Class Against Class by Mike Squires
In writing Class against class Mike Squires set himself two principal tasks. Firstly, to assert the truth that the experiences of the British working class played as decisive role in shaping the strategies developed by the Communist Party in the first three decades of its existence as did the Communist International.
In repudiating the conventional bourgeois account that the party was merely the instrument of Moscow and the Comintern Dr Squires draws on his extensive researches into the party’s history and the documentary record and builds on his pioneering Saklatvala: a Political Biography (Lawrence and Wishart, London 1990). It was world events, the betrayals of international social democracy, the suppression of the German Revolution, the betrayal of the 1926 British General Strike and official Labour’s enthusiasm for Empire coupled with the experiences of poverty, unemployment, war and exploitation which underpinned support for revolutionary change and for the Soviet Union’s construction of socialism.
Mike Squires second assertion is that far from a fallow period, the class against class era saw substantial advances and a real consolidation of communist organisation and a strengthening of the working class movement.
The Communist Party’s new line is conventionally dismissed as an unproductive, even sectarian period by bourgeois historiography. But advances included substantial increases in party and YCL membership, the publication and consolidation of the Daily Worker, and energetic interventions in elections that reflected the party’s almost unique role in combatting racism and colonialism.
Mike Squires argues that class against class was a period in which a tough and experienced cadre of communist militants in the unemployed movement and in industry – in factory, depot, mine and mill – established a deep penetration in the working class.
The new line recruits for the CPGB formed the backbone of the party during the critical fight against domestic fascism, the mobilisation of British workers and intellectuals to fight in Spain, the development of a popular front and the drive to raise factory production in the fight against fascism.
This generation drove the wartime and post war years of the party's achievements and laid a tradition of workplace organisation and political consciousness that both challenged class collaboration and right wing social democratic ideas in the Labour movement and steeled the trade union leaders and shop stewards who led a 1970's militancy that challenged the power of the employers at work and in government.
For new generations entering politics, steeled in the great strikes of 2022 and 2023 and betrayed by Labour’s collapse into naked class compromise, imperialist war and abject betrayal the class against class period rewards study.
Dr Squires is a retired London taxi driver and an NHS campaigner.