British Communism’s Patriotic Disease
It is for the Communists to build up the forces that will overthrow the social patriots, and in this country we must not delay or falter in that work.
Sylvia Pankhurst, ‘Towards a Communist Party’ (1920)
[We] must destroy the slanderous canard that ‘the Communists are friends of every country but their own’. … We must prove that we love our country.
Harry Pollitt, speech to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern (1935)
It was once the case that Communism was indelibly associated with class internationalism, and a sincere conviction that workers ‘have no country’. Today, however, the Communist Party of Britain and its affiliated Morning Star daily paper, along with the tiny ‘anti-revisionist’ Marxist-Leninist groupuscules that trace their lineage to the original Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), have renounced this heritage, in favour of a left-populist blend of economic nationalism, bourgeois constitutionalism and social conservatism. To understand this present situation, we need to trace the evolution of socialist patriotism in the CPGB, reflecting a combination of the corrupting influence of imperialism on the British labour movement, and the Soviet policy follies of the Popular Front era. In the centenary year of British communism, it will also be instructive to remember the CPGB’s radically cosmopolitan roots in the 1920s.
Left-wing nationalism crystallised as a definite trend in the late-nineteenth century, when Britain’s imperial dominance brought certain benefits for better-off strata of the British working class, such as consumption subsidies and welfare reforms, and Engels would lament how ‘workers gaily share in the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the Colonies’. The privileged minority, being primarily concerned with defending their small slice of the imperialist pie, was committed to class compromise through parliamentary channels, and gave open support for their national bourgeoisie’s colonialist plunder abroad.
The inculcation of socialist patriotism in the European labour movement culminated in the disastrous split in the Second International during the imperialist First World War, as many workers succumbed to the nationalist frenzy and backed ‘their’ governments over their class. In Britain, the jingoistic Labour Party, which marshalled the Trades Union Congress (TUC) into committing to a no-strikes policy, was opposed by a small trend of socialist internationalists including the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst and John Maclean, ‘the Scottish Lenin’. In these figures the German anti-jingoists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, for whom patriotism was part of the ‘bestial chorus of imperialist war-mongers and the shrill cry of capitalist hyenas’, found their counterparts. In September 1914, Maclean wrote that the ‘absurdity of the present situation is surely apparent when we see British Socialists going out to murder German Socialists with the object of crushing Kaiserism and Prussian militarism.’ Late folk singer Alistair Hulett’s tribute to the Red Clydesider concludes with Maclean saying, ‘A bayonet, that’s a weapon wi’ a working man at either end. Betray your country, serve your class. Don’t sign up for war my friend.’
The contradictions within the labour movement engendered by social imperialism were apparent in the immediate inter-war years leading to the 1926 General Strike. The forward march of labour was coupled with a virulent strain of racism, which came to a head in the murderous 1919 ‘race riots’ in port areas including Glasgow, a hotbed of working-class radicalism, as white trade unionists and members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) scapegoated Black, South Asian, Chinese and Arab sailors for ‘undercutting’ wages. This overt racial chauvinism was again challenged by a smattering of Marxists and syndicalists, particularly in Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation and Arthur MacManus’s Socialist Labour Party. Maclean also remained a committed anti-imperialist until his premature death in 1923, calling the Amritsar Massacre in India ‘the most cold-blooded butchery ever perpetrated by any conquering race’.
Alien Beginnings
When the Communist International (Comintern) was formed in 1919, one of its first tasks was to encourage the creation of a unified communist party in Britain. Negotiations between the small existing socialist groups in the country were marred by controversy over Lenin’s insistence that the CPGB would attempt to affiliate to the Labour Party. Lenin was rightly concerned to check the syndicalist and ‘left-communist’ tendencies of British socialism, but his intervention inadvertently ended up strengthening the influence of the rightist British Socialist Party, and side-lining the lefts’ criticisms of imperialist social democracy. Despite the loss of such staunch anti-imperialists as Maclean and Pankhurst during the affiliation debacle, the CPGB, established in August 1920, was still the most important internationalist trend in the country. In part this was determined by the party’s founding composition, with hardy militants from the Celtic fringe such as MacManus, a number of Jewish comrades including Zelda Kahan and Theodore Rothstein, and ‘a sprinkling of Indians, Caribbeans and Africans.’ (Virdee, 2014, p. 87) This was a time when western communism had always been a movement dependent upon an active migrant core, from Marx’s pan-European Communist League to the London-based First International, which had a strong Irish immigrant contingent.
Satnam Virdee identifies what he calls the ‘strategic universalism’ of the racialised outsiders in the CPGB: they saw ‘through the fog of blood, soil and belonging’, to ‘universalize the militant, yet often particularist, struggles of the working class … they acted as a leavening agent, nourishing the struggles of all’. (Virdee, p. 7) Anti-communists for their part often emphasised the ‘alienness’ of British communism. A Special Branch report on an early CPGB meeting described a collective of ‘Aliens, Jews and Sinn Feiners’; while former colonial policeman and Foreign Office informant George Orwell referred to leading CPGB theorist and son of a Bengali immigrant Rajani Palme Dutt, along with several Jewish members, as ‘deracinated’ – an allusion to the anti-Semitic epithet of the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ – and further described the Black American communist Paul Robeson, who had campaigned among Welsh miners, as ‘very anti-white’. (Morgan et al., Communists and British Society, 2007, pp. 184-6) Tellingly, Orwell was also an early outspoken critic of the anti-patriotic left, proselytising the ‘overwhelming strength of patriotism, [and] national loyalty … as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are weak as straw in comparison with it.’
The depression years of the late 1920s and ‘30s saw another spike in white working-class racism, again concentrated against Black, Asian and Arab seamen. When in 1930 workers of colour took strike action against racial segregation, they were now supported by the CPGB, which despite its small size had achieved significant trade union influence through its National Minority Movement. British communists also passionately took up the struggle against fascism in Spain, making collections for food and medical supplies for the republican forces, and participating in the formation of the International Brigades. In 1936, when the Labour Party did nothing to protect the Jewish population in London’s East End, it was the communists who helped beat back Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts and their Metropolitan Police accomplices during the Battle of Cable Street.
However, the CPGB never managed to fully exorcise the spectre of social imperialism and White Labourism. One of the first British delegates to the Comintern in 1920, Tom Quelch, was personally rebuked by Lenin for his xenophobia. Clemens Dutt, Rajani Palme’s brother, accused the party of ‘white chauvinism’ due to its soft line on imperialism, and in 1934 the Indian communist and anti-colonial revolutionary Shapurji Saklatvala (‘Comrade Sak’) criticised ‘adverse comments about Negroes and Asians’ by CPGB members, and complained that the leadership was not doing enough to support the ‘coloured seamen’. (Morgan et al., pp. 216-7) The party, which was rooted to a considerable extent in white Protestant working-class culture, also publically censured Saklatvala for initiating his children into the Parsi faith. This racism-wrapped-in-secularism was later revived by Jack Conrad of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) when he pandered to Islamophobic sentiments at a time of global anti-Muslim violence, by suggesting that when the anti-Iraq War Respect Party called for ‘women’s right to choose’ in one of its manifestos it meant the right to ‘wear the veil’. The CPGB’s work among Black workers was especially pitiful, much to the frustration of the Trinidad-born Comintern functionary George Padmore. From the mid-1930s Padmore and other eminent Black socialists including C.L.R. James and I.T.A Wallace-Johnson gravitated towards the newly-radicalised ILP, which developed a much firmer line on the self-emancipation of colonised populations.
The CPGB’s anti-colonial work was not insignificant, and in 1929 several of its members including Ben Bradley, the future secretary of the League Against Imperialism, were arrested and imprisoned in India on charges of conspiracy for organising a railway strike. Such activities, though, took place within a broadly Eurocentric outlook, which was encouraged by the Comintern’s overestimation of the revolutionary potential of Western Europe throughout the 1920s-30s, and its millenarian expectations of an imminent transition to socialism. Despite the protestation of prominent Indian communist M.N. Roy, the CPGB held that it should control the activities of communists in Britain’s colonies; a paternalistic attitude that smacked of the ‘white man’s burden’, and ultimately expressed what Sri Lanka-born British socialist and Black radical intellectual Ambalavaner Sivanandan called the ‘racial arrogance of Western “Marxists”’. A more overtly national-chauvinist trajectory was taken by the French Communist Party, which ceased public support for the anti-colonial struggle in North Africa after the signing of the Franco-Soviet Pact of May 1935 – an episode that led Padmore to resign in disgust from the Communist International. (Redfern, 2005, p. 52)
Donning the Butcher’s Apron
The Trotskyist narrative that blames the CPGB’s compromised internationalism squarely on its purported ‘Stalinisation’ after Lenin’s death is too simplistic, as clearly left nationalism was not a Soviet export to Britain. Indeed, the post-Lenin Comintern frequently criticised the rightwards trajectory of the CPGB and its ‘passivity’ when it came to anti-colonial matters, and it also instructed British communists to strengthen their theoretical appreciation of imperialism. (Sherwood, 1996) The principle problem was an indigenous British social patriotism, which would also infect post-war Trotskyist movements in the country, and reflected the persistent distortion of class consciousness achieved by imperialist ‘bribes’. A convincing interpretation is presented in Neil Redfern’s Class or Nation: Communists, Imperialism and Two World Wars, which is that the ‘foreign policy requirements of the Soviet Union dovetailed neatly with ideological baggage which the communist parties of the imperialist world had inherited from the Second International from which they had sprung.’ (Redfern, 2005, pp. 3-4)
In response to the disintegration of social democracy and aggressive rise of far-right reaction in Central Europe in the 1930s, the Comintern leader responsible for theorising fascism, Georgi Dimitrov, set about revising Leninism by ‘inventing the bogey of “national nihilism”’. Dimitrov asserted that communists should not ‘sneer at all the national sentiments of the wide masses of working people’, but should rather seek to defend ‘to the very end the national freedom of [their] own country’, and expose the ‘reactionary bourgeoisie’ for ‘betraying the national interests’. (Redfern, pp. 77-8) Moscow even instructed the CPGB specifically ‘to substitute the slogan “Workers of the World, Unite!” – with its associations of “cosmopolitanism” and “Luxemburgianism” – for a preferred translation, “Proletarians of all Countries”, which rhetorically sealed revolutionary movements back into national borders’. (Harker, 2011, pp. 25-6)
Dimitrov essentially told western communists to combat the fascists’ national teleology by creating their own one, an instruction which was enthusiastically taken on board by the CPGB General Secretary Harry Pollitt. A new role was given to middle-class intellectuals like Jack Lindsay, the historical novelist and pamphleteer, who began outlining a ‘radical-patriotic lineage from Aelfric to [Willie] Gallacher’ and claiming ‘that the CPGB were the modern-day representatives of the Levellers and the Ranters’. (Virdee, 2014, p. 96) The emphasis on British patriotism entailed ‘reproducing the chauvinism of Anglo-centric metropolitan culture’, and reflected the party’s ambivalence towards ‘divisive’ Scottish and Welsh nationalisms. Redfern provides a summary of the drastic culture shift within British communism, which would later inform the outlook of a later generation that included Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson:
‘In urging the working class and the people generally to take up the task of defending the nation, the CP began to claim that Britain was not really the land of Palmerston, Cecil Rhodes and Earl Haig but of Wat Tyler, Tom Paine and Percy Shelley. Publicity material for a “March of English History”, on which the portraits of “progressive” stalwarts such as these were carried aloft, evoked a Baldwinesque rural England: “ENGLAND! A word of power. A name deeply engraved on the minds of men, whether murmured with love, whispered in fear, shouted with hatred. Bringing a picture of green fields and hedges to the soldier stationed beneath burning desert skies.” Such a soldier could only have been serving in one of Britain’s many colonial possessions, but the author of this material was evidently not troubled by such considerations. This, admittedly, is an extreme case, but the fact that such material could be produced by Party members and that they could carry both the Union Jack and the Red Flag on demonstrations shows how quickly the CP’s internationalism was evaporating in the heat of the radical patriotism being promoted by the leadership.’ (Redfern, 2005, p. 88)
The CPGB’s patriotic turn brought it unprecedented popularity during the Second World War, encouraging a further dilution of its socialist political line. The party’s nationalism solidified and it seamlessly transitioned from the anti-fascist Popular Front policy of winning the war, to an absurd permanent class-collaborationist position of ‘winning the peace’. Its wartime no-strikes policy continued in the months following the Allied victory, including opposition to industrial action taken by dockers; while its new programme, The British Road to Socialism (BRS), placed a renewed emphasis on parliamentarism. (Parker, 2012, pp. 15-21) The BRS declared, ‘Our call is for the unity of all true patriots to defend British national interests and independence’ – explicitly upholding the British parliament as ‘the product of Britain’s historic struggle for democracy’ – thus envisioning ‘the telos of English communism as generated less by a rupture in the capitalist mode of production or international solidarity than by the unfolding logic of a national story.’ (Harker op. cit.)
This language has been inherited by the present Communist Party of Britain (CPB), a small splinter group that survived the CPGB’s self-liquidation in 1991. The CPB’s current 2020 edition of the BRS advocates cross-class parliamentary coalitions in which there is respect for the ‘sovereignty’ of all the forces involved, along with a reinvigorated patriotism, for instance claiming that ‘Belief in the right of the people to decide who governs them is deeply rooted in England, Scotland and Wales.’ (pp. 58-9) As Robert Biel argues in Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, the BRS’s revisionist notion of a ‘peaceful transition’ to socialism was inextricable from the CPGB’s social imperialism: ‘The “parliamentary road” theory itself … emerged against the background of an analysis of the world system which exaggerated the contradiction between socialist and capitalist countries, underestimating the importance of an economic strength drawn by capitalism precisely through its exploitation of the periphery.’ (Biel, 2015, p. 145) Indeed, the 1951 BRS included a tacit acceptance of neo-colonial economic ties, stating that through ‘close, fraternal association’ with its former colonies, Britain would ‘be assured of the normal supplies of the vital food and raw materials necessary for her economic life’. This provoked backlash from the party’s West Indian Committee (which included Claudia Jones), leading to a partial modification of the programme so that the 1958 edition proposed ‘close voluntary fraternal relations’ with the former Empire. (Smith, 2017, pp. 62-5) However, the claim this would entail economic relations of ‘mutual benefit’ still carried the assumption that the ex-colonies would remain structurally-peripheral suppliers of primary goods and purchasers of ‘the high-quality capital and consumption goods for which Britain is already famous’.
Triumphant anti-fascist patriotism in post-war Britain dovetailed with the generalisation of imperialist ‘bribes’ to the white working class in the form of the welfare state, and class antagonisms were effectively subsumed under a neo-colonial national compact (although, the social compromise was always shaky, and on several occasions the newly-elected Labour government brought in troops to suppress strikes). The bottom line is that the dividends of Labourite social democracy cannot be disentangled from the inglorious record of class collaborationism and the imperialist extortion of the neo-colonies, along with such open brutality as the bloody counterinsurgency in Malaya initiated by the Attlee government. As Biel puts it, the ‘democratic veneer’ of western capitalism is directly dependent upon ‘the exercise of naked terror and superexploitation in other areas of the world’. Certainly, the welfare state was in one real sense a working-class gain, coming on the back of intense trade union struggles during the inter-war years, but like most reform concessions it was a poisoned chalice. For both governing parties, it represented a collectivised patriotic insurance against further demands for class justice.
Herein lies the problem with the concept of ‘progressive patriotism’ championed by Corbynite former Shadow Education Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey, and taken up by the CPB and Morning Star. It presents a paternalistic narrative, in which workers of colour are the ‘good immigrants’ who helped rebuild the nation, not actors who resisted colonialism and fought for equality of work opportunities and provision of health and social services within the British metropole, in explicit opposition to the nativist construction of the welfare state. A prime example of this historical whitewashing is CPB member Matt Widdowson’s Morning Star article ‘There is No Contradiction Between Patriotism and Socialism’ from the beginning of the year, which asks ‘What else was the NHS but a collective national project involving people from around the world who were galvanised by a commitment to its founding principles?’ To service the NHS, the Colonial Office recruited hospital staff from ex-colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, as well as Ireland. These immigrant workers, mostly women, were placed in the lowest-paid, most insecure roles, and viewed as expendable by successive Labour and Conservative governments that imposed racist immigration restrictions and cemented the economic ‘colour bar’. The NHS was further tied to racialised ideas of national entitlement: ‘universal’ state welfare ‘came wrapped in the Union Jack’ – the Butcher’s Apron, as it was called in the colonised countries – so it is unsurprising that it has been effectively exploited by right-wing populism, along the lines of Enoch Powell’s imagery of white women ‘unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth’ because of immigrants. Even Labour saint Aneurin Bevan wrote in 1948, a year that saw mob attacks on newly-arrived Black and Asian residents, that if ‘colonial subjects come here on their own responsibility’ they ‘cannot complain if it is not all plain sailing’; the following year, he boasted he had ‘arranged for immigration officers to turn back aliens who were coming to this country to secure benefits off the health service’.
Nor can we buy into semantic arguments about patriotism being a ‘safe’ version of nationalism. As Paul Gilroy argues, the former, ‘even in its combative proto-socialist form’, is ‘empty without a filling of national pride’. (Gilroy, 2002, p. 57) Gilroy’s incisive critique of the British left’s ‘patriotic disease’ in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack is worth quoting at length:
‘Nationhood is not an empty receptacle which can be simply and spontaneously filled with alternative concepts according to the dictates of political pragmatism. The ideological theme of national belonging may be malleable to some extent but its links with the discourses of classes and “races” and the organizational realities of these groups are not arbitrary. They are confined by historical and political factors which limit the extent to which nationalism becomes socialist at the moment that its litany is repeated by socialists. The intention may be radical but the effects are unpredictable, particularly where culture is also conceived within discrete, separable, national units coterminous with the boundaries of the nation state.’ (Gilroy, p. 60)
National pride in a ‘core’ imperialist power like Britain is inextricably tied to the ideological logic of white supremacy, and the CPGB’s social patriotism ensured its inability to adequately challenge racial oppression. In his book Revolutionary Strategy, Mike Macnair of the CPGB(PCC) decries a retreat from class in the 1980s under the post-Marxist ‘new social movements’ paradigm, and suggests that ‘What began in the 1960s-70s as a common movement against racism has long splintered into a mass of much smaller ethnic and religious constituencies asserting individualised forms of identity politics.’ The problem with this framing is that in reality there was never a convincingly unified anti-racism in Britain, because cross-racial solidarity from white workers was not often forthcoming. Even the Communist Party displayed severe shortcomings when it came to tackling racism, as has been highlighted in Evan Smith’s British Communism and the Politics of Race. While the CPGB opposed Labour’s implementation of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, targeting primary immigration from Britain’s former Empire, it held that immigration controls were legitimate in principle, and minimised Labour’s culpability by positing racism as a ‘Tory trick to split the working class’. (Smith, 2017, p. 78) The party’s reliance on such facile slogans as ‘one race the human race’ stemmed from its reductive framing of racism as a purely ideological ‘divide and rule’ ploy by the capitalist class, rather than a structuring phenomenon in capitalist society determined by the legacy of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.
The most convincing communist opposition to white chauvinism came not from the leadership but rank-and-file members, for instance the party members who formed the organisation Trade Unionists to Combat Racism in 1973. The post-war CPGB was especially hostile to Black political and organisational autonomy, dissolving its ‘Robeson branches’ created to recruit West African nationals, and it even equated Black Power with ‘black chauvinism’. (Smith, p. 66) Disillusioned West Indian CPGB member Trevor Carter relayed in his memoir the widespread feeling among socialists of colour that the ‘relationship between the left and black people is like the relationship between parent and child. They always know what’s best for us.’ (Carter, 1986, p. 115) It was only in the last decade before the CPGB’s self-liquidation in 1991 that a newer generation of party members including Winston Pinder, Vishnu Sharma, Martin Rabstein and Dorothy Kuya drove forward a convincing anti-racist politics.
Widdowson claims that socialist patriotism is ‘an inclusive national history, as the struggles of minority groups intertwine and become an important part of the story of radical Britain — the Bristol Bus Boycott; the Imperial Typewriters Strike’. What ‘progressive’ role Widdowson thinks patriotism had in the aforementioned struggles he cannot say, for these were moments that precisely exposed the dangers of national identification among white workers, which caused many to abandon class universalism for narrow racial sectionalism in order to defend their place in the labour hierarchy. In the 1950s-60s in many British industries, including transportation, ‘white trade unionists insisted on a quota system restricting black workers to a maximum of (generally) 5 per cent, and there were understandings with management that the principle of “last in first out” at a time of redundancy would not apply if this was to mean that white workers would lose their jobs before blacks’. (Virdee and Wrench, 1995, p. 4) The 1963 Bus Boycott arose from the refusal of the Bristol Omnibus Company to employ Black and Asian workers. In 1974, when South Asian women workers at Imperial Typewriters in Leicester struck against workplace segregation and unpaid bonuses, the local Transport and General Workers’ Union representative accused them of causing ‘racial tension’, a line reportedly echoed by CPGB members, while the fascist National Front organised a group of white strike-breakers. (Race Today 6:9, 1974, p. 251)
Then there is Doug Nicholls’s absurdly reactionary Morning Star piece from 7 May, bluntly titled ‘Patriotism is Good for You’, which approvingly refers to hosiery and knitwear workers in the post-war decades ‘livening up’ marches with the racist and sexist slogan ‘If you’re wearing foreign knickers, get them off.’ Textiles was another racially-segregated industry, where whites earned the most and occupied the best positions. In 1972, immigrant workers at Mansfield Hosiery, Loughborough organised to challenge the racist labour regime. In response, their white colleagues, with the support of the National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers, staged a separate walkout to oppose the promotion of any Asians; one lorry driver who joined the Asian strikers on the picket was called a ‘n***** lover’ by the white knitters. (Race Today 4:12, 1972, p. 406) Such was the patriotic face of post-war social democratic ascendancy that Morning Star would have us return to.
From Socialism to ‘Sovereignty’
The CPGB’s economic nationalism intensified in the context of the ‘Alternative Economy Strategy’ (AES) devised by communists and Labour lefts like Tony Benn in the 1970s. While packaged as ‘democratic socialism’, the AES was in reality an attempt to revive Keynesian-style state capitalism. It was also tied up in the debates surrounding European integration, and the 1977 edition of the British Road to Socialism complained that Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) ‘imposed serious limitations on [Britain’s] sovereignty’; while Benn suggested that Britain had been reduced to ‘colony’ status. Such language had little to do with socialism. As scholar of international law Antony Anghie explains, the modern political concept of sovereignty is itself bound up with imperialism. During the nineteenth century sovereignty became ‘aligned with European ideas of social order, political organization, progress and development’, while non-European countries deemed ‘uncivilised’ and ‘barbaric’ were excluded from the ‘enlightened’ family of nations and of law. (Anghie, 2004, p. 103) The imperialist construction of sovereignty was emphasised by another pioneering Indian communist, Shaukat Usmani, who contested British parliamentary elections from jail in 1929 and 1931: ‘There is nothing like a sovereign under the sovereignty of capitalism. The sovereignty of the British Empire to-day belongs to the omnipotent Big Five (Banks), who not only forge methods of exploitation in India but are as ruthless in Britain, too.’ The AES’s invocation of sovereignty in the context of Britain’s waning economic power signified a longing for a return to the golden age of the welfare state, when the relative privileges of white workers owing to the imperialist global division of nations peaked.
As Gilroy again argues, the appeals to sovereignty and national independence among the left ‘addressed the British inability to accept the end of empire and the national discomfort at the loss of world pre-eminence’, and substituted ‘a stark image of reduced national status for the metaphysical yearning for greatness’. The socialist patriots’ positing of Britain’s place in the EEC as a form of ‘national oppression’, or even ‘colonisation’, further conveniently erased Britain’s ongoing neo-colonial exploitation of the Global South and its occupation of the north of Ireland, and cynically trivialised ‘the bloodshed and ruthless mass violence characteristic of decolonization’. (Gilroy, 2002, p. 62) AES-style left nationalism ultimately parroted the contemporary far-right’s emphasis on sovereignty, nationhood, and constitutional order. Powell, an Ulster Unionist who called for the ‘repatriation’ of Black citizens, had warned against ‘sinking national sovereignty in organizations for uniting the world’, and gained the support of considerable sections of white workers.
This is the background to the left-wing populism that came to the fore in the context of the Brexit referendum. The 2016 Brexit vote was supported by not only the CPB, but also the minuscule self-professed ‘anti-revisionist’ successors to the original CPGB: the New Communist Party of Britain, Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), and Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (as well as Socialist Workers Party guru Alex Callinicos). The Lexit (‘left Brexit’) camp was correct to identify the imperialist and anti-working class nature of the EU project, but missed how the referendum in essence reflected a split within the British bourgeoisie between those who favour strengthening ties with European imperialism, and those who wish to cement Britain’s role as a junior partner in American Empire. As Carlos Martinez writes, pro-Brexit politicians and capitalists like Arron Banks in the latter camp tend to be ‘more connected to finance capital, to the military-industrial complex, and to Big Oil’. The Lexiters further failed to transcend the terms of engagement set by the Right: the essential socialist question of working-class control and ownership of the state and economy was displaced with vague notions of extra-national subversion. In the Morning Star there are claims that ‘Foreign control over our political economy’ has replaced ‘a sovereign Parliament’; and calls for a return to the economic nationalism of the 1970s when ‘We wanted our nation independent, vibrant’ and rid of ‘humiliation on the world stage’.
The left-Brexiters further echoed the proponents of the AES in their anachronistic equation of monopoly capitalism with ‘the City’ (of London) and foreign trade, and subsequent erasure of the class character of state industrial capital. This ignores how industrial capitalism within Britain, and the remnants of the welfare state, remain tied to imperialist extortion (for example the use of financial blackmail to secure cheap materials, labour and export markets for British manufactures in Global South countries). Jeremy Corbyn’s stress on native manufacturing with his ‘Build it in Britain’ slogan – taken up by the Morning Star – was responding to instances like De La Rue, the British-based multinational printing company, losing its contract for making British passports. This particular corporation was established during the height of British Empire when it played a role in controlling money supplies in Britain’s colonies, and after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 it secured a windfall contract to print money for the new comprador government, ‘transferring millions from Baghdad to Britain at the barrel of a gun.’ The revisionist capitulation to nationalism-infused ideas about state ownership naturally sanctions xenophobia among workers, as when in 1978 the communist convenor at Govan shipyard Jimmy Airlie encouraged scabbing against striking workers on the Tyne, based on his assessment that ‘If Newcastle are losing six ships through disputes, we will build them. If we don’t the Japs will.’ (Quoted in Eaden and Renton, 2002, p. 164)
Given their conspicuous lack of any firm internationalism, strident advocacy of immigration restrictions and presentation of the Leave vote as an ‘authentic’ proletarian demand, tacitly excising the younger ‘precariat’ and workers of colour who tended to vote Remain from the ranks of the working class, the Lexiters played directly into the hands of racial-populism. Nicholls, who is general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions, resorted to promoting Tory arguments in the Morning Star about migrants ‘sharply undercutting wages in many areas and putting new strains on public services’. As Lenin argued over a century ago, support for immigration controls represents the ‘attempt to defend narrow, craft interests’, and is the outcome of the ‘spirit of aristocratism that one finds among workers in some of the “civilised” countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are, therefore, inclined to forget the need for international class solidarity.’ It is hard to see how migrants put a ‘strain’ on social and health services given these have in large part been built and maintained by their labour. And the real issue is not ‘undercutting’ or ‘stealing’ jobs, rather it is how racist labour market segmentation harms the bargaining power of all workers; the response to which is to organise migrant workers and demand ‘that the wages of Coloured workers be brought up to same level as white workers’ pay.’
The Morning Star has buried socialist internationalism, and in its place dragged up dewy-eyed Whiggish sop to Britain’s ‘great democratic radical tradition’, ‘the science, technology and secular consciousness that flowed from the first Industrial Revolution’ and ‘the traditions of progressive liberties, non-sectarianism, free speech and respect.’ Lenin warned about the imperialist-corrupted ‘heroes of despicable opportunism’ in the labour movement who phrasemonger about bourgeois ‘legality’, ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’. It is the capitalists’ prerogative to prettify bourgeois democracy, and that of Marxists to expose it as ‘restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.’
Far from being ‘progressive’, left-wing patriotism in Britain carries the shameful legacy of the Second International’s self-destruction while workers killed their comrades across trench lines; the betrayal of communist and liberation movements in the colonised countries, and a sustained history of racist and sexist trade union exclusionism. In the present context of the ramped up racial violence of the hostile environment, escalating inter-imperialist rivalry, and creeping fascism both nationally and internationally, no more quarter can be given to flag-waving prejudices. Given that the vast majority of the industrial proletariat now reside in the Global South, any retreat from class internationalism is also clearly strategically bankrupt – it’s high time to confine social patriotism to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
As Lenin always emphasised, even in the core imperialist countries the predominance of social chauvinism was never inevitable but contingent on the struggle for subjective leadership in the labour movement. There have been times in Britain when committed socialist internationalists have been able to punch above their weight and pose a serious challenge to left nationalism, including the inter-war CPGB through its National Minority Movement, and the central role played by Marxists like David Widgery and Maurice Ludmer (the communist leader of the Birmingham Trades Council) in launching the anti-fascist movement against the National Front in the 1970s.
During the youthful years of the Third International it was a point of pride for a communist to be considered a traitor to crown and country; loyalty to the global working class was absolute. In opposition to the latter-day heroes of despicable opportunism championed by Morning Star, we must return to the uncompromising anti-imperialism of Pankhurst and Maclean, and the ‘strategic universalism’ of Jones, Padmore, the Dutt brothers and Comrade Sak. Above all, British socialists should take to heart the second May Day commandment of Glasgow’s Red Sunday School in 1917, that:
‘Thou shalt not be a patriot for a patriot is an international blackleg. Your duty to yourself and your class demands that you be a citizen of the world.’