Review | Raising the Red Flag

Vik Chechi-Ribeiro reviews Raising the Red Flag which looks at the period leading up to the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1921 and is recently published by Haymarket Books.

‘The workers’ party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy.’ – Engels, 1871

The fall out from this year’s General Election has seen renewed discussion on communist organisation and the ‘party question’. In this sense, the publication of Tony Collins’ Raising the Red Flag – Marxism, Labourism, and the Roots of British Communism 1884-1921 detailing the period leading to the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) is timely. The book details splits and mergers of communist sects, chauvinist attitudes on nationalism, sexism and international solidarity, debates on operating inside and outside the Labour Party. Whilst our context is clearly different, the results of those past debates may be useful to those engaging in organisational questions today. 

Collins begins with a history of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1884, a forerunner of the British Socialist Party (BSP). The key political figure was businessman Henry Hyndman – a self-described Marxist but described by Collins as a ‘little England nationalist’ for his chauvinist attitudes.  

The formation of the SDF coincided with an upsurge in industrial strife including the famous Matchwomen and London Docks strikes, which resulted in a mass increase in trade union membership. However, despite having leaders on the Dock strikes, the SDF held a scepticism of independent working class action and prioritised building a parliamentary bloc rather than an industrial base. This refusal to engage with the strike wave and merge the burgeoning socialist and workers’ movements was a missed opportunity. It was also a potential explanation of why the SDF did not develop into a mass socialist organisation as was seen in other countries such as Germany during the Second International period.

The SDF’s sexism, chauvinist attitude to trade unions, and opposition to Irish independence resulted in several splits and the formation of more stridently anti-imperialist and rank and file groups including the Socialist League (SL) and Socialist Labour Party (SLP). Collins rues how these new formations, whilst holding serious political differences to the SDF, avoided openly polemicising against it because they believed it would slowly disappear over time. Collins concludes that this left Hyndman and his followers off the hook as it meant there was no public differentiation between radical groups and other tendencies on the left.

Instead, the social democratic and reformist Independent Labour Party (ILP), a major group in the future Labour Representation Committee (LRC), forerunner to the Labour Party supported strike action through the 1880s and 1890, filling the political vacuum left by the revolutionary groups. This resulted in a huge increase in the membership of the ILP and ‘revolutionary socialism ceasing to grow and the rival propaganda of constitutional action becoming the characteristic feature of the English socialist movement.’ Collins suggests this process was by no means inevitable. Rather, it was a result of strategic missteps from the SDF caused by a ‘paternalistic socialist’ attitude and mistrust of independent working class activity. 

The book details the impact of two seismic events: World War One and the Russian Revolution. This resulted in cleavages between those supporting the war and revolutionary defeatists such as John Maclean, those radicalised by the Russian Revolution and those inside the newly formed Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy terrified at the replication of revolution on British shores. Interestingly, Collins describes the modernisation of the Labour Party including the introduction of Clause 4, and how the formation of local branches and membership rights was an attempt to co-opt the revolutionary mood following the 1917 revolution. 

The Russian Revolution and the creation of the Communist International (Comintern) hastened desires for a unified communist party comprising the various socialist and communist parties outside the Labour Party. This resulted in the formation of the United Socialist Council (USC). Following years of protracted unity talks and five British groups attending the Second Congress of the Comintern, moves were finally made towards a British Communist Party founding conference. 

Raising the Red Flag finishes at this moment, with the formation of the CPGB in 1920 – ‘the largest gathering of communists that had ever assembled in Britain’. However, the absention of the SLP and Workers Socialist Federation (WSF) due to questions on parliamentarism and Labour Party affiliation, meant the founding conference and the composition of delegates resembled an ‘enlarged BSP, formerly known as the SDF’. 

The CPGB and the Labour Party

Key debates at the founding conference ranged from the relationship between elected officials (such as MPs and councillors) and party discipline, to affiliation to the Labour Party. At this point the Labour Party had a significant parliamentary presence and garnered the support of millions of working class voters and the trade union bureaucracy. The debate on affiliation dominated the conference, lasting for four hours with 30 speakers! The pro-affiliation position won the debate by a closer than expected 100 votes to 85. As Collins notes, the decision of the SLP and WSF (both anti-affiliation groups) to abstain from the founding conference was crucial in the CPGB’s decision to apply for Labour Party affiliation. The party’s application was predictably rejected but maintained a consistently timid rather than oppositional relationship.

Collins describes an example where hundreds of thousands of British workers demonstrated against war with Soviet Russia. The CPGB had an opportunity to use the Labour Party’s rejection to affiliate as a wedge issue between the Labour Party and trade union leadership and its more radical rank and file members. However, the CPGB ‘adopted the stance of a confused but sincere friend of the party, seeking to demonstrate that its programme was merely a more consistent and unwavering version of the Labour Party’. The CPGB leadership ‘denied its own politics’ and ‘prettified the politics of Labour,’ laughably claiming the Labour Party is fighting for the ‘overthrow of capitalism’. This failure of the CPGB to differentiate itself from Labour was crucial – why join a small revolutionary party such as the CPGB when the Labour Party, already a party of government, could deliver socialism through parliament? 

This muddled characterisation of both the Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy as well-intentioned ‘inconsistent socialists’ was a fundamental misunderstanding of the conservatising pressures on those institutions and the presence of politically hostile anti-communist ‘state loyalists’. (Collins describes another example where the CPGB failed to politically intervene during the 1921 miners strike.) This mischaracterisation also meant the CPGB failed to contend with, as Collins describes, ‘the central question…of state power to the establishment of working class rule’. 

Collins concludes that the failure of revolutionary tendencies in Britain to constitute themselves into a mass communist party lies ‘in the political sphere’. As witnessed across Europe, it was inadequate in the post-war period to assume an inevitable growth of socialist support amongst the working class. 

The task of building a revolutionary party was more difficult in Britain following the foothold the Labour Party had gained and its strong relationship with the trade union bureaucracy. In this context, the CPGB failed to sufficiently unite socialist forces around a political programme, oppose chauvinism and politically demarcate itself from the Labour Party. 

On its own terms, rather than offering an alternative path to revolutionary socialism, in government the Labour Party curbed the working class struggle and acted no differently to Lloyd George and his Conservative successors. But the stunted growth of the pre-war revolutionary left meant the formation of the CPGB had to be ‘built from scratch’ with no central leader playing ‘any significant role in the working class movement before 1919.’ 

Raising the Red Flag is a riveting history of British communism between the Second International and interwar period. Those advocating for ‘a party’, i.e., an organisation capable of realising the political independence of the working class, should not try to recreate the formation of the CPGB. However, in Collins’ closing words, those with the benefit of hindsight should ‘examine the political lessons of the past, and turn them into a political programme that will free the working class and all the oppressed’.