To some people looking at the political split in the left here in UK, communist and "communist", it may seem as if it was always so, but in our not so distant past, anarchist, socialist and communist all stood under the anti-parliamentarian banner. It was the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain around 1921 that caused the damaging split that we are still suffering from today. It was because of this that the Anti-parliamentary Communist Federation, APCF was formed in 1921. For those who are not familiar with the history of that era there is a very good article in The Free Communist:
It was hoped to create a Communist federation out of these remaining groups. The principle of federation — a federation of Communist groups developed voluntarily from below rather than an imposed centralisation from above — was always an important and consistent part of the anti-parliamentary movement’s proposals for unity. Aldred summarised the position in The Spur:Read the full article HERE:
I have no objections to an efficient and centralised party so long as the authority rests in the hands of the rank and file and all officials can be sacked at a moment’s notice. But I want the centralism to be wished for and evolved by the local groups and not imposed on them from a centre. . . . The Communist party, the real party, must be evolved through a federation of local groups, a slow merging of them into one party, from the bottom upwards, as distinct from this imposition from the top downwards. (August 1920)
The idea of federation was coupled with a demand for self-determination — the British revolutionaries should determine their own policy in relation to British conditions, irrespective of what Lenin and the Bolsheviks might say. Lenin was faced with different circumstances, Aldred argued, and might be forced to compromise to save the Russian Revolution, but in Britain there was no such excuse for compromise:
Lenin’s task compels him to compromise with all the elect of bourgeois society whereas ours demands no compromise. And so we take different paths and are only on the most distant speaking terms.
Or, more directly, we should stop ‘chasing the shadows of the great man [Lenin]. . . . It is not he who is running the British Revolution, but “ourselves alone”. The policy of looking to him to mind our business is hindering and not helping the revolution.’ But increasingly such advice from Aldred and a few others was ignored, as the move to join the CPGB gathered pace.
