Keir Starmer and Britain’s Road to Socialism
The fact that Joseph Stalin himself approved of the first edition of Britain’s Road to Socialism in 1951 is – for some – damning, while for others it is one of the only claims to legitimacy in a programme that remains steadfastly clung to the Labour Party. But this first programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain – now the Communist Party of Britain – has developed substantially, moving away from a critical support of Labour to a cosy association with its left wing. And with history moving so quickly and the last programme only having been published in 2018, the publication of an updated Britain’s Road to Socialism in April only shows that another edition is immediately necessary.
‘Following Labour’s 2019 General Election defeat and [Jeremy] Corbyn’s resignation,’ it reads, ‘it remains to be determined whether left trend in the party can – with enough trade union support – win the struggle not only for leadership, but also for policies that challenge British state monopoly capitalism and imperialism.’ But this future has already been determined. Keir Starmer was elected in the first round of votes, with 56% of votes over Rebecca Long-Bailey’s 26% who was ticketed as Corbyn’s political successor.
The widespread attempt not just to come to terms with the defeat of Corbyn but to come to terms with the role of the Labour Party itself, and where to go from here, brings a morbid curiosity about a new edition of Britain’s Road to Socialism. With leftists looking to other organisations in newer communist parties or base-building projects, that the Communist Party of Britain has put its eggs in Labour’s basket recalls Stalin’s criticisms of the programme’s early drafts.
In 1950, Harry Pollitt – then the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain – requested from Stalin himself ‘advice on the tactics of the Communist Party during the coming elections.’ Having put forward 100 candidates in the February election of that year, and advising those in constituencies they weren’t fielding a candidate to vote for the Labour Party, during this election they hoped to prevent a Tory government by running fewer candidates in Labour held constituencies in exchange for support for the demands of the working class in England – namely to scrap the wage freeze, begin trading with the Soviet Union, and prohibit nuclear weapons.
In the ensuing meeting between Stalin and Pollitt, Stalin agreed that it was essential to prevent the election of a Tory government, and that ‘Certainly the Labour Party is better, though only a little bit better than the Conservatives. However, one should consider that the working class of England considers a Labour government as their government.’ Pollitt replied that, ‘during the war years the working people of England openly talked among themselves in bomb-shelters and in the Metro, where they used to take shelter from bombings that they shall never again permit the Conservatives to come to power.’ (Joseph Stalin, ‘On the British Road to Socialism’)
Asking whether the Communist Party had its own calculated programme for the future, Stalin asserted the importance of this to counter Labour and its plan at the time to introduce nationalisation ‘to give direction and an ideal to the English masses. The Labourites are giving a direction to the English masses’, yet ‘in branches of industry that have been nationalised by the Labourites, the capitalists have remained in their posts, their profits are rising, but the pay of the workers remains frozen.’ The Communist Party, then
‘takes a very soft and completely unprincipled position in the struggle against the Labour Party. The English Communists should have told the Labourites that they, the Labourites, are not at all Socialist but the left wing of the Conservative Party. This is not done. This needs to be openly pronounced. English Communists must state that under the Labour government the capitalists feel very fine, that their profits grow. This one fact speaks out that the Labourites are building no socialism.
‘In England the workers want that they be involved in the management of the nationalised branches of industries. It appears that in the nationalised industries in England the capitalists continue to direct the economy and get huge profits. This situation is incomprehensible for the Soviet people who under nationalisation understand that if any branch of industry is nationalised, the capitalists are removed from there and it is managed only by the representatives of the working class. Soviet people cannot visualise any other nationalisation. In England, the capitalists continue to manage it and as a consequence, their profits grow.’ (Joseph Stalin, ‘On the British Road to Socialism’)
Stalin pointed out that communists in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries – those in the UK, US, Canada, Australia – are ‘inclined to concentrate their forces on current everyday tasks of purely practical character and not look far ahead.’ The Labour party should necessarily be critiqued from this stance with its own programme for the future so that the Party itself cannot grow among a ‘coalition of the working class, working intelligentsia, lower strata of the cities and of farmers.’
Three months after Pollitt send the draft of that programme to Stalin, Stalin found the critique of the Labour Party too soft and wanting; the Labour Party must be known among the working class as the left wing of the Conservative party, and by no means as a party for the working class. As for his take on the question of Parliament in that programme – in Britain’s Road to Socialism – Stalin said that they should ‘not ... delegitimise Parliament, that England shall come to socialism through its own path and not through Soviet Power, but through Peoples’ Democracy that would be guided by peoples’ power and not by capitalists.’ The minutes for the meeting here noted that ‘Comrade Stalin jokingly commented that just as Comrade Pollitt may notice, [Stalin] criticises the draft of the Programme from the rightist position.’
In 1977, prompted by a new edition of the party programme, the New Communist Party split from the Communist Party. Though the first contradictions between a ‘Stalinist’ current and the rest of the party began to appear 15 years earlier in 1961, it was in 1968 – with the Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia – that this became antagonistic as the leadership of the party sought to distance itself from both the USSR and its past support of Stalin. This new programme was denounced for its revision of Marxism-Leninism by those who saw that the party was, by ignoring the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, ignoring ‘the need for the working class to take state power unto itself to crush the resistance of the displaced exploiters and to win to its side the majority of the people for the creative task of building a socialist Britain.’ (‘The Crisis in the British Communist Party’, International Socialism, 1977)
With diminishing influence through the trade unions, and unable to effectively oppose Labour’s wage controls that were implemented in 1975-77, the party hoped to regain lost ground by throwing its past image of a ‘Stalinist’ party under the bus; and so, with the passing of this programme, ‘the party remains Communist in name only. In actuality it becomes a left social-democratic party with a left social-democratic programme.’ (‘The Crisis in the British Communist Party’) Rather than a quick transition to socialism in which an elected left government destroys the economic and political power of the bourgeoisie, there would instead be a series of ‘left, and eventually Socialist governments’ which ‘would not be a socialist government carrying out a socialist revolution, but one which, in the closest relationship with the movement outside Parliament, would begin to carry out a major democratic transformation of British society.’ Irene Brennan, a member of the party’s Political Committee, recognised that this was indistinguishable to the Fabians’ ‘gradualism.’
The main proponents of these changes to the party programme were championed by a new, right-wing current inside the party – the leaders of which current were ‘a number of young intellectuals drawn mainly from the students and academics.’ (‘The Crisis in the British Communist Party’) This contradiction within the party, between this new right-wing and the traditional members of the party, centred around industrial strategy as this new faction saw its strategy as an ‘economism’ that failed to recognise the totality of capitalism as a political system. Instead, the question of hegemony should be broached; not as a supplement to work done on the factory floor, but community groups and campaigns should instead be recognised as the proper battlefield of socialism.
But this new line came at a time when the industrial decline of the country was already nosediving, as the factory floor and the trade unions were being sabotaged by the Tories, MI5, and the British media. Instead, the ‘The most successful activity organised today by a party which once prided itself on its overwhelmingly proletarian composition is putting on events like the Communist University of London, which seeks to rival established universities in its detailed academic courses.’ (‘The Crisis in the British Communist Party’)
Like a broken clock that’s right twice a day, this gradualism came into line with Labour and many of its members and factions with the election of Corbyn as its leader in 2015. Joshua Chaffin, writing in 2018, reiterated the links between the Communist Party of Britain and Corbyn – even if these were limited to a mix of each parties’ memberships, sympathies from Corbyn’s circle and his old column in the Morning Star. But nevertheless, ‘In last year’s election, the party did not field any candidates – for the first time since its formation – urging its followers instead to back Mr Corbyn.’
Now, Starmer – who was at first welcomed into the role of Labour Party leader by those who’d been calling for Tony Blair’s rehabilitation, whose performances on Prime Minister’s Questions were uniformly praised as ‘forensic’ – has already demonstrated his incompetence and even his lack of desire to hold the Tories to account for their devastating failure to prevent and contain COVID-19. During Prime Minister’s Questions on April 29th, Dominic Raab – standing in for Boris Johnson – reiterated that he couldn’t yet outline an exit strategy from lockdown but, apropos of nothing, as the death rate in Britain is still in the hundreds, Starmer felt that this lack of transparency was inhibiting Labour’s support for the government. ‘We can’t [support them] if the government doesn’t share its thinking’, he said as if he himself was in the Conservative Party.
The left-wing of the Labour Party have not only retreated back into Momentum but, unable to hold consensus within the Labour faction, have attempted to repeat the same tactics that saw them emerge as a force within the Labour Party – and created another faction within Momentum itself. But what ultimately led to the election of Starmer was revealed in the leak of an internal investigation into the lack of action over the handling of antisemitism in the party.
Covering 2014-2019, the report entitled ‘The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism’ revealed a long history and chain of events that were already suspected by many in the left – of serial attempts to undermine Corbyn’s leadership in the party. The sustained attempts to paint the party as antisemitic were confirmed by those dealing with the complaints themselves, who sat on these complaints while assuring to Corbyn that due process was being followed – all to undermine Corbyn’s leadership and push him back to the fringes of the party.
The existence of internal saboteurs was clear to see, as Corbyn refused to take a hard-line to deselect MPs who’d used every public opportunity to jeopardize the party’s electoral hopes, as some even called for the public to vote for the Tories, but the full extent of this was only brought to light from the leaked report. Conversations on WhatsApp shows multiple lines of attack from the right wing of the party – from the abuse of Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black MP, to calling for a ‘purge’ of Corbyn supports from the party, as one senior Labour Press officer said that MPs who nominated Corbyn for leader of the party deserved ‘to be taken out and shot.’
But, within these group chats, what was unexpected to see were members of the party’s Governance and Legal Unit (GLU) itself – namely John Stolliday and Emilie Oldknow, who now both hold senior positions in Unison – not only share but stoke this same sentiment. As those who should have dealt with these complaints of antisemitism, they instead obfuscated the process and allowed it to continue while inducing factionalism against Corbyn in favour of then deputy leader Tom Watson. To quote directly from the report,
‘One staff member referred to Emilie Oldknow expecting staff to “fabricate a case” against people “she doesn’t like/her friends don’t like” because of their political views. During the 2015 leadership election GLU and other Labour staff described their work as “hunting out 1000s of trots” and a “Trot hunt”, which included excluding people for having “liked” the Greens on Facebook. One prominent GLU staffer, Head of Disputes Katherine Buckingham, admitted that “real work is piling up”.’
Stolliday thus described their work as ‘“political fixing”, and described overhauling selections of parliamentary candidates and overturning ... results to help the right of the Party.’ And so the core of Britain’s Road to Socialism, that ‘with enough trade union support’, the Communist Party of Britain – through the unions – will influence Labour leftward has instead had the opposite effect; those at the head of the trade unions have pushed Labour rightward.
When Seumas Milne wrote in the preface to the recent fourth edition of The Enemy Within that ‘The aftershocks of the miners’ strikes in 1984-85 can still be felt in Britain thirty years later’, this is no doubt one of the aftershocks: that the trade unions we have today are not the radical unions that fought tooth and nail against Thatcher’s government, that they are not able to unanimously down tools and hold their bosses and the country to ransom; that they are not the National Union of Miners. And today the unions face their biggest crisis since then, as the government pushes for schools and workplaces to reopen during an ongoing pandemic in an attempt to salvage the economy. Already the question of reopening was a false one; the country never fully closed down. While restaurants and retail stores were closed, from the start the government’s ambiguity around homeworking was used to its benefit as its advice was only ever to ‘work from home, where possible’ and insubstantial advice for business owners, without providing any financial support to the working class.
But even this wasn’t enough; with unions scrambling to protect their workers and demanding that they must stay at home and not return to work until it is safe, and gaining an extension to the 80% of wages covered by furloughs that are soon to end anyway, we see an intense revival of anti-union rhetoric among both the media and even Labour MPs – even going so far as labelling the teachers it desperately wants to sacrifice as ‘the blob’, ‘made up of political opponents, union barons and local governments’ who are ‘colluding to sabotage the reopening of schools’, borrowing the phrase from the height of hostility to unions in Reagan’s America.
It is important to remember that the conditions of support for Labour were never unconditional, as a principled position, but as a necessary tactic. J.T. Murphy, writing for the Communist International in 1925 replied to R. Palme Dutt’s assertion that the role of the Communist Party must not be ‘simply the role of a propagandist force within the Labour Party’, (R. Palme Dutt, ‘British Working Class After the Elections, Communist International, 1924) that the majority of Labour Party worked in tandem with trade unions. Dutt forgets ‘entirely that the Labour Party is a mass movement of which we are a part.’ This then has the effect that, ‘if we vigorously attack the “left-wing leaders” we attack the mass with a similar outlook and drive them away from the Party.’ (J.T. Murphy, ‘How a Mass Communist Party Will Come in Britain’, Communist International, 1925)
What are these conditions today? When we attack Kier Starmer, are we attacking the left-wing masses of the country and cutting off the nose to spite the face? When Murphy writes that ‘the fierce discussions raging throughout the Labour Party are not signs of decay, but the manifestations of life and vitality’ – can we find an equal vitalism today? (J.T. Murphy, ‘How a Mass Communist Party Will Come in Britain’) What fierce discussion is there in the Labour Party but the question of whether people should stay in the party at all – after the cover up of the leaked antisemitism report and repeated embarrassments at Starmer’s insistence on inquiries, into both the Tories and his own party, that deflect and delay problems that must necessarily be confronted now? This support for Labour was on the condition of uniting the working class – to ‘fight against splits in the workers’ organisations, and become the one Party fighting for united working-class actions.’ (J.T. Murphy, ‘How a Mass Communist Party Will Come in Britain’) The Labour Party has outlived this function.