CP Leaders want post-war coalition with the Tories¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: CP Leaders want post-war coalition with the Tories
This chapter excoriates the Communist Party’s wartime leadership for its abandonment of revolutionary principle, as evidenced by its official response to the Crimea Conference. The Party’s Executive Committee issued a letter that conspicuously omitted any reference to socialism or socialist revolution, instead endorsing the maintenance of capitalism and claiming the conference heralded a period of permanent peace and co-operation. This, the chapter argues, directly contradicts the teachings of Marx and Lenin, who demonstrated that only socialist revolution can eliminate the economic causes of war. The contradictions of capitalism were aggravated, not solved, by the conflict and the Yalta agreement. The CP leaders presented Churchill as a “progressive” and advocated continued coalition with the Tories after the war, calling for a “Labour and progressive government” that would include Churchill and Eden. This is a betrayal of Lenin’s teaching that workers and capitalists have fundamentally opposed interests.
The chapter situates this betrayal within a broader history of reformist degeneration. The POUM, formed in 1935 from a fusion of Trotskyist and worker-peasant groups, was banned in June 1937 after the Barcelona May Days, with its leader Andreu Nin murdered by Stalinists. The Common Wealth party, founded in 1942, won by-election support from dissatisfied Labour voters. The London Bureau, formed in 1932, grouped centrist organisations that vacillated between reformism and revolution; most relapsed into reformism by the war’s end. The SPGB, founded in 1904, rejected partial struggles and remained sectarian. The chapter also notes the repressive apparatus of the British state: the 1927 Trade Disputes Act, a response to the 1926 general strike, criminalised secondary action and mass picketing, allowed seizure of union funds, and barred civil service unions from the TUC; it was repealed in 1946 but partly revived by Thatcher in 1980. Labour minister Bevin’s 1944 Defence Regulation 1AA criminalised strike incitement in essential services, with five-year prison penalties, while peaceful picketing was made illegal. The CP’s Daily Worker was suppressed from January 1941 to September 1942.
The chapter’s polemic is sharp: the CP’s policy is to the right of the old reformist organisations. The only way to achieve peace and prosperity is for the working class to take power and expropriate the capitalist class. The CP’s policy has nothing in common with communism; the correct policy is that of Marx and Lenin and revolutionary communism.