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International Socialism, Mid-September 1973

Jules Townshend

Communist Party in Decline 1964 to 1970

From International Socialism, No. 62, September 1973, pp. 18–27.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

THERE WERE MODEST GROUNDS for satisfaction for the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1964. The calamities of 1956 – when the impact of Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin and of the Hungarian revolution had made one-fifth of the membership leave – were almost forgotten. The party had not collapsed and its membership had grown until it outstripped the pre-1956 figure. The decline in the circulation of the Daily Worker had been halted. And there appeared to be no rival contenders on the horizon that could challenge the party’s claim to be the real Marxist left of the labour movement.

These seemed no mean achievements for a period in which the class struggle was at a fairly low ebb. In the next six years, however, the unexpected happened. The membership, paper sales and activity of the party all declined.

The comment attributed to Dimitrov, the famous Bulgarian communist, that ‘Out British movement is in pain: it will not grow, neither will it die’ seemed to have become a curse. Yet these years should have favoured the growth of the party more than any other period since the war. The class struggle had not withered, as the ‘right’ reformists of the Crosland-Strachey variety had predicted. The Labour government failed to deliver even the most meagre of the reforms it had promised, and, particularly from 1969 onwards, there was a rising wave of industrial struggle.

Since 1970 the objective circumstances for the growth of the left in Britain have been better still. There have been a series of confrontations between the government and powerful groups of workers. Whole new layers of workers have been radicalised by the experience of struggle. There have been a number of political one-day strikes in opposition to the Industrial Relations Act and the freeze. And memories of the Wilson government have prevented the Labour Party reaping the advantage of these movements. But the Communist Party has still shown itself unable to take advantage of the situation. Its membership has started to grow, but very slowly [5], while the activity of its members has continued to decline visibly and its paper sales to stagnate. More importantly, perhaps, it has shown itself incapable of taking the sorts of independent initiatives in industry of which it was once capable. Yet, faced with the prospect of another spell of wage restraint and rising prices, more workers are looking for independent, militant leadership at the rank and file level than at any time since the 1920s
 

Before 1964

Until 1956, the British Communist Party had been a classical Stalinist party. Its policy followed closely directives from Moscow and its members regarded uncritical loyalty to Russia as the precondition for being a genuine socialist. When Moscow told communists to forget the class struggle and to work hand in glove with capitalist politicians – as during the late 1930s and after Russia had entered the Second World War-they did so. When it told them to denounce some of their closest collaborators within the Labour Party-such as the left Labour MP Konni Zilliacus – as ‘imperialist agents’ in the early 1950s, they did that as well.

Such a party demanded a high level of political commitment and a fairly high level of activity from its members. Something of the discipline and inner party solidarity characteristic of a revolutionary party was necessary, even though support for Russian foreign policy objectives had long since replaced genuine revolutionary objectives. Being a ‘Communist’ was something to be proud of and entailed an element of self-sacrifice.

In the late 1950s, however, the character of the party began to change radically. The level of internal discipline and commitment declined, members began to openly disagree with each other and with party policies, they expected to sacrifice less for the party – in short, the organisation of the party became increasingly like that of a reformist, social democratic party of the Labour Party type, rather than the old Stalinism. The most important single cause of this change lay in events abroad. What had inspired and sustained members since the party’s inception in the 1920s had been the belief that socialism was being built in Russia. For this promised land every tactical twist and turn, every compromise, could be justified. The burden of ostracism and witch-hunting during the Cold War was made light of by this belief.

But faith in the communist countries received two massive hammer blows in 1956. First, Khrushchev revealed that Stalin’s regime had been an oppressive dictatorship, involving the murder of thousands of communists. Soon after, the Russian suppression of the Hungarian revolution showed that Stalinism was by no means a thing of the past. Many workers and intellectuals left the party, particularly the younger ones. [6]

And the reflexes of those who remained in the party were never the same again. There was an inevitable weakening in the inner faith of party members on the intrinsic superiority of their politics over that of other sections of the labour movement – an erosion made worse by the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s. And with the loss of faith, the ability of the party to discipline its own members also fell.

Even the nominally vanguard conception of the Party was abandoned. While the 1951 edition of the British Road to Socialism said that ‘The Communist Party unites in its ranks the vanguard of the militant socialist fights of the working class’ [7] and the phrase appeared in the 1958 draft, it was omitted in the final and 1968 version. The internal crises of Stalinism were not the only factors working to destroy the internal cohesion of the party. For more than 30 years the policy imposed by the Russian leadership on Communist Parties in the west had been one of trying to win friends and influence people within existing society rather than preparing to destroy that society. In the mid-1930s communists were expected to downplay the interests of the working class to persuade social democrat leaders and liberal capitalists to form popular fronts with the Communist Parties. During the war, everything had to be sacrificed to the struggle against Germany, and so the party opposed strikes. In the 1950s the aim was to win trade union leaders, clergymen and the liberal sections of the middle class to the struggle for ‘peace’.

The policy flowed from the foreign policy needs of the Russian leaders. They regarded the various national Communist Parties as being chiefly of use in prodding established politicians or union leaders to back an alliance with the USSR. But the policy had also to be justified ideologically. This was done so by claiming that there were sections of the bourgeoisie who would fight alongside the working class – against fascism, against foreign domination or against the growth of ‘monopoly’. An important part of communist policy became to cultivate friendly relations with such possible allies.

In the British case, these allies were regarded as even more important than elsewhere. For the British Party was small and could exercise little direct leverage on the country’s international relations. On the other hand, there were powerful trade unions and a strong Labour Party and it became important to win influential elements in either to the ‘progressive’ side. The British Party’s programme, The British Road to Socialism, attempted to portray such a system of alliances as providing a means of moving from capitalism to socialism. In this it was asserted that an anti-monopoly alliance of ‘the people’, of ‘the organised working class, of all workers by hand and brain, of professional people and technicians, of all lower and middle sections of the towns, and of farmers in the countryside’ could use ‘traditional’ parliamentary institutions to carry through a gradual transformation of society.

Inevitably such a perspective meant that the party became less interested in direct participation and leadership of the class struggle and more interested in building up the alleged allies which were going to help it win parliamentary power. Unity with them became an end in itself, and any criticism likely to disrupt that unity had to be avoided. Work in industry came to be seen as little more than a conveyer belt for winning support in elections – either in parliamentary elections or in elections for union office in which the ‘left’ was standing. As a document circulated for the 1962 London District Congress urged, ‘We need to work in a way which will make electoral work the continuous centre of branch activity, local and factory.’ [8] John Gollan reiterated the point seven years later: ‘The highest form of class struggle is not the economic but the political and in British conditions the latter must also express itself in the electoral fight with the ultimate aim of winning communist representation.’ [9]

In reality this meant a trend to separate the political and the industrial struggle, just as the main stream of the reformist labour movement had always done. In the factories there would be struggles over pay and conditions. In the localities and the unions there would be elections. And by and large the two forms of activity carried out by party members would be distinct from one another. These trends already existed in the party well before 1956 or the Sino-Soviet split. The importance of the break-up of world Stalinism was that it removed the sense of identity with a world movement that had provided a coherence to the party’s membership. In the past, the party had been able to sacrifice the interests of workers to those of its middle class or trade union allies, while maintaining intact much of its own internal discipline. This was possible because of the identification of the members with the international communist movement.

Although most party members continued to hold party cards formally after 1956, the forces holding the party together were much weakened and it increasingly underwent a sort of internal disintegration. The party’s full-time union officials became more and more concerned with holding on to positions for their own sake until they became almost indistinguishable from non-party lefts like Scanlon or Jones. For them the party was little more than an electoral machine providing votes and in return demanding little in the way of real sacrifice.

This attitude of the party full-time officials was shown graphically in the case of Will Paynter, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers and a member of the executive of the Communist Party for 20 years. When he retired from the NUM in 1968, John Gollan spoke of ‘his brilliant service to the miners and the Communist Party’. [10] Yet during his period of office there had not been a single official strike among miners, and shortly after resigning from office he left the Communist Party to join the government’s Commission of Industrial Relations at a salary of £6500 a year.

The party leaders, obsessed with parliamentary politics, found that they could not achieve parliamentary success themselves. Electorally, the party underwent a continual decline, despite the money and effort put into election campaigns.

Effective electoral politics came to mean electoral politics at one remove, through trying to influence the left Labour MPs. The focus of much of the politics of the Daily Worker and, later, the Morning Star, became the antics of these MPs, just at the time when most workers were showing less interests in these antics than previously: compare the negligible impact of the Labour left in the 1960s with the role in national politics of Bevanism in the 1950s.

Finally, for party members on the factory floor, its organisation had quite a different function. It provided them with a network of contacts, a means of getting information and making links with other militants, some sort of guidance on how to relate to the union machine. It became for them, in fact, an organisation that only really mattered when it came to trade union matters, without in any way providing any perspective for linking day-to-day industrial struggle or union elections into a workers’ movement for transforming society.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, such a gap between politics and trade unionism was not of all that great importance to most militants. The typical form taken by the class struggle was that of the small-scale, short strike, usually over in a few days or even a few hours. The expansion of capitalism meant that local militancy of this sort could bring considerable improvements in wages and working conditions. Although the union officials might occasionally intrude on such disputes, they rarely affected the outcome. It was possible, for instance, for the growing strength of the shop stewards in the engineering industry to co-exist with the right wing regime in the Amalgamated Engineering Union of Sir William Carron, who referred to stewards as ‘werewolves’. And national politics, of whichever variety, was even more remote from the shop floor struggle. Under such conditions, the Communist Party could grow, despite its increasing lack of cohesion.

However in the late 1960s and early 1970s things changed drastically. The stagnation of the economy, the various attempts at legally binding incomes policies and wage freezes, the abject failure of the Labour Party to deliver any reforms, the development of large and long strikes, direct government support for the employers in industrial dispute, and the attempts to limit the power of rank and file militants with In Place of Strife and the Industrial Relations Act – all meant that the politics of the government and the reaction of the trade union leaders became crucial for every militant. The Communist Party could provide little in the way of a co-ordinated response to any of these events without the risk of making wider the split within its ranks between those who had achieved office through electoral politics – in particular the trade union leaders – and the militants on the shop floor. The more the class struggle developed, the more it would be compelled to abstain from direct intervention in the struggle.
 

Labour’s years

The Labour government elected to power in 1964 showed almost immediately that it was not going to carry through any serious reforms. British capitalism was not prepared to be reformed, however little or however gradually. It demanded instead a series of governmental attacks on gains made by workers in the previous 20 years, and the Labour ministers, ‘left’ as well as right, acquiesced in its demands.

The Communist Party proved itself unable to come to terms with the situation in theory or to benefit in practice. The general secretary of the party, John Gollan, told the 1967 Congress, ‘The present debacle is not the personal responsibility of Wilson alone. It is a debacle for the whole right wing of the labour movement, arising from the refusal to apply socialist solutions to the crisis of British imperialism which has persisted since 1945.’ [11] Such an analysis simply ignored the fact that the former leaders of the left, Greenwood and Castle, as well as the leaders of the right of the Labour Party had acquiesced in the abandoning of reforms. It also forgot to mention that ‘left’ trade union leaders like Cousins of the Transport Workers were also implicated. [12]

’Left unity’ meant that the party tried even to make people believe that the government could be pushed to the left. As Gollan told the 1965 Congress, ‘What is our call from this congress? To create a mass movement which will stop the steady rightward drift and force changes in policy in a left direction.’ What was needed was ‘a change in the balance of forces in the labour movement with the breaking of right wing domination and a victory for left and progressive forces.’ [13]

But if the ‘left’ in the Labour Party could produce changes, then there seemed little point in people who were disillusioned with Labour joining the Communist Party. It would be easier to strengthen ‘left’ forces by joining the Labour Party. A leading Scottish party member, Dave Bowman, was only drawing out the logic of the party’s own politics when, in 1970, he left the party to be able to run for a high position in his union, the NUR. So too were a score of union officials in the ETU who left the party rather than lose their positions in 1964 when a rule banning communists from holding office in the union came into effect. Yet the leaders had somehow to argue that the only way to strengthen the left in the Labour Party was to leave it and join the Communist Party. ‘Our party always will support every left development in the Labour Party. But these rapid political developments and experiences show that a strong Communist Party with thousands of new members is a vital need. Both political processes are required – an ever stronger left movement in the Labour Party and ever stronger Communist Party.’ [14] In other words, you could take your pick which you joined. Hardly a rousing call with which to build the party, particularly at a time when large numbers of rank and file activists were simply dropping out of the Labour Party, disillusioned by the inability of its left to influence policies.

Such an approach also necessarily weakened the ability of the party to act as a fighting body, even in the Stalinist sense. What mattered were resolutions aimed at influencing Labour Party or TUC policy, rather than strong forces among the rank and file in industry. Often it was easy to get such resolutions through without any mobilisation of the mass of workers at all. National officials, district secretaries or convenors would write out the resolutions and a handful of people at a meeting would vote for them. The ‘resolutionary’ orientation of the CP opened the way for many of its members to avoid the arduous task of maintaining continual contact with the rank and file in industry. District officials or convenors could sit in their office all day, meeting with the employers more than with their own members, and the party would turn a blind eye-as long as they voted for the right resolutions.

It was possible for establishment experts on industrial relations to note in 1967 that ‘Against the broad complaints of “communist interference” with their business which firms sometimes made, one must set the very good opinions conveyed to us privately by several plant managements, of individual communists in leading positions among the stewards. One manager described the communist chairman of his works stewards’ committee as an “invaluable buffer”. [15]

Harold Wilson, in his memoirs, describes how one such ‘buffer’ – Dick Etheridge, convenor of Austin Longbridge – behaved during a struggle against redundancy in 1966 (after Wilson’s anti-communist witch-hunt during the seamen’s strike).

‘Towards the end of the Monday morning session of conference, the promenade outside the conference hall was occupied by thousands of car workers who had descended on Brighton by special trains from Birmingham and Coventry. During lunch time as I worked on my papers, thousands of demonstrators converged on the Grand Hotel, their loudspeaker slogans repeated again and again. Work on my papers delayed my return to conference, though from my room I could hear the jibes at colleagues who had to fight their way past a mob which the police had unaccountably allowed to form a crescent-shaped blockade around the hotel entrance: such cries as “Ray Gunter wants a halter round his neck, and we can all go marching home”.

’I told them that I understood their anxieties, but that they could not be removed by shouting slogans. I asked them to choose three of their number to come into the hotel for a quiet talk with me. I agreed – and twelve of them entered the hotel with me, led by a veteran communist shop steward, Mr Dick Etheridge. For over an hour we talked, smoked and drank tea. When I eventually left for the conference hall, the booing had given way to cheers of “Good Old Harold”.’ [16]

The Communist Party granted as much, if not more, indulgence to ‘progressive’ national union leaders as to its own convenors. When such leaders wanted to reduce the pressure on them from party members in the rank and file they found that voting for the right resolutions or visits to the ‘socialist’ countries had a marvellous effect. The party would then treat any criticism of the leaders as ‘splitting’ the unity of the left.

In the late 1960s, the growth of militant and often unofficial industrial struggle meant that a growing number of union leaders found a ‘radical’ and ‘progressive’ image to be an asset. They were willing to make verbal concessions to the party – providing it did not demand militant actions as well. The party was to find itself enjoying a new popularity in official circles, whilst its base as a fighting organisation in industry diminished.
 

The seaman’s dispute

The most important strike in the first years of the Labour government was the seamen’s strike of 1966 for a reduction in hours to 40 hours a week and an increase in pay by 12s 6d (65p) a month. On the evening the strike began, Harold Wilson broadcast a bitter denunciation of the strikers. It was, he declared, ‘a strike against the state, against the community’. Five weeks later, after the seamen’s executive had rejected a compromise settlement put forward by the Pearson Committee of Inquiry, he returned to the attack, still more viciously. The union executive, he said, was being dominated by a ‘tightly-knit group of politically motivated men who, as the last general election showed, utterly failed to get their views accepted by the majority of the British electorate ... Some of them are saying quite blatantly that they are more concerned with harming the nation than with getting the justice we all want to see ...’

For many years the Seamen’s Union had been the most right wing in Britain, even scabbing in 1926. But in the early 1960s bitter rank and file discontent had grown up, expressing itself in a number of large unofficial strikes and in the growth of a reform movement in the union. Among the leaders of the reform movement were communist militants such as Gordon Norris and Jack Coward. The right wing were successful in maintaining their control of the key post in the union in the elections for the general secretaryship in 1962. Prior to the election their candidate, William Hogarth, issued a bitter witchunting denunciation of the reform movement in the union journal. ‘The trouble was engineered by a bunch of rabble rousers who got most of their support from the flotsam and jetsam of the political fringe. The reformers contemplate a sell-out to the Communist Party ...’

But the left continued to grow in strength, getting a number of members on to the executive, and there was a renewed outbreak of rank and file militancy in 1965. The union leadership was forced to make concessions to the membership if it were not to see the union itself in tatters. There are signs that the Communist Party interpreted this as meaning that Hogarth himself was moving to the left, and the Morning Star began to suggest that he was ‘progressive’. Certainly the party put far more emphasis on gaining positions in the union than on organising the rank and file. When Bert Ramelson, the party’s industrial organiser, met with leading militants after the issuing of the Pearson report, he advocated calling the strike off. And when the executive finally did call the strike off, after Wilson’s witch-hunt, communists like Roger Woods in Liverpool braved cat-calls from mass meetings to argue the executive’s case.

In the years after the strike, manoeuvering to secure official positions became the keynote of party policy in the union. For a time it seemed a successful strategy. A number of leading party militants became full-time officials and the union seemed genuinely to have moved to the left. There is no doubt that for a time, the party thought it would eventually take full control of the union. But things did not work out like that. With the decline of the rank and file militancy, the right wing full-time officials were able to assert their full control. Few militants were left among the rank and file to fight this trend. Partly this was because of the strategy of getting full-time officials jobs, partly because of the tendency of younger militants to leave the industry after a few years. And several of the militants that remained broke with the party in disgust with its politics of manoeuvre.

Hogarth went on to follow the traditions of his predecessors. He made sure that his union registered under the Industrial Relations Act and shortly before his death denounced the miners for going ‘into the gutter, to hold the whole country to ransom’. [17]
 

Birth of the Liaison Committee

Soon after the seamen’s strike, the Labour government made its second major attack on organised workers, through pushing through the compulsory pay freeze of 1966–67. The Communist Party organised token opposition to this by setting up a ‘lobby organisation committee’ that later became the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions.

At first this body’s activities were restricted to organising demonstrations against the wage freeze. But in 1969, with the attempt by the Labour government to introduce a law against the unions, In Place of Strife, it took on new life. May Day 1969 saw the first political strike in Britain since the 1920s, with several hundred workers out for a one-day stoppage. The Communist Party and the Liaison Committee both played an important role in organising the stoppage and the demonstrations in London, Liverpool and Glasgow (although an even more important role was probably played by the print union SOGAT – which at that time still included NATSOPA). But, typically, at the meetings organised to protest at the proposed law, pride of place when it came to speaking was given to left wing Labour MPs who had endorsed the TUC’s opposition to the stoppage.

The party’s analysis of the dangers of the proposed law was indicative of its general approach. While it correctly saw the threat to shop stewards as exemplified in the proposed strike ballots and cooling-off periods, it ignored the other prong of the Labour government’s strategy that aimed to give trade union officials greater control over their members’ activity. This would have arisen with the widespread introduction of procedure agreements which the officials would inevitably have policed, and with the registration of trade union rule books which would clearly set out the functions and responsibilities of stewards inhibiting their right to call industrial action. Registration was condemned as ‘aimed at absorbing the trade unions into the establishment’. [18] But a component of equal importance – its aim to tie stewards more firmly to the trade union establishment, was missed. In the event Labour dropped In Place of Strife, partly due to the LCDTU’s agitation, and also after the TUC had promised to discipline unofficial strikers, but this was all the more reason to try and build up a rank and file counterweight to the full-time officials.
 

Productivity deals

Another dangerous anti-working class weapon that the Labour government forged was the productivity deal. Towards it the party’s attitude was completely confused. One of the most famous of all productivity deals, the Fawley Blue Book Agreement, was negotiated and signed in 1960 by an ETU full-time official and a senior steward, both of whom were long-standing members of the party.

Certainly the party leadership did not seem to realise the threat in 1965 when the productivity deal vogue was getting into full swing. ‘The keynote of the rationalisation now being demanded is to use modern technique to screw higher profit from the worker and to reduce the number of workers on the job ... We should insist that every increase in productivity must be paid for then and there on the workshop floor.’ [19] And thus the Declaration of the LCDTU conference of February 1968 called for ‘increased efficiency and productivity’. [20] This position was no doubt held in order not to alienate ‘left’ trade union officials, who virtually to a man were signing productivity deals. Such officials saw them as an easy way of getting wage increases without a fight, enabling them to maintain friendly relations with the employers without seeming to attack their own members’ wages.

The failure to oppose productivity deals where the party had strength led to tragic consequences. In the mines it accepted the 1966 National Power Loading Agreement on the grounds that it abolished piece-work. The agreement drastically held down wages for the next four years. In engineering the party had given strong support to Scanlon in getting him elected to the presidency of the AEU. Having uncritically supported him and regarding him as an ally, the party’s engineering members did not publicly question his signing of the 1968 engineering agreement, which allowed stop watches to be brought into factories subject to the permission of local AEU members. Quite naturally this was most harmful to weakly organised factories. In electricity supply the 1964 agreement was signed by Scanlon and Bob Foster, national organiser and a party member. Later Foster was to sign with Bob Wright the 1969 National Power Station Agreement, which could have allowed as many as 40,000 to become redundant.

By 1970 the party was forced to adopt a more articulated position towards such deals, partly because of the success that Tony Cliff's Employers’ Offensive, Productivity Deals and How to Fight Them was having with shop stewards. Bert Ramelson, the party’s industrial organiser, produced a small pamphlet, Productivity Agreements, which although it exposed them, offered little in terms of a counter-strategy. It pressed for changes in government policy, for a fight for higher wages and earnings and for a reduction of working time. But it did not argue unequivocally for their rejection, nor did it elaborate any strategy for a steward confronted with a package deal offer by management. At the 1969 Congress, the Scottish miners’ leader, Mick McGahey, introducing the discussion of ‘Defence of the Unions’ referred to productivity deals once only, in passing. This subject he said, needed more attention paid to it. That was the sum total of the leadership he was prepared to give on the matter.

The party’s continuing confusion on the question was reflected in the Devlin Phase Two negotiations in London’s enclosed docks, which were concluded in September 1970. Had the party as a whole fought the deal the chances of its acceptance were slim. But while the party formally opposed, its leading members, much respected in dockland, spoke in favour of Phase Two at meetings and also sat on the negotiating team.
 

Revolt of the lower paid

But the most important point about the Communist Party in industry during the period of the Labour government was not so much what it did but what it did not do. In 1969 and 1970 the biggest strike wave since the 1920s began. The most significant strikes were by groups of workers, like the dustmen, the teachers, the British Leyland workers in central Lancashire, the glass workers at St Helens, with few traditions of militancy, or groups, like the Ford Dagenham workers or the miners, whose fighting spirit had been subdued for a decade or more. The strikes were much longer than those of previous years, and involved far greater numbers of workers – thousands rather than hundreds. And the strikes usually began with unofficial movements, to which the union machine was forced to give some sort of official sanction once under way.

This should have been the golden opportunity for the left to show to whole new layers of workers the relevance of socialist organisations and ideas. Precisely because they did not have the established traditions and routines of the traditionally more militant industries, those involved in these movements were more open to radical ideas. Yet the Communist Party, by and large, took little action to intervene in these struggles. Where it had members and influence, they were involved in the strike movement. But where it had no influence traditionally, it did little to try and gain it. For instance, despite a strong Communist Party base in nearby Merseyside, the party did next to nothing to help the Pilkington Strike of 1970 or to influence its leaders, even though the strike could have provided an opportunity for launching a reform movement run by the left wing in one of the most right wing and undemocratic unions.

In this particular case, the reason for inactivity was probably inertia. But the failure to intervene followed from the logic of the party’s general approach. If the most important thing was either to win office in the union or to persuade those already in office to be friendly to the party, then there was little point in organising a continuing rank and file movement. Indeed, in those unions which were already ‘left wing’ there seemed to be dangers in doing so. Such activities could hardly bring pleasure to the national union leaders and might make them turn against the party. For instance, in the transport workers’ union one of the main aims of party policy was to get the ‘black circular’, which banned party members from holding office, rescinded. Jack Jones, general secretary for life, was all-powerful in’ the union. To really organise the rank and file – in the docks or for that matter among local authority manual workers – would be to incur Jones’ wrath and lose the party a friend.

Even in unions where the party itself had a powerful base – the engineers or the miners-similar considerations applied. This base was built upon a close alliance with full-time officials who were not in the party but found it convenient to ally themselves with it. If the party had organised in any of these unions a powerful rank and file movement concerned with conditions and wages as well as elections, it would have soon found the movement clashing with its friends (and some of its members) in the ranks of officialdom. Much better, it seemed, to leave the rank and file unorganised, giving little direction or co-ordination to the work of members in industry, except in the period preceding elections. The inevitable result of such an approach was that the party did not grow in the new areas of struggle, but stagnated, with a membership in those industries and cities which had traditionally been militant and where it had traditionally been strong. And even here, its factory organisation declined and its discipline grew looser until it was little more than an informal network which provided militants with contacts with one another and advice on organising for union elections.
 

Students and Vietnam

If the Communist Party was not prepared to build rank and file movements in industry, neither was it able to make significant inroads into the political protest movements that developed in the period. Tens of thousands of youth – albeit mainly from middle class backgrounds – were involved in the Vietnam campaign and student agitation. But the leadership and the slogans for both these movements were provided not by the Communist Party, but by those it described as the ‘ultra-left’.

Among students, the main focus of party activity for many years had been to try and gain influence in the apparatus of the National Union of Students and among the heads of local student unions. To this end, it played the leading role in setting up a ginger group, jointly with Liberal and Labour student organisations, the Radical Student Alliance, in January 1967. The RSA found itself able to take the initiative on one occasion when it came to mass student activity – in the spring of 1967 when it spearheaded national student demonstrations and one-day strikes against the increases in fees for overseas students.

But the most important development of student militancy by-passed it. This was the wave of student occupations, which began with the sit-in in the LSE in March of 1967. Neither the party nor the RSA was able to relate to this movement. Although occasional RSA figures played a part in the sit-ins, the impetus to militancy was provided by groups of revolutionaries operating among the rank and file of the student movement, unencumbered by entanglement with the bureaucracies of the NUS or the local student unions, often facing the opposition from RSA figures when it came to pressing for all-out direct action. The politics of the rank and file revolutionaries varied from place to place: in about half the struggles IS provided the impetus on the left, elsewhere groups of anarchists, Maoists or New Lefters did. Only in isolated cases, as at Hornsey College of Art, did individual party members play any significant role.

1967 and 1968 were also the years in which mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War took place. But again, it was the ‘ultra-left’ not the party that provided the leadership to these. In accordance with its general line of unity with the left MPs and left trade union bureaucrats, the party had been agitating over the Vietnam issue for some years through an organisation called the British Council for Peace in Vietnam headed by the Labour left – Lord Brockway. In order to avoid embarrassing Labour MPs and liberal-minded clerics whose names figured high on its speakers lists, the BPCV refused to raise the question of victory for the liberation forces in Vietnam, or even for the immediate withdrawal of US troops. Instead it emphasised the need for ‘peace’, with references to the 1954 agreement (which had divided Vietnam) and the UN secretary general U Thant. Indeed there were even instances of party members trying to remove physically from demonstrations those who raised the call for an NLF victory.

The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was set up – initially by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation – in order to press for a more positive commitment to the Vietnamese struggle. Its main supporters soon became the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group. In October 1967 it organised the first really large demonstration on Vietnam, around the slogan ‘Troops out Now’ and expressing clear support for the liberation forces. 30,000 people participated, at least five times as many as had taken part in any of the BPCV’s activities.

Yet the party refused to recognise the fact at first and was still criticising VSC six months later, when a second mass demonstration was held. ‘We believe that what is required is a movement of hundreds of thousands that will make a real political impact in Britain. It is here that the attitude and activities of the VSC are obstacles to the building of such a movement, since they express continuous hostility to all whom they consider not to have passed their test of full commitment, and constantly endeavour to narrow down, and indeed attack, genuine efforts for the broadest unity around immediate realisable demands such as we have already outlined.’ [21] The events that followed proved these objections to be unfounded, for VSC was instrumental in organising a demonstration in March 1968 of a similar size to the previous October’s. The BCPV employed the tactic of trying to split the demonstration by calling one for a week later. In the event theirs was a far smaller one. The party then adopted a conciliatory position and joined with VSC to organise a mammoth demonstration of more than 100,000.

The Communist Party paid a big price for its inability to relate to the student and Vietnam movements in 1967 and 1968. The revolutionary left – the International Socialists in particular – were able to recruit many people who in an earlier period might have been attracted to the party. Although most of these were students or white collar, they constituted a loss to a party that sorely needed recruits and the energy that an influx of young members could have provided. One result was that in many localities (although not yet in the factories) the revolutionary left disposed of more activists than did the party.

The party was able to regain some of its influence in the student world after 1969. In part this was because of the decline of the rank and file student militancy, resulting in a number of serious defeats (for instance at LSE) and some real ultra-leftism – with small groups of anarchist or Maoist students trying to substitute themselves for a mass movement that did not exist. In part it was because the militant actions of 1967 and 1968 had changed the consciousness of most students sufficiently for them to reject the CIA-backed right wing Labour leaderships that had dominated in the NUS previously. The party was able to win electoral support because it combined verbal radicalism with a strong dose of moderation as regards practical actions. It could rely upon the conservatism of the mass of students to counterbalance pressures from the revolutionary left. However, the strength of the CP among students since 1969 is more apparent than real. It has only about a thousand student members, whereas IS, for instance, has about 700 members – each with a much higher level of activity than their party counterparts.

The emergence of the ‘ultra-left’ meant that for the first time the party found its position as the main organised force on the British political left under challenge. Initially it seems to have hoped that it would be able to neutralise the ‘ultra-left’ influence by making friendly initiatives of local cooperation. But the tactic made little headway. The party was forced to prepare its membership against the revolutionary left wing groups, and produced a pamphlet, Ultra Leftism in Britain by Betty Reid, one of the longest it had published in the post war period. Betty Reid contended that, ‘Marxists have to explain that ultra-left bravado and adventurism is basically a failure to believe in the possibility of winning a conscious majority to the understanding of the need to change society. As always the other side of the coin of ultra-revolutionary rhetoric is the lack of confidence in the possibility of mobilising the great potential power of the working class.’ [22] ‘Ultra left’ theories were also ‘disruptive and unhelpful’. [23]

But as one member complained, ‘Simply to declare in well-worn phrases that ultra-leftist ideas are “disruptive and unhelpful” and to exhort the party to make a “determined approach” to win young people, is to fail to give a clear lead. The crucial fact to reflect upon is not their disruptive character but that these ideas are exerting considerable, albeit temporary appeal to young people while membership of the CP continues to decline’. [24] To properly have analysed the appeal of the ‘ultra-left’ would have compelled the party to come to terms with its own reformism. This it could not do. And so the decline in its membership continued.
 

Attempts to halt the decline

By and large, remedies to halt the falling membership and degeneration of party organisation were seen by the leadership in organisational terms. Thus the executive set up a committee to examine party organisation in 1965. To solve the problem of membership losses it proposed ‘improved membership control, simplification of organisational methods, and training of branch officers’. [25]

The decline of 1 per cent in the previous year was also seen by the 1965 Congress as the result of the lack of national effort to build the party and the working class’ continuing illusions in the Labour Party which ignored the fact that the party had grown steadily over the six years prior to 1964.

At the 1967 Congress Gordon McLennan, national organiser, admitted that membership had declined although there was support for a ‘left alternative’. What he believed to be wrong was that ‘we have not worked with sufficient determination and consistency to increase party membership within the context of our all-round activity for the labour and progressive movement.’

A year later in a speech to the executive he emphasised the urgency of recruiting youth. ‘Whatever needs to be done in this regard should be done. Whatever it entails in dislocation, disruption of present forms and methods of work will be repaid a thousand fold if many more people come into our ranks.’ [26] He called for a greater emphasis on student work, more selling of the Morning Star, more regular branch meetings, greater involvement of members in branch life, and more education and training of members. The 1969 Congress Political Resolution, explained: ‘The problem has always been that of systematic political and organisational work to build the party during mass campaigning, and securing an understanding in the movement of the role of the Communist Party and the need for socialism.’

While this at least indicated that the leadership was aware of the dangers of its approach, the question of why the problem had become more acute at that point in time was not raised by the leadership. Nor of course was that of the party’s political direction. And similarly at the 1971 Congress, the lack of growth was attributed to the failure to recruit young cadres, due to the ‘arduous past period’. The congress decided to adopt the most organisational of organisational solutions and abolish the annual re-registration of members, thereby retaining on paper all members who had not resigned, died or been expelled.
 

Factory branches

One area of organisation that had concerned the party leadership since the early 1960s was the decline of factory branches. At the 1963 Congress Gollan said: ‘We want to stress the importance of the factories ... Our new members are overwhelmingly factory workers... many thousands of whom do not know the vital communist principle of factory organisation. It is our job to teach them to fight anew on this front.’ By this time the ratio of factory to residential branches had dropped to one in eight.

This concern was again expressed at the following Congress two years later. In defending the principle of factory branches against those who held that since the party was concerned essentially with fighting elections only residential branches were needed, Gollan replied, ‘The factory struggles, industrially and politically, have a decisive influence on the trade unions. We therefore utterly oppose all the arguments that we should give up factory branches.’

In fact the party decided to launch a conference in the next year to study how to get a new impetus in this area. At the conference, attended by 236 delegates of whom 86 came from factory branches, Frank Stanley, the party’s chairman, urged that he did not believe that the decline in factory branches could be ascribed to political reasons or organisational neglect, but rather to pit closures, redundancy factory closures and the completion of building jobs. Apart from calling for more factory branches, he pressed for them to meet regularly, organise study circles and factory gate meetings, develop social activity, sell the Morning Star and the party’s pamphlets. More attention as well should be paid to new industries and factories.’ [27]

Further concern was expressed in 1968 when Gordon McLennan stated: ‘We are making far too little progress in bringing the efforts of the whole party, residential branches as well as leading committees, to getting improvements in our factory organisation.’ [28]

If factory branches represented at Congress are any indication, efforts to stem the decline did not appear to succeed. They fell from 132 in 1967, to 126 in 1969 and 122 in 1971. And this is to ignore the qualitative degeneration of many such branches. The failure was not an organisational one: it was a political one. Factory branches had been sacrificed on the altar of the party’s electoralism, which required residential branches.
 

Political concessions

The party leadership did make some attempt to halt the decline in the membership through a change in political emphasis: they attempted to give the party an ever more ‘liberal’ image. In order ‘not to put off potential readers, the name of the paper was changed from the Daily Worker to the Morning Star in the mid-1960s. In the 1968 version of the British Road to Socialism stress was put on the need to be as ‘democratic’ as possible, going so far as to allow the Tory Party to organise even if a socialist government was elected. ‘A democratic advance to socialism ... entails a multi-party system in which parties contend for the people’s support.’ [29] And Jimmy Reid in his introduction to the new draft at the 1967 Congress stated that one of the reasons for the re-drafting was the need to put an even greater emphasis on the peaceful transition to socialism. [30]

For similar reasons, the trial of the Russian writers Daniel and Sinyavski (1966) and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia were condemned. In this respect, the British party was following close behind its much bigger French and Italian brothers. For them condemnation of the invasion was necessary if they were to convince the bourgeoisie that they could be trusted as part of some governmental coalition in the future. The British party could not aspire to the same heights, but condemnation of the invasion was a way of reassuring its friends at the top of the unions that it would not, on orders from Moscow, suddenly adopt a policy of organising to undermine them.

Other factors also were now at work in the case of some party leaders. Some of them at least were personally acquainted with the realities of life in Eastern Europe and knew that Czechoslovakia was not an isolated occurrence. The whole of Eastern Europe-including Russia-could soon be experiencing similar troubles. To identify too closely with the Kremlin would be to risk the same sort of devastation to the party as had been caused by the Hungarian revolt of 1956.

There was opposition in the party to the criticism of Russia. A grouping led by Sid French, of the party’s Surrey District, linked the party’s condemnation of the invasion with its lack of emphasis on industrial work. In effect, the Frenchites called for a return to the Stalin-type party of pre-1956, with an ‘internationalist’ position – i.e., uncritical support of the USSR – and a disciplined approach to the industrial struggle. But the highest vote they could achieve at a party conference, at the 31st Congress in November 1969 over the party’s line on Czechoslovakia, only gave them 118 votes, as against 295 for the leadership.
 

Conclusions

Neither the organisational changes nor the political concessions to liberalism could halt the decline of the party as a party. By the time the Tory government came to power in 1970, the party’s policy of building the ‘left’ in the unions seemed to be enjoying important successes with the election of Scanlon in the engineering union and the domination of Jack Jones in the transport workers’ union. But this increase in apparent influence was not translated into an increase in either membership or electoral importance. And without a strong disciplined organisation at the rank and file level in industry, the party was bound to be the servant, rather than the master of the ‘left’ union leaders.

We hope to be able to continue the examination of the Communist Party in the years since 1970 in a future issue of this journal.

Notes

1. As reported at congresses. YCL membership fell from 5000 in 1965 to 3000 in 1971.

2. As reported to 1969 congress of the party, cf. Socialist Worker, 27 November 1969.

3. Figures from executive committee reports for the different years.

4. As reported to 1969 congress.

5. According to Comment, 18 November 1972, membership grew by 500 in 1972 to 29,000. But this total is still lower than that for June 1971.

6. The membership fell from 35,000 to 28,000. The executive claimed that it was mainly intellectuals who left, but provided little evidence to back this up.

7. British Road to Socialism, p. 22.

8. Comment, 9 February 1963, cf. Harry Pollitt in Daily Worker, 31 March 1956.

9. John Gollan at 1969 party congress, quoted in Socialist Worker, 27 November 1969

10. Morning Star, 5 November 1968.

11. Morning Star, 30 December 1967.

12. Cousins was a member of the government for its first two years and did not resign until the government’s policies began to bring it directly into conflict with the unions late in 1966.

13. Daily Worker, 29 November 1965.

14. Morning Star, 18 November 1967.

15. Turner, Clark and Roberts, Labour Relations in the Motor Industry, London 1967.

16. H Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–70, London 1971, pp. 288–9.

17. Morning Star, 5 May 1972.

18. Bert Ramelson in Morning Star, 20 January 1969.

19. Gollan, Political Report, 29th congress in Daily Worker, 29 November 1965.

20. Morning Star, 17 February 1968.

21. Betty Reid, Comment, 17 February 1968.

22. Ultra-leftism in Britain, p. 58.

23. Resolution: Unity, the Communist Party and the Struggle for Socialism, 32nd congress, 1971, Congress Report.

24. Comment, 16 November 1968.

25. Report of the Committee on Party Organisation, p. 7.

26. Comment, 16 November 1968.

27. Comment, 18 June 1966.

28. Comment, 16 November 1968.

29. British Road to Socialism, p. 6.

30. Comment, 16 December 1967.

 
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