Communist League (UK, 1919)

Communist League
Communist League
Abbreviation	CL
Elections

The Communist League was a small far-left organisation in the United Kingdom which existed during the year of 1919. Its stated goal was to establish a network of workers' councils that would "resist all legislation and industrial action directed against the working class, and ultimately assuming all power, establish a working class dictatorship".^[1]

History

Following the

anarcho-communists with the anti-parliamentary socialists under a single formation, an initiative that was taken up by dissident London branch of the SLP,^[2] which in February 1919 proposed the convocation of a unity conference to bring together the nascent British communist movement. The London SLP preemptively drew up a provisional constitution for the new organization, including:^[3]

a call for local workers' committees and councils to aim at seizing the means of production and creating a proletarian dictatorship;

the ultimate aim of a republic of federated communes;

and a declaration that the parliamentary vote is obsolete and that direct industrial action should be adopted as an alternative.

The Communist League was founded in March 1919 by the London District Council of the Socialist Labour Party and various anarchist groups in London and Scotland, including Guy Aldred's Glasgow Anarchist Group.^[4] The anarchist newspaper Freedom published a report on the founding conference in which it noted that, despite the League not being itself a specifically anarchist organization, its anti-parliamentary program provided a big step in the direction of anarchism for many of its members,^[3] while also reporting on early disputes between the League's members over theoretical issues such as "economic determinism" and the "dictatorship of the proletariat".^[2]

The establishment of the Communist League was welcomed further in April 1919 at a London anarchist conference, which claimed that the new-found anti-parliamentarism among socialists and communists was due to anarchists' past propaganda work and called for closer cooperation between anarchists and the Communist League, which eventually resulted in a joint conference being held between the two.

decentralisation of the organization's governing body into a "Local Delegate's Committee", which followed the anarchist model of elected delegates subject to instant recall, with the aim of preventing the rise of "boss domination and cliqueism".^[5]

The League set about "agitating, educating and organizing" the working class, entering into workers' committees in order to develop their class consciousness, which the League argued would eventually lead to the overthrow of capitalism and the committees then taking over the administration of the newly-established communist society.^[6] As its official organ, the League began publishing a newspaper, The Communist, in which George Rose remarked that:^[2]^[3]

we know that there must develop the great working class anti-Statist movement, showing the way to Communist society. The Communist League is the standard bearer of the movement; and all the hosts of Communists in the various other Socialist organisations will in good time see that Parliamentary action will lead them, not to Communism but to that bureaucratic Statism correctly named by Hilaire Belloc the ‘Servile State’.... Therefore, we identify ourselves with the Third International, with the Communism of Marx, and with that personification of the spirit of revolt, Bakunin, of whom the Third International is but the natural and logical outcome.
— George Rose, May 1919

The organization quickly expanded over the subsequent months, forming a number of branches mostly in London and Scotland. A South Wales branch was also established by coal miners in Treherbert, led by the Welsh trade unionist William Mainwaring, who registered his disagreement with one particularly section of the League's constitution, stating that: "to say [the parliamentary vote] is obsolete will lead many to suppose that it once was useful."^[3] The League later entered into negotiations with the aim of merging with other anti-parliamentary communist groups such as the Workers' Socialist Federation (WSF),^[3] but this proposal was rejected by the WSF's leader Sylvia Pankhurst.^[7] Attempts by Aldred to open discussions with the ILP, the SLP and the BSP did not prove fruitful either.^[5]

Although Aldred had expressed in an October 1919 article that the revolutionary moment was "drawing closer and closer together on a platform of practical revolutionary effort", divisions still existed over the question of

Labour Co-op candidate John Biggar,^[5] resulting in the victory of the Liberal candidate and former Prime Minister H. H. Asquith

.

Tensions between the anarchists and the Marxists within the League had also heightened during the latter half of 1919, with fierce debates breaking out over the theoretical differences that had been present in the organization since the founding conference.[3] By the turn of 1920 these tensions completely boiled over, leading to the complete dissolution of the Communist League.^[2] Aldred went on to found the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation the following year,^[7] while the Stepney branch of the League took part in the establishment of the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) along with Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation and E. T. Whitehead's Labour Abstentionist Party.^[8]