Cadres

Eric Hobsbawm

The Lost World of British Communism by Raphael Samuel
Verso, 244 pp, £19.99, November 2006, ISBN 1 84467 103 8
Communists and British Society 1920-91 by Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn
Rivers Oram, 356 pp, £16.99, January 2007, ISBN 978 1 85489 145 7
Bolshevism and the British Left, Part One: Labour Legends and Russian Gold by Kevin Morgan
Lawrence and Wishart, 320 pp, £18.99, March 2007, ISBN 978 1 905007 25 7

Lenin’s ‘vanguard party’ of Marxist cadres, disciplined and ideally full-time, his ‘professional revolutionaries’, was the most formidable political invention of the 20th century. Its impact on the history of that century was extraordinary. Some thirty years after Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, parties of this type ruled over one third of the world’s population. By dint of following the Leninist model, small groups were able to punch far above their weight, while in the right historical circumstances, their structure afforded them enormous potential for expansion and, indeed, state-building. Even in unfavourable conditions, such as those that prevailed in Britain, their impact was out of proportion to their size.

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Vol. 29 No. 8 · 26 April 2007 » Eric Hobsbawm » Cadres (print version)
pages 23-25 | 4426 words

Letters

From David Craig

Eric Hobsbawm’s account of the devoted – and finally abortive – activities of British Communists needs to be supplemented by a few close-up memoirs if we are to take the measure of that doomed phase in the history of the left (LRB, 26 April). I belonged to the Party from 1956 until, in the mid-1970s, it crumbled and dispersed; I gave up on it as an effort that was getting nowhere and could do nothing to stop the self-seeking groups who run our country.

During that time I attended hundreds of branch meetings, canvassed for Labour in England and Scotland (and for the CP when chance arose). I took part in evening meetings and weekend courses, spoke and wrote against the American invasion of Vietnam, and did my best to work as an egalitarian socialist in my dealings with colleagues and students. I served on the CP’s Cultural Committee and discussed things with women and men as intelligent and humane as Margot Heinemann, George Matthews, Brian Simon, and Margot and Arnold Kettle. I even had a comradely conversation with John Gollan when I met him by chance on the summit of Beinn Alligin.

We all seemed to think that one day, not too remotely in the future, our country would be governed by politicians who believed that ‘workers with hand and brain’ should enjoy ‘the full fruits of their labours’; and that social, not capitalist, ownership of ‘production, distribution and exchange’ would take over the economy.

Of course other people believed in these ends and were working towards them too. More than once I sat in the Café Roma in Oxford, watering-place of the New Left after the death of Stalin and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising, and discussed things among the fragrance of espresso and frying vegetable oil with people such as Raphael Samuel and Stuart Hall. They were among the Marxist intellectuals who had broken with Communism after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s cruel tyranny at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, and they taxed me with condoning the gulag (not yet called that), the show trials, the famine caused by collectivisation, the persecution of Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, and so on. I still believed that the Soviet experience was not something we in Britain were doomed to follow; and Khrushchev’s ‘revelations’ did not surprise me because I had made a point of reading such works as Darkness at Noon, not only to spike the guns of anti-Communists but also to face the possibility that enormities could be perpetrated in the name of Marxism and had better be guarded against if ‘the revolution’ ever came about on our tight little island.

One night in Scarborough in 1961, during a weekend school in literature which I had organised for the Workers’ Educational Association, I sat in a bar with Edward Thompson while an impassioned woman, all eagerness to learn, asked him, ‘Edward, what are you trying to achieve?’ – as though, once he had told her, she would throw herself into the same great cause. He replied: ‘To build a left within the Labour Party.’ He did try, and the New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review published much good work striving towards socialism with a human face. Some of us did much the same, throwing what weight we had behind CND, campaigning against the American atrocities in Vietnam and Cambodia, and (at Lancaster University) bringing out a magazine (on pink paper) in the name of an alliance between Communists, Trotskyists, left socialists and other like-minded people.

None of this, we can now see, had any effect. Today we stagger from one atrocity to another, and look with helpless foreboding at places where horror may next break out. The difference is that it is no longer possible to have much trust in organised politics as a means to a better state of affairs, because during my lifetime they have had so tragically slight an effect.

David Craig
Burton-in-Kendal, Cumbria