`For a Revolutionary Workers' Government': Moscow, British Communism and Revisionist Interpretations of the Third Period, 1927—34

Abstract

Hitler's accession to power brutally sealed the fate of the German Communist Party (KPD). With 360,000 members, the strongest affiliate of the Communist International (Comintern) was dissolved in March 1933, its militants interned or executed. 1 Its liquidation was the most tragic West European consequence of the disastrous, ultra-left policy of the Third Period, determined by the Comintern, rooted in Russian considerations and accepted, sometimes with reluctance, by national communist parties. Such has been the verdict of a wide range of historians. It is a conclusion which has recently come under attack from academics anxious to revise our understanding of these turbulent years. 2 This article engages with this new revisionism. We sketch the anatomy of the Third Period and its consequences for European communist parties. Next, we outline the arguments of recent historians who, contrary to traditional judgements of the impact of the Comintern's 'new line' upon the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), suggest both that there were strong indigenous pressures inevitably leading to its adoption and that its consequences were more positive than previously assumed. We go on to subject these arguments to critical scrutiny in the light of evidence from the recently accessible Comintern archives. Our survey reaffirms the validity of previous evaluations of the Third Period.

Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern: a historical controversy revisited

“…One result was a further fillip for resurgent Russian nationalism (Broué, 1997, pp.493-521;Carr, 1982;McDermott & Agnew, 1996, pp.80-119). (Draper, 1969(Draper, , 1972McIlroy & Campbell, 2002b;van Ree, 2002, pp.213-220). In Germany, it entailed the KPD cooperating with the Nazis over the referendum to remove the Social Democratic Prussian government in 1931 and the Berlin transport workers' strike in 1932.…”

“…'Social fascism' pivoted on a one-sided assertion of the bourgeois nature of reformism at the expense of its working-class base and mission to prosecute working-class interests within capitalism; and an equally one-sided insistence on the integration into the state of the union bureaucracy. These ideas were inserted into a catastrophic theory of capitalist crisisits propagation verged on caricature of Bukharin's arguments about increasing instabilitywhich generated millenarian radicalization (McDermott & Agnew, 1996, pp.100-105;McIlroy & Campbell, 2002b). 42 Crucial to the breach with Bolshevism, was the elevation of Stalin to an infallibility Lenin had never enjoyed during his lifetime as the authoritative interpreter of the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin.…”

Critical Reflections on Recent British Communist Party History

“…245, 249-50;Fishman 1995;Thorpe 2000. For critiques ofFishman and Thorpe, see McIlroy 2001;McIlroy and Campbell 2001;Campbell 2002a and2002b; Eaden and Renton 2002, pp. xiv-xv, xix;.20 Worley 1999, p. 248.21 Saville 1956, pp.…”