Collins’ history of the origins of the British revolutionary left is full of interest, and lessons of which to take heed, finds Alex Snowdon

The history of left-wing politics in Britain has been dominated by reformism. Left Labourism in particular has, since the early twentieth century, been more prominent than any revolutionary or anti-capitalist currents. The Communist Party of Great Britain became a party of some size and significance, but never on the scale of its sister parties in countries like Italy, Greece and France. It also degenerated politically under the influence of Stalinism.

The Trotskyist tradition grew after 1968, so that its organisations had thousands of adherents, but it was numerically dwarfed by the Labour left. It did a great deal to sustain the Marxist tradition and had successes in fusing revolutionary politics with some implantation in the workers’ movement, but struggled to develop this on a mass scale. Intellectually, Marxism has at times been an influential current in radical intellectual circles or on the left of the labour movement, but it always struggled to reach broader layers. It has been in retreat for decades.

All of this begs the question of whether things could have been otherwise. Investigating the historic possibilities for the revolutionary left requires digging back into the period before the formation of the CPGB in the early 1920s. This was a volatile time, from the emergence of revolutionary socialism in Britain in the 1880s until the CPGB’s formation, in which organisations rose and fell, or fused and split, and in which there was considerable flux. Different political currents – Marxist, syndicalist, reformist and so on – developed. They influenced each other, but also reacted against each other.

Tony Collins has performed a great service by pulling together the strands of radical socialist politics during this period into a coherent narrative. He critically assesses the development of organised Marxist politics, starting with the formation of the Social Democratic Federation in 1884, and examines the complex pre-history of the CPGB. It weaves together the histories of key organisations, in particular the Social Democratic Federation, Independent Labour Party, Socialist Labour Party, British Socialist Party and Workers’ Socialist Federation.

A central argument emerges from this narrative: while the development of the left (and, within that, specifically the revolutionary left) was conditioned by objective factors, the subjective element was highly influential. It wasn’t simply inevitable that Marxist organisations would be marginalised by the emerging Labour Party in the early twentieth century, or that the newly-formed CPGB of the 1920s was destined to be relatively small. There were important subjective errors by the organisations and currents associated, more or less closely, with the Marxist tradition that shaped these errors.

This is not to belittle or deride the efforts and achievements of these pioneering revolutionary socialists, for whom the author clearly has great admiration. Collins refers to how E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class rescued an earlier generation from smug dismissal, commenting that he wishes to do the same for the political actors, overwhelmingly working class and almost all obscure, in this era. It does, however, mean, maintaining a clear-eyed, sober view of their limitations and mistakes.

Pre-World War I tendencies

The same applies to the broader struggles of workers and oppressed groups during a tumultuous period in British history. How things turned out was not how they were fated to be. In the early part of this history was the New Unionism, the wave of workers’ revolts in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Later, the Great Unrest (roughly 1910-14) took trade-union struggle to new heights.

Collins argues convincingly that the outbreak of war was an interruption in an upturn of workers’ resistance that never entirely subsided in wartime conditions, but was renewed on a mass scale in 1918-20. This was similar, though not to quite the same extent, to how in Russia the strike wave of 1912-14 was halted by war but re-emerged on a revolutionary scale in 1917. This was also the era of the mass movement for women’s suffrage and of anti-colonial revolt in Ireland (which had repercussions in British politics, including in the labour movement).

The outcomes of these historic struggles were not pre-ordained. Serious failures of leadership and strategy, whether by trade-union leaders, Labour politicians or the radical left, were sometimes of great importance. It is also noted that the defeats of the era conditioned how the new CPGB was formed and subsequently developed. Although the General Strike of 1926 (which falls outside the book’s historical span) is often assumed to be the high point of British labour struggles, it was in fact the immediate post-World War I crisis that saw the most profound convulsions in society, including spectacularly high levels of strike action. The CPGB developed in the shadow of defeat.

In the course of this fascinating history, a number of key themes emerge. Firstly, there is the question of how Marxism, as a body of ideas, could be related to practical activity and the building of socialist organisation. Marxists of the era struggled enormously with this and made numerous mistakes. The extent to which elements of the revolutionary left were propagandistic can be hard for socialists today to fathom. It was not guaranteed, for example, that Marxists would support strikes, as they could be seen as an irrelevant distraction from patient educational work or as an inadequate reformist remedy compared to working for the overthrow of capitalism altogether.

The fusion of Marxism with the struggles waged by working-class people, strikes in particular, was an essential element in developing any kind of serious organised revolutionary left. There were at least partial or temporary successes in this respect, but the overall record was at best patchy. It was rare for Marxists, even when they were convinced by the necessity and value of strikes, to play a leading role in strikes or to make a serious attempt to shape their direction. Abstract propagandism was the order of the day.

Collins highlights the contributions of those outstanding figures who very much grasped the need to connect socialist politics with practical struggle: Eleanor Marx, John Mclean and Sylvia Pankhurst above all. Marx was exemplary in her efforts to connect socialist politics with workers’ organising, but struggled to establish an organisation that could embody such an approach systematically. There were many examples of ideas remaining disconnected from lived experience or practical activity. The SDF, which later evolved into the British Socialist Party (BSP), provides recurring examples of aloof propagandism.

Socialists and elections

A second theme is that of how socialists ought to relate to elections, parliament and (increasingly) the Labour Party. Collins documents the twin tendencies of ultra-leftist abstentionism and reformist opportunism, both illustrated with many examples. An abstentionist approach to electoral politics could be shaped by an orientation on Marxist education and propaganda, which could not be sullied or diluted by the concrete, everyday issues involved in electoral politics. Or it might derive from a focus on industrial organising and building workplace power. The syndicalist tradition, which intersected closely with a number of socialist currents, had little if any place for electoral or parliamentary activity.

The flip side, reformist opportunism, has many, many examples to illustrate it. Indeed an intriguing strand of Collins’ narrative is how this coalesces into a distinct tradition. There is, of course, the tradition of left reformism that looked to the Labour Party and to winning seats in parliament, but there was also a distinct tradition of those with some background in Marxism fetishising elections at the expense of an orientation on workers’ struggle. This tradition was also characterised by a downplaying of Marxist principle and willingness to make political and ideological concessions. It found organised expression mainly in the British Socialist Party, which would later be the dominant element in the new CPGB. It tended to be poor on issues like war, racism and women.

There are many glimpses of a better approach: a strategy that could bring together economic and political issues, take the realm of mass politics seriously without bending opportunistically to prevailing opinion, and (as time went on) orient successfully on the Labour Party while remaining politically and organisationally independent of it. These were complex and challenging circumstances with no easy answers. In the later parts of the book, there is insightful discussion of how some socialists engaged in dialogue with Lenin, learning from the experiences of the Bolsheviks and the international movement, but there were no ready-made prescriptions that could simply be replicated in Britain.

Nationalism and war

A third theme is how the revolutionary socialist currents of this period responded to nationalism, imperialism and war. The errors were legion. The leader of the SDF, H.M. Hyndman, was a notorious British chauvinist, but this was emblematic of a wider trend not an individual defect. Some elements of the left tried, in vain, to merge socialism (even Marxism) with some sort of distinctively British sensibility, basically a capitulation to nationalism. There was great reluctance to take a stand against the British Empire and, in debates about imperialism, principled internationalist politics competed with jingoism and defences of empire. Racist attitudes, inevitably, were never far away.

The initial responses to the outbreak of World War One are illustrative. Collins rightly criticises Ray Challinor, in his landmark (and still, I’d argue, very useful) book The Origins of British Bolshevism, for obscuring how weak the Socialist Labour Party’s response to the tragedy of August 1914 was. The SLP was the most radically left-wing organisation of its time, with a very impressive record in industrial organising as well as commitment to Marxism, yet even it was muted in its opposition to war. This changed as the war went on, as it did with other organisations on the left.

John Mclean emerges in this part of the book as an extraordinary figure for his unwavering anti-war agitation. He was consistent in his politics and ceaseless in his efforts to agitate against the carnage. He also strove to link the war to domestic and economic issues. It is all the more remarkable when set against the record of the rest of the radical left. Much of the anti-war politics that did develop, even on the ostensibly revolutionary left, was more pacifist than anti-imperialist in character.

Many of the more positive experiences in this arena – the examples of anti-imperialism and anti-racism – derive from solidarity with the Irish in their anti-colonial resistance and struggle for independence. There are interesting passages on James Connolly, the great Scottish-born Irish Marxist, and his relations with the British revolutionary left, and also on the way that some elements of the revolutionary left later championed the Irish cause. Maclean and Pankhurst emerge with more credit than many of their contemporaries, as they do on most political issues. Pankhurst’s work in east London, where she linked working-class issues with the women’s suffrage movement, is inspiring. Yet it also shows up the weakness of much of the revolutionary left on women’s oppression and in organising working-class women.

Raising the Red Flag is a narrative of a remarkable and dramatic period in the history of British working-class struggle, focusing especially on the individuals and organisations that pioneered organised socialist politics in this country. It examines how these early generations of socialists interacted with the sometimes momentous events unfolding around them, tracing how their choices (and often errors) conditioned the development of socialism as an organised current in the working class.

Crucially, Collins articulates a cogent case for how subjective decisions and actions were profoundly influential in that development, arguing that many of the defeats and defects were not inevitable. It is an invaluable contribution to the literature on the British left, especially those in the Marxist tradition, before, during and after World War One.