The Communist Party and Empire

The Communist Party and Empire is the first volume in Andrew Murray's new history of the Communist Party in Britain. This is a frankly partisan account from an author whose perspectives are shaped not only by study of the extensive body of writing and research on a party and movement whose most defining characteristic was that it was born in struggle against the mightiest imperialist power in the world and at "a centre of international exploitation without historical precedent" but also as a leading figure in the contemporary anti-imperialist movement.

The first chapter describes the entwined histories of imperialism and socialism in Britain before the first world war; the second follows debates analyses around imperialism developed in the international (really European) socialist movement. These aim at providing context to what follows.

Chapter three focuses on Lenin and Leninism, and the integrated theory of world revolution, giving a wholly new significance to colonial struggles which developed after 1914, as well as tracing the work of those in Britain drawing the same conclusions. Dealing with the development of the Communist Party itself.

Chapter four describes the formation of the Communist international and its British section, and how they began to grapple with the novel political requirements of world revolution. These were the nearest to a revolutionary situation seen in Britain since the years of Chartism, and take the account to the landmark 1926 General Strike, which ended the period in which proletarian revolution could reasonably be imminently anticipated.

Chapter five deals with the CPGB, now relatively isolated from the rest of the British labour movement, reorienting itself under Comintern direction, embracing more closely the Bolshevik party model and an intransigent class-against-class perspective.

The final chapter covers the controversial 'third period' of the party's history, often dismissed as a sectarian aberration, but also the years in which the CPGB took a more definite shape and produced a strong network of revolutionary cadre, created the Daily Worker and embedded itself more deeply in the working class and trade union movement.