One of the less satisfactory features of John Mahon's recently published biography of Harry Pollitt [Lawrence & Wishart, £6] is the very slight treatment of a major event in his subject's career, namely, his accession to the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Yet Mahon fully appreciated the importance and interest of that event.
In 1949 I wrote an article (the first text reprinted below) commemorating the 20th anniversary of Pollitt as party leader, and circulated copies to a select list of friends and acquaintances in the party. One of these — I think it was Jack Woddis, now head of the International Department — saw fit to hand his copy to John Mahon, who was then in charge of the party's London District. Mahon sent for me and told me that it was an offence against party discipline to circulate documents like this. It was not, he said, that there was anything incorrect in what I had written: on the contrary, he had been there at the time and knew that things had happened just as I described. But the story could be misunderstood and be used against the party. In fact, a copy of my little piece had gone astray and was being used by ‘enemies’ in Lambeth...
As I am sure Mahon well appreciated, I had not written my article on the change of party leadership in 1929 just out of an itch to celebrate jubilees. After a period immediately after the Second World War when the CPGB had followed an extreme right-wing course, signs appeared in 1948-49 of a possible turn to the left. This was very welcome to party members of a certain type, to which I belonged — what were sometimes called ‘Sixth Congress Communists’, meaning comrades who had joined the party before the Seventh Comintern Congress [1935], in the ‘Third Period’ of ultra-leftism, and had never shaken off nostalgia for the slogans and style of work of their political youth. In those circles the criticism ‘from the left’ of the British party's post-1945 policy which had been made by the Australian CP was well-received: on this episode, see Edward Upward's novel set in this period, The Rotten Elements [Penguin, 35p].
At the same time there was marked resistance to any ‘left turn’ on the part of important sections of the party who were quite happy with the right-wing line. It was as an attack on these people that I wrote my article on the party struggle of 1929, seeing in that a kind of precedent for the conflict of 1949.
Eight years later I wrote another study of the same events, this time set in a broader context, entitled ‘The Communist Party and the Labour Left, 1925-29’, and this was published by John Saville as one of the Reasoner pamphlets. The point of view was quite different, and a number of new facts were mentioned. The text of this pamphlet [which originally appeared with the writer's name given as ‘Joseph Redman’] is included in Essays on the History of Communism in Britain, by Michael Woodhouse and Brian Pearce [New Park, £1.50]. This also contains five other contributions by me to the history of the British Communist Party, all originally published in Labour Review in 1957-59. It does not include, however, the second text reprinted below, ‘Marxists in the Second World War’, written by me under the pseudonym ‘B. Farnborough’, which appeared in the Labour Review of April-May 1959.
BRIAN PEARCE
16 October 1976