Olwyn Hughes¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter is a political obituary for Olwyn Hughes, a Welsh miner and lifelong Marxist, written by Alan Woods. Its core argument is that Hughes’s life exemplifies the authentic, class-conscious revolutionary spirit that persisted within the British working class despite the betrayals of the Stalinised Communist Party. The narrative thrust traces Hughes’s political formation from his youth in the Ammanford mining valleys—known as ‘Little Moscow’ due to its militant history—through his wartime break with the Communist Party and his adherence to Trotskyism.
The chapter makes several key claims. First, that the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution produced a cynical and dishonest British Communist Party, whose leadership mechanically reversed its line to serve Moscow’s diplomatic needs. The evidence is stark: the CP’s abrupt shift from ‘popular frontism’ to an ultra-left policy after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and then, in summer 1941, to full support for the imperialist war effort, demanding increased productivity and a halt to strikes. A vivid anecdote describes a comrade, Dudley Edwards, forced to tear up a speech and deliver its opposite on the eve of war. Second, the chapter argues that only the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) offered a principled alternative: defence of the USSR combined with class independence, calling on Labour to break the coalition and nationalise industry under workers’ control. The CPGB responded with the scurrilous pamphlet Hitler’s Secret Agents and sought to have the RCP banned. Third, the chapter contends that Hughes’s Marxism was not bookish but forged in lived experience. This is demonstrated through the harrowing account of a mining explosion: Hughes entered the mine first, found a friend whose skin had been blasted away, and later witnessed the mine owner and inspector fabricate evidence—claiming a box of matches was found in the dead man’s pocket—to blame the victim. The heat had melted metal, making the claim absurd. This incident, Woods insists, reveals more about Hughes’s unshakeable class loyalty than any text.
Historically, the chapter draws on the class war in the South Wales coalfields, the memory of the 1926 General Strike, the affiliation of the South Wales miners’ union to the Communist International, and the impact of the Spanish Civil War. Theoretically, it contrasts Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism with the CP’s caricature of it, and defends the Trotskyist position of unconditional defence of the USSR alongside independent working-class politics.
The polemic is directed squarely at Stalinism. The CPGB leaders are accused of cynically duping a generation of sincere militants, of slandering Trotskyists as fascist agents, and of abandoning all principle to serve the Moscow bureaucracy. The chapter also implicitly argues against any view that dismisses the wartime RCP as sectarian or irrelevant, insisting that its ideas made a real impact, including among CP workers.