Communist Party of Great Britain
영국 공산당
A communist party founded in London on 31 July 1920 through the merger of the British Socialist Party and several other Marxist groups. As the British section of the Comintern it built influence in the trade union movement but won only a handful of parliamentary seats. In 1991 its leadership renamed it Democratic Left and disbanded the party.
In depth
The Communist Party of Great Britain was founded on 31 July 1920 at a Communist Unity Convention at the Cannon Street hotel in London through the merger of the British Socialist Party, the Communist Unity Group of the Socialist Labour Party, the South Wales Socialist Society and others. At its January 1921 congress in Leeds the majorities of Sylvia Pankhurst’s Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) and of the Scottish Communist Labour Party joined. Left communists including Pankhurst and Willie Gallacher opposed parliamentarism and affiliation to the Labour Party, but the line Lenin argued in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, that communists should work within reformist organisations, prevailed. Labour rejected the party’s affiliation in 1921 and, after the Zinoviev Letter affair of 1924, expelled Communist Party members.
The party backed the 1926 General Strike and the long miners’ strike that followed, and its membership in mining areas grew greatly. During the Comintern’s Third Period of 1929–1932 it branded social democratic parties “social-fascist” and tried to build separate revolutionary trade unions, with almost no success. After the switch to Popular Front tactics in 1935, Gallacher was elected MP for West Fife, and party members played a leading role in the street struggle against Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. In the Spanish Civil War it created the British Battalion of the International Brigades.
After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, when the Comintern described the war as imperialist on both sides, the central committee adopted an anti-war line; Harry Pollitt, who opposed the change, was relieved of his duties and replaced by Rajani Palme Dutt. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 the party switched to supporting the war and Pollitt was restored. Membership peaked at around 60,000 in 1943. In the 1945 general election the party received 103,000 votes according to the English source and 97,945 according to the Russian source, and two Communists were elected, but both lost their seats in 1950. In 1951 it issued the programme The British Road to Socialism, which advocated a peaceful transition to socialism.
The party suffered heavy losses after it supported the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution: between a quarter and a third of its members according to the English source, more than 7,000 according to the Russian source. Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker’s correspondent, resigned when his reports were spiked and was expelled from the party. Afterwards the party functioned increasingly as a pressure group, using its trade union base to push the Labour Party leftwards. Amid conflict between Eurocommunists and pro-Soviet members in the 1970s, the New Communist Party split away in 1977 and the Communist Party of Britain in 1988. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the 42nd Congress in November 1991 adopted the name Democratic Left, and the leadership under Nina Temple disbanded the party.