Over a hundred years ago the British Communist Left was singled out for criticism by Lenin in his polemic "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Since then, there have been many studies of the revolutionary movement in Britain, but very few have dealt adequately with the history of left communism.
In fact the left communists in Britain were among the small minority of revolutionaries who defended internationalism in 1914. Enthusiastic supporters of the October 1917 Russian revolution they called for the formation of British soviets, and in the struggle to form a communist party they opposed any support for the Labour Party, parliament or trade unions, which had become bulwarks of the capitalist state. When the post-war revolutionary wave began to ebb, they exposed the betrayals of the Third International and its British party and attempted to go to the roots of their degeneration – years before the Trotskyist Opposition and in a more profound way.
For all its weaknesses and failures, the political struggle of the British Communist Left is still full of lessons for today.
This new revised edition of The British Communist Left examines the origins and development of a political current whose significance is still often ignored or distorted. It includes original texts by Sylvia Pankhurst, JT Murphy and others, together with little known documents of the early Third International, many available here for the first time.