Mallado

Brian Pearce, interview, 1 February 1999.

Minutes of Working Committee on Party History (24 January 1957), Manchester, C P/C ent/C om m /10/02.

Ibid

B. Pearce to J.R. Campbell (15 Decem ber 1956), Manchester, C P /C en t/C o m m /10/02. Campbell’s refusal is contained in a note to Frank Jackson (24 January 1957), Manchester, C P/C ent/C om m /10/02.

B. Pearce to J.R. Campbell (15 Decem ber 1956). Ibid.

Ibid.

Minutes of Editing Commission (4 March 1956) Minutes of Editing Commission (2 May 1957). Ibid.

believed that ‘as an essential preliminary to the writing of any history of the Party, a series of scrupulously careful studies of the chief episodes in the Party’s struggle since its foundation must be prepared’.

The Commission had planned to utilise members for research and placed a letter in the Party press calling for volunteers. Finally, however, in February 1958, Page Arnot proposed that ‘the present plan of the Commission should be abandoned in view of the failure up to date to obtain the necessary help in gathering factual details’. I t was also suggested that James Klugmann should be appointed, full-time, to write the history, that a time limit of one year be placed upon the writing and that ‘the draft should then be submitted to the Executive Committee’. H o b s b a w m asked if ‘this would mean the ending of the Commission’, but was told that although it would not be wound up, members need not hold themselves available.^^® Klugmann’s ‘openly partisan’ Historv of the Communist Partv of Great Britain was published in 1968 and ran to two volumes. The Historians Group, according to Hobsbawm was not to be associated with the actual history’. I n d e e d , in his Preface, Klugmann, whilst acknowledging the assistance of several Party figures, did not cite any of the CPGB Historians Group. The writing of the Party’s history is one example of how the leadership’s preoccupation with control during this period meant that its practice persistently fell short of its rhetoric.

New formations

Although over 7,000 left the Party during the period between the secret speech and the 25^*^ Congress, a coherent opposition or sustained alternative to established British Communism did not emerge. The Reasoner put itself in the forefront in terms of the debate, arguing that ‘this is the time to examine our mistakes. Their effect has been to isolate us from the Labour movement, to diminish our political influence and to hinder the devoted work for Socialism of a generation of Communists’. A p a r t from The Reasoner and the New Reasoner

Minutes of Political Committee CPGB (15 April 1957), Manchester, C P /C ent/C om m /10/01.

Minutes of Editing Commission, (27 February 1958). Ibid.

Ibid.

Klugmann, Historv of the Communist Partv of Great Britain. 191 9-19 24 . 11. Klugmann published the second volume on the period. The General Strike 1 9 2 5-19 27 . in 1969, after which Noreen Branson took the history up to 1951.

Hobsbawm, T h e Historian’s Group of the Communist Party", 30. Thompson and Saville, Taking Stock’, 6.

which superseded it, another journal emerged in 1957, edited by four Labour Party members, two of whom were ex-Communists, with the aim of creating ‘a mass basis in the universities for socialist thought’. T h e proposed title was New University Left, but it appeared as Universities and Left Review. I t s editors included Raphael Samuel and Stuart Hall and it boasted an impressive range of contributors for its first two issues, including Saville, Thompson and Hobsbawm, as well as Richard Crossman, Michael Foot, Lindsay Anderson and Issac D e u ts c h e r .T h is journal merged with New Reasoner in 1959 resulting in New Left Review, but the tendency which these publications represented never recaptured the ‘political influence’ for which The Reasoner had called.

Driven as they were, by powerful intellects, these journals more than held their own in the political debates of the period, both with the CPGB and within the established political culture. The headquarters, a coffee shop in Soho, became a centre for organising the Aldermaston Marches and New Left writers frequently engaged in discourse with the fashionable media. Despite these considerable achievements, the New Left made little appeal to the organised working class. Its clear position on unilateralism found a resonance, particularly amongst students. Calls for other political objectives such as workers’ control, however, were heeded only by those for whom, in any practical sense, the idea would always remain abstract.

The Communist Party, by contrast, retained genuine roots within British trade unionism. Although probably not an accurate reflection of CPGB membership, statistics showing the occupational composition of National Congress delegates, indicate that the Party had a real relationship with the British working class.

R. Samuel to Kim (undated), Manchester, CP/Cent/O rg/18/05. Ibid.

Ibid.

See M. Kenny, The First New Left. 44-46. Kenny's language, ‘it has become commonplace among later critics of this formation to comment upon its lack of connections with the working class’, implied that such critics were incorrect in this assumption. Under the sub-heading ‘An Industrial Wing of the New Left?’, however, Kenny devoted just over two pages to the subject focusing upon a New Reasoner conference in April 1959, attended by thirty trade union officials.’, 45. Following this, the New Left released a bulletin. Searchlight, which ‘ran for only four issues, from January to April I9 6 0 ’.

Table 8. Occupational Composition of National Congresses, 1952-1963136

Year 1952 1954 1956 1957 1959 1961 1963

Number of delegates 520 615 486 547 492 455 461 Occupations percentage of total delegates

Engineering 26 23 25 18 22 25 25

Building 6 8 10 7 10 9 8

Teaching 6 6 7 11 9 8 8

Mining 6 6 7 6 8 10 5

Transport & Rail 7 7 6 6 5 4 6

Housewives 5 6 6 6 5 5 4

Clerical & Admin 3 7 5 4 3 6 7

Professional & Technical 2 4 2 5 3 3 5

CPGB Officials 14 7 8 8 6 ? ₅ Clothing/Textiles 3 4 3 3 4 2 2 Distribution 2 2 2 3 2 2 1 Medical 1 0 1 1 1 1 2 Printing 2 2 2 3 2 2 1 Agriculture 1 1 1 1 1 ? ? Unemployed ? ? ? ? ? 1 1 Attending as women delegates 14 15 14 15 15 14 15

A fall in the manual trades, such as engineering and building around 1957, coincided with a rise in occupations such as teaching and professional and technical. It is not clear whether university lecturers are represented under teaching or professional. There were several lecturers such as Christopher Hill, Ralph Russell and Arnold Kettle at the 1957 Congress. Kettle, however, as a member of the Executive Committee may be represented as a CPGB official. Bearing such uncertainties in mind, it can be seen that those occupations broadly described as manual were represented by 53 per cent of delegates in 1952.^^^ This fell to 44 per cent in 1957, but climbed back to 52 per cent in 1959. If teachers and housewives are included, the figures increase to 64, 61 and 66 per cent respectively. Across the period as a whole, 51 per cent of delegates, on average, were manual workers, a figure increasing to 64 per cent when teachers and housewives are included.

Comparisons between the CPGB and the work of the New Left are problematic.^^® The New Left’s repudiation of structures and organisation made it a qualitatively different organisation from the highly structured CPGB. It is impossible

Source; Newton, The Sociology of British Communism. 162.

136

Engineering, Building, Mining, Transport, Clothing, Distribution, Printing and Agriculture are included ih this calculation.

^®® The ‘First New Left’ lasted from 1956 until 1962, when Perry Anderson began editing New Left Review. Universities and Left Review, was, in part, a response to the large Trafalgar Square demonstration against British intervention in Suez in 1956.

to say who read the journals of the New Left and who they may have influenced, but there is little evidence that those who had repeatedly surrendered claims to political leadership, were able to appeal to sections of the trade union movement, either at a bureaucratic or rank and file level. This is not to devalue the work of this much looser affiliation but in its own terms, by 1959, it did not appear to have won anything like the loyal support throughout the country that the CPGB had retained.

Figures for membership are not available, but the final issue of New Reasoner listed ten ‘Left Clubs’, with another five ‘in active formation’ throughout the British Isles.^^® David Widgery calculated that between 30 and 40 local Left Clubs ran on a modest scale outside London’ with a number of loosely autonomous sections operating throughout the capital at various t i m e s . S t u a r t Hall recalled that the London Club attracted to its weekly meetings audiences of three and four hundred drawn from across the whole spectrum of the left’.^'*^ It is unclear whether these figures refer to political meetings or to the club’s skiffle and jazz socials. Such activity was, of course perfectly respectable, but could hardly be said to be fulfilling the objective of a return to the main highway of British revolutionary traditions’ which had been prescribed in The Reasoner.^'*^ Although Thompson may have been correct that ‘the British people do not understand and will not trust a monolith without a moral tongue’, they were even less prepared, it would seem, to support the moralism of the New Left.^"*^ Thompson, in 1963, gave his own verdict on the early New Left as he wrote I am not, I think, betraying a closely guarded state secret when I say that the movement which once claimed to be “The New Left’’...has now, in this country, dispersed itself both organisationally and (to some extent) intellectually. We failed to implement our original purposes, or even to sustain what cultural apparatus we had’.^'^'^

One particularly active area under the auspices of the New Left was the Fife Socialist League, founded by former Communist, Lawrence Daly in 1957. Daly left in 1956, along with around 25 per cent of local Party membership, in an area which had traditionally been one of the party’s strongholds.Daly, a County Councillor and an area delegate for the National Union of Mineworkers, stood in the General

New Reasoner. 1:10 (Autumn 1959).