Introduction

On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the General Strike we are republishing a number of articles, and excerpts of articles, which provide a kaleidoscopic snapshot of the response of the Italian Left to a momentous occasion in the history of the international working class. They present us with a view of the General Strike which goes beyond parochialism and sees the events in the context of international events, especially the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.

The official ’left-wing’ interpretation provided by Hobsbawn, described in a recent biographical dictionary as „A prominent Marxist scholar” and „authority on the history of the working classes” is shown to stand in marked contrast with ours in the article How to Write History.

Hobsbawn’s thesis is built around the indisputable fact of the betrayal of the trade union leaders, but what Hobsbawn fails to mention – and a half-truth causes more damage than a straightforward lie – is that the Communist International was equally responsible for this betrayal, because it not only bestowed an aura of left-wing credibility on these same leaders, but virtually handed over the leadership of the workers’ movement into their hands. In this, we agree with Trotski’s criticisms of Comintern policy, but if Trotski went so far as demanding a clear break with these leaders, and condemned the Comintern for failing to break with the „Left TUC” after the General Strike, the Italian Left would trace the error back to the united front tactic, a policy which Trotski had helped to formulate and which he would continue to uphold, to the extent that after the strike he continued to defend the policy of the CPGB pleading to affiliate to the Labour Party. The united front tactic, officially launched by the Executive Committee of the Communist International in December 1921, would force the CPGB into an unholy alliance with the forces of reformism, their natural enemies, and compel it to soften its criticism of reformism and therefore negate its raison d’etre – which is to provide a clear revolutionary alternative to reformism and bourgeois democracy. Rather than the united front providing a wonderful opportunity for the workers to „compare and contrast” the reformist and communist positions, the confusing neighbourliness of reformists and communists had the reverse effect in having the latter bolster the unwarranted revolutionary credentials of the former.

The Italian Left interpretation of the United Front, whilst accepting the postulates of the 3rd Comintern Congress that it was not enough to have communist parties, but was necessary to have Communist parties with strong links with the masses, differed in recommending that this linking up be accomplished in their rightful place – the workers economic organisations. Here workers could compare the communist with other class positions in the practical struggle; and here communists could work with individuals of different political alignments without producing the confusion born of formal political pacts.

The united front tactic, as endorsed by the Comintern, accepted such political pacts between parties, and in combination with the Comintern approved tactic of working within parliament, also vigorously opposed by the Italian Left, caused even more confusion as to the exact nature of the CPGB’s revolutionary programme. No amount of eloquent pamphlets explaining the independence of the communist party could take away from the damage caused by the observable fact of communists entering the parliamentary circus and becoming performing clowns. In Britain this tactic would be reduced to vertiginous levels of ambiguity and confusion by having communists stand as Labour Party candidates and enter parliament subject to Labour Party discipline and their party whip.

But omission is not Hobsbawn’s only crime, he also develops the highly dubious argument that since the Establishment was expecting and was prepared for the General Strike (and this was indeed the case) it was necessarily trying to goad the workers into an unsuccessful revolt which it could then ruthlessly crush. The upshot of Hobsbawn’s argument is that with this as the Government’s alleged intent, the workers were correct to have been so orderly and disciplined and thus foil the Government’s clever plan. This „prominent marxist scholar” thus would have us forget that the bourgeois State is ALWAYS prepared to crush proletarian revolts, and that its very existence operates as a constant „goad” to the workers. If the Government is more prepared than usual, the proletariat must be better prepared still. Hobsbawn simply wishes to terrify us with the bourgeoisie’s strength rather than concentrating on strengthening the proletariat. Unfortunately for him his argument also leads him to inadvertently negate his earlier criticism of the Trade union leaders – for who was more disciplined and orderly than they?

In the article The Comintern’s Tactics (we will publish later instalments in future editions of CL), we can see how the betraying trade union leaders had their prestige raised in the eyes of the workers by means of the Anglo-Russian Trade-Union Committee, and this is depicted as running parallel with an increasing conflict between the interests of the Russian State and the International proletarian movement.

The first trade agreement with Great Britain, signed on March 16, 1921, took place in a situation where 40% of Russian gold reserves, or #68,000,000, was sitting in the Bank of England having been sent to Britain during the war to maintain British currency. The British Government agreed not to claim or dispose of the property of the former tsarist and provisional governments of Russia sum pending a general peace treaty between the two countries. Between 1921 and 1924, the amount of trade between the two countries, as recorded by the chairman of the Soviet Trade Delegation rose from #3,4000,000 sterling to #11,100,000 and in 1924, further trade treaties between the two countries were signed, with a possible third agreement, relating to the question of a substantial loan, kept tantalisingly dangled before the Soviet delegation, with the brickbat of reparations and non-return of the gold reserves kept threateningly in the foreground.

To solve the immediate problems of a starving and war-weary population, and in order to rebuild a productive apparatus, the Russian state increasingly came to rely on diplomatic negotiations with other countries. The first treaties were signed in February 1921 with Persia and Afghanistan, then in March 1921 with Turkey, where 16 communist leaders had recently been liquidated. The policy from now on was that inter-state relations would not be disturbed by the attitude of foreign governments to communists in their own country. In May 1921, the first Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was signed with the Soviet government agreeing to cease all propaganda that might threaten the interests of the British Empire, especially in Asia, and it was sufficient to cause Chicherin to explain at the 10th Conference of the Russian Communist Party that this marked a significant new departure in Russian foreign policy. But were not such compromises inevitable?

Lenin addressed this issue in his pamphlet The Tax in Kind (15/3/1921) where he set out two conditions for the building of socialism in Russia. In an economically backward country like Russia, he wrote, the transition to socialism was only possible on two conditions: 1/ „agreement between the proletariat, which is realising the dictatorship, or which holds political power, and the majority of the peasant population” and 2/ „on the condition that it receives timely support from the socialist revolution in one or several advanced countries” (…) „In the main, the position is as follows: we must satisfy the economic needs of the middle peasantry and agree to free turnover, otherwise, owing to the delay in the international revolution, it will be impossible, economically impossible, to retain the power of the proletariat in Russia”. He went on to outline a number of less-than-socialist economic compromises, including trade deals and loans from foreign capital, which would be necessary to preserve a proletarian bridgehead within the State, whose full communist programme could then be activated when revolution broke out in the West

Lenin’s formula was to buy time in Russia whilst the Communist International co-ordinated the revolutionary movements in other countries. Once revolutions in the West had successfully installed communist parties in power in the developed West, Russia would be able to quickly dispense with commercial relations with its peasantry because modern techniques and resources from the West would accelerate the march to collectivisation by breaking down all the little small local economies and integrating the peasantry more quickly with the most modern and efficient production techniques. The Revolutions in the West would be the Fifth Cavalry which would relieve the embattled communist forces in Russia and enable them to proceed to fulfilling the full communist programme.

Such compromises wielded with the dialectical adeptness of Lenin, who never lost sight of the long-term goals of communism whilst grasping the nettle of the necessity for the Communist party to maintain the Russian State as a citadel of revolutionary resources, might have caused minimal damage under his guidance, but his illness and death at the beginning of 1924 left a vacuum which would soon be filled by men who would forget many of the injunctions that had guided his actions. Soon the interests of preserving the Russian State would be allowed to run counter to the aim of spreading revolution in the West. In 1924, at the 5th Congress the policy of supporting so-called workers government was reinforced and an increasing ’meshing’ with the leaderships of the social-democrats was urged. But such meshing appeared to be no longer with the main eye to encouraging a revolutionary outcome to workers’ struggles, but in anticipation that these same social democratic leaders would soon be forming governments: governments which might declare against an aggressive war policy on Russia and grant favourable trade concessions to the Russian State.

Such indeed occurred and 1924 would see ’left’ governments installed both in France – the Left-wing bloc under Herriot – and in Britain where MacDonald took up his place as prime-minister at the head of a minority Labour Government, granting diplomatic recognition to Russia, as well as signing two draft treaties with Russia. In exchange, the communist party would be bound still more tightly to the Labour Party and the trade-union leaders, an accomplishment made all the easier after more effective control of the CPGB had been accomplished though the ’bolshevisation’ measures which had also been passed at the 5th Comintern Congress in the same year, and which ensured that the leaders of the communist parties were handpicked by Moscow, and a regime of stifling blind faith installed, inspired by fear of being ousted rather than genuine conviction.

At the Trades Union Congress, which met on September 1, 1924, Purcell, one of the celebrated Trade-union left-wing leaders which Russia was so actively courting at the expense of the Communist Party and the Profintern, would give clear evidence of his credentials as a whole-hearted protagonist of the treaties: «The vital point is that Russia has been devastated and her economic organisation in many places destroyed. In the work of reorganisation her demand for goods of all kinds, rendered necessary by the gigantic efforts at reconstruction, makes her at once the largest customer – in fact, the greatest in Europe and Asia – and the smallest of our competitors in heavy industries. Her potentialities as a food producer make her the biggest factor in reducing world food prices. For this reason our entire weight must be thrown persistently on the side of the treaty at all costs» (A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations, K. Coates, L & W). This appeal was evidently directed at the pockets of British capitalists, and the British unemployed insofar as it hinted at jobs, and found considerable support amongst them. The only annoying thing, prompting the opposition of the Federation of British Industries was that the Soviet Government refused to renounce its monopoly of foreign trade in the interests of British manufacturers and merchants who would be prevented from increasing their booty. The Russian State then was becoming a large commercial competitor.

The triumph of the Bukharin-Rykov tendency in Russia would reverse Lenin’s view that the fate of Russian state depended on the fate of world revolution, and instead make the world revolution depend on the existence of that State. Eventually the Russian State, torn by the problems of reconstructing capitalist relations at the same time as aiming to destroy them, and swelled by a huge intake of opportunists and place-seekers lacking in genuine communist conviction, would launch a doctrine which whilst it attempted to harmonise the aims of reconstructing a productive apparatus in Russia with socialism produced instead a travesty of Marxism known as ’Socialism in one Country’; a philosophy which implied communism was possible of achievement on a national rather than international scale. The victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution which the installation of this pseudo-marxist philosophy signalled would coincide with attacks against the Russian Opposition and the Italian Left, which would eventually result in them being expelled from the Comintern under a welter of insults and misrepresentation and eventually lead to the extermination of most of the Bolshevik old guard.

The General Strike was one of the casualties of these developments, and its failure marks a definitive separation of the Russian State from the international proletarian movement: for what use the Russian State and the Comintern if it was continually going to deliver the working class into the hands of its enemies?

It is therefore difficult to think of the Comintern’s tactics at the time of the strike – disciplining the CPGB to the authority to the General Council of the TUC – as just a mistake. If this was the case – and Stalin would join the chorus of condemnation against the trade union leaders after the strike in the press of the CPGB – then one way of damage limitation lay open to the Comintern: a clean break with these leaders by disbanding the Anglo-Russian Committee. The ARC had come about after prolonged contacts between the Trade union organisations of Russia and England which had seen the Soviet trade union delegation addressing the Hull Congress of the TUC in 1924, and a return visit to Russia by an English delegation, bulging with academics and government experts, some weeks later. This move produced a dramatic rightward shift in the policy of the CPGB and suddenly the task was no longer one of getting a majority of communists onto the General Council of the TUC but rather that of pushing the current General Council forward and giving it the confidence to uphold the international unity campaign with a tacit acknowledgement that they would not be criticised by the communists. But if this campaign was defended in the name of ’international trade union unity’, since it de facto indicated a backdoor way to uniting the Amsterdam and Red trade union internationals – itself a questionable way of going about it – Stalin hoped the committee would ’play an enormous role in the struggle against all possible interventions directed against the USSR’. This cause of Trade union unity, which gave the Trade union leaders left-wing credibility at very little cost, had the effect of discouraging independent rank-and-file leadership, the detrimental consequences of which would be felt during the General Strike.

So if mistake indeed it was, rather than calculated sacrifice of the English workers movement on the altar of capitalist stabilisation in Russia, then the Comintern could go part way to remedying the mistake by splitting with the traitorous Union leaders. This would not happen, with suspicious implications as noted by Trotski in his book The Third International After Lenin: «The maintenance of the amicable bloc with the General Council, and the simultaneous support of the protracted and isolated economic strike of the mine workers, which the General Council came out against, seemed, as it were, to be calculated beforehand to allow the heads of the trade unions to emerge from this heaviest test with the least possible losses». Once the revolutionary deluge had subsided, the English trade-union leaders, typical representatives of the petty bourgeois, could clearly see who was going to butter their bread – the British bourgeoisie. They could now dispense with the left-wing veneer provided by the Russians and it would be they, not the Russian leaders, who would leave the Anglo-Russian Committee.

Macdonald in Power, and Capitalism’s Mortal Crisis are excerpts from articles published by the Italian Left in 1928 and 1929 in Prometeo, the paper of the Left-wing Fraction of the Italian Communist Party which formed at Pantin in France in 1928 after fascism had become entrenched in Italy. Like the other articles, they draw attention to the failed strategy of forging alliances with other so-called workers parties.

There are many lessons to be drawn from the fiasco of the General Strike, but perhaps the main one of all is that the communist party must at all cost preserve its independence and its revolutionary doctrine, and resist attempts to win influence by yoking itself to the bigger social-democratic parties. Any alliance between the Communist party and other parties, especially parliamentary parties, not only serves to sow confusion in the minds of the proletariat about exactly what marxist communism is, but also serves as a recipe for lowering consciousness to the level of social-democracy, not raising it to the level of revolutionary communism.

The question nevertheless remains: How does the Communist Party establish links with the masses? Our solution to the problem we will consider in another article in this issue The Comintern and the United Front.