a viable alternative to capitalism and briefly at the beginning of the 1960s even appeared to be overtaking the West in technological achievement.

Communism in Britain was never a mass movement. Even at its height in the immediate post-war period whilst still basking in the reflected glory of the Soviet Union’s decisive role in defeating the Nazis, it could still only muster two MPs, both swept away in 1951 never to return. The party often punched above its weight, however, wielding important industrial influence well into the 1970s and exerting an intellectual pull - in the 1930s at least - on the Left in Britain akin to the pull of the Catholic church on Anglican intellectuals during the previous century. Surprisngly this book is only the fourth complete history of the party to appear so far.

Dave Renton and James Eaden set out their stall from the start as Trotskyist historians “sympathetic to the views of the founders, critical of the husk that the Communist Party became”. They argue that the influence of the Comintern played a decisive (and usually malign) role in the twists and turns of party policy such as the disastrous “Class Against Class” period of the late 1920s, the post-Hitler popular front period, justifying the Nazi-Soviet pact, opposing the war in 1939 and then supporting the war in 1941 after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, and during the war itself prioritising production at all costs - even to the point of condemning and undermining the occasional strikes. The authors conclude that by the 1940s the pary was no longer a serious revolutionary party and thus struggled to find a politics that would differentiate them from the left of the labour party. When socialist politics revived in the late 1960s the young New Left activists passed the spliffs and largely by-passed the party.

The final fall of Stalinism in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s would appear to have written the obituary for the party. The authors argue, however, that this was not inevitable but a consequence of the “actual historical practice” of the British party. Its demise was a defeat for a particular political theory and practice, not the socialist ideal itself. Unusually for self-confessed academics this is a readable and lucid account, admirably sourced. It’s a pity, however, that the authors have been let down by the publishers for the book has many elementary typos and misspellings, which should have been picked up on even the most cursory of proof-reading.

Review: Francis Beckett, BBC History, September 2002.

The Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in 1920 and wound up in 1991. This is the fourth attempt to write its history in one volume. But this one is not a history at all, but a contribution to the bitter debate among former communists about whose fault it was that the Party declined and fell. It's written by insiders, for insiders, and anyone not involved in the byzantine ideological disputes with which the CP ended its life will get quickly lost. No concessions are made to the ignorance of the ordinary reader. If you want to simply know the story, you will derive little benefit from this book.

It's written in the impenetrable jargon of Marxist debate. It will help if I tell you that 'lefts' means left-wing politicians of whom the authors approve, 'left sectarians' means left-wing politicians of whom the authors do not approve, 'principled' is applied to views with which the authors agree, and 'the movement ook on a mass working-class character' means nothing whatsoever.

The book is also dishonest. There is just one sentence about Moscow gold in the 1920s, and here it is: 'Cold War historians have made great play of the sums received from Moscow, pointing out for example that the Communist International gave the British party £5,000 in 1924 and £16,000 in 1925'. The phrase 'for example' apparently absolves the authors from mentioning the £30,000 received in 1921, and the £270,000 receivedin 1926 and 1927 to help miners' families.

You can argue that giving money to miners' families, when miners were being starved into submission by a vindictive government, was a noble thing to do. But no decent historian of British Communism should ignore it. We learn that the Cominform was founded in 1947 by 'the Communist Parties of East and West Europe', but it was founded by Stalin to control foreign Communist Parties. It talks of the post-war Communist manifesto, as though it was written by British communists, but it was written at Stalin's behest.

These errors may partly be caused by the authors' failure to visit the Comintern archives in Moscow. Having spent just a week there I know the treasures it holds. Let's hope the next writer in this field gives it the time it needs.

This sloppy book is not helped by a most unreliable index, nor by the fact that it appears not to have been proof read. The appearance of someone called 'Adolf Hilter' is one symptom of this; the repetition of virtually the same inadequate account of Kruschev's 1956 speech denouncing Stalin is another.

Review: Labour Research, August 2002.

When it was founded in 1920, the Communist Party's (CP) membership consisted mainly of trade union militants who had been involved in industrial struggle. From the beginning the CP emphasised the need for workplace organisation, leading to the growth of the shop stewards' movement. The party's work in support of the miners during the 1926 general strike led to the arrest of 1200 of its members. This carefully researched book highlights the party's major activities over the next seventy years - the launch of the Daily Worker in 1930 (later renamed the Morning Star); the formation of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement and the "Hunger Marches" which resulted; its anti-fascist activities, including the 'Aid for Spain' movement against Franco; its anti-colonial stance; its relationship with the Comintern; its opposition to the post-war anti-union legislation and much else leading up to the 1991 vote by the Party Congress to dissolve itself and set up a new organisation - the Democratic Left.

Review: Paul Anderson, Standing too close to the Leninist line, Tribune, 12 July 2002, p. 19.

The Communist Party of Great Britain was not one of the success stories of the 20th century. Founded in 1920, it struggled through the next 15 years as a tiny sect reliant for survival on subsidies from Moscow, briefly caught the popular mood of the Left in the late 1930s and 1940s (with a gap between 1939 and 1941 when Stalin was Hitler's ally), then lived a life of fitful but inexorable decline through the Cold War until its death, unmourned, in 1991.

The facts of this story are well known. During its lifetime - partly because its protagonists thought they had a world-historical role, partly because its antagonists half-believed them - the British CP always received far more attention than its rather limited impact appeared to warrant. And since its demise its entrails have been picked over relentlessly by historians, both specialists writing about key communist personalities and campaigns and generalists taking the broad view of the party's rise and fall.

Since 1991, there have been three overview post-mortems: one by a critical old CP-er, Willie Thompson; one from a Tribune democratic socialists, journalist Francis Beckett; and one (a shabby job) by two academics, Keith Laybourn and Dylan Murphy. So why do we need another? Well, what's missing is the Trotskyist version, and that's what Eaden and Renton provide, building on the pioneering work on the early years of the CP by Brian Pearce and Michael Woodhouse published back in the 1950s and 1960s.

Eaden and Renton are sophisticated Trots, and their book is extremely well researched - they have read all the secondary literature and lots more besides. They make telling points against the revisionist school of CP history that tries to minimise the role of Moscow's diktats in the everyday life of the party - and there is much else in their account that is praiseworthy, in particular the material on the CP's strangely ambiguous role in the industrial militancy of the 1960s and 1970s.

The problem, however, is their unyielding belief that all would have been for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only the correct Leninist line had been consistently applied. According to Eaden and Renton, the CP was fine until the degeneration of the first workers' state but lost its way because from the late 1920s it followed Stalin into abandoning the perspective of world proletarian revolution.

The CP became a tool of revisionist Soviet foreign policy that (after a tragic and quixotic ultra-Left phase of attacking socialists as "social fascists") sought co-existence with capitalism - advocating a "popular front" against fascism with liberals and "progressive" conservatives rather than a "united front" with other workers' parties. After that, it was downhill all the way except for brief spells when the CP rediscovered the delights of the proletarian united front - particularly in 1939-41, when all true socialists were against the war effort...

I'm sorry but this is too much to swallow. For starters, it ignores the brutal fact that throughout the 1920s the CP was a tiny militant sect, massively outnumbered and outpowered intellectually by the Independent Labour Party.

Then there's the small problem that it was only when the CP shifted to the Right in the 1930s and again between 1941 and 1945 that it came close to becoming a mass party. As for the claim that 1939-1941 marks some temporary respite from political degeneration, well, that's not the way it seemed to the majority of the Labour Left, which saw the Hitler-Stalin pact and the CP's subsequent defeatism as a great betrayal.

On more recent history, Eaden and Renton are weak on the crisis in the CP that followed Nikita Kruschev's secret speech and the Hungarian revolution in 1956; and they have little of interest to say on the role of the CP in the early-1980s Bennite Labour Left or in the second wave of CND. They take a peculiarly superficial view of the arguments that attended the collapse of the CP in the mid-1980s - were the Eurocommunists really nothing more than opportunists of the worst kind? - and add nothing to our understanding of the momentous fall of Iron Curtain in 1989.

All the same, I recommend this book. I thoroughly enjoyed disagreeing with it.

Review: sithemadpie18@hotmail.com, 'An excellent read for everyone, a definite "must buy" book', Amazon.co.uk, 21 May, 2002

This book is a well written and concise look into the British Communist Party from the 1920's to the 1990's. It has clearly been well researched and no stone has been left unturned. Despite being a book of the political history genre, I was pleasantly surprised to find the book enjoyable on many more levels. It has obviously been written with more than just the politically knowlegeable in mind. Credit must be given to the authors for a magnificent literary piece. This book is likely to be a definitive classic in its genre.

Review: Andy Brooks, Through the Distorting Mirror of Trotskyist Theory, New Worker, May 2002

The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920. James Eaden and Dave Renton, Palgrave (Macmillan), 2002, 220pp, hdbk, £45.

The shabby end of the CPGB in 1991 has inspired a number of attempts to record the rise and fall of the old communist party in Britain. Unfortunately all of them have come from bourgeois, revisionist or Trotskyist outlooks and this work is no exception.

The authors’ state in their opening words that “the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain followed the trajectory of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. Its formation was influenced by the experience of October 1917. The degeneration of the Soviet state and the rise of Stalinism directly affected its political practice. And the final collapse of the party coincided with the break-up of the Soviet Union”.

In the following 200-odd pages Eaden and Renton seek facts to fit their Trotskyist theories to draw a very predictable conclusion. Needless to say, there is no serious discussion about the major thrust of their thesis.

The authors therefore assume that their readers will agree with their assumption that Trotsky was right and Stalin was wrong; that Stalin was a “mass murderer”; that Trotsky’s “United Front” theory was superior to the Comintern’s call for Popular Fronts and that North Korea started the Korean War.

Some attempt at broadening the discussion does take place on the “Class against Class” politics of the early Comintern, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler and the pre-war anti-fascist struggle in Britain - unavoidable given the impact it had on the British communist movement.

But overall the entire work looks at the history of the CPGB through the distorting mirror of Trotskyist theory.

So while no-one can deny that the CPGB did fail and its collapse was linked to the final days of the Soviet Union Eaden and Renton have only one explanation - that the whole project was doomed once “Stalin has emerged as party leader and effective dictator [of the USSR]”.

For them, the British Road to Socialism (BRS) is an extension of pre-war Popular Front policies rather than a revisionist departure from Marxism-Leninism. And the authors make no attempt to consider the concept and practice of revisionism within the CPGB.

Though the impact of the Sino-Soviet split is noted the authors seem unaware that opposition to the Gollan leadership went beyond simply siding with Beijing against Moscow.

True there is a brief mention of Michael McCreery’s Committee to Defeat Revisionism, and the formation of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) by Reg Birch in 1967 but only in the context of the polemic between the Communist Party of China and Krushchov’s Soviet party.

Sid French and the New Communist Party get similar short shrift, dismissed as “traditionalists”, “tankies” and “supporters of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia” without one word about the NCP’s opposition to the BRS or its stand towards the Labour Party.

On one hand the authors recognise that Krushchov had taken a different direction: "As Ian Birchall suggests, ‘the choice that confronted the CPs throughout the period - Stalinism or Social Democracy - was now posed in a particularly acute form”.

But they clearly believe that modern revisionism is in fact just another aspect of “Stalinism” -- a view reflected by many British Trotskyists who hailed the counter-revolutions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as the collapse of “Stalinism” - when in fact it was the final collapse of revisionism.

This blinkered and plainly wrong perspective leads an extraordinary conclusion that “As the reality of Stalin’s Russia became more and more obvious, defence of Stalinism became a debilitating shibboleth which may have sustained the party faithful but which also cut off the party from large groups of workers and potential left-wing sympathisers … the legacy of a Stalinised Marxism also meant that the party could never develop a dynamic understanding of Marxist theory to apply as a guide to their political practice in Britain. The Gramscian turn of the 1970s was the nearest the party was to come to a re-appraisal of Stalinised Marxism, but the reading of Gramsci taken by the party was to merely re-enforce the already established Popular Frontism of the party”.

Facts have a way of asserting themselves despite the most absurd theories and this is revealed in the book’s history of the ups and downs of the CPGB over the years.

Eaden and Renton recognise the fact that the CPGB leadership had begun to embark on a revisionist course in the 40s - though they call it “Popular Frontism” and attribute it directly to the influence of the Soviet Union and the Comintern in the 30s.

After blaming “Stalinism” for the woes of the CPGB the authors add: “Popular Front politics, adopted in 1935-36 and never seriously challenged thereafter, are a second and connected factor leading to the debacle of 1990-91. The British Road to Socialism, the Broad Democratic Alliance, Eurocommunism, even New Times, were all continuations of this theme. In each case the argument was put forward that some process of working-class moderation would open up the space for a radical left government. The problem for the Communist Party was that in arguing for diminished expectations, it was attempting to occupy a political space which was already successfully inhabited by the Labour Party.

Having chosen not to be a revolutionary party, the CPGB had little success when it attempted reformism. Determined not to become a mere “ginger group” to the left of Labour, the leaders of the party found themselves in precisely that situation that they were most keen to avoid. The strategies undertaken to surmount isolation were all unsuccessful. Despite sporadic, local successes, the electoral strategy failed to take off. There were no Communist MPs after 1950. In stressing the priorities of the Popular Front the part was often to act as a moderating and conservative influence on groups of left activists within the Labour Party the unions and the broader movements over which the party retained a significant degree of influence”.

This clearly would have been a better focus for a workers’ history of the CPGB - but that book has sadly still to be written.