Strategy for the class struggle

back in the day

by John Maryon

For the working class to successfully advance towards socialism it requires an understanding of most effective tactics for the class struggle. It is important to learn from the lessons of past generations but also we must adapt  to the reality of today's modern world. Arguments that took place over a century ago should not hold back the formation of joint actions and alliances. We must look at the world through the eyes of a new generation.
The victory of the 1917 Russian revolution was followed by the active promotion of a Communist International. Initially the strategy aimed to ride the revolutionary wave by building communist parties worldwide. In Britain the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was established in 1920. Following the First World War the revolutionary wave abated and the strategy was changed to reflect the new conditions. It was an initiative that aimed to encourage joint action with other working class parties. It was going to be a lengthy process to overcome the reformism and class collaboration of the social-democrats. This tactic became known as the United Front. By 1928 a new strategy was adopted to advance a more revolutionary struggle to take advantage of the severe capitalist crisis by advocating a more militant approach. It encouraged the formation of strong trade unions. There was an attempt to expose the treachery of social democracy which had betrayed the workers and had  increasingly co-operated with imperialism.
With the rise of fascism it was the communists who led the struggle against the new menace and it doing so gained great respect. The Bulgarian communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov, realised the seriousness of the situation and proposed the creation of a new alliance, which he called the Popular Front. It reflected the new situation in which a number of communist parties had become mass movements. Communists with both right-wing and left wing social democrats now often shared the same prisons. Unfortunately a number of communist parties now saw their role as taking the  parliamentary option and the revolutionary road was abandoned. In Britain the CPGB  was to adopt this approach and in doing so abandoned its revolutionary vanguard role. It adopted an increasingly revisionist position under the illusion that participation in bourgeois democracy offered a way forward. It effectively denied a revolutionary approach in which the working class would seize power and take control of its own destiny. 
As Western European communist parties, following the Second World War, adopted a left social-democratic position they started to lose respect and purpose. They failed to learn the lessons of history in which it had been the great revolutionary leaders like Lenin, Mao and Kim Il Sung who had successfully led their people to socialism.
For today we may look back at the strategies that have succeeded and those that have not. We cannot stick to one fixed tactic but must adapt and change as conditions alter. Social democracy no longer pretends to be socialist and in practice presents itself today as yet another bourgeois bandwagon that in practice cannot achieve anything. 
No revolution can succeed without working class support.  But the working class in Britain is demoralised and confused with limited aspirations. They have been conditioned into meekly accepting a few crumbs from the rich man’s table. They vote for liberals, social democrats and reactionary populist parties. 
The anomalous named 'Your Party' is left social-democratic and contains many sincere well-meaning people who are opposed to imperialist wars and see the need for a more fairer society. However they are not revolutionary, have not embraced the scientific teachings of Marxism and not grasped the essential concept that a class struggle is necessary to defeat the forces of reaction that blight all of our lives. 
A so called Popular Front alliance is full of dangers. There cannot be a successful alliance between communists and social democrats in a bourgeois parliament. History shows that communists may be used by the bourgeoisie and then dumped when it suits them. Bourgeois democracy is a cruel illusion. When the inevitable break comes it splits the working class. The Popular Front transfers the class battle from the streets and workplaces to a bourgeois parliament that is totally ineffective.
It is important to note that a popular front government may be in government but not in power. Lenin pointed out that an alliance implies that the bourgeoisie no longer have the ability to rule alone and that then is the time for revolutionary change. Social democracy offers only tinkering with a failed system, based upon exploitation, that is well past its sell-by date. We need a radical change to challenge the power and oppression of Imperialism. 
A true communist party is always to be found where the battle is the hardest. One that is committed striving for unity of the workers in the class struggle to achieve full state power rather that a sham bourgeois parliament. A United Front alliance between revolutionary and reformist parties remains the only viable policy until a revolutionary situation develops.

A man of his times

by Ben Soton

Yours For the Revolution – The Evolution of Tom Mann’s Political Thought: Phil Katz, Manifesto Press, 2023, £20.00

“Yours For the Revolution” was how the legendary trade union leader Tom Mann would sign his letters; his life is the subject of Phil Katz’s latest book. Katz is also the author of works such as Freedom From Tyranny: The Fight Against Fascism and the Falsification of History; a study into how the, EU-backed far-right is attempting to falsify history and equate communism with fascism. With this in mind any book by Katz is certainly worth reading.

    The book, by its name covers the ideological development of Tom Mann (1856-1941) from Christian Socialist, through syndicalism to eventually arrive at Marxism-Leninism and the Communist Party of Great Britain. It is divided into seven sections covering key periods in Mann’s life. Subsequently the book is useful for anyone interested in the history of the labour movement from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.
    Mann is best known for his involvement in the 1889 London Dock strike and the development of New Unionism. New Unionism saw the emergence of Trade Unions representing unskilled workers; a move away from unions representing primarily skilled, and to that matter male workers. The 1889 Dock Strike saw gains for many workers including an eight-hour day and the establishment of a Royal Commission of Labour. The Royal Commission eventually saw some union leaders bought off by the establishment; most notably John Burns, who later became a Liberal Peer. This was far from the case with Tom Mann. He remained active in the Labour Movement in Britain and abroad; with his activism taking him to Australia, South Africa, America, Russia and eventually China. His support for workers across the globe drove him in the direction of internationalism and his understanding of the state eventually lead him from the limited ideology of Syndicalism to Marxism-Leninism.
    Katz criticises revisionist historians who wish to keep Mann in his early Christian (Utopian) socialist phase; thus, hiding the syndicalist and especially communist phase in his development. To achieve this, they often make little reference to his life after the 1880s; subsequently ignoring the remaining sixty years of his life. The author points out that there have been attempts to dilute the work of William Morris in a similar war; portraying him as a romantic artist and a designer of wall-paper rather than a Marxist revolutionary.
    In this, highly detailed book Katz performs an outstanding role in debunking this reactionary myth; making the book a fitting tribute to one of the British labour movement’s most outstanding figures. Tom Mann was after all a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which he remained a member of until his death in 1941.

Claudia Jones: A life of struggle

by Ben Soton

 The Political Life and Times of Claudia Jones: David Horsley; CPB Books & Pamphlets; London 2020, £4.95.

This pamphlet is both an insight into the life of a remarkable woman and a history of the struggles of black people in the Caribbean, the USA, and Britain. It describes the life of Claudia Jones, famous for the establishment of the Notting Hill Carnival.
     Claudia was born in Trinidad in 1915 and as a child immigrated to the United States where she joined the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA). She was deported to Britain in 1955 where she became involved in progressive and anti-racist politics as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
    The pamphlet discusses how the CPUSA tried to tackle racism within its membership as well as US society as a whole. It also covers the highly contentious issue of whether or not Black Americans in the Deep South constitute a separate nation, a view once upheld by the CPUSA which supported self-determination for the Black Belt in the 1932 election.
     The anti-fascist nature of World War II strengthened revisionism within the CPUSA under the leadership of Earl Browder. However, Browder, who attempted to liquidate the Communist Party, was removed from the leadership and replaced by William Z Foster.
    Browder’s class collaborationist position was further weakened with the Cold War and the emergence of the pro-fascist Joseph McCarthy and the growing influence of the Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee. McCarthy, who defended Nazi war-criminals, led a wave of persecution against progressives and communists in particular.
    I have often asked why it is acceptable or even patriotic to fly the Confederate flag in some parts of the United States. Surely the Confederacy, a state based on slavery, was not only a thoroughly reactionary one but one based on a rebellion against the United States? Perhaps our comrades on the other side of the pond should call for the banning of the Confederate flag as well as statues of slave owners on the grounds of their ‘Un-American’ activity.
    The McCarthy era with its fascist persecution led to Claudia’s deportation to Britain in 1955. Whilst in this country she was able to travel to the Soviet Union; a country that had solved its own race relations problem in a matter of years. I am told that the United States is still working on theirs.
     Throughout her life Claudia suffered from the effects of childhood tuberculosis; a condition exacerbated by her time in prison during the McCarthy era. The effects of condition led to her untimely death in 1964.
    The recent upsurge in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has led to an interest in Black History. If the BLM is to take a class based, anti-imperialist direction, rather than a corporate logo used to promote the latest pair of trainers then it is important to promote the lives of people like Claudia Jones. I strongly suggest all comrades of all colours read this pamphlet that can be ordered online on the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) website.

Pages of Our History: Labour Monthly

By Robin McGregor

 

For almost exactly 60 years, from July 1921 until March 1981, publication of the Labour Monthly was regular feature of the British left.

Despite its carefully chosen name it was a staunchly Communist periodical, albeit aimed at a wider broad-left audience. For much of its life the magazine had only one Editor, Rajani Palme Dutt (RPD), whose 53 year editorship was only ended by his death in 1974 at the age of 78. For a while he was also editor of the party’s Weekly Worker and was author of a number books.

Born in Cambridge in 1896 of a Bengali father and a Swedish mother, Dutt obtained a first class Classics degree from Balliol despite being expelled due to his work in opposing the First World War. His grim experiences in jail almost broke his physical health but hardened him politically. He worked for the Labour Research Department as its International Secretary and was a member of the left-wing faction of the Independent Labour Party, which was to leave for the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920. His role in forging the disparate founding groups into a disciplined party cannot be underestimated.

His background was unusual in a heavily proletarian party, he had little competition for the role of the Party’s leading theoretician. His linguistic skills made him particularly suitable for important posts in the Communist International and in anti-colonial work, particularly with regard to India. His Oxford background was also helpful for extracting money from rich sympathisers such as the founders of Collet’s bookshop. He served on the CPGB Executive between 1923–1965 and was briefly General Secretary of the CPGB when Harry Pollitt stood down over the British party’s line on the war effort after the German-Soviet pact in 1939.

His style was not universally admired. ‘R Pontifical Dutt’ was one of his politer nicknames. His single sentences often resembled paragraphs and for decades he was a bit too ready to assume revolution was just around the corner.

His loyalty to the CPGB was not unconditional. He rejected Khrushchev’s 1956 attack on Stalin by famously noting: “That there should be spots on the sun would only startle an inveterate Mithras worshipper,” a quote still guaranteed to infuriate Trotskyites and revisionists. In 1968 he defended Soviet intervention in defence of socialism in Czechoslovakia against the revisionist leadership.

The name Labour Monthly was carefully chosen. At the time the main CPGB voice was a weekly: The Communist. The Communist International was interested in a publication that would reach out to the wider labour movement. It never bore a party imprint but its orientation was clearly that of the Communist International, of which the CPGB was described as its British Section. Later efforts to bring it under direct party control were rebuffed by Dutt whose argument that it was Lenin himself who decreed its status always won the day.

The first issue came out in July 1921. It was of very elegant appearance, being printed in a French Rococo type designed by Stanley Morison, a former cell-mate of Dutt’s when both were jailed as conscientious objectors in the First World War. Morison’s Marxism was mixed with an earlier submission to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church that clearly made him unsuitable for membership of a Bolshevik party, but they remained friends. Morison was a noted typographer who went on to invent the now universal Times New Roman font before going to redesign The Times, write anonymously three monumental volumes about the history of that newspaper and many indispensable works on the history of typography.

 The CPGB optimistically assumed that a technically ‘non-party’ publication would give them a voice in the event of the party itself being declared illegal. Whilst it was frequently honoured with a ban in those parts of the British Empire whenever it proved influential, it was never formally banned in Britain as was the Daily Worker for a period.

The main advantage of this status however, was that contributors from the Labour Party and elsewhere could appear without endorsing the CPGB. Debates could take place in its pages with the party guiding the agenda. These debates covered trades unionism in 1924, the united and popular front campaigns in the 1930s, discussions on arts in 1967–68, and on the Common Market in 1971. In its final decade it tended to ignore, rather than confront, the ultra-left such as Militant and the revisionists that revolved around the glossy Marxism Today.

At the end of each year readers were invited to post their copies back for them to be bound. That many did so can be testified by the large number of dark-blue bound volumes to be found in actual and virtual secondhand book shops.

From the beginning it was never a news magazine, that was the preserve of other party publications such as the Workers Weekly, Sunday Worker (1925–29) and from 1930 the Daily Worker; it was strongest on analysis. The June 1922 issue contained an account by future Labour Leader George Lansbury defending his local east London council’s opposition to the brutal poor law, a biting commentary on the failed international conference at Genoa and an article on the nature of ‘dictatorship’ by German communist Max Beer. Articles on the Rise and Fall of the German Labour Movement and Capitalist Concentration in Germany demonstrated that it lived up to its subtitle: A Magazine of International Labour.  All this was prefaced by Notes of the Month. This was the defining feature of the magazine that came from the pen of ‘RPD’ himself, appearing regularly until the month after his death.

George Bernard Shaw was a pre-war contributor and mostly likely a financial supporter, whilst a Russian chap with the name of L Trotzky made a few early contributions before he dropped out of favour. Nehru who wrote about India, Togliatti on Italy and Kenyatta on Kenya were only three of the international contributors. An important occasional feature until the 1950s was the first English publication of some hitherto untranslated short writings by Marx and Engels.

During the early war years it suffered from a boycott by wholesalers including W H Smith, who also stopped selling it in their shops. This did not inhibit a major increase circulation however, as when the CPGB had earlier faced similar problems with the Daily Worker its early days they simply sold more copies themselves. Later in the war it had a considerable readership amongst the British bourgeois interested in getting the views from our Soviet allies.

During the Second World War paper shortages faced publishers with two choices: they could either maintain their format with curtailed circulation or reduce quality. Labour Monthly choose the latter course and published pocket-sized magazines with tiny type in double columns and narrow margins on thin blue paper to allow for an increase in circulation.

With the ending of paper rationing its appearance improved, but it was always a worthy rather than an attractive publication. It had few illustrations, which were rarely well produced, a few colourful covers for significant anniversaries were the limit of its concession to popular taste.

As with most left-wing publications, it had little advertising, apart for left-wing books and latterly some trade union solidarity messages. No doubt it had some ‘Moscow Gold’ but its long-term future depended on sales and the Guarantee Fund in which every single donation, however small, was faithfully recorded. In a manner similar to the Left Book Club, a network of Monthly Discussion Groups was developed and greatly expanded during the war years.

A periodical so closely defined by the personality of a long-serving editor rarely survives his departure. Following Dutt’s death in 1974 its decline hastened. ‘Succession planning’ had never been in Dutt’s vocabulary. He was succeeded by Pat Sloan of the British-Soviet Friendship Society, who himself died in 1978. Another party worthy, Harry Smith, briefly took over, but the final volumes were edited by Andrew Rothstein and Robin Page Arnot. The last were two founder members of the CPGB who had been involved in planning the journal in 1921, and were aged 83 and 90 respectively when the final number appeared in March 1981. Before closure, the monthly had on occasions been forced to become bimonthly. A shortage of renewals in late 1980 and early 1981 resulted in a decision being taken to close it down in an orderly manner to allow debts to be settled before it passed into history. True to its roots, the final issue caused outrage: the maverick Labour MP Ron Brown provided an article Afghanistan: Eyewitness Report, championing the advances made in the country after the Soviet intervention.

Runs can be found in major public and university libraries, and many issues from 1923–1976 have been digitized and are now available for free on the rather dubious UNZ website at http://www.unz.com/print/LabourMonthly. The standard biography of Dutt is that by John Callaghan: Rajani Palme Dutt: A Study in British Stalinism (Lawrence & Wishart, 1993), but it cannot be recommended.

A Man of the Clyde

by New Worker correspondent

Len McCluskey speaking

Jimmy Reid: A Clyde-Built Man by WWJ Knox and Alan McKinlay. Published by Liverpool University Press (2019).

Last Friday saw the launch of a new biography, authorised by his family, of Jimmy Reid: A Clyde-Built Man by WWJ Knox and Alan McKinlay, and published by Liverpool University Press for £24.95 for the paperback edition. Held at the Glasgow HQ of Unite the Union, it began with a ‘light lunch’ of steak pie with roast potatoes followed by chocolate pudding. The vegetarian option was macaroni and cheese, a very 1970s meal to commemorate the life of the leader of the 1971–72 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in.

 Present-day leader of engineering union Unite Len McCluskey described Reid as a “working class hero” who inspired him in his youth and compared his speech on his becoming rector of Glasgow University as being like the Gettysburg Address. One of the two authors described Reid as being one of many “Philosophers in Overalls” on the Clyde. Knox said that Reid’s political life was a “life in three acts”. That indeed was true. Soon after the work-in that was successful in saving some shipyards, albeit at the expense of others, Reid rapidly went downhill.

Jimmy Reid’s leading role in the workers’ occupation of the Clyde shipyards threatened with closure made him a national figure during the UCS “work-in”. Backed by other unions at home and abroad, the UCS workers were publicly backed by famed Scottish comic Billy Connolly and the former Beatle, John Lennon. Reid was a leading member of the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and he soon achieved iconic status in the party led by a fellow Scot, John Gollan.

But Reid’s fame was illusory. His hopes of entering parliament on the CPGB ticket were dashed at the general election of February 1974. Although he did get 14.6 per cent of the vote, the best communist vote for years, he predictably lost to the sitting Labour candidate. His support plummeted at the second snap poll in the autumn of the same year.

In 1975 he left the CPGB to seek his fortune in the Labour Party, which only the previous year he described as “Falangists”. A career in print and broadcast journalism followed. He wrote for the {Glasgow Herald, The Scotsman}, the {Daily Mirror} and tellingly, the {Sun} when it was a rabidly Thatcherite Tory rag.

During the 1984–85 miners’ strike he launched a vicious attack on Arthur Scargill in the Tory {Spectator} magazine at the behest of the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who wanted his own hands kept clean. A former comrade, Scottish miners’ leader Mick McGahey, somewhat aptly called him “the broken Reid”.

Some charitable souls suggested that Reid was simply desperate for cash to acquire the vast quantities of a noted Scottish beverage that had long been a feature of his life. Soon after Tony Blair came to power he urged support for the Scottish Socialist Party in the first Scottish Parliament elections, but he soon found a home in the Scottish National Party (SNP). He died in 2010 and he is remembered in the Jimmy Reid Foundation, the publisher of the {Scottish Left Review}, a journal of the left in Scotland.