the contribution of the communist party

Jim heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Thu Aug 6 09:31:10 PDT 1998


I wonder if the contributions of the Communist Party are not being viewed through some rather rose-tinted spectacles.

In Britain the Communist Party was a mainstay of national chauvinism and the union bureaucracy. Its campaigns against foreign imports ('British jobs for British workers' was their slogan!) provided fertile ground of the far-right, especially amongst Lancashire's remaining cotton mills in the 1970s.

The CPGB was central in promoting the policies of the post-war Labour governments amongst workers, forever drawing up plans for British Industry (again with the chauvinistic emphasis upon the British). This attempt to tie workers' interests to those of the national capital generally led to labour fighting with one hand tied behind its back, as the employers could always appeal to a strong reservoir of class collaboration - all curtesy of that peculiarly national-minded institution the Communist Party of Great [I'm not making that up] Britain.

The CPGB earned its spurs as a loyal part of the British state in the Second World War, when, as a part of the Poeple's War effort, the CPGB organised Joint Production Committees to speed up production and attack slackers. In Huddersfield, Barrow and elsewhere the CPGB acted as strike breaker, even ot the point of supplying the names of militants (like Bob Shaw) to the emloyers' blacklists.

The CPGB's committment to the trade union bureaucracy was the source of its committment to social stability. During the General Strike of 1926, its slogan 'All Power to the General Council [of the TUC]' was raised at the exact moment that the general council was selling out the miners.

Throughout the post-war period the CPGB acted to suppress news of the repressions in Eastern Europe and to stifle criticism from its own members. When Edith Bone, a delegate from the British Party was detained by Soviet troops in Hungary, only just sescaping with her life, the party suppressed her reports and denounced her as a Nazi agent.

The party was particularly conservative in its reaction to the initiative of its own members. My mother-in-law was sales organiser for the Daily Worker in the Nottingham East constituency. The party regularly sold its weekend edition to a majority of the homes in the area. But still the party apparatchiks insisted on imposing their own candidate - the painfully slow John Peck - on the constituency instead of their own preferred choice Pat Jordan (who left to join the Institute for Workers Control with Ken Coates). Election after election bumbling Peck would lose the one seat that the party was in a position to win. When Peck finally did win a local council seat, he rewarded those who had campaigned for him for years by joining the Green Party!

The failure to relate to the new left in the sixties led to defections in droves. (I think you will find that homosexual communists in the US were kept in the closet, too, forming the Mattachine society as a respite.) In embarrassment the leadership created a grotesque parody of the politics of liberation that had passed them by. All through the seventies and eighties the CPGB conducted this grim charade of 'identity politics' which was a mediocre celebration of middle class consumption habits, leavened withan utter hatred of the working class membership that they viewed as holding them back.

The cadre of that sorry twist are all around today, and have made its anti-working class direction throughly explicit:

Stand up Minister of the dark forces Peter Mandelson and take a bow. And you too Beatrix Campbell, anti-working class polemicist and promoter of child-sex panics. And Sue Slipman, who moved straight from the Communist Party to the right-wing SDP, now in charge of lottery cash, or is it British Gas (a move to the left, some said). And let's not forget Geoff Mulgan, one-time Marxism Today contributor, and now head of the Prime Minister's 'exclusion unit'. Or for that matter Kim Howells MP, one-time leader of the Hornsey Art School Sit in, latterly the man who stabbed miners' leader Arthur Scargill in the back.

-- Jim heartfield



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