CPGB founding member, chief theoretician for half a century, and pioneer of Marxist historiography on India
After Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech, Dutt told the CPGB Political Bureau: 'On Stalin's sun there were, unsurprisingly, some spots.' The Soviet system, he added, had 'demonstrated the ability of a socialist society to recognise and correct its mistakes.'
Founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and its chief theoretician for half a century, a Marxist historian and journalist. His Fascism and Social Revolution (1934) analysed fascism as an extreme form of monopoly-capitalist crisis, his India Today (1940) pioneered Marxist historiography on India, and he served as CPGB General Secretary in 1939–1941, replacing Harry Pollitt over the party's anti-war line at the outbreak of World War II.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1920Founding member, CPGB
- 1921–1974Founded and edited Labour Monthly (53 years)
- 1923–1965Member, CPGB Executive Committee
- 1924Alternate member, ECCI Presidium
- 1925–1935Comintern representative (Belgium & Sweden); supervised Communist Party of India
- 1936–1938Editor, Daily Worker
- 1939–1941General Secretary, CPGB
- 1943–1965Vice-chairman then Vice-president, CPGB
Related historical events
The Work of a Theoretician: Fascism and Anti-Colonialism
Dutt's corpus offered a systematic critique of capitalism, social democracy, and fascism within an anti-imperialist framework. His biographer John Callaghan judged him in his day 'the most brilliant Marxist analyst in the English-speaking world', and Eric Hobsbawm wrote in 1963 that 'several generations of Marxists have received a great part of their political education' from him. The work flowed into party education through Labour Monthly, which he founded in 1921 and edited until his death, and the Daily Worker (editor, 1936–1938).
His defining study of fascism is Fascism and Social Revolution (1934). Dutt defined fascism as 'the economics and politics of the extreme stage of capitalism in decay', arguing that the world economic crises of 1914 and 1929 had made rational self-justification of capitalism impossible. Fascism, in his account, was no coherent theory but 'a ragbag of borrowings from every source' covering the reality of monopoly capitalism in a period of crisis and extreme class war: it drew workers away from revolution and chained them to the capitalist state while claiming to be 'anti-capitalist'. Since liberal democracy, social democracy, and fascism were all forms of bourgeois dictatorship, social democracy had disorganised the working class from within and thus aided fascism's advance. His formulation ran: 'Fascism operates primarily by coercion alongside of deception; Social Democracy operates primarily by deception, alongside of coercion.'
On colonial questions Dutt traced the mechanisms of imperial extraction. His kinsman Romesh Chunder Dutt had produced a pioneering study of the drain of wealth from India under British rule, and Rajani Palme Dutt developed this into an analysis of the economic mechanisms of 'unequal exchange' between Britain and its dependencies, four decades before Arghiri Emmanuel popularised the concept. His India Today (1940) became a classic of Marxist historiography on India. The so-called 'Dutt-Bradley Thesis' of 1936 oriented India's communists towards a broad Anti-Imperialist People's Front with the central demand of a Constituent Assembly. On the British labour movement he charged that the Empire was 'the unspoken premise of all British Labour and trade union politics', the 'hidden spring of capital-labour harmony' in the imperial metropolis.
Politically he was unswervingly loyal to the Soviet Union and the Stalin line, earning the moniker 'Stalin's mouthpiece' in Britain, and he played down the significance of Khrushchev's Secret Speech. A hardliner until his death, he opposed the party's criticism of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and its Eurocommunist turn in the 1970s.