Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 22:43:22 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Re: The Search for a Western Proletariat: Lukacs,  Korsch,  Gramsci & Modernity



Candice asks:

>Wasn't the [British CP] still a growing force >subsequent to the 
>General Strike of 1926?...
>What was its relationship to the Labour Party >during this period?


From`the beginning,  the Labour Party rejected outright all attempts by the
CP to affiliate with it.    The Communists,  for their part,  were already
seeking to undermine Labour authority in the trade unions through such
organizations as the Minority Movement and the National Unemployed Workers'
Movement;  and it was not surprising that the alliance should have been
consistently rejected by the Labor Party leadership.    Indeed,  the
Communist assault from the Left was one of the factors which drove moderate
Labour parties to seek an open or covert bourgeois alliance.

These inconsistencies within the CP were,  however,  complicated by violent
zigzags of policy within Comintern itself.    Delays in the realization of
European revolution (obstinately denied by our two flyweight Trotsky
epigones), the introduction of NEP,  the opening up of trade relations with
the capitalist world,  all brought with them a certain mitigation of
Moscow's uncompromising hostility to the West.    In December 1921 the
Executive Committee of the Comintern for the first time issued the slogan of
a "united front" with other working class parties and support for "Labour
Governments;  and three months later the CP was formally instructed to
"establish relations" with the General Council of the TUC and to apply once
more for admission to the Labour Party.    

Once again,  the CP was rebuffed,  and it was back to the drawing board (and
more hurried trips to Moscow).    A report on the whole Labour Party--CP
affair was commissioned and issued,  the results of which were far reaching.
The Party was re-organized on the model of the Russian party,   discipline
was tightened,  and it was decided to refrain from electoral attacks on the
Labour Party.    Politically,  these changes yielded some dividends; in 1923
two Communists,  Newbold and Saklatvala,  standing for constituencies where
there was no Labour candidate,  were elected to Parliament with unofficial
Labour support.

This tacit alliance was,  however,  never welcomed or sanctioned by the
Labour leaders,  and its artificiality was quickly demonstrated.   What
proved fatal to it was the accession of Labour to power in early 1924.
The CP could, at the cost of some mutal embarassment,  support a Labour
opposition;  it could not conceivably support a Labour government.    The
London conference of the Labour Party later that year took steps to
categorically exclude individual Communists from any branch of the party,
though they could still be admitted as members of affiliated trade unions.
The ulitmate crisis arose,  logically enough,  out of the General Strike.
This was the parting of the ways between those who wanted revolution and
those who rejected revolution.     It quickly became clear that the majority
of those who had embarked on the General Strike were not prepared to cross
the Rubicon which separates strike from revolution,  even if by holding back
they brought about the defeat of the strikers.

The Communists,  applauded and backed by Moscow,  denounced the retreat as
treachery to the working class,  but thereby only revealed their own
isolation.    The prestige of the CP,  as well as that of the Soviet
government,  already on the decline in the period immediately preceding the
Strike,  underwent a severe slump.     In the early 1920s sympathy with
Soviet Russia among the Labour rank-and-file had not only tempered official
Labour hostility to the Communists but had put an effective brake on
official action against Soviet Russia.    Now only the feeblest of protests
followed the Arcos raid and the breaking off of relations with the Soviet
Union in 1927.    Under the first Baldwin government,  anti-Communist
feeling reached its height.     Communist Party membership fell from
11,000--12,000 immediately after the General Strike (already down from a
high in 1925 of 14,000) to barely 5,000 in the following year.    The Party
thereafter was to undergo a long series of reorganizations,  recriminations,
and outright splits over the next decades.    Thoughts of a mass party,
entertained briefly in 1925-26,  were abandoned or at least relegated to an
indeterminate future.    

So the short answer to your question is "no".    The best modern account of
this period is in W.J. Hobbes,  *The Communist Party and the General Strike
of 1926* (Cambridge,  Ma., 1981: Harvard University Press).    See also
Daniel F. Calhoun,  *The United Front: The TUC and the Russians,  1923-1928*
(Cambridge, 1978: Cambridge University Press).

Finally,  re your comments on the development of Marxism within the German
working class,  may I suggest Stanley Pierson's *Marxist Intellectuals and
the Working Class Mentality in Germany,  1887-1912* (Cambridge,  Ma., 1993:
Harvard University Press).     Read especially,  in light of the debate here
on the list,   Chapter 11 ("Marxism Exhausted").


Louis Godena   



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