Chapter Nine Alienation from Marxism

“Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?” Historian Ross McKibbin has posed the question, and he suggests a number of inhibiting influences: smaller factories where owners knew employees, layer upon layer of caste and craft subdivisions within the working class, a persistent attachment to church and chapel, loyalty to a depoliticized monarchy, the legitimacy of Parliament as a reformed institution based on a broad suffrage, opportunities for social mobility up to the House of Lords, education in democratic procedure via model parliaments and trade unions, faith in the rule of law, and a government that had withdrawn from industrial relations to permit unfettered collective bargaining. McKibbin particularly focuses on another necessary “condition for the emergence of a Marxist party . . . an active ‘socialist’ leadership whose own values and way of life are largely outside and hostile to the ruling values of civil society.” That was certainly not to be found among the first Labour MPs: all had been born into the working class, nearly all had been industrial workers, none had a university education. “The sort of men who were so prominent in European socialist parties—marginal bourgeois, journalists, ‘theoreticians’, professional orators—were comparatively rare in Britain.” The British working class had forged its own organizations and its own leaders, who did not care to accept middle-class patronage, even under the name of socialism.1

Everything McKibbin says is true, but he and other historians have missed other factors which may be at least as important, and which only become visible when working people themselves explain why they were not (or had ceased to be) Marxists. They rarely mention such global issues as the purge trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the invasion of Hungary, or Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of 1956. Instead, they emphasize philosophical, ethical, and literary problems. Put bluntly, the trouble with Marx was Marxists, whom British workers generally found to be dogmatic, selfish, and antiliterary. These complaints cannot be dismissed as the sour edge of post-Hungary disillusionment—though the disillusioned deserve to be heard here. The memoirs of those who were never disenchanted and of those who were never Marxists, as well as a revealing sociological study, point to the same conclusion, though most of them were written before 1956. British working people judged Marxism by the Marxists they knew, and concluded, with good reason, that such people were not going to make a better world.

The Labour Party rather than the Communist Party would attract mass support, for reasons that can be traced back to their religious and literary roots. In the first half of the twentieth century “Practical Christianity”—a vague but sincere belief in charity, equality, and doing good—was the consensus theology of British working people, whether or not they attended church.2 It was a doctrine entirely at home in the Labour Party, but difficult to reconcile with orthodox Marxism. Stuart Macintyre has highlighted the contrast: where Labour socialism was ethical, idealist, and undogmatic, early British Marxism embraced a more “scientific,” materialist, and rigid world view. If a more humane and flexible Marxism failed to take root, that was largely a result of the availability of Marxist literature in English. By 1933 much of the later Engels had been published, but little of the early Marx; plenty of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, but no Lukács or Gramsci. Hence, early British Marxists dismissed as “bourgeois” the same canon of English classics that inspired generations of autodidacts, thus alienating the very proletarian intellectuals who might have been the driving force behind a more creative Marxism. Where Marxists defined exploitation in purely economic terms, Labour socialists, brandishing their Everyman’s Library volumes, promised beauty in life, joy in work, a moral vision in politics. Following a long line of radicals and mutual improvers, they proclaimed that knowledge (rather than ownership of the means of production) is power.

“Thus,” Macintyre concludes, “the Labour leaders preached and practised on the basis that there was no other impediment to socialism than the backward mentality of the masses—no Foreign Office officials with a penchant for circulating documents of doubtful provenance; no newspaper proprietors ready to publish them; no bankers with ultimatums concerning government spending.”³ That last remark is not fair to the WEA, which certainly did teach working people to read critically the pronouncements of diplomats, press magnates, and financiers. Yet the respective ideologies taken up by the Labour and Communist parties did create a self-sorting mechanism, with idealists and self-improvers attracted to the former, cynics and authoritarians to the latter. This, it should be emphasized, is only a rough generalization with plenty of exceptions: no single cause can entirely explain the membership of any political movement. The Labour Party certainly had its share of careerists, and the early Communists in particular included many genuine crusaders, such as Helen Crawfurd. But even she once confided to a comrade, “Mary, Communism is all right, though there are scoundrels in the Communist Party!”⁴ My point is that there was something inherent in Communism that put the scoundrels in control. The ideology attracted them to the point where they came to dominate the Party, and most of the idealists either left in disgust or were pushed out.

Evangelical Materialism

The establishment of a Marxist stronghold in the South Wales coalfields can be traced to the great Welsh Evangelical Revival of 1904. Many miners who were swept up in that enthusiasm soon found a more worldly outlet for their spiritual passions in Keir Hardie’s socialism, while others turned to Marxism.5 South Wales Nonconformity could be as dogmatic as it was literate, grounded in close readings of an authoritative text. That mentality was readily transferable to Marxism or, for that matter, any number of other surrogate religions. Collier D. R. Davies briefly embraced the 1904 revival and then, in rapid succession, turned to fundamentalist Unitarianism, orthodox atheism, and evangelical Marxism. For a time, he recalled, the Independent Labour Party “satisfied my religious yearnings, for socialism became a religion in which I developed an unquestioned, dogmatic faith. Its future triumph I never doubted. It would solve all problems and put everything right.” When it didn’t, he resorted to psychoanalysis, which, “it seemed, had achieved a comprehensive formula, according to which men could be made automatically good.” When they weren’t, he returned to Marxism, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and finally came full circle, taking orders in the Church of England.⁶

The dogmatic tendencies of working-class Marxists were reinforced by two authors they often studied side by side with Marx. One might assume that Adam Smith and Charles Darwin gave aid and comfort to unbridled capitalism, but they were also read enthusiastically (and very differently) by the partisans of the Plebs League and the NCLC. Smith, Darwin, and Marx all offered materialist theories of evolution based on struggle and exploitation. They all suggested that the existing social order was not divinely ordained, but had progressed according to certain scientific laws. Once those laws were understood, society could be reconstructed along different lines. For Dunfermline housepainter James Clunie (b. 1889), Das Kapital and The Wealth of Nations both demonstrated that industrialism inevitably increased economic inequality, the exploitation of labor, and class conflict. To this The Descent of Man added “the great idea of human freedom. . . . It brought out the idea that whether our children were with or without shoes was due to poverty arising from the administration of society.”⁷

The difficulty was that this combination of theological absolutism and scientific certainty could produce a pharisaical type of Marxist who alienated his potential followers. Frank Goss described his own father, an SDF activist, in those terms:

My father’s socialism might be considered in somewhat the same plane as being a Plymouth Brother or a Seventh Day Adventist, except that it was by a more scientific and materialistic approach that the millennium was to be achieved on earth rather than the hope of achieving a heaven after death.

A mixture of Marx and the Sermon on the Mount with a greater or less degree of each in the mixture, made up the outlook of most of the socialists of those days. They looked forward to a new world in which all people of the earth would be equal, brothers who would use the earth and its products for the benefit of all, each contributing in effort according to his ability and receiving according to his needs. A good socialist was one who acted in his everyday life in his relations to others in the sense of this hope in the brotherhood of man. To them, the sanity of their proposition was so obvious that it only needed explaining sufficiently for all people to adopt it. Each socialist would become the nucleus of a snowball of revelation which, gathering momentum, would soon embrace all the world.

The immediate set-back to this theory was that . . . there were large numbers of people on whom the blinding light of socialist sanity had been projected who did not seem capable of absorbing it. From this it was simple reasoning for socialists to classify themselves as the enlightened and all others, for whom the light had not proved to be of any lasting value, were lumped together as “the unenlightened”. Socialists became the chosen people all over again.8

Even true believers were compelled to admit that this was a problem. Glasgow foundryman Thomas Bell (b. 1882) discovered as much agitating for the Socialist Labour Party, a precursor of the Communist Party. “With cold, hard scientific logic and quotations from Marx and Engels, we usually reduced all opposition to silence,” he assured his readers, “but we never made members.” He suspected “our sectarianism had something to do with it.” Apparently the workers “thought we were terribly intellectual, and that they had to have a knowledge of Karl Marx and science before they could join the Party.”⁹ Walter Citrine (b. 1887), who passed through an early Marxist phase, noted that a workmate on a Liverpool construction site, an SDF man, was “cordially hated by most of the other workmen because of his sarcastic manner, and perhaps because he always defeated them in argument.”¹⁰

Not many working people were prepared to accept dictates from such men, especially when Communist discipline went beyond matters of ideology. As Hymie Fagan (b. 1903) recalled, the Party closely policed the daily lives of its members, dictating their dress and even instructing them to pay their bills: “We did not want our members to appear queer, in the original sense of the term, in the eyes of the working class.” As manager of the Party bookstore in King Street, he once committed the astonishing indiscretion of putting Trotsky’s autobiography in the shop window. He fought back when Party boss Harry Pollitt accused him of deviationism: “Bugger you mate, I’m not going to invent a confession.” After that experience, he was duly skeptical of Stalin’s show trials.¹¹ One particularly rigid Sheffield Stalinist devoted his memoirs (titled “We Tread But One Path”) to proclaiming his invariable rightness on all issues, though he did confess to one terrible disappointment: for reasons he could not comprehend, his son had become a political cynic and emigrated to the land of apartheid.¹² As one woman told J. T. Murphy, “Before I joined the party all the comrades used to come to me and say what a good worker I was and tell me that I ought to join; that I was the type which they wanted in the ranks of the party. But after I joined, although I do more work than before, they never cease to tell me what a fool I am.” On that point, Murphy ruefully quoted T. A. Jackson: “The party line is always moving in a circle.” Murphy himself quit the Party in 1932 over an obscure doctrinal dispute. That ended his career as a journalist for the Soviet and domestic Communist press, forcing his wife to go back to work. “And, strange as it may seem, we were happier,” he concluded.

It was as if we had been released from a condition of continuous tension, common to the life of Communists, wherein all one’s thoughts are concentrated on the party and its work, its associations, its people, its doctrine, to the exclusion of the larger world around us. The more I have thought about the way in which we lived previously the less surprised I am that the Communist Party made so little headway.13

The primary motive of autodidacts had always been intellectual freedom. Few of them would sacrifice it to a Marxism that submerged individuals in the massing of masses and clashing of classes. James Griffiths (b. 1890), the Welsh collier and MP, attended the Central Labour College, but steeped as he was in the “religious idealism” of the ILP, “I could not bring myself to accept the materialist concept of history: my Welsh temperament recoiled against such an arid doctrine. At the end of each lecture on the M.C.H. I would join a fellow student, who shared my revulsion, in singing: ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’”¹⁴ Taxi driver Herbert Hodge (b. 1901) was at first impressed with the intellectuals he met in the Soho branch of the Communist Party, but soon realized that they treated workers as unthinking objects. One recent university graduate blandly repeated the Leninist notion “that the less the unemployed got to eat, the quicker they’d revolt. I suggested he should try a few months of semi-starvation himself, and see how revolutionary it made him feel. But he only smiled the university-graduate’s superior smile which makes the non-university man feel such a fool.” From his own work with the unemployed, Hodge knew that years on the dole only produced apathy, and that out-of-work men wanted practical help in dealing with the Board of Guardians far more than ideology. That experience, plus his eclectic reading (Bergson, Nietzsche, William McDougall, Bertrand Russell, the New Testament, and Herbert Spencer as well as Marx) led him out of the Party towards a socialism that would be brought about by individual volition, not “human masses, social systems, and economic forces. We’ve become so used to thinking in these terms that we’ve forgotten the root of them all is the human individual.”¹⁵

More idiosyncratic still was R. M. Fox (b. c. 1894), a factory laborer who was published by the Hogarth Press and lectured for the WEA. He found both Marxists and the Labour Party too confining, casting his lot instead with Irish nationalists, militant suffragettes, conscientious objectors, and the Industrial Workers of the World. He frequented Charlie Lahr’s anarchist secondhand bookshop in Holborn, a mecca for down-and-out Nietzscheans and scruffy poets, where he could freely indulge his “crush on philosophic Germans, gloomy Scandinavians, sour Swedes and analytical Russians.” Fox always insisted that economic deprivation made intellectual liberty all the more valuable to the poor. He hailed Maxim Gorky for realizing that “men who have felt the burden on their backs . . . appreciate freedom”; only bourgeois socialists like Sidney Webb wanted more state control.16 Any political system that denied working people “beauty, colour, and adventure from life” was treating them like machines. Therefore Fox rejected the crude “pamphleteering” of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, much as he admired its brutal truthfulness:

Some who speak of working-class literature mean only churned-up political rhodomontade. But while working-class literature is in the political manifesto stage it is not literature and it is not working class. The literature of wage-earners only reaches maturity when it ceases to be pitched in a wholly aggressive key and expresses the life of the workers as something of intrinsic worth and interest apart from polemical purpose. . . . Such a literature cannot be confined to the workshop for it is not only or chiefly with the worker as a worker, but with the worker as a man or woman that we are beginning to be pre-occupied.¹⁷

Communism, of course, was not the sum total of Marxism, and at this point one might ask about the possibilities for developing a humane proletarian Marxism outside the Communist Party. The answer is that the logical sites for building an alternative Marxism were the Central Labour College and the National Council of Labour Colleges, but they clung to an ideology that was, in its own way, as ossified as Communism. Many CLC students, among them Aneurin Bevan, came to feel that its simon-pure Marxism was too dogmatic and not entirely relevant to the twentieth century.¹⁸ Even a sympathetic historian concedes that its lecturers simply and tediously “reproduced the work of leading marxists, very often with little or no commentary” beyond the repeated mantra that it was all “scientific.” Marxism was thus treated as “a compendium of answers to set questions, without enough emphasis being placed upon its ability to identify new questions and problems.”¹⁹ By 1923 CLC students were protesting the neglect of non-Marxist economics.²⁰ Later, Communist students would attack the school from the left for not submitting to Party control, and moderate trade unionists concluded that the college was turning out irresponsible agitators. A succession of financial scandals and internal battles over educational resources finally led to the CLC’s closure in 1929.²¹

Harold Heslop, the Durham miner-novelist, attended the CLC in 1925–26 and found the curriculum dismally propagandistic. “They insisted that there was no viable reasoning on economics before Marx, and none whatever since,” so the students learned nothing of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or John Stuart Mill. Instead, they were plunged cold into the bewildering mental theories of proletarian philosopher Joseph Dietzgen without any preparatory work in philosophy. “For us, Aristotle was some ancient Greek who had written a book about babies . . ., but never were we offered even a potted biography of Kant, Locke, Butler, Hume, Hegel and all the tribe of German philosophers. All we were instructed to do was to locate them and reject them on the grounds that they were not relevant to the needs of the working class.” Heslop was in search of a working faith, “obsessed by a deeper hunger than I had hitherto known for salvation,” and he was profoundly affected by Marx’s outrage, his pity, the “crashing force in the simplest of his observations.” But that side of Marx was lost in CLC lectures.22

Likewise, many students found NCLC lecturers intellectually contemptible. According to Jack Hilton (b. 1900), a militant agitator for the unemployed who had been imprisoned for rioting,

They are hatless and suffer from cerebral fever; they look high-brow and sordidly live on economic rigidity. Marx, Dietzgen and Engels are their food and they eat it up like gluttons. . . . They’re overripe single-trackers, they lack human nature. They are merely book socialists, their ferocity is confined to the iron rigidity of terminology. Really they are as useful . . . as a group of feminine sissies when playing cave man stuff. . . . Their lectures are parrot-like and have mathematical precision. To them Bill Shakespeare would be taboo. . . . History is just to emphasise the obvious fact that the “haves” some time ago diddled the “have nots,” and its purpose is in the last analysis proved conclusively and indubitably to be “That the only remaining class to rise, will rise,” and so become dominant in the we-are-the-boss stakes.

For all their talk of “international solidarity . . . whenever one or two dogs of party fractionalism meet for common action, they nearly always snarl and chew one another up.”²³ Even T. A. Jackson, the most brilliant NCLC lecturer, eventually admitted that their ideological track had been far too narrow: “‘What do they know of England, that only England know?’ And for ‘England’ read ‘Marxism’ and you have a truth of ten times the dimensions.”²⁴

Harry McShane, a Glasgow engineering worker, was an early recruit to the Communist Party but left it before the great disillusionment of 1956. The more he read of the young philosophical Marx, the more impatient he became with the Party’s “mechanical materialist view” that “history makes men.” Lenin and Bukharin, he noted, thought otherwise: “Action is changed by ideas,” and the workers are “not just an economic force,” but thinking individuals “who hold and discuss ideas.” Socialism is not simply the outcome of inexorable historical development, but “the creative act of the working class to solve the economic crisis of capitalism. Because it is creative, it isn’t inevitable; the capitalist system can end up in fascism, as in the thirties in Germany, rather than socialism.” And because socialism is creative, “it isn’t about state planning . . .; it is about the working class owning the means of production and planning their lives for themselves.” The key to building socialism, then, was creating an intellectually sophisticated working class, though that seemed a remote prospect by the 1970s. “The intellectuals are writing for one another instead of for working-class people,” McShane complained, “they seem to think that workers can’t read!”25

Have You Read Marx?

In fact, most workers did have great difficulty reading Marx and Marxists. Unlike John Ruskin, William Morris, and Robert Blatchford, the Marxists generally and glaringly failed to produce literature accessible to the working classes. If Ross McKibbin is right—that there was no British Marxism because Britain lacked an alienated intelligentsia, but developed a working-class party and trade union movement independent of the middle classes—that amounts to saying that Marxism is inherently a movement of the educated classes rather than the laboring classes. The latter were effectively and, one could argue, deliberately excluded by the difficulty of Marxist language. Any number of autodidacts registered that complaint.²⁶ As Harry McShane asked, how can human beings be emancipated by a doctrine they cannot understand and have no role in creating? McShane began his education in Marxism by reading Justice and the Socialist, the respective organs of the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist Labour Party. But the former, he found, preached “a narrow stupid Marxism,” while the latter printed page after grey page on the materialist conception of history. Even with A. P. Hazell’s penny pamphlet, A Summary of Marx’s “Capital”, it took him a full week to master the labor theory of value. Like most working-class readers, he much preferred Blatchford’s Clarion, where an unideological socialism was leavened with breezy articles on literature, freethought, and science.²⁷

Of the Labour MPs surveyed by the Review of Reviews in 1906, only two mentioned Marx as a formative author. Walter Hampson (b. 1866), the wandering socialist fiddler, complained that whenever he lent out his Das Kapital, it came back with the latter pages uncut.²⁸ In fact it is difficult to locate anyone who even claimed to have read all three volumes. T. A. Jackson doubted that fifty people in all of Britain had persevered to the end,²⁹ and according to J. T. Murphy few Communist Party members “had more than a nodding acquaintance with the writings of Marx.”³⁰ Robert Roberts (b. 1905) remembered

a course which opened with fanfare and fifty-four students in a room over the bar at the local trades club, to study (under a man with a large red beard) the “first nine chapters of Das Kapital.” After a month only three of us remained, and one was a girl whose father (standing guard in the bar below) insisted on her attendance. This class was the prototype of innumerable similar fiascos which occurred right through the ’20s. Of Marxism the proletariat wanted not even the “first nine chapters.”31

Even the Ruskin College Marxists, A. E. Coppard recalled, were living “the sweetest Surreyside melodrama”: all earnestly preparing for the Revolution, “and there was not enough hot blood in the lot of them to fill a flea.” They answered every criticism with the same conversation-stopper: “Have you read Karl Marx?” Coppard finally learned how to trump that card: “Have you?”

Then inevitably came the lame admission, “Some of it, all that’s really necessary, the first five chapters of Das Kapital, they contain the essence, all you want.” Yet to them the Revolution was truly a mystic ideal; as vague as heaven it was, and in that identical vagueness lay its kindred power to sway them.³²

Few common readers could penetrate the smokescreen of jargon. Glasgow MP George Barnes (b. 1859) had unpleasant memories of the language used at an SDF meeting. “I was so belaboured with words about exploitation, proletariat, bourgeois and others of learned length and thundering sound just then imported from Germany that I believe I retired sore all over and determined to go no more to Social Democratic Federation branches. And I never have.”³³ Others persevered with Marx, whose very difficulty might suggest a kabbalistic power to transform a desperate economic situation. Ewan MacColl recalled a fellow Communist in Depression-era Manchester, a seaman who sold the Daily Worker until he was found in the local party headquarters, literally starved to death. Confronted with that, MacColl could only talk about one thing: “Politics—there seemed to be nothing else in life, nothing else that was worth a damn. All the time I was living on a thread of anger which was eating me away.” The girls he tried to date were not charmed by his conversation, “and who could blame them. You were talking such fucking jargon! But the jargon meant something to you—it was a code that you’d cracked.”³⁴ It also cut off Marxists from the class they were supposed to be mobilizing. Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) founder J. R. Campbell organized Marxist study circles for Glasgow slumdwellers who, as his stepson remembered, “had not the faintest idea what he was talking about. . . . I watched the knitted brows and perplexed looks in the eyes of his students and wondered if they had the slightest inkling of Karl Marx’s message.” In a very general way they sympathized with Campbell, but they could not even master the catechism: when asked “What is a capitalist?” one ship-welder answered, “A capitalist is a bastard of the first water!”³⁵

Margaret McCarthy was at first dazzled by young Communists who reeled off words like “dialectical,” “empiric,” “formalistic,” and “materialist conception.” Only later did it become apparent that “the intensive application of confusing hieroglyphic verbal terms and high-sounding political phraseology” was an encryption device to exclude newcomers like herself from Party discussions. “I have since, of course, realised that most human institutions, and particularly political bodies, do tend to freeze out the new recruit, despite the professed desire to attract the masses,” she explained, “but the Communist Party members had a particularly suspicious attitude, due partly to jealousy for place and power which the newcomer, especially one with any gift of eloquence, might eventually challenge, and partly to vague motives of security.”36

The fact that working-class readers did respond to Marx’s rare concessions to wit suggests a missed opportunity. In 1925 Ifan Edwards was driven by unemployment to read Das Kapital in the public library. “It took him about four hundred pages of close print to come to the crux of his argument in the classic illustration of the labourer looking for a job in a factory, and, as he said, ‘expecting nothing but a hiding,’” Edwards remembered. “This little aside appealed to me very much, as I had had one or two hidings myself.”³⁷

Unethical Socialism

If an ideology offers a rationalization for a type of unacceptable behavior, it will often (though not invariably) attract followers with that kind of moral weakness. Such formulas as “Self-interest is the greatest virtue” or “Your anger is not a personal failing, but a healthy response to social injustice” or “All human relations are power relations” will exert a gravitational pull on selfish, hostile, or dictatorial personalities. Early British working-class Marxism was all too often a vulgar Marxism that glibly dismissed morality in capitalist society as bourgeois morality, or resorted to the easy excuse “capitalism has made us what we are.” In contrast the Labour Party preached a kind of twentieth-century Wesleyanism. Socialism would be brought about by an ethical revolution based on broadly Christian principles, just as nineteenth-century evangelicalism had transformed a brawling, hard-drinking proletariat into respectable chapelgoing Victorians. Working people rooted in this tradition were repeatedly appalled by the behavior of individual Communists, most of whom seemed to lack the moral commitment that had built the Methodist Church, the trade union movement, and the Labour Party.

After the failure of the General Strike, cotton-weaver William Holt (b. 1897) “dipped into Das Kapital” and joined the Communists—though a veteran radical, with the works of Marx and Lenin lining his homemade bookshelves, warned “that I should not find them quite as heroic and admirable as I believed.” Holt organized a Todmorden chapter of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, but it fell victim to internal bickering and a general unwillingness to volunteer for organizational work. Tellingly, Communist activity in the town came to a halt while Holt was in jail for leading a demonstration against the Means Test. “One of the local men who called himself a Communist complained that the reason why nothing had been done in Todmorden while I was in gaol was because I had not trained cadres of leaders. As a matter of fact, I had spent hours trying to teach this very man, but he was a born grouser and incorrigible,” explained an exasperated Holt. “Why don’t you do something yourself?” he shot back, “I’m not Atlas.” In fact his Communist cell attracted “a few ragged, well-known loafers” who “began to use me as a tool for furthering their own ends.” He hated the “conspiratorial” climate of Party meetings where, “in an atmosphere of strange antipathy, one speaker after another . . . gave humourless speeches criticizing their own actions and passionately admitting their mistakes.”38

Such complaints are registered fairly consistently in workers’ memoirs. A. T. Collinson (b. 1893), a founding member of the Communist Party in Middlesex, left it partly because too many had joined up “to gain personal advantage, and when successful in this respect they fade out.”³⁹ Frank Chapple became a member in 1939, but as a ship-repair electrician he noticed that Communist organizers “didn’t appear like true Communists to me. . . . Why should leading Communists always get the good numbers to work at, corner weekend work at overtime rates, have something more important to do when it was time to get out and sell the Daily Worker?”⁴⁰ Lathe-turner Les Moss (b. 1901) admitted that he spent a lot of company time discussing Marxism (“it’s true we hardly did any work sometimes”) and he left the Party in 1947 because, he felt, it was run by intellectuals who kept power in their own hands but would not back workers in their confrontations with bosses.⁴¹ ILP activist Jack Ashley found Communists not only dogmatic, patronizing, and addicted to jargon, but plain dishonest as well. When a Communist friend argued that the exploitive practices of capitalist publishers justified his stealing books from an Oxford bookshop, Ashley saw it as “a rationalisation of a selfish action.”⁴² Though John Brown was a student of Marx and an NCLC official, he saw “that the type of man who was joining the Communists was very obviously not the self-sacrificing martyr type so largely responsible for the creation of the Labour Party.” As a Ruskin College student (1932–34) he was no more impressed with Oxford undergraduates

who had swallowed chunks of Marx and Lenin whole, and repeated their undigested paragraphs ad nauseum whenever politics was discussed. They looked upon Cole as a hopeless reactionary, and spoke continually of “mass action” by the workers. What form this “mass action” was to take was never clearly defined, and I noticed that when it came to doing any propaganda or canvassing work for the local movements, those who had been shouting the hardest were not to be found.⁴³

Margaret McCarthy noted a marked change in the calibre of Accrington Communists between 1926, when she joined the Party, and 1932, when she returned from a sojourn in Russia. At first it attracted real idealists:

. . . active people from the trade unions, students from the National Council of Labour Colleges, ILPers who had been driven leftward by the General Strike, and such types as generally form the active core, the local intelligentsia of the Labour movement. But these people had drifted away from the Party and a new class of individuals had entered, who rather frightened me. They were not only unemployed, which was not surprising in our depressed district, but often distinctly unemployable people, with a turn for violent language and a yearning for violent action. On one occasion I found a heavy wooden truncheon in the Party rooms and at once demanded a meeting of the local members, where I lectured them on the stupidity of Communists carrying weapons and had the thing thrown out. There was a protest to the District Headquarters of the Party against my speech at that meeting and I found myself again in trouble for inferring nasty things against Party members. Some time later, three-quarters of these self-same members in Accrington went over en bloc to the local branch of the Fascists which was opened by Mosley himself, and I knew that my estimation of their characters and intentions had been correct. But in the meantime it was they who had the ear of the Party.

“I wanted to clean the Party of such types,” she wrote, but “in due course I was to learn that the Party and they were one; that it was such characters as my own which were alien and astray in the Communist Party.” When idealists attempted to reform Party bureaucracy and corruption, “they usually found this a sure and quick way right out of the Party.” Assigned to the Party’s Scottish office in 1930, she was appalled to find the kind of tyranny and gross mismanagement one associates with a Five-Year Plan. “It soon became clear to me that such Party organisation as functioned was maintained by one factor only: namely the untiring, loyal, self-sacrificing devotion of the members who worked at innumerable unpleasant, exhausting and time-devouring jobs.” They had to endure

the petty bullying and domination of the Party bosses, whose inefficiency and muddling they resented but concealed, maintaining the leadership through a real, if grumbling, sense of duty to the Party. . . . The District Secretary was a typical example, being physically large, loud, rude and brutal in his manner, jealous of his power, notoriously mean and ungenerous, and cringing before the national leadership in London. In him I saw typified the new individuals rising to power in the Party, the species of new “Party boss”.

This is what ultimately drove her out of the Party. It was not so much the suffocating repression in Stalin’s Russia, nor her realization that the Leninists had distorted Marx’s original vision, nor even “the obvious fact that the average unemployed worker in Britain, existing as miserably as he did on the dole, still enjoyed an infinitely higher standard of life than the average Russian worker in Moscow working full-time.” What finally made her snap was the spectacle of loyal Party workers railroaded by their superiors for some minor error or ideological deviation. Even before Stalin’s terror moved into high gear in 1934, she had seen a miniature show trial in a Party chapter in Glasgow:

I sat in that small meeting, in that filthy room, looking at the squalid people as they disparaged and abused our comrade, not in the Party’s interests but from some obscure motive of power, relishing the opportunity to badger and humiliate, to rend and vilify. I sat among them, sensitive to the atmosphere of the meeting, furtive, shifty, thick with moronic bigotry, and it seemed to me that I could not breathe, that I was choked and blinded by the fug of imbecile, foul and unnecessary conspiracy, the conspiracy of comrade against comrade. Then suddenly all became cold and clear to me. THIS was the Party! This cluttered room, these mean, perverse people, the silent, shamed victim of their mindless, pointless venom. This was the Party. This room full of filth and ignorance was the cell of the Party, the Party in essence. The Party was just this, multiplied a thousandfold, a millionfold. And it was because the Party had become like this that it had withered, the workers wanting none of us . . . .44

ILP agitator Jennie Lee favored a Popular Front alliance with the Communists, and was even inclined to view the great Soviet famine of the early 1930s in a favorable light, but it was a personal incident of gross callousness that left her unforgettably bitter toward the Party. Her grandfather had been a dedicated trade union organizer and socialist who suffered victimization. Even in retirement he daily visited the Fife Miners’ Union headquarters in Dunfermline. One day he ran into a young Communist delegate arriving for a miners’ meeting who sneered: “What are you doing here? I thought we had got rid of all you old buggers!”

He might just as well have lifted his fist and struck the old man physically. He could not have hurt more. My grandfather did not go again to the office. His union, his life, all the pride and the labour and hopes he had put into it! Then to end up sitting looking into the fire, sad, perplexed, afraid to go near his old workplace lest he should be spat on. I walked down Rose Street, Dunfermline, the evening I heard of that encounter, with murder in my heart. I think if I had met a known communist I would have been gaoled for manslaughter. That sort of incident told in bald outline may sound silly and trivial. Multiplied a thousand times and repeated all over Great Britain in a thousand different variations, it goes far to explain the dislike and distrust of the Communist Party that balks all their efforts to achieve friendly relations with the rest of the working-class movement.⁴⁵

Around 1939 Mary Craddock succumbed to an adolescent passion for Communism. “I loved the slogans, the little pills of wisdom that went down my gullet painlessly—‘The best for the most’—‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’” But any mention of Communists made her father spit: “Riff-raff, that’s what they are. Corner enders. Them as wouldn’t work if they could. On the look-out for something for nowt. Them’s communists.” A Durham miner crippled by rheumatism, on the dole since age fifty, a founding member of the Labour Party, he had precious little stake in capitalism. What sharply distinguished his Labour doctrine from Communism was, first, a belief in individual freedom and a hatred of bureaucracy. He distrusted even the local all-Labour urban council, which he regarded as a swamp of inefficiency and patronage. More than that, he retained the old Labour Party’s Victorian faith in personal moral responsibility. His daughter discovered that side of him when she pointed out a particularly filthy slum:

“Look at it,” I said. “That’s what capitalism did for you.”

Father and I surveyed in silence the grim ugly street that had been put up to house the pitmen. It was incredibly ugly, drab with gaping windows and rotting doorways propping up slatterns in sack aprons and curling-pins. Inside one could glimpse disorder born of despair. I saw it as a failure of the System. Father had a different view. He was looking at the slatterns and their filthy little kids.

“Aye,” he agreed. “It’s a very bad area this. It’s a terrible thing to see the way people let themselves go when they’ve lost their self-respect.”46

Several factors alienated George Scott from Communism—Harry Pollitt’s rabble-rousing, the Soviet invasion of Finland, not to mention his own upward mobility as a young reporter in Yorkshire—but the moral issue was preeminent. He was disgusted by the “immature but clever cynicism” practiced by Stan, a fellow journalist. Stan sneered equally at the “opiate of the masses” and at men who put themselves in harm’s way in wartime (“I shall join Intelligence and get a nice, comfortable, safe chair in an underground cellar in Whitehall”). He had read Das Kapital (or parts of it) and could talk slickly about dialectical materialism. His own dialectic was derived from Straight and Crooked Thinking, a guide to identifying faulty logic, but he “enjoyed it because it taught him how to twist truth to his own ends. He put what he learned into practice and his methods of debate were skilful, muscular, witty and deliberately crooked. . . . He had a cold, well reasoned appreciation of the blessings of benevolent despotism as a form of government. Naturally he saw himself as the despot.”⁴⁷

Though he passed through a “near-extreme left” phase as a telegraph messenger boy, R. L. Wild (b. 1912) was not impressed by the local Party man in Winchester. He was one of those “small men with big ideas,” who worshipped Stalin and read little beyond Marxist dogma, but what decisively condemned him in Wild’s eyes was the fact that he lived comfortably by sponging off his family. “Were his dreams of power, of some sort of niche in an English Kremlin, or a commissarship in Hampshire?” Wild wondered. “How much of all this was for an ideal, a cause? How much was through greed and laziness and conceit?”48

Sociologist G. H. Armbruster investigated that question in a Welsh mining town in 1939. It is significant that the locals were acutely suspicious of Armbruster, variously denouncing him as a Tory, a German spy, a social worker, or a Communist—all of which they regarded with equal hostility. He found that in spite of prolonged unemployment and the circulation of Marxist literature, colliers still manifested “a strongly individualistic bias” and a desire “to be recognized as just a bit better than their neighbors.” Though the out-of-work miner could offer “a ready explanation for his misfortune in terms of the evils of capitalism and the necessity for economic transformation,” on another level he still viewed unemployment as a personal failing, in a culture where “respectability” meant having a job. Armbruster concluded that the “spontaneous collectivism” of the Welsh miners was a myth: they were generally skeptical of proposals to nationalize the mines or place them under workers’ control. Most miners professed a kind of socialism, but it scarcely resembled any socialist theory developed by intellectuals. It was in fact welfare capitalism based on inherited moral principles of “practical Christianity”:

For the majority of workmen who call themselves socialists, aside from the strong religious note of “brotherhood,” socialism partakes of the character and aspirations of the existing order. Their ideal is really more closely akin to the program of the Liberal Party than that of a clear cut socialism as we understand it; the security of their jobs, adequate wages, the improvement of housing conditions, increased pensions, social insurances, etc. are the tangible contents of these aspirations. The question of common ownership of production is even looked upon with a healthy skepticism. . . . There are those who speak of socialism almost purely in religious terms who may even vote Conservative, and regard it as a sort of benevolent exchange of brotherhood, of charitable giving, for whom it means a universal association in spirit of kindliness, and with the realization of which all problems will end.

The chapels had always reinforced this doctrine of Christian benevolence and individual responsibility. But as a schoolmaster involved in charity distribution noted, these values were now increasingly confined to the older generation: “This new one that’s being raised on [handouts] and has never worked, never will. They won’t do a thing for themselves but grab any charity that’s given to them. They spend the rest of the time quarrelling among themselves over who got more than they deserved.” For some of those who had lost the old ethic of sturdy independence, Communism offered a refuge and a rationalization, though as Armbruster noted, they were strikingly incapable of real selflessness:

Their communism is clearly one of psychological necessity, of some integrating faith in utter contradiction to their former outlook and behavior. They have transferred self condemnation to the convenient condemnation of “the capitalist system which makes us as we are”. . . . For those . . . who are versed in the verbiage of socialist and communist doctrines, there is a surprisingly clear recognition that a gap exists between their principles and their ability to live them. I have a good number of statements to the effect, spontaneously rendered by such men. They understand that their habits have been conditioned by living in an entirely different society. “Aye, it will come [socialism], but not in our time; we’d all be too much capitalists; we are too selfish.” Another: “It won’t be with us, we’d just come to believe in it, we can’t change our ways, we must come to it gradually,” and another, “we have progress, evolution as Darwin says; you or I won’t see socialism, we aren’t socialists at heart, but our children will know it because they will really be socialists.”

Employed colliers belonged to a community that provided a living frame. Their workmates, chapels, and trade unions interpreted events in the larger world and offered a clear set of moral and political principles to live by. Plunged into the mass unemployment and political turmoil of the 1930s, these miners lost that frame and were profoundly disoriented:

The unemployed man slowly loses his anchorage in institutions such as trade unions which provide attitudes and some understanding of his relation to wider economic and social forces. The trade unionist can at least measure his reactions toward events as they affect his primary aspirations. The workless lack concrete organizations of their needs and are without the hard practical guidance of daily labour and the vigilant struggle to ensure the conditions of their jobs.

Cut adrift, the unemployed increasingly resorted to “systems” for winning football pools, millenarian Christianity, millenarian Communism, and (among women especially) astrology. All these panaceas offered short-cuts to salvation involving no real individual effort: as Armbruster noted, the unemployed conspicuously “lack the capacity to act upon any of their convictions.” Even when they denounced capitalism or condemned the moderation of the trade unions and the Labour Party, this was “a rationalization for inaction. Many is the man I found vociferous in his denunciation of ‘the system’ and the conduct of his own organizations who when the time came for demonstrations, hunger marches, etc. was not present.” Of the 3,000 voters in this district, the Communist Party could claim only thirty-five members, all unemployed. Armbruster got to know eight of them well:

They were known by their fellows as bad trade unionists, and as workmen concerned only with the promotion of their own interests. They possessed little of the fellowship which they now profess, and even at present I have seen these men conducting themselves in a fashion which was in direct contradiction to their avowed belief in brotherhood and equality. I am certainly not extending this as a generalization for all communists among the miners. I knew several members sincere in every respect, but I think it is evident that as an all-embracing philosophy, particularly in the naive fashion in which it is interpreted here, it fulfils a definite psychological function for many among the unemployed who deeply require a precisely formulated attack on the “system” to externalize their personal guilt feelings. . . . There was, I found, a great deal of truth in the popular observation that the communists were poor workers and trade unionists. I knew two leaders of the party, each of whom was discontent with work in the mines and found in communism a justification for their attitude and often callous indifference for the safety and welfare of their butties in the colliery.

There was, for example, a former preacher, traumatized by ten years of unemployment, who now proclaimed that “Marx has replaced God” and regularly read the Daily Worker: “While in the mine he was not regarded as a faithful trade unionist and was a ‘company man’ insofar as he would pass remarks to officials about so and so’s conduct, in return for favours.” His brother was transformed from an apolitical chapelgoer to a Communist by six years of unemployment: “Was not liked when working, looked after his own interests to the detriment of others. . . . Spends his time trying to get as much charity as he can from the social services, much to the dislike of many of his fellows. Recognizes that his conduct has not corresponded to his beliefs and rationalises it . . . by reference to the ‘conditions that make us as we are,’ and the hope that ‘evolution’ will remake man.”49

The criticisms offered by Armbruster, William Holt, and Margaret McCarthy are largely corroborated by Andrew Thorpe’s research in recently opened CPGB archives. Except for a blip following the 1926 General Strike, the Party had fewer than 10,000 members before 1936. Membership then surged to unprecedented levels during the worst phase of Stalin’s terror, and rose again in the months following the Nazi-Soviet Pact. General disillusionment among Party members was produced not by events in Moscow, but by failings much closer to home. Internal CPGB documents frankly admit that grass-roots organization was “so rotten” that it alienated potential recruits. New members were likely to find that local chapters were run by incompetent hacks, or dominated by cliques that froze them out. Others were driven away by ideological sectarianism, or by the endless labors (meetings, trade union agitation, activity in front organizations, selling the Daily Worker) demanded of party members. As a result the CPGB, like the Communist parties of the United States and Weimar Germany, had an enormous and rapid membership turnover.⁵⁰ No doubt victimization was a contributing factor, but the early organizers of the Methodist Church, the trade union movement, and the Labour Party had suffered similar bouts of persecution. They each nevertheless succeeded in building a movement with a mass working-class base, in large part because of their moral appeal. Lacking that attraction, the CPGB was never more than a marginal political force.

If the failure of British Communism was a moral failure, the exception that proves that rule was Rhondda East. Here, as Chris Williams has shown, a series of scandals left the local Labour Party vulnerable to charges of corruption and nepotism. Communist councillors and activists were able to seize the moral high ground by attending to the everyday concerns of their constituents, including medical clinics, free milk, and child welfare. As a result, the Communists came close to capturing this parliamentary seat, polling 31.9 percent of the vote in 1931, 38.2 percent in 1935, and 45.5 percent in 1945. But most of these votes represented a protest against Labour malfeasance, not an endorsement of Marxist ideology, which (as the borrowing patterns in miners’ libraries suggest) was largely ignored outside of a few “little Moscows.”51

More typically the Party emphasized doctrine and slogans rather than practical assistance in dealing with the problems of poverty. When Communists attempted to recruit tramps by taking over the National League for the Abolition of Vagrancy, they did not address such mundane issues as improving shelter conditions. “One talked of the theory of Dialectical Materialism, and another appealed to us to take our hands off the Chinese,” recalled a baffled hobo. “Exactly what they thought they were getting at has puzzled me ever since.”⁵²

Stalin Reads Thackeray

“It is an extraordinary thing to see an out-of-work man arguing his head off about the fate of a Trotsky, in the midst of sheer misery and poverty,” James Hanley reported from South Wales in 1937. “The ordinary voice has given way to the loud Quack, the most skull-splitting theories upon Politics, Art, Literature, Painting and the rest are trumpeted into the ear, all things are ordained with the assurance of a Caesar.” Here the Communist attitude to literature could be particularly blinkered. “‘Unless your writing has in it the Marxian viewpoint it is valueless,’ etc. etc., and they quoted Marx and Balzac by the yard, though I’m sure the latter’s droll stories would have shocked them considerably,” Hanley protested. “Many of these people hold that all literature that has ever been written is valueless.”⁵³ Given that most autodidacts were devoted to the literary canon, nothing could have done more to drive them away from Marxism.

In 1938 an adult educator suggested that most Marxist literary critics could learn a great deal from reading Marx, who did not rule out the role of individual genius in authorship, who denied that literature could be reduced to a by-product of economic conditions, who disliked socialist propaganda novels, who admired a whole range of classic authors (Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Scott, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens) regardless of their politics.⁵⁴ But doctrinaire British Marxists of the 1920s and 1930s generally refused to see any value in art apart from propaganda. The National Council of Labour Colleges sponsored agitprop theater groups, and from that platform Ness Edwards denounced Shakespeare and nearly all other important playwrights as reactionaries: only Shaw and Ibsen won his guarded approval. There was also a Workers’ Theatre Movement, affiliated with the Communist Party, whose aims were laid out in a 1930 manifesto: “It rejects decisively the role of raising the cultural levels of the workers through contact with great dramatic art which is the aim of the dramatic organizations of the Labour Party and the ILP. . . . The task of the WTM is the conduct of mass working-class propaganda and agitation through the particular method of dramatic representation.”

As Raphael Samuel pointed out, that dogma effectively cut off these movements from everything vital in drama. Sean O’Casey would have been the ideal playwright for a proletarian theater, but he was never performed by any WTM troupe: T. A. Jackson disapproved of his “pessimism.” While the ILP and Co-operative societies sponsored dozens of thriving theatrical groups, the WTM failed to find much of a following in the working class.55 WTM propaganda even repelled some of its own performers, who could not forever suppress their unpolitical love of literature. Ewan MacColl remembered his father, a Communist ironfounder, as someone who was always giving him secondhand books. He “belonged to the generation who believed that books were tools that could open a lock which would free people. He really did believe that.” At age eight MacColl received the works of Darwin. By fifteen he had read Gogol, Dostoevsky, and the entire Human Comedy:

They were a refuge from the horrors of the life around us. . . . Unemployment in the 1930s was unbelievable, you really felt you’d never escape. . . . So books for me were a kind of fantasy life. Books, however abstruse their theories were, were an escape. For me to go at the age of fourteen, to drop into the library and discover a book like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or The Mistaken Subtlety of the Four-Sided Figure . . . the titles alone produced a kind of happiness in me.

I fell in love with books. When I discovered Gogol in that abominable translation of Constance Garnett with those light-blue bindings (I can remember them to this day), I can remember the marvellous sensation of sitting in the library and opening the volume, and going into that world of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin in The Overcoat or in The Nose, or The Madman’s Diary. I thought I’d never read anything so marvellous, and through books I was living in many worlds simultaneously. I was living in St. Petersburg, and Paris with Balzac, I really was. And I knew all the characters, Lucien de Rubempré and Rastignac as though they were my own friends.

By then MacColl had also read Engels’s The Peasant War in Germany and The Origins of the Family. He joined the Young Communist League and the Workers’ Theatre Movement, organizing a troupe of his own called the Red Megaphones. But the tension between art and sectarianism was never resolved. For the Red Megaphones, and particularly for someone as well read as MacColl, WTM scripts were an insult:

We had a strong feeling that we were being written down to. . . . We were beginning to doubt the efficacy of the endless sloganizing. I’ve noticed frequently among middle-class party people that I’ve worked with, over the years, that there’s an idea that workers will accept anything, providing the message is OK. The quality doesn’t matter, the form doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we agree on the correct slogans.

The group performed satiric songs and sketches, “but we always felt uncomfortable because they seemed to be written from the outside. Saying things like ‘the workers’, but we were the workers. It seemed false for us to be standing there singing ‘the workers’. Christ! We couldn’t have been more the workers!” MacColl firmly believed in class solidarity, but he saw that identity politics erased identity, submerging him in “the masses”:

From the time I began to think—about the age of twelve or thirteen—I resented people who talked about us as “you people”, or “you workers”. I felt reduced, as if my identity was being taken away. “You people”, you great enormous mass of nobodies who produce all the riches of the earth, you people, my people, me!56

T. A. Jackson spent a lifetime struggling with that conflict. He wrote his autobiography to prove “that a man can be a Communist and still remain human”—implying that it was not easy to reconcile the two.⁵⁷ Though it was issued by Lawrence and Wishart (the Party’s publishing arm) in the depths of the Stalinist chill, the title, Solo Trumpet, was shamelessly individualistic. Jackson’s habit of running afoul of Party discipline (he was removed from the Central Committee in 1929) was not unconnected with his hopeless love of the English classics, which he had mastered thoroughly by age fourteen. At that point in life, as a reading-boy in a London printing works, socialism made no impression on him, largely because he was exploring the metropolis through the frame of secondhand classics:

It was truly a wonder-world, for I was seeing it not merely with eyes of flesh but with the eyes of heightened imagination;—seeing it not only through spectacles manufactured by an optician, but through glasses supplied by magicians named Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, William Makepeace Thackeray, Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, Harry Fielding, Toby Smollett, Sam Johnson and Will Shakespeare himself . . . —and that was the trouble. I was book-hungry and I found a land where books were accessible in a quantity and variety sufficient to satisfy even my uncontrolled voracity. How could anyone expect me to even begin to contemplate the complete overturn of a world as wonderful as this?58

Was an education in the classics really a vaccination against Marxism? That certainly was not the case with Marx—or Tommy Jackson, for that matter. Yet it is telling that Jackson’s unpublished memoirs devote much more attention to his literary pursuits than the version published by Lawrence and Wishart. His comrade Helen Crawfurd, in her own unpublished manuscript, likewise had far more to say about literature than the usual authorized Party autobiography. She derived lessons in socialism and feminism from Carlyle, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Ibsen’s Ghosts and A Doll’s House, Dickens, Disraeli’s Sybil, Mary Barton, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Under the Greenwood Tree, Tennyson’s The Princess, Longfellow, Whitman, Burns, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, George Sand, the Brontës, Les Misérables, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.⁵⁹

As a published proletarian author, William Holt did not appreciate party hacks telling him that “There can be no proletarian art until after the revolution.” On a tour of the USSR he found much to admire in Soviet industrial and social organization, but Russian agitprop films struck him as devoid of creativity or individuality. Conversation among Communists was “dreary—obsessed as we were by politics—humourless and barren. . . . The tension of party life was unnatural, and a growing suspicion began to haunt me that Bolshevism was a horrible disease.” He described it as an antiliterary psychosis, occasionally relieved when his comrades “unconsciously revealed to me the repressed, more human side of their nature,” as when Page Arnot introduced him to Stendhal. Holt was ultimately expelled from the Party for writing articles that “described mill-girls laughing and talking of what they were going to wear at Blackpool.”⁶⁰

Jack Jones (b. 1884) became aware of the conflict between ideology and literature as a boy miner in Merthyr Tydfil, when he earned a few extra shillings selling sweets in the theater. There he saw the opera and whole history of English drama, from Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde. All of it was eroding the puritanical culture of Nonconformity, “making inroads on the narrowness of the outlook of different sections of the town’s growing population.” After the First World War he became an early Communist Party member, as well as a South Wales Miners’ Federation official in the godforsaken town of Blaengarw, but the two roles inevitably clashed: he resented the endless stream of Party dictates and, when he failed to carry them out, the constant attacks by local Communists. Then in 1923, in his capacity as bookbuyer for the Blaengarw Miners’ Institute Library, he discovered the great peace of the Cardiff Central Library. “I’d like to do a year’s reading in the quiet of this room,” he told a librarian.

I left school the day before my twelfth birthday to go and work underground with my dad. For a dozen years after I started work I don’t think I read one good book. I remembered bits of Bible-stories which I had been told in Sunday School—but those somehow got mixed up in my mind with Sexton Blake and Jack, Sam and Pete. Not until I married did I do any real reading—bought a number of volumes of Everyman’s Library, which were all sold to a secondhand bookseller during the hard times which came after the lock-out of the miners the year before last. Since then it’s mostly Marxist books I’ve been reading. But as a miners’ leader I must stock my mind with more than what Marx and Engels and those of their school have written.

Once a month, when his duties took him to Cardiff, he would exchange twelve to twenty books and take them home in an old suitcase. He read Tolstoy and Gorky, and raced through most of Dostoevsky in a month. He was guided by a librarian who, like a university tutor, demanded an intelligent critique of everything he read. Disdaining “books of the month” and “best-sellers”, Jones was anxious to distill “the quintessence of the great minds of all time, the imperishable intellectual substance of the ages.” Back at the Blaengarw Workmen’s Hall, he brought in a stock company to present a one-week Shakespeare festival, followed by stripped-down opera and even a Shaw repertory. They all attracted large crowds, but local Communists attacked him for neglecting his duties to “mess about with bloody actors.” In 1928 he quit his post as miners’ representative and moved closer to the library that had been “my university.” He finally left the Communists for the Liberal Party and became a successful novelist, beginning with Rhondda Roundabout in 1934.61

Jones was reacting against the attitude typified by Communist Willie Gallacher, who began his first volume of autobiography (1936) by stating outright that he would not discuss anything that did not have “a definite bearing upon my becoming a working-class agitator.”⁶² Starting in the Popular Front years, that hostility to literature abated. Gallacher loosened up in later installments of his memoirs (1951, 1966), where he confessed a liking for Burns, Scott, the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, children’s comics, and Olivier’s film of Hamlet (he once played Second Gravedigger for an amateur society). Of course he admired Dickens, and not only the obvious Oliver Twist: the Communist MP was prepared to admit that he appreciated the satire of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit.⁶³

Especially during the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, Communists became more anxious to embrace the British literary heritage. They noted that Marx had admired Tom Jones and Robert Burns; that Engels had learned much about English social conditions from Carlyle’s essays, Disraeli’s novels, and the poetry of Elizabeth Browning; that Stalin, in his youth, read Shakespeare, Vanity Fair, and The Origin of Species. They cited exhaustive production figures for English classics published in the USSR, where “There is no Board of Censors nor any official censorship.” There was even a glowing report of a Moscow Art Theatre dramatization of The Pickwick Papers. True, the audience was not quite sure how to respond to its quintessentially bourgeois hero.64 But if Stalin was a devotee of Thackeray, surely it was safe to applaud.