WeeklyWorker

23.04.2026
Britain’s militant minority

The good, the bad and the party

Confusion reigned over what attitude to take, when it came to the ‘official’ lefts in the trade unions and the Labour Party. Factional rights could conceivably have helped bring about clarity. Jack Conrad marks the centenary of the 1926 General Strike

Serious revolutionaries can only but admire the CPGB of 1926. An admiration that can only but increase, when we compare the class-wide impact of this tiny party to the crass tailism, economism and popular frontism of today’s left (divided not merely into the apocryphal 57 varieties, but nowadays into 572 - what with the internet and all those bloggers of one).

Of course, we must never give up on our critical faculties. To actively question the past is the first condition for learning from the past … without which future practice is as good as blind. And, as already touched upon in this series of articles, there were significant shortcomings in 1926.

Partially this was down to the CPGB being theoretically weak and lacking deep social roots - related phenomena which undoubtedly reflected objective conditions. Though the working class movement in Britain possessed a long and incredibly rich history, though it was in global terms enormous and highly organised to boot, its consciousness - that is, after the break-up of Chartism - was dominated first and foremost by trade unionism.

True, socialism revived in the 1880s and 90s, but principally via members of the free-thinking intelligentsia, who had been left disappointed by the failure of late Victorian Britain to deal with the ‘social problem’. Some - notably Henry Hyndman - adopted Marxism, but only to turn it into sectarian dogma. Others - ie, the Fabians - advocated technocratic or statist socialism. Their big idea was to educate elite society. Hence, in the cutting words of Theodore Rothstein, they represented “nobody but themselves”. Even when there was the substantial involvement of working class activists, as in the case of the Independent Labour Party, its ethical socialism remained largely “hanging in the air”. They exercised “no influence whatsoever upon the large masses of workers”.1

That seemed like it was going to change with the formation of the Labour Party in 1900. In fact, Labourism was organisationally an outgrowth of trade unionism and politically a direct continuation of Liberalism. A defining characteristic, widely explained by the fact that Britain, throughout the 19th century and well into the early 20th century, was the dominant global power and thereby had the means - eg, extracting imperial tribute and sponsoring migration to the ‘white colonies’ - needed to ameliorate class contradictions at home and thereby put off socialism.2

While the CPGB included many prominent leaders of mass strikes in its ranks, and while a good many CPGB members were elected as Labour councillors, even MPs, no-one can really claim that the party, as the party, exercised hegemonic class leadership. There was the potential to change that, perhaps through the National Minority Movement, nonetheless the CPGB never assumed mass form. Where in other European countries communist parties became mass it was, note, primarily through a process of splits and fusions in already existing mass parties. Eg, in France by winning the Socialist Party’s December 1920 Tours congress and in Germany by winning the Independent Social Democratic Party’s October 1920 Halle congress.3

But, of course, the CPGB did not only emerge from British, but global conditions - specifically, the impact of the October Revolution, as embodied in the Communist (Third) International. Here was the source of the CPGB’s greatest strength, but also its quick descent into the sectarianism of the so-called third period and then the popular-frontist opportunism of the so-called fourth period.

Follow Moscow

Throughout its history, the CPGB leadership obediently, doggedly, did its best to follow the advice/instructions/cues that came from Moscow (well, till Czechoslovakia 1968). For sure, the CPGB had no record of independent strategic thinking. That, by the way, is not to suggest that CPGB historians, scientists and economists were worthless. No, many of them were good - some very good.4

Already, in the mid-1920s, the key comrade, when it came to picking up the advice/instructions/cues that came from Moscow, was Rajani Palme Dutt. Not for nothing has he been called the “shadowy pontiff” of the CPGB (between 1924 and 1936 he lived in Brussels, from where he also helped steer the Communist Party of India on behalf of Comintern).5 Palme Dutt was not the CPGB’s public face - that was Albert Inkpin, Arthur MacManus and Harry Pollitt - but he was the brains. However, while his writings display considerable skill and often provide penetrating insights, their prime purpose was always to present Comintern’s line in the most convincing light.

Perhaps an exception here is Palme Dutt’s April 1926 defence of Trotsky’s Where is Britain going? He eviscerated the “vague confusion and shoddy sentiment” of Trotsky’s numerous British critics.6 But Trotsky now had numerous Soviet critics too.

Beginning in 1924, there was a concerted campaign against Trotsky and Trotskyism conducted in the pages of Pravda and Izvestia. Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nicolai Bukharin, Joseph Stalin, Nadezhda Krupskaya and Alexei Rykov were determined to take down Trotsky’s arguments presented in Lessons of October - a highly jaundiced, polemical account of the October Revolution that still passes for authentic history amongst the more gullible sections of the left.7 It was not just about putting the historical record straight. Lenin’s closest comrades seem to have genuinely feared that Trotsky might be tempted to carry out a coup in order to make himself the Soviet Union’s Bonaparte. In my opinion, not a likely scenario. Trotsky always denied the charge and surely the Red Army would have refused orders to overthrow the Communist Party regime.

That said, in April 1926 the United Opposition was formed around Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Maybe with Palme Dutt’s close connections with Moscow - not least those provided by his wife, Salme Pekkala-Dutt - he had prior knowledge of this Olympian realignment. Either way, by late 1927 any sympathy for that quarter had long since evaporated. Palme Dutt became a devoted, slavish follower of Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. A position he loyally maintained throughout the rest of his life (despite that, apparently, he never liked the popular fronts, not least the suspension of the anti-imperialist struggle in the colonies, though he mainly kept that very close to his chest).

United fronts

Painfully small, the CPGB both sought to maintain revolutionary principles and gain a hearing from the left-moving masses - the latter to be achieved not only through Workers’ Weekly. There were united fronts with the Labour left too - the National Minority Movement in the trade unions and the National Leftwing Movement within the Labour Party. Both initiatives had considerable rank-and-file support in the form of affiliated trade union organisations and ward, constituency and district parties.

Needless to say, any principled united front goes hand-in-hand with an inbuilt tension. Communists need to maintain unity with Labour lefts and therefore their social base; they also need to build the revolutionary pole of attraction through criticising, exposing and eventually overcoming the reformist pole. A difficult, though not impossible, balancing act. Not surprisingly, the whole General Strike period abounds with tilting, adjustment and barely disguised wobbling over unity/criticism.

The contradiction between unity and criticism often saw rightist approaches. Over 1924-25 the CPGB seems to have cohered around a perspective of gradually and patiently moving the Labour Party and the TUC further and further to the left through a combination of winning the argument below and mobilising to elect and then “educate and persuade” left leaders. Presumably this would culminate in a Labour-communist government - a workers’ government with communist participation - this being a step towards “a genuinely proletarian workers’ government, which, in its pure form, can be embodied only in the Communist Party”.8

In 1925 Palme Dutt seriously suggested that left trade union leaders “occupy at present the position, not only of leaders of the workers in the immediate crisis, but also of the spokesmen of the working class elements in the Labour Party - it might almost be said, an alternative political leadership”.9 No mere objective assessment. This was positive spin promoting the ‘official lefts’. With some considerable wit and much biting irony, Trotsky tore to shreds such misguided assessments and Palme Dutt himself seems to have undergone a change of heart. Without crediting him, he took up Trotsky’s specific arguments on the left Labourites, albeit in a somewhat diluted form.

As an aside, failure to credit Trotsky was perhaps understandable, given the times. We should not make too much of it anyway. Palme Dutt did, as already noted, provide a trenchant defence of Where is Britain going? This while the campaign against Trotsky and Trotskyism raged. The CPGB’s 7th Congress of May 1925 had already passed a resolution that woodenly repeated the Soviet party’s now standard vilification of Trotskyism. JT Murphy supplied an introduction to the English edition of The errors of Trotskyism, written jointly by Nicolai Bukharin and Lev Kamenev.

Inconsistencies

Anyway, back to the main thread. As I have argued, through its own logic a general strike poses the question of state power. That entirely orthodox line was presented by JT Murphy in September 1925:

Let us be clear what a general strike means. It can only mean the throwing down of the gauntlet to the capitalist state, and all the powers at its disposal. Either that challenge is only a gesture, in which case the capitalist class will not worry about it; or it must develop its challenge into an actual fight for power, in which case we land into civil war. Any leaders who talk about a general strike without facing this obvious fact are bluffing both themselves and the workers.10

Eight months later and only two days before the General Strike, the same comrade was perhaps joining those who were “bluffing both themselves and the workers”:

Those who are leading have no revolutionary perspectives before them. Any revolutionary implication they may perceive will send the majority of them hot on the track of a defeat. Those who do not look for a path along which to retreat are good trade union leaders who have sufficient character to stand firm on the demands of the miners, but they are totally incapable of moving forward to face all the implications of a united working class challenge to the state.11

In other words, a middle course between the Scylla of surrender and the Charybdis of revolutionary struggle was considered feasible. “Good trade union leaders” could defend the miners through a general strike, while not mounting a challenge to the existing constitutional order. This illusory industrial use of the general strike was explicitly defended in the CPGB executive committee’s statement adopted after the failure of the General Strike at its extended meeting of May 29-31 1926.

Its agreed resolution urged workers not to accept the argument that the general strike must “end either in revolution or the complete defeat of the working class”. To suggest otherwise was a “travesty of the facts”. There can be a general strike that neither goes forward to revolution nor backwards to defeat. If led “with the necessary courage”, there can be a general strike “for definite concessions”.12

No-one should deny the utility of a one-day or limited general strike as a gesture of protest. Indefinite strike action by the class - an open-ended general strike - is another matter entirely. As we have seen, even the threat of one causes the middle classes to polarise. Some 100,000 mainly middle class volunteers joined OMS: eg, Graham Greene, Joyce Carey and Ian Fleming. Yet many others from the same class background sided with the miners: eg, Cecil Day Lewis, RH Tawney, WH Auden, Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Alongside this there were associated splits and divisions within the ruling establishment. Stanley Baldwin was prepared to negotiate a “total surrender” with the TUC. His chancellor of the exchequer, Winston Churchill, sought naked dictatorship and a fight to the finish: he thought “a little blood-letting” would be a good thing.13 Meanwhile, David Lloyd George talked of compromise and a possible coalition with Ramsay MacDonald and the Labour Party.

Certainly, once a general strike begins, it releases latent energy and creativity below. With the declaration of a general strike, a fateful first step along the road to power has already been taken. However, to prosecute the strike and protect its unity necessitates drive, boundless confidence and ruthless determination.

It is not a question of the “complete defeat of the working class”, but it has to be either the victory of the existing capitalist state or the victory of the working class. One or the other. Those who suggest otherwise are, yes, “bluffing both themselves and the workers”. Does that mean ‘complete victory’ for the working class and the consolidation of a socialist state? Not necessarily. There can be a victory which opens up that road, crucially if the existing constitution is overthrown.

Baldwin was right, in a sense, then, when he said: “The General Strike is a challenge to parliament and is the road to anarchy and ruin”.14 He insisted on presenting the strike not as a routine labour dispute, but as a direct threat to the constitutional order.

Victory for the General Strike would certainly have shifted the balance of class forces. It is highly doubtful, though, that the TUC, or the councils of action, could have seized power. Certainly with the TUC the will was never there and the old order would not have simply vacated the field of struggle by conveniently collapsing. But a triumphant workers’ movement would surely have demanded the resignation of the Tory government, whose “swollen majority” had come about through the forged ‘Zinoviev letter’ and a conspiracy hatched between MI5, MI6, Tory central office and Buckingham Palace.

Conceivably, Baldwin would have gone to the country asking, ‘Who governs? The unions or the government?’15 Probably, Labour would have become the biggest party in the Commons. Perhaps MacDonald would have sought a coalition with Lloyd George’s Liberals - that even if Labour had a majority in its own right. Under such circumstances the CPGB would have been well placed to press ahead with agitational demands for sacking capitalist ministers and, instead, presuming any sort of communist presence in parliament, the united front demand for the formation of a “genuine workers’ government” with “communist participation”.16 A government committed to the overthrow of the existing constitution with measures such as the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, the formation of a popular militia in place of the standing army, equal voting rights for both sexes, freedom for India, etc, etc. Yes, for Baldwin, that represented “anarchy and ruin” from the point of view of his class.

My purpose, though, is not to run an entire counterfactual history that ends in a socialist Britain. Fun, thought-provoking perhaps … but better left to writers of fiction. Rather my purpose is simply to illustrate the vistas that would have opened up with the victory of the General Strike.

Confusion

As stated above, the CPGB’s evident confusion on the significance of the general strike stemmed from a right communist viewpoint, which assumed that the basic contradiction in the workers’ movement revolved around an ill-defined left-right axis. A conceptual framework which downgrades, or entirely puts aside, the more profound contradiction between reform and revolution - a contradiction specifically manifested in the programmatic attitude taken towards the existing constitution and the state.

Following on from this error, in the attempt to promote “genuine leftwingers”, there follows an entirely false estimation of the trade union bureaucracy. It, if it is under left leadership, comes to be seen as the pivotal revolutionary force. Thereby the CPGB began to strategically think in terms of winning trade union positions for ‘official lefts’ as the prime means for “completely” changing the “policy and leadership of the Labour Party”, so that it becomes the decisive instrument of working class self-liberation.17

The danger here is obvious. It is quite conceivable to envisage the Labour Party becoming a united front of a special - ie, permanent - type. The decisive instrument of working class self-liberation is, though, always a Communist Party. The role of the CPGB is therefore not to act as a ginger group within existing structures. No, it must merge with the great mass of class-conscious workers and thereby become the working class organised into a party.

“Genuine leftwingers” - ie, leading left Labourites - gain their reputation by voicing the widespread dissatisfaction with the existing social order that always exists. They do so, however, within definite limits. True, in 1926 there was the language of the coming Socialist Commonwealth and wanting to be seen defending the beleaguered Soviet Union. However, the ‘official’ Labour left was tied body and soul to the ‘official’ Labour right and thereby, in the last analysis, to the British state. Theirs, after all, is a British national socialism, to be achieved through the existing constitution.

Not being subject to instant recall, not operating under strict discipline, not being accountable to a revolutionary party, the further their political careers progress upwards, the more ‘official’ lefts are sociologically and psychologically removed from the rank and file, and the more open they are to flattery, bribery and identification with the pro-imperialist ‘official’ right, and eventually incorporation into the gilded circles of the bourgeois establishment.

The right-communist error, that the CPGB could “educate and persuade” Labourites to pursue a general strike through to a successful conclusion, was hotly disputed within the party. Hence the inconsistency, swings and fudging in the party’s pronouncements. Sometimes dire warnings were issued about the left Labourites. At other times the CPGB was either arguing that “good” lefts could be won over, or even that the bureaucracy as a whole should not be challenged, because force of circumstance - ie, spontaneity - would see the TUC successfully lead the working class to victory, almost despite the trade union bureaucracy’s compromising record, instincts and social location as intermediaries between labour and capital.

For example, in October 1924, in the immediate afterglow of the formation of the NMM, JR Campbell was writing:

It would be a suicidal policy for the CP and the Minority Movement to place too much [sic] reliance on the official left wing. It is the duty of the party and the Minority Movement to criticise its weakness and relentlessly endeavour to change the muddled and incompetent leftwing viewpoint of the more progressive leaders into a real revolutionary viewpoint.18

Almost exactly a year later JT Murphy had taken this wishful-thinking policy of converting existing leaders to the point where “We should ... recognise the general council as the general staff of the unions directing the unions in the struggle”.19

Such ideological hermaphroditism led the CPGB to claim that the miners could be defended “only” by a general strike that would lead to civil war and at the same time that wages and hours could be preserved by “concessions” won by “good” left leaders who could get the general council to “stand firm”.

True, at the 8th Congress over October 16-17 1926 there was in effect a disowning of this, what had been a right-communist reliance on trade union officialdom. It was agreed that the “principal lesson” of the General Strike was the need to convince the working class:

That the only way to complete victory is the destruction of the capitalist state and its replacement by a workers’ state based on the mass organisations of the workers. The necessities of this developing struggle will compel the working class under the leadership of the Communist Party to struggle for the elimination of the present trade union bureaucracy, and the revolutionising of the trade union and labour movement in outlook, policy and structure. Without the defeat of the labour bureaucracy, more and more revealing itself as the agent of capitalism within the labour movement, the successful struggle of the workers is impossible.20

Notwithstanding this partial recantation, it is more than a pity that the congenital venality of the trade union bureaucracy, including its left, was not fully appreciated and therefore not consistently explained to the militant minority before the General Strike began.21 If it was, the CPGB would have been well positioned to help transform the moderate majority into a militant majority.

Surely one of the handicaps that prevented the CPGB simultaneously educating itself, and therefore the militant minority, was the absence of factional rights. The CPGB as a whole relied on the correctness of the executive committee in King Street and in turn King Street relied on the correctness of Comintern and its dominant and most authoritative national section HQed in the Kremlin. Even while Lenin lived, this carried its problems.

Factions were banned in the Russian Communist Party as an emergency measure in 1921. However, almost instantly this essentially military measure became enshrined as Comintern doctrine. Democratic centralism was drifting inexorably towards bureaucratic centralism.

Unity around Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov and Stalin was one thing: on a scale of 1-10, we might give it an 8. Pluses for the CPGB far outweighed minuses. With the triumvirate of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, that was perhaps down to 6. Unity around Stalin and Bukharin might score 4, not least because of the ‘socialism in one country’ doctrine. By the time we reach Stalin’s monocracy and the ‘theory of social fascism’, we start to get into negative numbers - more so with the popular fronts. For those committed to ‘Moscow knows best’ there was no escape route (we shall discuss the Soviets and the General Strike in a following article).

Anyway, had the CPGB permitted factions in 1925, the confusions, inconsistencies, vacillations and criticisms could have been clarified, hardened - ie, taken on organisational form - which in principle must be allowed to reach down to districts and branches and involve the open publication and subsequent elaboration of differences. There had to be more than executive committee manoeuvrings and coded language in the party press.

Doubtless the establishment of rival factions would have been condemned as diversionary by conservative elements. Eg, the party should not engage in unnecessary discussion before a pending social explosion. However, as well as bringing the outside possibility of a split, a measure of last resort, factions educate and, with a healthy internal regime, create the conditions for a higher, stronger unity. Workers’ Weekly versus Sunday Worker could give birth to the Workers’ Daily. A hard faction committed to a united front with left Labourites but which places its main emphasis on implacable criticism of them might have begun as a minority on the CPGB’s leadership. It would, though, be well placed to become the majority.

So from the militant minority in the party to the militant majority in the party … and from here transforming the militant minority in the working class into the militant majority.

Bolshevik faction

It is worth adding a coda. The Bolsheviks were divided after the February Revolution. Nothing like to the degree seen in the ranks of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, true. Differences within the Bolsheviks were more those of shade. Nonetheless, at the March 28-April 3 1917 conference, Bolshevik delegates unashamedly referred to themselves as a faction … there was even debate about reuniting with the Mensheviks (well, the Menshevik Internationalists). Internal differences were also referred to as factional: eg, ‘Choose your factional speakers’.22

The main bone of contention was the ‘Attitude towards the provisional government’ - there was a very small defencist faction that wanted to offer it critical support. Having been decisively outvoted, it split away.

However, the majority remained divided, though it amounted to nuance. Eg, as a tactic, Kamenev advocated offering the provisional government critical support: publish the tsarist secret treaties, end the war with a democratic peace and distribute land to the peasantry. The provisional government would, of course, do no such thing. That allowed the conditional offer of support to be a principled calculation designed to hang. Kamenev was supported by his fellow Pravda editor, Stalin. The idea being to expose not only the bourgeois provisional government as pro‑imperialist, but also the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary majority in the soviets who wanted a strategic agreement between the popular classes and bourgeois society. Such an approach, argued Kamenev, would allow the Bolsheviks to win a soviet majority and ready the country at large for the soviets taking power through Bolshevik leadership.

Lenin, of course, insisted on offering the provisional government no support whatsoever. He famously criticised Kamenev in the ‘April theses’. Nor would he countenance any idea of reunification with the Mensheviks. However, the differences between Lenin and Kamenev were quickly sorted out and they both united in successfully overcoming the leftist impatience of the Petrograd committee under the leadership of Alexander Shlyapnikov. His faction wanted the Bolsheviks to immediately call for an armed uprising - that without winning a majority in the soviets or allowing the backward countryside to sufficiently catch up with the advanced towns politically.

My point here is to show that the Bolsheviks were far from weakened by factionalism. Admittedly, backward factions are hardly good news in and of themselves. But better they operate openly, not in secret, not as a sullen mood - that way, differences can be properly argued out and, hopefully, positively resolved.

That would surely have been the case with the CPGB of the 1920s.

  1. T Rothstein From Chartism and Labourism: historical sketches of the British working class London 1929, p280.↩︎

  2. Lenin’s Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism (1916) being the most famous and influential study.↩︎

  3. For a colourful and informative account see B Lewis and LT Lih Zinoviev and Martov: head to head in Halle London 2011.↩︎

  4. Eg, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, John Saville, Eric Hobsbawn, JBS Haldane, JD Bernal, Maurice Dobb.↩︎

  5. See J Callaghan Rajani Palme Dutt: a study in British Stalinism London 1993.↩︎

  6. R Chappell and A Clinton (eds) Leon Trotsky: collected writings and speeches on Britain Vol 2, London 1974, p280. Palme Dutt’s April 1926 Labour Monthly article, ‘Trotsky and his English critics’, is included in the appendixes.↩︎

  7. See DC Corney (ed) Trotsky’s challenge: the ‘literary discussion’ of 1924 and the fight for the Bolshevik Revolution Chicago IL 2017.↩︎

  8. J Riddell (ed) Towards the united front: proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 Chicago IL, 2012, p1161.↩︎

  9. RPD ‘Notes of the month’ Labour Monthly October 1925.↩︎

  10. Communist Review September 1925.↩︎

  11. Workers’ Weekly May 1 1926.↩︎

  12. Workers’ Weekly June 4 1926.↩︎

  13. New Statesman May 22 1926.↩︎

  14. The British Gazette May 6 1926.↩︎

  15. Tory prime minister, Edward Heath, did exactly that in February 1974 … and lost.↩︎

  16. J Riddell (ed) Towards the united front: proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 Chicago IL, 2012, p1161.↩︎

  17. ‘CPGB 8th Congress: reports, theses and resolutions’ quoted in J Klugmann History of the Communist Party of Great Britain Vol 2, London 1969, p228.↩︎

  18. Communist Review October 1924.↩︎

  19. Workers’ Weekly October 16 1925.↩︎

  20. ‘CPGB 8th Congress: reports, theses and resolutions’ quoted in J Klugmann History of the Communist Party of Great Britain Vol 2, London 1969, pp223-24.↩︎

  21. “Partial” because at the very same 8th Congress of the CPGB the call for “More power to the general council” was still made, along with the perspective of putting “pressure on officials” (quoted in J Klugmann History of the Communist Party of Great Britain Vol 2, London 1969, pp225, 227).↩︎

  22. Trotsky includes the minutes of the Bolshevik’s March 28-April 3 1917 conference in his book, The Stalin school of falsification London 1974, pp181-237. See www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/ssf/sf14.htm.↩︎