Lawrence Parker details the history of and reception to the document which, he argues, drew upon “disgraced” figures such as Kautsky and Bukharin and captured the CPGB’s Janus-faced nature at the outset of the Second World War.

Crowdmembers at a CPGB meeting in London. (1939)

The Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB’s) Draft Programme of 1939,¹ due to be submitted to a cancelled congress in Stoke Newington, London in October of that year, was a document thoroughly overshadowed by both the beginning of the Second World War and the party’s change of line following the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the USSR’s denunciation of the imperialist nature of the conflict. The draft has rarely been commented on and even more rarely studied; its emergence is shrouded in mystery. 

The politics of the CPGB during the Second World War were subject to a set of twists and turns, particularly during the early years of the conflict. When war was declared in September of 1939, the party initially supported it in line with the anti-fascist politics of the popular front, calling for the replacement of the Chamberlain government. However, the Comintern then intervened to enforce a change in line with the freshly signed Nazi-Soviet Pact, declaring the war to be imperialist and thus unsupportable. The CPGB shifted around to support this policy, with a minority of its leadership – general secretary Harry Pollitt, MP William Gallacher and Daily Worker editor J.R. Campbell – in opposition. 

My contention in this article is that the Draft Programme and the almost forgotten circumstances of its production do add to our knowledge of the CPGB’s history, sometimes in unexpected ways. I would further argue that although the party’s change of line in the opening stages of the Second World War is revealing enough, it wouldn’t have been especially revelatory to the wider British labor movement of the time, given that it was well-known that the CPGB constantly adjusted itself to the political line of the Soviet Union. This basic truth was repeatedly broadcast in polemics by the Labour Party, which said that the CPGB could not be trusted because of its reliance on the Soviet Union (in reality, decrying the communists for an unpatriotic unwillingness to follow the dictates of British imperialism, which His Majesty’s Labour Party was always prepared to do). 

The circumstances of the Draft Programme, on the other hand, point to an organization that formally at least hearkened back to an “orthodoxy” inherent in the Marxism of the Second International and, in particular, the Erfurt minimum-maximum programme of the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) of 1891. Because this strand had influenced Lenin, it was picked up by CPGB intellectual leaders such as Salme Pekkala-Dutt and her husband, Rajani Palme Dutt. The latter wrote more voluminously than his wife, and his works show an occasional attachment to Karl Kautsky that survived Stalin’s later disavowals of the influence that Kautsky and the SPD had in fact exercised on Lenin and the Bolsheviks (not to mention the young Stalin).² This more healthy strand in the CPGB’s intellectual life, occasionally paraded by members who were contemporaries of the Dutts, was adulterated by the baser, “immediate”, programmatic metals of the Comintern of the 1920s and 1930s, which were attempts, in one form or another, to evade the basic inoperability of the party’s ultimate goal of a militarized dictatorship. This forms the essential drama of the 1939 Draft Programme.

Existing Commentary

The draft has been subsequently commented upon by a limited number of CPGB writers, albeit focused on its 10th section, ‘From Capitalism to Socialism’, and on only a few pages around the issue of the conquest of power at that.³ In 1978, John Gollan, a former general secretary of the organization, had a posthumous pamphlet, Reformism and Revolution, produced by the party, which included a short exegesis of parts of the 1939 draft. The CPGB’s programmatic history was a highly charged topic in 1978 because its ‘revisionist’ 1978 draft British Road to Socialism had been bitterly contested by wide swaths of the party, who objected to its more explicit reformism. Gollan contextualized the appearance of the 1939 draft in the popular front tactics of the late 1930s. He pictured a CPGB “struggling to defend parliamentary democracy against the fascists out to destroy it, but at the same time [intending] to replace parliament by soviets. Attempts to reconcile these conceptions became increasingly difficult”.⁴

Gollan picked up on one particular passage in the 1939 draft, which argued: “the new socialist state will be a vast extension of democracy for the overwhelming masses of the people, but it will be a dictatorship against the handful of exploiters. Such a dictatorship will guarantee the freedom of the people. So long as the struggle against capitalism and against the survivals of capitalism has to be fought, such dictatorship remains necessary. In proportion as socialism is realized, workers’ democracy becomes the democracy of the entire people.”⁵ As Gollan was well aware, such passages jarred with the reformist predilections of the CPGB’s right-centrist leadership (of which he had been a key representative) and he didn’t want such sections bolstering the narrative of the party’s left, which saw the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as a key symbol of the organization’s remaining revolutionary élan. So, he noticeably softened it by pointing out how the 1939 draft made ‘dictatorship’ an act of contingency, not principle: “The argument is interesting. The aim of the conquest of power by insurrection is not advanced. On the contrary, the violent struggle arises because of capitalist resistance, and this decides the dictatorship of the workers. Already in 1939, this draft programme was wrestling with the new problems.”⁶ In other words, Gollan is suggesting the 1939 work presages the CPGB’s later drift rightwards under his leadership, and that of his successor, Gordon McLennan. 

A similar attempt at softening was undertaken by Noreen Branson, a veteran CPGB member who was writing the party’s history under the watchful eye of its 1980s Eurocommunist leadership. She admitted: “the dictatorship of the proletariat was still seen as the ultimate goal, as, for example, in the draft programme drawn up for the expected congress in 1939.”⁷ Branson instantly reassured her readers and her own party that such lines of principle were consistently blurred by contingent factors: “party members had never spent much time preaching on the sidelines. Even in their most sectarian and isolated days of the class against class period [the ‘third period’ of 1928-32], they had always understood that the way forward was to mobilize people for action on the key issue of the moment… which could in turn lead the struggle on to a higher stage.”⁸ 

Jack Conrad, of the CPGB faction around The Leninist, also commented on the 1939 draft in a book composed in the 1980s. Like Gollan, Conrad thought that the Draft Programme was a premonition of the CPGB’s reformist future, but where the former portrayed this in a positive light, the latter thought it was entirely negative. Conrad correctly picked upon one opportunistic and historically false passage: “The path of violence is never chosen by the working class, but only by the exploiters.”⁹

But Conrad’s analysis was slightly more doubtful in other places. He argued: “But the most significant step to the right was the description of how socialism would be achieved. According to the Draft Programme, a ‘labour movement’ majority in parliament was key. A proletarian state would emerge not from revolution, but from the new (parliamentary) government’s call to rebuff the ‘violent resistance of the powerful financial magnates’.”¹⁰ From comparing this to the 1939 draft, my judgement is that the original is a good deal more slippery than Conrad maintained. 

It is certainly true that the draft made the nature of the struggle for working-class power dependent “on the character of the resistance of the capitalist class”.¹¹ But, in fact, the draft then moved on to issue a warning about over-reliance on legal and parliamentary methods to initiate socialism. “It would… be a fatal illusion for the British labour movement to place its trust in respect for legality on the part of the ruling class and imagine that political power can be peacefully transferred to the working class by a parliamentary majority. Even in the event of the conquest of a parliamentary majority by the representatives of the working class, a government based on such a majority, which endeavoured to make serious inroads into the foundations of capitalist exploitation, would be faced with the most violent resistance of the powerful financial magnates and of the capitalist state apparatus, developing from economic and financial sabotage to armed action.”¹² In a further passage, the draft said: “In order to end completely all power of resistance by the exploiters, the new state power of the working class requires to be established with decisive strength. It must disarm the exploiters, put an end to their armed organisation and machinery of coercion, and deprive them of political rights, so that they cannot harm the work of socialist construction or endeavour to win back power.”¹³ In that sense, the 1939 draft, rather than merely being seen as a portent of something else, emerges in its own right as a classically centrist document that fudges the issue of revolutionary violence in a confused manner.

This somewhat stilted debate is explained by the nature of the CPGB in the 1970s and 1980s. Much of its post-war factional struggle can be explained by the fact that, up until the 1960s, the leadership was prepared to pacify a growing left (which it pejoratively referred to as its ‘sectarian’ wing) by formally retaining older concepts from the 1920s communist lexicon such as ‘vanguard party’, ‘Leninism’, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and so on. As the leadership drifted further to the right and into its own mythology of the 1930s popular front, it saw a factionally-divided CPGB and a recalcitrant left as obstacles to its future survival – hence its later willingness to drop these old symbols of revolutionary virility and embrace Eurocommunist dogmas. Therefore, the issue of the CPGB’s attachment to the idea of using revolutionary violence against oppressors became symbolically important to right and left factions in the party. This explains the formality of the 1970s/1980s debate on the 1939 draft; it was a mirror of largely symbolic factional concerns. However, this obscured the broader dialectic of principle and contingency that was being played out, alongside other existential concerns as to the proximate origins of the Comintern parties from the Second International.

Published or Aborted?

Gollan claimed that the Draft Programme was “never published”,¹⁴ which, as we shall show, is false. Conrad suggested it was “aborted”,¹⁵ although “published and discarded” is probably the best formulation to explain its emergence and disappearance.

Of course, we have the draft in its printed form and the Daily Worker announced to the world that it had been published on September 13, 1939.¹⁶ The programme commission’s introduction to the draft, dated August 29, 1939, said it had been sent out to party branches “with the realisation that considerable amendment will be necessary before its final adoption”.¹⁷ We also know that by October of 1939, the draft had total reported sales of 9,261 across the CPGB districts, including 4,673 in the London area.¹⁸ However, the draft was published on the very day that the Daily Worker reported that the proposed October party congress where it was to be adopted was postponed, apparently due to a lack of available halls after many had been converted to war use.¹⁹

Such occurrences did not stop the launching of the draft in earnest, with the Daily Worker publishing a mammoth 17-part article (between September 15 and October 6), laying out the various sections of the draft in detail. The CPGB also produced a two-part commentary in the August and October issues of its Party Organiser journal by Robin Page Arnot, laying out some of the political inspiration behind the Draft Programme and its structure. 

So, this document was definitely launched, but references drop away in the party press after October 1939 and the impression is therefore that it was discarded. This is speculation on my part, but it may be that there never was a conscious decision to abandon the draft. The obvious explanation would be the immediate situation and the fact that the party did a somersault towards an anti-war line. 

The CPGB’s attention was clearly elsewhere, although Page Arnot stressed that the war “makes a programme even more necessary than before”.²⁰ Philip Bolsover argued in a more urgent tone: “Why are we fighting? What do we want to guard during this war; what do we want to achieve as it ends? Without an answer to these questions; without an immediate programme on which to take our stand; without a future ideal to which we look, we are lost, dragged willy-nilly at the tail of a military machine, befogged by propaganda whose aims may seem temporarily to present some affinity with ours, but can eventually lead us to disaster.”²¹ These lines were clearly written before the CPGB’s line changed in the second half of September, but the sentiment behind them would be pertinent to any communist organization in wartime. It wasn’t war per se that discouraged the party from moving forward with the programme, although the fall-out of the war inside the CPGB and the resulting fluidity may have dampened down thoughts of debating principles any further on the part of a leadership that was decidedly managerial in its instincts.

An Erfurtian Draft?

When Page Arnot introduced the Draft Programme to his CPGB comrades, he was keen to emphasize its historical lineage. He said: “In forging [the programme] we can draw on the great legacy of programmes, documents of the international proletariat left to us by Marx, Engels and Lenin.”²² Page Arnot recommended the study of various documents, including the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) of the German SPD. He added: “Invaluable also are the writings of Engels in connection with [Gotha] and with the 1891 (Erfurt) Programme of the German Social Democratic Party, which was used for many years as a model by parties in other countries of Europe.”²³ Page Arnot also recommended the Erfurt-influenced 1903 programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), alongside other programmatic documents of the Comintern era. 

We do have an even clearer explanation of what had gone on the CPGB’s programme commission, and of some of the aims and motivations behind the draft, in an August 1939 letter from Salme Pekkala-Dutt to Harry Pollitt. The latter hadn’t apparently been on the commission, and it seemed from the tone of the letter that Pollitt had complained about the draft and some of the language used. Pekkala-Dutt argued that the draft was a “compromise between different conceptions”, and thus not quite what she had previously talked about with Pollitt.²⁴ She added: “As you will remember I spoke of a short, simple, business-like document of not more than 7,500 words (something like the old Erfurt programme or the Russian programme [likely that of 1903], but of course not the same contents) putting forward our demands in all spheres and proceeded by a concise up-to-date argument, including explanation of the party. This to be accompanied later by an extremely popularly written commentary or explanatory booklet similar to Kautsky’s Class Struggle [1892] or Bukharin’s ABC [of Communism – 1920]”²⁵

In these surprising passages, Pekkala-Dutt is talking of the influence of Kautsky, of whom the Stalinists had been trying to expunge from the historical record as an influence on Lenin since the early 1930s and Bukharin, shot as a “traitor” in the Soviet Union in 1938. Neither were these historical issues then unimportant in the CPGB, given that the organization had, as might be expected, welcomed the Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) in 1939, with Labour Monthly hailing this work as a model of “Stalinist theoretical profundity and clarity”.²⁶ Internally, some of the CPGB leadership discounted some of the more lurid historical fantasies of the Soviet bureaucracy, and one can easily read between the lines of the CPGB’s public pronouncements on the Draft Programme to see where the influence of such ‘traitors’ in fact percolated.

In a number of articles in Labour Monthly, Page Arnot also drew upon other historical sources that had influenced the work of the programme commission in 1939 in terms of its political demands. In reviewing a pamphlet by Pekkala-Dutt herself on the Chartist movement, When England Arose (1939), Page Arnot drew out the lessons for the CPGB. He said: “The people of England, above all the working class, are seen in movement, politically awakened, fighting for political power in reliance on their own strength, aiming to end oppression and exploitation.”²⁷ Similarly, in an article on the Working Men’s International Association of 1864, Page Arnot drew attention to the preamble and rules of that organisation, notably: “the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves… the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule.”²⁸

This all found its way into the 1939 draft and the CPGB almost literally followed the advice on Engels in his 1891 writings on the old Erfurt programme. Engels said, “If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.”²⁹ In a section of the 1939 draft, ‘Programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain for the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism’, the CPGB advocated: “Replacement of the existing political system, which is dominated by wealth and privilege, by a workers’ democratic republic, through the establishment of local and district councils of delegates democratically elected from every factory, workshop and mine, from agricultural workers, distributive and office employees, and from every other grouping of the men and women in this country who have to work for their living, and through the establishment of a central popular assembly based on these local councils and controlling the government.”³⁰ This was the democratic crown of a section that called for the “abolition of the capitalist state apparatus”, “full political rights and liberties for all working people” and “expropriation of all public halls printing presses”.³¹ An earlier section outlined the history of democracy and the state in Britain and concluded, “resistance to any attack on democratic rights, and the struggle to maintain these rights, is essential for the working class. Only the overthrow of capitalist rule, however, will lay the basis for full democracy for the people.”³² Page Arnot argued the section showed “how the British workers fought and won their democratic rights, but were not able as yet to carry that democratic struggle to complete success”.³³

Immediate Demands

It was apparently Pekkala-Dutt who had broached the idea of something more immediate to lie alongside this exposition of democratic principle: “… I proposed as a mass-agitational weapon the issue of an immediate programme for the people’s front to be written by [Pollitt].”³⁴ This was woven into the draft in its seventh section, ‘The Immediate Programme’.³⁵ Page Arnot expressed the urgency behind its conception: “The Communist Party puts forward immediate demands as the basis of the common struggle now. These demands are something which everyone can fight for right away. In the course of this struggle the people will be mobilised to overcome the resistance of the monopoly capitalists and ‘in this way the working class will be strengthened for the further advance to socialism’.”³⁶ The 1939 draft explained the need for such immediate demands in terms of an incremental view of the development of working-class consciousness that, in the modern era, we would usually expect to hear from Trotskyist advocates of ‘broad’ struggle. It said: “In the course of this struggle the solidarity and confidence of the working class and other progressive sections of the people will be developed, and the possibility created of the defeat of reaction and the establishment of a government which will carry out the programme, mobilising the people to overcome the resistance and sabotage of the monopoly capitalists. In this way the working class will be strengthened for the further advance to socialism.”³⁷

The immediate demands section also included democratic demands that had been filleted from the previously mentioned ‘Programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain for the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism’. That section had read, “Abolition of the capitalist state apparatus (police, standing army, judiciary, etc.) and establishment of a new state apparatus based on the people…”³⁸ In the section of immediate demands, this democratic struggle was turned into reformism: “Repeal of all legislation restricting the democratic rights of the working class; democratic control of the police; full political rights for all citizens in the armed forces, police and public services.”³⁹ And crowning this series of demands that “everyone can fight for right away”⁴⁰ was not, of course, the “workers’ democratic republic” advocated elsewhere in the document but, more prosaically, a Labour government. The draft argued: “Victory in this struggle [for immediate demands] will make possible the establishment of a government led by Labour, which will hold back the advance of fascism at home and abroad, safeguard and extend democracy in Britain and the Empire, and carry through economic and social measures for the immediate improvement of the living and working conditions of the people.”⁴¹

Thus, the fudged 1939 Draft Programme proposed two separate and counterposed roads to socialism. The first was the orthodox Second International/Bolshevik method of a minimum programme of political demands, crowned by the projected achievement of a democratic republic as the optimum route to communism. The second was an incremental struggle for piecemeal reforms more doubtfully festooned with the utopia of a Labour Party forming a government and thereby facilitating the confidence for future socialist advance. The draft thus captured the CPGB at a very unique moment in its ideological history. Its centralization from the mid-1920s in the form of a debased caricature of ‘democratic centralism’ meant that it was impossible for a wider British proletariat to master the CPGB for revolutionary ends, but the flickers from its Second International inheritance took much longer to subside. A picture therefore emerges of a very peculiar Janus-faced party that we need to study rather than smooth out into singularly flat and pejorative definitions.

A History of Fudge

Such a fudge was nothing new as far as the CPGB was concerned. The “third period” of 1928-32 is most often recounted as an era of blood-curdling ‘ultra-leftism’, where a loud-lunged CPGB argued that Labour was a “third capitalist party”, or “social-fascist” and pursued follies such as “red” unions and a “revolutionary workers’ government”. This is all true enough, but this was interlarded with the same incremental logic of immediate demands and limited horizons of proletarian consciousness. Thus, the CPGB’s 1929 general election programme Class Against Class had an immediate programme of action for which the party used exactly the same “preparatory” logic it expressed in relation to its 1939 draft: “The following programme of immediate demands is… not an alternative to the programme of the revolutionary workers’ government, but the application of its principles to the immediate situation as preparatory measures expressing the needs of the workers, the struggle for which weakens the forces of the capitalist class and strengthens the power of the working class, and prepares it for its greater task of conquering power.”⁴² The passage from “third period” to popular front hadn’t altered these conceptions in the slightest.

More broadly, immediate demands and an appeal to the lowest rungs of working-class consciousness were all that was available to the CPGB in the late 1930s. Its commitment to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its small-scale mimicry of a militarised “democratic centralism” leading to the debarring of “factional struggles” in the CPGB, including unofficial factions that took the form of organisational “intrigues”,⁴³ meant that there was little possibility that it could become the herald of what the 1939 draft proposed as a “workers’ democratic republic”.

This was shown by the intolerance shown to other tendencies in the workers’ movement in the draft itself. Trotskyism was idiotically portrayed as the “direct agency of fascist penetration in the labour movement”.⁴⁴ Trotskyism was a miniscule and ineffectual political movement, infected by many of the misconceptions of the Stalinism that it sought to critique; Leon Trotsky himself, on the other hand, was widely known and read in the British labour movement (partly thanks to the CPGB itself in the 1920s) and it was an utter absurdity to import the atmosphere of Soviet show trials into a situation where the CPGB itself was a small minority. Activists who, say, had been through the ranks of non-Trotskyist organisations such as the Independent Labour Party, for example, would have mostly been inoculated against this horseshit. It was the same story with the CPGB’s formally correct and well-made calls for “unity in diversity” in relation to various attempts to affiliate to the Labour Party in the 1930s and 1940s; the CPGB simply didn’t have the democratic legitimacy to carry such impassioned arguments.⁴⁵ Thus, the party consistently took refuge in a plastic empiricism and the relative idiocy of immediate demands as a coping mechanism to disguise the basic unpopularity of its politics and the extreme unlikeliness of bureaucratic centralist methods producing mass organisations able to win a democratic republic. (This method lived on to plague Comintern “wannabes” in the shape of Trotskyism, Maoism, Enverism and so on.)

“Written for Imbeciles”

Such an outcome was a source of intense dissatisfaction for CPGB leaders such as Pekkala-Dutt, who, in another letter to Pollitt a few days before the one dealing with the Draft Programme quoted above, decried a situation where the party was forced to take refuge in immediacy. She wrote: “I have often heard the workers in the labour movement express the view that our agitational pamphlets are at present written for imbeciles; that we forget that the workers nowadays have had elementary school education and that our writing reflects the middle-class composition of the party who imagine the workers to be slum dwellers or shop girls. I agree with them that even the shop girls have begun to think nowadays.”⁴⁶ Pekkala-Dutt located the source of this in divisions within the CPGB itself, noting “objections to Marxist education among the party comrades” and, more hyperbolically, perhaps, that “members hate Raji’s [R. Palme Dutt’s] books and writings because they analyse”.⁴⁷ Unsurprisingly, Pekkala-Dutt drew upon her recent studies of Chartism to indict the ideology of such members. “The Chartists had mastered whatever literature was available at the period and tried to convey to the workers the outcome and their thoughts. The language of the Chartists was not easy… often much more difficult than the language of the present trade union documents.”⁴⁸

From this, it is obvious that the tensions in the 1939 draft were underpinned by different CPGB conceptions, of working-class consciousness and of the party itself, that were not yet at this point factional but more a matter of emphasis and tone. One pole drew on principle, theory, historical example, and a more expansive set of expectations regarding the capabilities of the British proletariat. The other was stuck in a day-to-day agitational rut that spoke of little but the inoperability of a broader project with a deformed Comintern party apparatus. 

These poles fed through more generally into how CPGB members and sympathizers faced up to the difficulties of the party’s more isolated position as it changed its line to oppose the imperialist war and as Britain was exposed to a barrage of anti-Soviet propaganda during the USSR’s war with Finland in 1939-40.⁴⁹ In his interesting lament for the CPGB’s popular front era of the late 1930s, the writer Jack Lindsay gave a picturesque account of his own difficulties: “I recall my own misery, early in 1940 when in a roadside transport-café I was drawn into an argument with the 40-odd workers there, and not a single one of them but was ferociously anti-Soviet on the issue of the Finnish war.”⁵⁰ We can contrast this with the calm manner in which another writer, Edward Upward, responded to the talks that led to the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939. He wrote in his diary, “Now it is more or less clear that there will eventually be a war between British and German imperialism and that we shall have to aim at the defeat of ‘our own’ imperialism (i.e., our own fascism).”⁵¹ This sense of “the main enemy is at home” that had been advocated by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the First World War (Upward mentions reading works from the CPGB’s Little Lenin library such as The War and the Second International)⁵² fed through into a later entry in April 1941 where Upward wrote: “I am still inclined to think that a B[ritish] victory would be an even greater disaster for the world than a Nazi victory…”⁵³ Like Lindsay, Upward was not immune to pressure and doubt in this period and admitted at one point that he had allowed himself to be “partly persuaded by the capitalist press that Russia had now begun to adopt an ‘expansionist’ policy”.⁵⁴

However, having to adopt principles that were minoritarian and unpopular didn’t seemingly cause Upward any particular angst. At root, these differing responses are underlaid by alternative conceptions of the party: one fears any move that sets it apart from the broader working class; the other is more comfortable with partially being removed by line and principle. Of course, the irony of Upward’s stance, despite its obvious delusions in Soviet adventures of diplomacy and war, is that it ultimately speaks of diversity much more clearly than the tendency to simply want to close ranks with everyone. Standing aside and alone on principle instantly makes a claim to diversity that is never commensurate with a constant accent on populist agitational demands.

Preparing for Illegality

We can move on from these individual responses to the way in which the party as a whole reacted to its new line of opposition to the imperialist war. We have the well-known account by Douglas Hyde of how the CPGB prepared for expected illegality by establishing hidden printing presses across London and developing underground networks.⁵⁵ Nan Berger recounted similar experiences: “The party… realised the dangers ahead and took steps to safeguard its resources and members in so far as it could. Some members were withdrawn from party branches and organised in small groups. Some of the groups were given tasks to do but they were not very onerous and they were instructed to study the behaviour of other parties which had been forced to operate under semi-illegal conditions.”⁵⁶ These were the moves of an organization that knew it was disreputable and set apart from the majority of the British workers’ movement.

Set against this is the fact that the CPGB did not, in practice, pursue a “revolutionary defeatist” line that the main enemy, British imperialism, was at home. Instead, as Morgan argued, as the CPGB’s politics unfolded across 1939-41, it effectively renounced revolutionary defeatism and pursued instead mass agitation and trade union work, which was not shaped by any coherent revolutionary strategy.⁵⁷ Indeed, the organization’s rhetoric and activity continued to be shaped by the cross-class language of the popular front era in the form of the idea of a “people’s peace” and a “people’s government’ that were proposed by the CPGB-initiated People’s Convention of 1941.⁵⁸ Therefore, the Leninist faction was correct in its later characterization of the CPGB in the early war years. It argued: “In no sense was the party’s opposition to the war from October 1939 to June 1941 ‘revolutionary defeatism’, since the absence of the accompanying chorus of turning the imperialist war into a civil war left the party conductor waving his baton to empty air.”⁵⁹ These were the moves of an organization that still hankered after submerging itself into a floodtide of populism. 

In a sense, the CPGB’s 1939 Draft Programme and its Erfurtian inheritance was another baton that was merely waved to empty air. It partly embodied an organization that could still think back to its emergence from the Second International and Lenin’s Bolsheviks, and outside the urge to merely embed itself into the ruinous defeatism of endless mass agitation. But it was also trapped in a self-projected immediacy that was a by-product of the democratic deficit that existed at the heart of the parties founded by the Comintern in the early 1920s. The 1939 draft captured almost perfectly the Janus-faced nature of the CPGB’s ideological existence at the start of the Second World War.

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1. CPGB Draft programme to be submitted to the 16th party congress London 1939.  https://archive.org/details/draftprogrammeto00comm_1
2. See https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2017/10/31/palme-dutt-and-karl-kautsky/ and https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2020/12/14/notes-on-kautsky-as-a-marxist-and-the-post-war-cpgb/ For more on Dutt, Kautsky and the CPGB. For the young Stalin and Kautsky, see https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/11/24/just-another-kautsky-fan-understanding-the-early-stalin/
3. CPGB Draft Programme op. cit, pp. 59-61.
4. J. Gollan, Reformism and Revolution, London, 1978, p. 52.
5. CPGB Draft Programme op. cit. p. 61.
6. Gollan op. cit. p. 53.
7. N, Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927-1941, London, 1985, p. 218.
8. Ibid.
9. CPGB Draft Programme op. cit. p. 60.
10. J. Conrad, Which Road? A Critique of ‘Revolutionary’ Reformism, London, 1991, p. 128.
11. CPGB Draft Programme op. cit. p. 59.
12. Ibid. pp. 59-60.
13. Ibid. pp. 60-61.
14. Gollan, op. cit. p. 52.
15. Conrad, op. cit. p. 126.
16. P. Bolsover, “Draft Programme of the Communist Party”, Daily Worker, September 14, 1939.
17. CPGB Draft Programme op. cit. p. 1.
18. CPGB Party Organiser, December, 1939.
19. ‘Party Congress is Postponed’ Daily Worker, September 13, 1939. A “national conference” was instead proposed for September 24-25.
20. R. Page Arnot, ‘The Structure of the Party Programme’, Party Organiser, October 1939.
21. Bolsover, op. cit.
22. Page Arnot, ‘The Party Programme’, Party Organiser, August, 1939.
23. Ibid.
24. Letter from Salme Pekkala-Dutt to Harry Pollitt, August 20, 1939, CPGB archive, CP-Ind-Poll-16-01.
25. Ibid.
26. ‘A Powerful Weapon of Bolshevism’, Labour Monthly, February, 1939.
27. R. Page Arnot, ‘Chartism’ Labour Monthly, July 1939.
28. R. Page Arnot, ‘Working Men’s International Association’ Labour Monthly, October 1939.
29. https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm
30. CPGB Draft Programme op. cit. p. 63.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid p. 21.
33. Page Arnot ‘The Structure of the Party Programme’ op cit.
34. Letter from Salme Pekkala-Dutt to Harry Pollitt, op. cit.
35. CPGB Draft Programme op. cit. pp. 37-44.
36. Page Arnot ‘The Structure of the Party Programme’ op. cit.
37. CPGB Draft Programme op. cit. p. 44.
38. Ibid. p. 63.
39. Ibid. p. 38.
40. Page Arnot, ‘The Structure of the Party Programme’ op. cit.
41. Ibid. p. 37.
42. https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/pamphlets/1929/class-against-class.htm#20
43. CPGB The Party and its Work, London, 1937.
44. CPGB Draft Programme op. cit. p. 52.
45. See R. Palme Dutt, ‘The Road to Labour Unity II. The Evolution of the Labour Party’, Labour Monthly, April 1943. Dutt drew upon the foundation period of the Labour Party as an alliance of affiliated organizations to support the CPGB’s own 1943 application for affiliation. “The foundation principle was thus working-class solidarity in the electoral and parliamentary field and not any special fixed programme or policy.”
46. Letter from Salme Pekkala-Dutt to Harry Pollitt, August 17, 1939. CPGB archive, CP-Ind-Poll-16-01.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. See https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1457/cold-war-adumbration/ for more details.
50. J. Lindsay, After the ‘thirties, London, 1956. p. 64.
51. E. Upward, diary entry, August 21, 1939. British Library. Upward’s biographer said, “he had no difficulty in accepting the communist line that it was a war between rival imperialisms and the Soviet-German pact was a way to prevent further British appeasement of Germany.” P. Stansky, Edward Upward: Art and Life, London, 2016. pp. 158-159
52. E. Upward, diary entry, November 14, 1939.
53. E. Upward, diary entry, April 17, 1941. Upward added a note to this in June of 1988 that said he was “tempted to tear this page out”.
54. E. Upward, diary entry, October 25, 1939.
55. D. Hyde, I Believed. New York, 1950. pp. 91-94.
56. N. Berger, Twenty-Nine Thousand Nights: A Communist Life. London, 2017. p. 114.
57. K. Morgan, Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics 1935-41. Manchester, 1989. pp. 108-109.
58. Ibid. pp. 201-213.
59. R. Hardy, ‘1939 – A Critique’. The Leninist. July 1984.