British Communism, Lost & Found
Just watched the BBC4 doc My Dad was a Communist, courtesy of the invaluable Sphaleotas. It has its moments: nice footage (Cable St soundtracked by the Pixies), a rueful Alexei Sayle revealing his Oedipal Maoism and declaring his relief that the likes of him were never given any political power...but there was one very big elephant in the room, which I'll get to later. I admit an obvious personal interest (as it's confessional month over at SDMYABT). My Grandparents were Communists - in fact they met through the Party, so I owe my very existence to the Communist Party of Great Britain. My Mum's adolescent rebellion took the form of Trotskyism as much as T Rex and cider. So I suppose I share all these talking heads' (David Aaronovitch, Wesker, etc) ambiguity about the genus English Tankie. I've always been torn between admiration of them as uncompromising socialists and asking over Scrabble 'but, erm, why on earth did you stay in the Party after Hungary?' (an event was covered fulsomely in the documentary in question).
Maybe this was in part down to the instrumental reason despised by all pomo-types - the belief that the Motor Of History was the Kremlin and any brutalities or hypocrisies had to be forgiven. The documentary ends with either dimwitted platitudes of left (admiring their 'idealism') and right ('no-one should believe themselves to be in possession of the absolute truth' etc). So we end up with a kind of 'what were we thinking'/I love 1956 post-politics. But this really isn't good enough - not everyone had a post-1989 revelation that they'd devoted their lives to a lie. What I most admire about my Grandparents is that they never gave up, never went off into a rightwing sulk, as so, so many other Communists did. My Grandad, who died last month, actually spent the last 5 years of his life in a Trotskyist organisation, arguing with my Grandma, who'd joined Labour in the early 80s, about the 'scab' party she belonged to...
But what this documentary ignored was just how influential the British Communist Party has been over the last 25 years. Totally unmentioned here was the role the CPGB played as, essentially, the co-creators of New Labour. When Trots, Anarchists and Labour Bennites were fighting back in the class war Thatcher kicked off, much of the CP was claiming that the class war no longer existed. Bea Campbell attacked the miners, Hobsbawm (admirable as a historian, a disaster as a political thinker) applauded the expulsion of Marxists from the Labour Party. People trained in apologias for the embodiment of the march of history in tanks rolling into Hungary and Czechoslovakia were to become rather adept at transferring that march to Capital, laying the groundwork for Market Stalinism. That's not even mentioning the John Reids and the Mandelsons who started in the CP before destroying the British Labour movement. We still live with the legacy of British Communism, not as a tragicomic memory of gauchely confrontational politics, but as that post-political reality itself.
(red star for whoever guesses what the building at the top is...)
posted by owen hatherley at 4:29 pm
11 Comments:
My great-grandparents were Communists, and, given that they eked out a life in dust-blown fly-speck of a rural railway town, I'm always torn between wonder that the Communist Party of Australia ever reached their lives (through the railway union, I guess), and consternation that they were Party members at all during the 30s, 40s and 50s. They died well before I got to have those arguments with them over the Scrabble board - before 1989. Communism's "fall" never happened for them, in their lifetimes, though still I wonder what kept them in the Party during the heyday of Stalinism. How much did they even know, out there in the middle of nowhere, about what was actually going on in Spain, Russia, Hungary...? Am I just making excuses for them?
(Cue the strange political arguments I used to have, as a teenager, with my grandmother. "You're just like my parents!" she'd yell at me, "so idealistic!")
The CPA, having always been a marginalised organisation (there was a referendum under Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1951 to try and ban the CPA - it was lost, a victory for freedom of organisation that I wonder if we'd still see, these days) has played little role in shaping the contemporary Labor Party over here. That said, the Party's authoritarian legacy - particularly during the Vietnam protests of the early 70s, when it played a clear role in "managing" dissent - lives on in the blight that continues to weaken the (tiny) Australian left today: a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between notions of "working class discipline" and a kind of inchoate, libertarian approach that can so often collapse into puerile immaturity.
Oh yeah, and that building is Goldfinger's Daily Worker headquarters in Clerkenwell. But I kind of cheated, so I hereby disqualify myself from any prize draw.
One weird feature of British discourse on communism, which I feel infects the previous comment from the post, although only implicitly present in the latter, is equating 'Tankies' with 'Stalinists'. Who was it who sent in the tanks? Khrushchev, not Stalin. The CPGB departed from Stalin with Khrushchev, and then from the Soviet Union in 1968; the CPA followed the same trajectory. What is it about the Stalin era that people are supposed to have found so abhorrent? The crimes of Stalin are commonplace knowledge now, but contemporaneously could surely be chalked up to Western propaganda.
To the post, I really like the point about the CPGB segueing into Millbank. Mandy is particularly instructive in this regard: he left Labour and joined the Communists because the Militant Tendency had taken control of the Young Socialists and Eurocommunism had taken hold in the CPGB – the CPGB was the social democratic alternative.
It's the Morning Star/ Daily Worker building at the bottom of Clerkenwell Road.
Now the showroom of a bland office furniture company, doubtlessly promoting office desk 'solutions' and such like.
It's a Goldfinger, innit? Or am I thinking about something else?
Yes, it's Goldfinger. Stars all round.
Re: 'Stalinists' - well, isn't it just a general rubric to describe any 'socialism' that follows, in all the essentials (though in Khrushchev's case without the gulags and purges) of the Stalinised USSR...? With or without Uncle Joe. It is overused, and I get irked when eg Cuba, Ho Chi Minh or Yugoslav self-management get described as 'Stalinist' by my fellow Trots - but there really isn't a better term unfortunately.
The 'well we thought it was western propaganda' line only goes so far: it might have worked for the purges, gulags and other brutalities (there had been 'barbarous reds' stories ever since 1917, and usually bollocks) but there's certain points where to be a communist really did involve disabling the thinking part of one's brain: the 'third period' in the Comintern (admittedly not a big factor for the CPGB and CPA), Nazi-Soviet Pact, Berlin '53, Hungary '56 (which is why the latter always gets brought up: it was suddenly so obvious)
Not to be trivial, but the title sounds like a reference to "The Lost World Of British Communism" by Robin Blackburn and Raphael Samuel.
My Grandfather was a communist and apparently put in a cell over night for communist graffiti. Thanks for info on the telly programme. I'm going to try and track it down.
Theres a blog called "An Unrepentant Communist" http://unrepentantcommunist.blogspot.com/
which emanates directly from the tradition of the Communist Party in Britain although the author now lives in Ireland. May I assure you that many, (probably the majority that I am still in touch with), who were in the CP in the past, retain their basic political beliefs and philosophy, and merely regard the loss of the USSR as a regrettable and seriously damaging victory for the forces of imperialism and reaction. Which it undoubtedly was, can anyone seriously imagine the Iraq war, and the bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO if the USSR still existed? 'Tankies' is a pejorative term...believers in the ideological framework of Marxism would still believe that the basic analysis provided by the ideas we have held for many years still bears relevance to this day...after all the first really serious predictor of 'globalisation' was Marx, and Venezuela and Cuba demonstrates that 21st Century socialism is still vibrant, relevant, and developing
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