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ARTICLES |
Left Turn: A Reassessment of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the Third Period, 1928–33
University of Reading
From 1928 to 1935, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) campaigned under the slogan of ‘class against class’; a policy which, at its most basic level, entailed the pursual of an ‘independent leadership’ of the working class and the dismissal of the established Labour bureaucracy as an ally of capital. As such, the CPGB aligned itself not only against the Conservative and Liberal parties, but also in direct opposition to the Labour Party, TUC, and ‘sham left wing’ within the labour movement, whose commitment to reformism—the party reasoned— obstructed the workers‘ march to freedom. The theoretical justification for such a policy was established within the Communist International (Comintern), the World Communist Party of which the CPGB was a loyal section, and was supposedly constructed from a materialist reading of the existing ’international situation‘. Very briefly, by 1928, the Comintern had delineated three periods of postwar struggle. The first, between 1917 and 1922-3, was deemed to have been a period of revolutionary upheaval, while the second, between 1923 and 1927, was recognized as one of ’capitalist stabilisation‘. The ’third period‘ therefore, was to herald a fresh round of crises and revolution as the contradictions inherent in capitalism induced a ’capitalist offensive‘, unemployment, industrial rationalization, working-class militancy, and imperialist war. This article will endeavour to analyse the experience of the CPGB in such a period and, in so doing, seek to widen the context within which the years of ‘class against class’ have generally been perceived.