Communist Party conference prepares post-war sell-out¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter digest from Socialist Appeal (November 1944) delivers a polemical autopsy of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s national conference held in October 1944, arguing that the Stalinist leadership is actively preparing a post-war sell-out of working-class interests through class collaboration with the bourgeoisie. The core narrative thrust is that the CPGB, far from representing revolutionary socialism, has become an instrument for disciplining the British working class into accepting capitalist exploitation after the war, mirroring the Stalinist betrayal already underway across Europe.
The chapter makes several key claims. First, the CPGB’s conference programme—demanding higher wages, nationalisation of basic industries, and better housing—is exposed as demagogic window-dressing, since the leadership insists these reforms can be achieved through collaboration with the capitalist class rather than through independent working-class struggle. The evidence cited is the wartime record: the CPGB’s systematic sabotage of workers’ struggles, its role as strike-breakers and blacklegs, and its enforcement of “equality of sacrifice” that delivered profits for capitalists and misery for the masses. Even Palme Dutt is quoted admitting that capitalist profits “had increased by leaps and bounds during the war.”
Second, the chapter argues that the CPGB’s post-war perspective is a fantasy. It draws on A.J. Cummings’ sympathetic News Chronicle report to demonstrate how the conference was indistinguishable from a Tory meeting—complete with British and Russian flags draped together, and Pollitt’s plea for “economic co-operation between the capitalist and socialist world.” The chapter counters this with a Leninist analysis: the capitalists are bound by their class interests to colonial exploitation and monopoly; cooperation with them means submission on their terms. It invokes Lenin’s critique of Millerandism to argue that such collaboration produces “wonderful plans on paper” that are never implemented.
Third, the chapter predicts intensified interimperialist rivalry after the war, not the idyllic cooperation the CPGB promises. Roosevelt’s declared intention to treble US exports, combined with America’s cheaper production and Britain’s stripped-back investments, will force a savage assault on workers’ living standards. The Stalinists’ talk of nationalisation is dismissed as dishonest unless it includes refusing compensation to capitalist parasites.
The chapter’s most notable polemic is against the CPGB’s electoral strategy. When a Welsh delegate moved an amendment opposing alliances with “progressive Tories,” the executive rejected it, with John Gollan denouncing the amendment as “perilously close to the line of the Labour Party in wanting to fight alone.” The chapter seizes on this to argue that the Stalinists are openly supporting Tories, undermining the hard-won independence of working-class organisation that Lenin championed.
On the war in Asia, the chapter attacks Pollitt’s hypocritical demand that the British government apply the Atlantic Charter to colonial possessions while simultaneously supporting British imperialism’s war aims. The 5,000,000 Indian famine deaths are presented as the real answer to such phrase-mongering. The chapter concludes by counterposing the Trotskyist position—independent working-class struggle leading to the overthrow of capitalism—against the Stalinist betrayal, calling on communist workers to recognise that their leaders have abandoned revolutionary socialism.