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The University of Manchester Research Communists and British Society 1920-1991 Document Version Proof Link to publication record in Manchester Research Explorer Citation for published version (APA): Morgan, K., Cohen, G., & Flinn, A. (2007). Communists and British Society 1920-1991. Rivers Oram Press. Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on Manchester Research Explorer is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Proof version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Research Explorer are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Takedown policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please refer to the University of Manchester’s Takedown Procedures [http://man.ac.uk/04Y6Bo] or contact [email protected] providing relevant details, so we can investigate your claim. Download date:30. Sep. 2021 INTRODUCTION A dominant view of the communist party as an institution is that it provided a closed, well-ordered and intrusive political environment. The leading French scholars Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal discern in it a resemblance to Erving Goffman’s concept of a ‘total institution’. Brigitte Studer, another international authority, follows Sigmund Neumann in referring to it as ‘a party of absolute integration’; tran- scending national distinctions, at least in the Comintern period (1919–43) it is supposed to have comprised ‘a unitary system—which acted in an integrative fashion world-wide’.1 For those working within the so-called ‘totalitarian’ paradigm, the validity of such ‘total’ or ‘absolute’ concep- tions of communist politics has always been axiomatic. Cruder recitations of the party ‘line’ have typically adopted them unquestioningly. More recently, fuller documentation of the Comintern’s apparatus of controls, seemingly replicated in all but their most extreme forms by individual communist parties, has prompted renewed interest in the encompassing character of communist commitment. At the same time, traditional emphases on the instruments of authority have been supplemented and enriched by culturalist approaches and the growth of interest in commu- nist mentalities. In a British context, Raphael Samuel provided a virtuoso rendition of such themes in an acclaimed series of articles published in 1984–5. Tellingly, like the doyenne of French communist historians, Annie Kriegel, he took as his theme not the mentalities of the party’s followers, but ‘the’ mentality, singular. Brilliantly depicted as a ‘lost world’, it seemed self-contained and almost frozen in time, with evidence from decades and communities apart placed together like fossils in a cabinet.2 What many of these accounts convey is a sense both of enclosure and of what Studer calls the ‘fusion’ between the individual and the party. ‘To be a Communist was to have a complete social identity, one which tran- scended the limits of class, gender and nationality’, Samuel argued. Studer describes it not as a party but as a destiny, ‘at once a community, 2 COMMUNISTS AND BRITISH SOCIETY INTRODUCTION 3 an order, a family—a way of life’.3 It meant inhabiting ‘a little private of cultural or political capital which allowed more negotiated relationships world of our own’—Samuel’s recollection—or being ‘shut up’ in a party with the party. Specifically in the British case, Samuel acknowledged that cell; and to the strong opposition of inner citadel to the ‘outside world’ ‘party-mindedness was not easy to impose on a membership so heteroge- is added an emphasis on the total overhaul of one’s personal identity that neous in its origins, and overlapping at so many points with the labour and adhesion to the party involved. Sandro Bellassai, writing of the Italian trade union movement’, though without himself exploring the ‘real if communist party, describes this as ‘the exemplary perception and presen- limited autonomies’ which resulted from this.11 tation of one’s own life story divided into “before” and “after” entering These are critical distinctions. Perhaps they help clarify the over- the party. This “event” alone marked an existential watershed between the familiar historiographical exchanges in which conflicting generalisations kind of hazy and defective personal “prehistory” and a new season of as to autonomy or control have corresponded to, or predetermined, a focus completeness and maturity...’4 In the autobiographies of French commu- on different aspects of the communist experience. They also allow the nists the process is often described as a ‘second birth’, indispensable in possibility of genuine comparison, so that Pennetier and Pudal can stress the formation of the ‘total’ communist and even involving the ‘killing’ of the specificity of French communism in the degree to which it conformed the former self.5 In Britain, according to Samuel, ‘joining the Party was to the master narratives of the Comintern era.12 Pointedly, a major histor- experienced as a momentous event, equivalent in its intensity—to taking ical survey to which both they and Studer contribute bears the plural title, a decision for Christ’.6 A century of communisms. In the global perspective which its editors adopt, It is this idea of a rarefied world, defined by sharp temporal and asso- the characterisation of communism in terms of diversity held together by ciational boundaries, which suggests the analogy with the total institution. a common project seems unarguable.13 In a more limited way, it is the In Goffman’s definition, cited by Pennetier and Pudal, the total institution assumed singularity of the communist experience, in the double sense of is ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated its oneness and distinctiveness, that we examine more closely here, even in individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of the case of a single national variant like the communism of the CPGB. time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life’.7 There is no doubt that the idea of a single overriding commitment had What Goffman had in mind were prisons, barracks, monasteries, labour a tremendous significance for communists themselves. The British theo- camps, to which one might certainly add the intense segregation of the retician R. Palme Dutt described it to 1930s’ student recruits as a Comintern’s International Lenin School (ILS), attended by some 160 comprehensive ‘life-outlook’: British communists between 1926 and 1937. The aim, in the words of an early CPGB syllabus, was that of a party hammered out of steel; but for Communism is a complete world conception covering every the little band of British communists, who even in their heyday were scat- aspect of life, and transforming all our thinking and activity; the tered across the outside world in proportions of a thousand to one, an comradeship of Communism draws us into a great collective absolute sense of enclosure must have been especially difficult to maintain.8 movement, in which all can find their realisation, and in which In sensitive accounts, the notion of totality is therefore always qualified. the old distinctions of politics and life, of political activity and Pennetier and Pudal thus describe western communist parties as ‘open’ private life, disappear and lose their meaning.14 total institutions, albeit with uncertain implications given the predication of Goffman’s original conception upon confinement and the condition of Dutt himself was a brilliantly gifted Oxford graduate whose intellect, the ‘inmate’. The same authors also propose a variant of Kriegel’s conscience and career prospects were all subordinated to the party, and concentric rings model of communist organisation, identifying the total who gave to it something like the ‘24 hour-a-day’ commitment it is held institution more specifically with an inner kernel of activists and func- to have demanded.15 In this sense, traditional historiographical emphases tionaries.9 Studer too distinguishes the ‘true’ communist in this way, while convey the spirit of countless party texts, exactly as Klehr’s definition of Harvey Klehr, in his study of the American communist party elite, has the ‘real’ communist mirrors the attempts at cadre formation of commu- suggested that most rank-and-file party members were not ‘real’ commu- nist parties themselves. Nevertheless, the extent to which these ambitions nists in the Leninist sense.10 Crucially, Pennetier and Pudal also introduce were realised needs to be shown even in the lives of these ‘real’ commu- the notion of ‘critical distance’ to describe the independent accumulations nists, if only to establish which the real ones were and how they acquired 4 COMMUNISTS AND BRITISH SOCIETY INTRODUCTION 5 this quality of authenticity. Where distinctions of life and politics disap- tively relaxed approach to recruitment and the oversight of members’ peared, nothing will be lost in testing the claim against the evidence now activities. This was symbolised by the party’s general secretary, the available to us. Where this was not the case, or only partly so, then the Lancashire boilermaker Harry Pollitt (1890–1960), a former shop stew- tensions between them may provide a more effective way of exploring ard and secretary in the 1920s of the trade union-orientated Minority both communist history itself and the wider issues of left-wing political Movement, whose labour-movement credentials and command of the activism which it raises. vernacular made for a distinctly expansive conception of communist Consequently we have adopted an ‘open’ research methodology politics.18 Not least because the CPGB’s institutional presence was so unconstrained by circular definitions of the real, the formative and the much weaker than its counterparts in Weimar Germany or post-war significant.