The Lost World of British Communism by Raphael Samuel

Author:Raphael Samuel
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books

Leadership was constitutive, a pre-condition of political work. No meeting could be convened except under the aegis of a higher authority; no discussion could take place unless there was an ‘experienced’ comrade to lead it; ‘every activity’, in the words of a 1923 training manual, ‘has its leading committee or directing authority’.16 Leadership, in short, was an existential necessity in Party life. As Liu Shao-chi put it in On the Party (1950): ‘Three Party members in a factory or village do not necessarily constitute a Party organization. They must be organized according to the principle of democratic centralism. Under ordinary conditions, one of the three should be the group leader and the other two the members of the group, so that in all activities there will be a leader and two followers. Only then can it become a Party organization.’17 In the British Party, the arithmetic proportions were sometimes no less bizarre. There were ‘leading comrades’ in every sphere of Party work, ‘leading comrades’ in even the tiniest groups-factory cells of no more than three, for example, in the Party of the 1920s. The principle, if not the proportions, were adhered to in the more prosperous times of the anti-fascist war. The Factory Group, writes Sam Blackwell, ‘must have its leadership. Up to ten comrades, a group leader; over ten, a small committee of key comrades.’18

The leader principle, as it operated in the Communist Party, was very different from that prevalent in the Labour Party and the big trade unions. It eschewed any notion of personality, it allowed no space for the fixer, the broker or the ‘card’ – i.e., the machine boss of whom Herbert Morrison was the 1920s prototype. Party leaders had none of that strutting self-importance which is the hallmark of the Westminster politician, nor yet of the town-hall grandee, promoting protégés, signing expensive contracts or distributing largesse. They did not throw their weight about in the manner of the old-time trade-union boss (the Party had no ‘rough diamonds’ to compare with Ernest Bevin or Arthur Deakin). Leaders were admired, when they were admired, not in and for themselves, but as bearers of the Party’s cherished virtues: dignity, fortitude, perseverance, sacrifice, learning and (this being a British Party) good humour. As in other spheres of British life, there was a distinct, if unstated, prejudice against cleverness. What was expected of leaders was not that they should be brilliant but that they should be firm. They needed to have fire in their oratory; but they were required, first and foremost, to be ‘clear’. ‘Clarity’ stood on a par with ‘correctness’ in the Pantheon of Communist virtues: ‘crystal clarity’ in dispelling confusions; ‘precision’ in expounding the Party line; ‘extreme simplicity’ (‘very characteristic of Stalin’)19 in presenting an argument; the ability to grasp essentials, ‘so that’ (in the words of an admirer of William Gallacher) ‘questions which puzzle intellectuals become transformed into plain good sense’.20 Whatever its nominal godheads, the Communist Party had no gurus, in the manner of British

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