Comrades All

Abstract

The legacy of republican socialism bequeathed by the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) was taken up by the later British Socialist Party (BSP) and this, in turn, became the core of the Communist Party of Great Britain when it was formed just after the First World War, in 1920. The CPGB was born on a cold summer’s day when a dedicated group of socialist revolutionaries held a meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel near St Paul’s. The delegates, 160 in all, were from a variety of backgrounds; many had fought in the First World War. Arthur McManus chaired the meeting. He was the son of a Fenian and had helped turn the Clyde ‘red’ before coming south to England. There was also Sylvia Pankhurst and her Workers’ Socialist Federation (WSF) from the East End. The WSF and the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), McManus’s Scottish group, were meeting in this London hotel to make acquaintance and forge alliance. Lenin himself, who put £55,000 at McManus’s disposal, had primed them. Lenin waited on results and accepted the SLP’s recommendation that the ILP be excluded for being too revisionist whilst a revolutionary and politically stable core of support was built up. The CPGB began life with 3,000 dedicated members including hard-line trade unionists like Arthur Horner and Willie Gallacher, self-taught workingclass activists like Harry Pollitt and intellectuals such as the rather austere and aloof Rajani Palme Dutt. They were all revolutionaries, anti- parliamentary in their political aims and violently opposed to the ‘capitalist’ class. The Communists were never gradualists or reformists, and their enemies who were — the trades union movement, the Liberals and, above all, the Labour Party — were all vilified in turn.