Revolutionaries and the Labour Party |
The Communist Party and the Labour Party |
It will be convenient to begin with the foundation of the British Communist Party in 1920. Of course, by that time the basic character of the Labour Party was already determined. Essentially a very moderate parliamentary pressure group closely allied to the Liberal Party before the war, it had, in 1918, formally declared itself a socialist organisation for the first time and, more important in this context, voted to establish local Labour Parties open to individual members. Moreover in the general election of 1918, the first fought truly independently of the Liberals, it polled 22 per cent of the total vote (as compared to around 7 percent in the two elections in 1910). Clearly, it was becoming a mass party, even though its individual membership was still small.
The founding conference of the CP obviously had to determine its attitude and tactics towards the Labour Party. The first question was simple. The first political resolution adopted (unanimously) by the conference stated:
The Communists in conference assembled declare for the Soviet (or Workers’ Council) system as a means whereby the working class shall achieve power and take control of the forces of production; declare for the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary means for combating the counter-revolution during the transition period between capitalism and communism; and stand for the adoption of these means as steps towards the establishment of a system of complete communism, wherein the means of production shall be communally owned and controlled. This conference therefore establishes itself the Communist Party on this basis and declares its adhesion to the Third International. [1]
Workers’ Councils, proletarian dictatorship and the Communist International were all anathema to the Labour Party leaders. To found a separate party proclaiming them was to declare war.
The tactical question remained. The conference, whilst repudiating “the reformist view that social revolution can be achieved by the ordinary methods of parliamentary democracy” [2], had also agreed to take part in elections for propaganda purposes. But what attitude should be taken to Labour candidates where no CP candidate stood? And there was the question of affiliation.
The Labour Party was a federal body; until very recently it had consisted exclusively of the parliamentary group plus affiliated unions and socialist organisations. The British Socialist Party, by far the biggest of the groups that amalgamated to form the CPGB, was itself affiliated. The BSP contingent at the conference wanted the CP to affiliate too. They could cite Lenin’s approval for this position [3] but they had held it before his intervention, indeed since 1912. The argument for affiliation was very clearly put by I.F. Hodgson, in moving the proposition:
It appears that we are not to join the Labour Party because it is led by trade union leaders who have a bourgeois outlook and whose mentality is that of the middle class. That is clear and distinct, and with regard to these same Labour leaders I would say that they are deadly enemies of the revolution which you and I are seeking.
I say that these men are destined to play the pan of your Scheidemanns and Noskes, and the time will come when we have to deal with them in no uncertain way. Not by voting. I will say that. But comrades and friends, this same declaration proceeds to say that it shall be the duty of the branches to form Communist groups in trade union branches and to work in the trade union movement in that way... Here you meet on the industrial field in the trade union certain trade union leaden. You are fully aware that, whether or not through sheer rascality, duplicity and corruption, they are misleading the working class. You meet them there with the intention of destroying their influence and of winning the confidence and trust of the rank and file to that end. That is exactly the kind of tactics that I believe in. But may I remind you that you meet these same people in the Labour Party, and that you meet them on a much larger field than you do in the trade unions? We are a polical party ... If you are going to operate inside the trade union branches, why not in the branches of the Labour Party? If you are going to operate inside the trade union movement, why not inside the Labour Party at its annual conferences? [4]
The obvious reply, that Labour Party branches (unlike union branches) constitute a political selection of individuals on a reformist basis, was not then so apparent as it became later.
In the event the principle of affiliation was carried by 100 votes to 85. A few days later Lenin made a major speech on the issue at the Second Congress of the Communist International. He had earlier (in Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder) argued for electoral support for the Labour Party, “as the rope supports a hanged man”. The Second Congress speech is important for three things: Lenin’s characterisation of the Labour Party, the method of operation he proposed towards it and the perspective.
On the first matter, Lenin explicitly rejected the view, held by the BSP, that the Labour Party was “the political organisation of the trade union movement”:
I have met the same view several times in the paper of the British Socialist Party. it is erroneous, and is partly the cause of the opposition, fully justified in some measure, coming from the British revolutionary workers. [5]
Evidently Lenin was aware of the rightist tendencies of some of the BSP leaders – with whom he was allied against the lefts – and was seeking to correct them. There then follows the famous definition:
Of course, most of the Labour Party’s members are working men. However, whether or not a party is redly a political party of the workers does not depend solely upon a membership of workers but aLso upon the men that lead it, and the contents of its actions and its political tactics. Only the latter determines whether we really have before us a political party of the proletariat.
Regarded from this, the only correct, point of view, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. it is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidrmanns. [6]
However, this bourgeois party composed of workers was a contradictory phenomenon. The fact that it was largely composed of workers compelled Communists to relate to it, and its actual structure here indicated the method:
It should be borne in mind that the British Labour Party is in a very special position: it is a highly original type of party, or rather, it is not at all a party in the ordinary sense of the word. ft is made up of members of all trade unions, and has a membership of about four million, and allows sufficient freedom to all affiliated politicalparties. It thus includes a vast number of British workers who follow the lead of the worst bourgeois elements, the social-traitors, who are even worse than Scheidemann, Noske and similar people. At the same time, however, the Labour Party has let the British Socialist Party into its ranks, permitting it to have its own press organs, in which members of the selfsame Labour Party can freely and openly declare that the party leaden are social-traitors. Comrade McLaine has cited quotations form such statements by the British Socialist Party.
I, too, can certify that I have seen in The Call, organ of the British Socialist Party, statements that the Labour Party leaden are social- patriots and social-traitors. This shows that a party affiliated to the Labour Party is able, not only to severely criticise but openly and specifically mention the old leaders by name, and call them social- traitors. This is a very original situation: a party which unites enormous masses of workers, so that it might seem a political party, is nevertheless obliged to grant its members complete latitude. Comrade McLaine has told us here that, at the Labour Party conference, the British Scheidemanns were obliged to openly raise the question of affiliation to the Third International, and that all party branches and sections were obliged to discuss the mailer in such circumstances, it would be a mistake not to join the party. [7]
Thus the proposal was that the CPGB go into the Labour Party as an open revolutionary party, with flags flying and drums beating so to say, to conduct a vigorous and open offensive against the social- traitors, i.e. against the whole leadership and political tradition of the Labour Party. This is a very different proposition from the practice of later entrist groups which have operated through ostensibly “native” Labour cover organisations or have maintained secret organisations whose very existence is denied to “native” Labour Party members.
Naturally, Lenin’s views, even if accepted as valid for 1920, cannot establish the correctness or otherwise of entrist tactics for revolutionaries in the very different circumstances of today. What they do establish, and this is why they are quoted at length, is that the appeal to Lenin’s authority by various contemporary entrist groups is fraudulent. The circumstances on which Lenin based his support for CP affiliation to the Labour Party have long since passed into history.
Finally, the question of perspective. In contrast to the various “long-term entry”, “deep entry”, “entry sui generis” etc. perspectives, Lenin took it for granted that CP affiliation had a strictly limited time scale and he was not in the least troubled by the prospect of expulsion:
In a private talk, Comrade Pankhurst said to me: “If we are real revolutionaries and join the Labour Party, these gentlemen will expel us.” But that would not be bad at all. Our resolution says that we favour affiliation insofar as the Labour Party permits sufficient freedom of criticism. On that point we are absolutely consistent ... Let the Thomases and other social-traitors, whom you have called by that name, expel you. That will have an excellent effect upon the mass of the British workers. [8]
And again, in the concluding words of the speech:
If the British Communist Party start by acting in a revolutionary manner in the Labour Party, and if the Hendersons are obliged to expel this party, that will be a great victory for the communist and revolutionary working-class movement in Britain. [9]
Thus the theory. In fact, of course, affiliation was never achieved. The CP first applied for affiliation in August 1920, in a letter which quoted the resolution on workers’ councils and proletarian dictatorship as the political basis of the party and also the resolution rejecting parliament as a possible instrument of social revolution. The Labour NEC replied with a rather mildly worded rejection which concluded: “the basis of affiliation to the Labour Party is the acceptance of its constitution, principles and programme, with which the objects of the Communist Party do not appear to be in accord.” Of course they were not, but why so gentle?
The European revolutionary wave of 1916-20 and the tremendous strike wave of 1919 with military and naval mutinies in Britain, had caused the Labour Party to put forward a left face, the better to control let tward moving workers. It was not thought opportune to attack the CP too sharply for the moment, rather the NEC was playing for time. Further (and fruitless) correspondence followed but the CP correctly saw that the key was local action; as Tom Bell put it:
Our tactic then was not to accept a refusal by the Labour Party but to carry the campaign into the country, that is to go to the local Labour Parties, to the trade union branches ... we were met by a variety of circumstances. Some local Labour Parties, dominated by reactionary elements who found the Communists troublesome, naturally took the opportunity to follow the lead of Henderson and the Labour Party Executive, to exclude the Communists from the local Labour Parties. In other localities, where the Communists had been already working well and had influence in trade union organisations and the local workers’ movement, the local parties were inclined to be sympathetic and not to take any action against the Communists. The whole content of this campaign raised die question of Soviets versus the parliamentary democracy and brought to the front the question of the role of violence in the struggle for power. [10]
In fact, much of the substance of the advantages Lenin had seen in CP affiliation to the Labour Party was gained in this way. Of course, the decisive factor in determining the outcome was the level of the class struggle and the extent of CP and sympathetic left Labour involvement and leadership in it.
Here the tide was beginning to run the wrong way. The post-war boom collapsed in the autumn of 1920. Unemployment soared, reaching over two million by the end of 1921. Trade union membership fell substantially, from 6,505,000 in TUC affiliated unions in 1920 to 5,129,000 in 1922 to 4,369,000 in 1923. On March 31, 1921, the miners were locked out. On Friday 15 April, Black Friday, the leaden of the other unions in the Triple Alliance (the railwaymen and the transport workers) sold out the miners by calling off their promised sympathy strike. The miners held out till the end of June before accepting wage cuts. There was a generalised employers’ offensive. By the end of the year wage cuts had been imposed, with or without strikes and lock-outs, on engineers, shipyard workers, seamen, cotton-trade operatives and printers. In 1922 the AEU, together with 46 craft unions, withstood a lock-out from March to June before capitulating to the employers’ demand for “undivided authority in all managerial functions”, i.e. the effective end of shop floor organisation.
Against this background the CP, which was naturally and correctly primarily oriented on industrial organisation and struggle, pursued its Labour Party campaign. At the 1921 Labour Party conference, when a motion for CP affiliation was put, the NEC chose to avoid a direct decision by supporting the Previous Question (i.e. in effect that the matter be not discusssed further or voted on). This they carried easily enough (4,115,000 to 224,000 on a card vote), but they proposed no offensive action against the CP.
In 1922, after a whole series of working-class defeats, the NEC was emboldened to both reject affiliation in its report (it defeated the reference back by 3,086,000 to 261,000) and to amend the rules to exclude, as delegates to any Labour body or conference, members “of any organisation having as one of its objects the return of candidates to Parliament or local authorities, unless endorsed or approved by the Labour Party.” This was carried, 342 to 161, the left not pressing for a card vote. It proved impossible to enforce this rule immediately except in right-wing Labour Parties, and, in the general election of November 1922, two CP members, Walton Newbold in Motherwell and Saklatvala in North Battersea, were elected with Labour support (Walton Newbold ran on the CP ticket, Saklatvala, a well-known Communist, was the official Labour candidate). The CP called on members to vote Labour and ran only six candidates of its own. At the 1923 Labour Party conference affiliation was defeated again (although the vote in favour rose to 335,000) but the rule excluding CP members as delegates was rescinded – an important success. That was the high point.
There was another general election in December 1923. The Labour Party won 30.5 per cent of the total vote and, with 191 MPs, became the biggest party in the House of Commons. The first Labour government was formed under Ramsay MacDonald with Liberal support. The CP had called for a vote for Labour (running 9 candidates of its own, seven of them on the Labour ticket – all unsuccessful) but it had also declared, in advance, “The advent of the present leaders (of the Labour Party) to power will not constitute a workers’ government, but a government in the name of Labour, pledged to the interests of capitalism.” [11]
This correct position was not maintained for long. Not only did the party hail the election result as “a victory for the working class”, which was true only in a highly qualified sense, but went on to positively encourage illusions in the Labour Party. The CP’s leading theoretician, Palme Dutt – reputedly a leftist in British CP terms – going so far as to write:
A Labour government in a minority cannot be expected to show easy successful action or immediate results straightaway. This must be recognised and there will be patient understanding of the position on the part of the workers. [12]
This at a time when some “native” Labour lefts had opposed the formation of a minority government on the grounds that it would be a prisoner of the Liberals and others had argued for the formation of a government only so as to present a socialist programme’, which would, of course, be a propaganda operation, leading to an immediate vote of no confidence. The party had shifted to the right of some genuine left reformists!
The whole Labour Party orientation, including the affiliation campaign, was, of course, a united front operation and, like all such operations, carried the danger of adaptation to the reformists. The CP had begun to wobble dangerously in the opportunist direction.
This temporary lurch to the right, soon to be corrected, did the CP no good at all with the Labour Party leaders. These were now in the big time electorally and had actually formed His Majesty’s government of the British Empire, which then covered, as they proudly proclaimed, “one quarter of the world’s land surface”. It was indeed a government “pledged to the interests of capitalism”. “Philip Snowden’s budget was, indeed, no more than a competent exercise in orthodox Tree Trade economics; it was essentially a Liberal measure,” wrote the life-long reformist G.D.H. Cole. [13]
To the Labour leaders in office, the CP, with its class struggle approach, with its uncompromising anti-imperialism, with its talk of Marxism and Workers’ Councils, with its connection with what was then still “Red Russia”, was a serious electoral embarrassment. The time had come to break decisively with such dangerous notions. Accordingly, in October 1924, the government instituted a prosecution for sedition against J.R. Campbell, editor of Workers Weekly (the main CP organ) under the infamous Mutiny and Sedition Acts of 1797-8. In the event the affair was mismanaged and the government was compelled to abandon the prosecution in the face of a storm of protests from working-class organisations. This brought about its downfall, for the Liberals and Tories united on a vote of no confidence, condemning the government for yielding to “unconstitutional pressures”.
Before that happened, and at the height of the Campbell case, the 1924 Labour Party conference marked a sharp shift to the right. CP affiliation was rejected again (the pro-affiliation vote being nearly halved at 193,000) and a motion making CP members ineligible for membership of the Labour party was carried by 1,804,000 to 1, 540,000. The period of “open penetration” (the phrase was coined by the CP leader J.T. Murphy) was ending. The Labour Party was becoming a party in the usual sense, no longer a federation, a process speeded up by the conflict with the revolutionaries, the CP.
As before, it proved impossible to enforce the decision immediately. Saklatvala was elected again in North Battersea in the “red scare’2 Zinoviev letter general election of October 1924 (in which the Labour Party increased its vote to 33 per cent of the total but got only 157 seats as compared to 191 in 1923).
If we exclude the temporary collapse into left reformism at the end of 1923, the CP had done a pretty good job. It had maintained and developed an independent revolutionary organisation (increasing its membership from 2,000/2,500 in 1921 to a claimed 6,000 in early 1926 [14]) and it had established solid links with a quite wide layer of militants, industrial and political alike. Naturally, the greater part of these gains had been made outside the Labour Party; through the Minority Movement’s “Back to the Unions” campaign (from 1924) and through general CP activity. Nonetheless the CP’s tactical political stance (essentially fight for affiliation, “Labour to power” and support the Labour lefts against the right) had been a necessary ingredient in its modest successes. Now that stance had to be modified, could not be carried on in the old way. It had to shift either leftwards to a much sharper criticism of the Labour Party or rightwards to an accommodation with the Labour lefts.
It shifted rightwards. The matter was not decided in terms of the Labour Party as such, nor was it decided by the leaders of the CPGB – although a case can be made that they might have taken the same position if they had been left to themselves. They were not left to themselves. The Moscow centre firmly imposed its line on the CPGB. Already in 1924, at the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, Zinoviev had said:
In Britain we are now going through the beginnings of a new chapter in the Labour movement. We do not know exactly whence the communist mass party of Britain will come, whether only the Stewart MacManus door [i.e. the CPGB – DH] or through some other door. And it is entirely possible that the communist mass party may appear through still another door. [15]
The other door envisaged was the trade union left: more exactly, the group of left officials, some of them members of the General Council, who had come to exert a big influence on the TUC. Although many of them maintained some sort of relationship with the Minority Movement, and some owed their positions partly to its electoral support, their leftism was largely verbal, and, above all, directed to international matters.
From the spring of 1925 the TUC collaborated with the Soviet Trade Union Federation through the “Anglo-Soviet Joint Trade Union Advisory Committee”, a fact which gave the left General Councillors a certain “revolutionary” aura and a cover against critics on the left. On Moscow’s insistence, the CPGB built up trust in these left bureaucrats in the critical months of the run up to the general strike and subordinated itself to them. The central CP slogan was “All Power to the General Council”!
In May 1926 the lefts joined with the right-wing bureacrats to sell out the strike and so made possible a shattering defeat for the working-class movement. As Trotsky wrote soon afterwards:
This road [of revolutionary struggle] appeared too long and uncertain to the bureaucrats of the Communist InternationaL They considered that by means of personal influence on Purcell, Hicks, Cook and others... they would gradually and imperceptibly draw [them] into the Communist International ... These “left” friends, in a serious test, shamefully betrayed the proletariat. The revolutionary workers were thrown into confusion, sank into apathy and naturally extended their disappointment to the Communist Party itself which had only been the passive part of this whole machinery of betrayal and perfidy. [16]
The counterpart to “All Power to the General Council” in the CP’s Labour Party work was the National Left-Wing Movement. The November 1925 Labour Party conference reaffirmed the exclusion of CP members from the Labour Party (by 2,287,000 to 321,000). Significantly, the left bureaucrats of the Anglo-Soviet Committee did not fight for their “CP comrades”, a fact that should have convinced all but the wilfully blind that these people were totally unreliable.
The CPGB, under Stalin’s guidance (for he was by now the dominant figure in the USSR), remained wilfully blind. Their response was to set up, a month later, the National Left-Wing Movement. Its proclaimed aim was “not to supersede the Labour Party but “to remould it nearer to the heart’s desire of the rank and file”. [17] It was claimed that over fifty Constituency and Borough Labour Parties supported the NL-WM and that over a hundred were refusing to operate the ban on CP members. After the defeat of the general strike the CP put more emphasis on the NL-WM. “The Sunday Worker became virtually the organ of the new movement, regularly allotting space to reports of the organising of Left-Wing groups up and down the country and to expositions of its programme.” [18]
Now, of course, if such an organisation had been formed by genuine leftward moving reformists or centrists, a revolutionary party would have sought to relate to it through involvement in joint work together with fraternal but firm criticism. But this was not the case at all. The National Left-Wing Movement was a CP operation from start to finish, in spite of the participation of many genuine Labour lefts. The CP leadership decided to set it up, controlled it throughout and finally terminated it.
What was its purpose? The theory was that it was a bridge to the CP for leftward moving Labour people. But why should they join the CP if the object was to “remould” the Labour Party, especially as the CP itself said that this was both possible and necessary? Moreover, since the CP ran the thing it could not criticise its fundamentally reformist aspirations. It was no bridge but a barrier: a thoroughly opportunist scheme which served the interests of reformism, not revolution. The CP was positively promoting reformism.
These criticisms, as well as others not untinged with ultra-leftism, were made inside the party, indeed inside the party leadership. But so long as Moscow kept the Comintern on a rightist course, the line of “remoulding” the Labour Party was maintained.
The defeat of 1926 had enormously strengthened the right in the unions and this had strengthened the Labour Party against the CP. The level of industrial stuggle plummeted in the next few years. The notion that a revolutionary left current could be sustained in the Labour Party in thse unfavourable circumstances was absurd. The CP leaders tacitly recognised this and sought to promote a reformist left. When Constituency Labour Parties were suspended for refusing to expel CPers, the CP line was to keep them in existence as Labour Parties – there were twenty-two such by early 1928. There was even a proposal to unite them into a national party! This crowning folly was avoided – Moscow’s line was shifting left by this time – but CP members devoted a vast amount of time and energy to propping up “genuine” (i.e. disaffiliated) Labour Parties at the expense, inevitably, of the CP’s own growth.
What should have been done? In the conditions of profound downturn after 1926, it is necessary to recognise that since revolutionary work inside the Labour Party was excluded, for the time at any rate, the solution was to pull out everything that could be pulled out and concentrate on building the CP directly, whilst maintaining a united front approach to Labour.
The CP eventually adopted the first position but ruined it by rejecting the second. From gross opportunism it swung into lunatic ultra-leftism.
The change was forced on the reluctant majority of the CPGB leadership at the Ninth Plenum of the Comintern Executive in February 1928. The main business of this gathering was the condemnation of Trotsky, expelled from the CPSU, the previous November; it also marked the beginning of the violent lurch to ultra-leftism imposed on Communist Parties internationally, in part at least to undercut the appeal of the Left Opposition’s cogent criticisms of the opportunist policies of 1925-27.
After agreeing unanimously to “wage an unrelenting struggle to liquidate Trotskyist groups” (the CPGB did not yet have one) the Plenum went on to discover that in Britain “the Communist Party confronts not one enemy camp but two, the Conservative Party ... and an alliance of Liberals, Labour Party and union leaders supported by part of the bourgeoisie, by the petty bourgeoisie, and by the Labour aristocracy ... At the present time a Labour government would from the start be objectively an instrument for attacking the workers. The experience ... makes it essential for the English Communist Party... to replace the slogan of a Labour government by the slogan of a revolutionary workers’ government.” [19]
Insofar as this attitude was correct, it was equally correct in 1920 or in 1924 when exactly opposite conclusions were drawn. The slogan of a revolutionary workers’ government was meaningless, except in a purely propagandist sense, since the means to realise it did not exist. In short, the decision was a nonsense. But that no longer mattered. The Comintern was by now an instrument of Stalin’s domestic and foreign policy requirements.
The Ninth Plenum was only the beginning of the “new line”. The Sixth World Congress of the Comintern (July-September 1928) proclaimed the onset of the “third period”, the period of “ascending revolutionary struggles” which required a sharp turn to the left and the abandonment of the united front tactic as it had been understood since 1921. And at the Tenth Plenum (July 1929) the theory of “social fascism” was officially adopted:
In this situation of growing imperialist contradiction and sharpening of the class struggle, fascism becomes more and more the dominant method of bourgeois rule. in countries where there are strong social-democratic parties, fascism assumes the particular form of social-fascism, which to an ever-increasing extent serves the bourgeoisie as an instrument for the paralysing of the activity of the masses in the struggle against the regime of fascist dictatorship. [20]
The CPGB acquired a new “left” leadership (1929), the NL-WM was unceremoniously junked and the position of “don’t vote Labour” pressed on the unheeding masses. The Labour Party secured 37 per cent of the vote in the 1929 general election. The 25 CP candidates won a mere 50,000-odd votes. Soon the CP was denouncing its allies of yesterday in the NMM and the NL-WM as “the sham left representatives of social fascism”. [21] Membership slumped (from 7,377 in 1927 to 3,200 at the end of 1929) and the party became totally isolated. Its mode of political approach to left Labour people in the unions and the workplaces was a violent denunciation of their party as a fascist organisation!
By the time the line changed again (in 1934-35) the CPGB was no longer a revolutionary party. The process of Stalinisation was complete. Our focus of interest therefore now shifts to the Trotskyists.
1. Communist Unity Convention: Offical Report, CPGB, 1920, p.9.
2. Ibid., p.29.
3. Lenin, Reply to a letter from the Joint Provisional Committee for the CPGB, 8 July 1920. (The unity conference was held 31 July-1 August.) Collected Works, Vol.31, p.202.
4. CUC, Official Report, pp.31-32.
5. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.31, p.257.
6. Ibid., pp.257-8.
7. Ibid., p.260.
8. Ibid., pp.260-1.
9. Ibid., p263.
10. Bell, The British Communist Party, 1937, pp.67-8. Tom Bell was a leading member of the CP in the period under discussion.
11. MacFarlane, The British Communist Party, 1966, p.103.
12. Ibid., p.104.
13. Cole, A Short History of the British Working Class Movement, 1932, p.409.
14. Bell, Pioneering Days, 1941, p.165. And MacFarlane, op. cit., p.135. Other sources give the more probable figure of 5,000 members in 1926.
15. Quoted from Pearce, Early History of the CPGB, 1966, p.12.
16. Trotsky, Lessons of the General Strike, Writings on Britain, Vol.2, 1974, pp.252-3.
17. Milliband, Parliamentary Socialism, 1973, p.153.
18. Pearce, The Communist Party and the Labour Left in Communism in Britain, 1975, p.181.
19. Degras, The Communist International: Documents, 1960, Vol.2, p.431.
20. Degras, Ibid., Vol.3, p.44.
21. Dewar, Communist Politics in Britain, 1976, p.82.
Last updated on 16.6.2004