Common Wealth and the labour movement¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter dissects the rise and inevitable decline of the Common Wealth Party during the Second World War, framing it not as a genuine socialist vanguard but as a transient political expression of the middle class’s wartime ruination. The core argument is that Common Wealth’s spectacular by-election successes were a direct consequence of the Labour Party’s paralysis—its subordination to the Coalition government left working-class opposition without an electoral outlet, allowing a radicalised petty bourgeoisie to fill the vacuum with a demagogic, superficially socialist programme. The chapter insists this was a symptom of the labour movement’s inertness, not a sign of Common Wealth’s independent strength.
Key claims rest on a class analysis: the ruin of the lower middle class during the war shattered its traditional allegiance to British capitalism, driving it toward a radical posture. However, the author argues that Common Wealth’s programme is in essence indistinguishable from Labour’s, meaning its appeal is purely contingent on Labour’s immobility. With the Coalition’s end and Labour assuming power, the gravitational pull of the mass labour organisations will crush Common Wealth—splits, membership loss, and irrelevance are predicted as inevitable. The evidence cited is the pattern of by-election victories, which the author treats as ephemeral bubbles, not durable realignments.
Historically, the chapter situates Common Wealth within the broader crisis of British capitalism during total war, when class allegiances frayed but had not yet been reconstituted. The theoretical context is orthodox Trotskyist: the petty bourgeoisie cannot lead; it oscillates between revolution and reaction. The polemical target is twofold. First, the Labour Party is attacked for its class-collaborationist role in the Coalition, which betrayed working-class interests and created the space for middle-class radicalism. Second, Common Wealth itself is dismissed as a transient, unstable formation—its radicalism is demagogic, not revolutionary. The chapter’s sharpest warning is that if the organised workers fail to give the middle class a militant lead against big business, Common Wealth or its successors could become the basis for a new fascist movement. The task for revolutionists is therefore to integrate these radicalised petty bourgeois elements into the mass organisations of labour, without conceding to their illusions, through practical agreements directed against big business. The prose is unsparing: Common Wealth is not a partner but a phenomenon to be absorbed and dissolved.