Duncan Bowie on the Revolutionary Left
Raising the Red Flag by Tony Collins – published by Haymarket
This book is a study of the British revolutionary left between 1884 and 1921 Published in Chicago, the author is a professor at De Montfort University, whose previous books are on the history of sport (rugby, rugby league and football). Given this is a new subject area for the author, the research and use of primary sources are impressive, and more attention is given to the perspective of other socialists within the Second International and emerging Third International, including journals in Russian, than most previous specialist writers on this period of revival of British socialism.
Collins admits his study is partisan and Collins’ focus is on the more extreme uncompromising elements of the communist left – the internationalists within the Social Democratic Federation/British Socialist Party, James Connolly and the Socialist Labour Party in Scotland, John Maclean and Peter Petroff and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers Dreadnought and her own miniscule Communist Party, which refused to join the CPGB, and which was the subject of Lenin’s polemic against ‘Infantile Communism’.
The SDF, SLP and the Workers Dreadnought have all been the subject of detailed academic studies, but Collins’ combined study is both useful and comprehensive. Collins no doubt sees himself as a purist (which as an armchair academic is no doubt fairly easy) and his criticism of the Communist Party, the Labour left and even of many of his favoured subjects for their compromises and betrayals fails to recognise that revolutions may actually need popular support to be successful and that revolutionary purity may not be enough.
The SDF is criticised for not being internationalist and not working with the trade union movement, SLP’ers such as Tom Bell and Arthur Macmanus are criticised for joining the bureaucratic Communist Party, trade unionists who actually win concessions are seen as compromising more revolutionary prospects and as “deadheads”, while Pankhurst is criticised for being domineering and a one-woman party. Even Maclean, who seems to be Collins’ greatest hero seems to be guilty of sectarianism and of a “persecution obsession” Reformers who out-manoeuvred revolutionaries are attacked for being “wily” or “Machiavellian”, while revolutionaries who become reformers are referred to as “erstwhile” members of their former revolutionary parties.
For Collins, the working class has repeatedly been failed by its leaders. All compromise is betrayal. Oh to be a purist revolutionary academic historian! Nevertheless, this study is still worth reading but only from an informed critical approach, and be wary of the polemical language.