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Socialists and ‘mobility’ in twentieth-century Britain: images and experiences in the life histories of British communists

2011; Routledge; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03071022.2011.563824

1470-1200

Kevin Morgan,

Labor Movements and Unions

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1Hartmut Kaelble, Social Mobility in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Europe and America in Comparative Perspective (Leamington Spa, 1985), chap. 4. 2The article draws on interviews carried out for the CPGB Biographical Project at the University of Manchester, ESRC award no. R000 237924. 3On this, see James A. Henretta, 'The study of social mobility: ideological assumptions and conceptual bias', Labor History, xviii, 2 (1977), 165–78. 4Kaelble, op. cit., 123–5; Geoff Payne, Mobility and Change in Modern Society (Basingstoke, 1987), 5. 5Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians. Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis 1880–1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 56–7 and passim. 6Kaelble, op. cit., 25, 124. 7Payne, op. cit., 17, 91. 8Thernstrom, op. cit., 73 and passim. 9David Glass (ed.), Social Mobility in Britain (London, 1954); Thernstrom, op. cit., 3. 10Hartmut Kaelble, Historical Research on Social Mobility. Western Europe and the USA in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1981), 11–12. 11Thernstrom, op. cit., 47–8, 64. 12E.g. Kaelble, Social Mobility, op. cit., 30; also see 131 where it is conceded that 'very forceful short-term events' sometimes overshadowed long-term changes. Even migrations, forced or otherwise, could be set aside as geographical mobility and hence the concern of other specialisms (Kaelble, Historical Research, op. cit., 12). For a useful commentary, see Payne, op. cit., chap. 1. 13Andrew Miles, Social Mobility in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England (Basingstoke, 1999), chaps 1, 8. 14Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women (Cambridge, 1998). 15See also Andrew Miles and David Vincent, 'The past and future of working lives' in Andrew Miles and David Vincent (eds), Building European Society: Occupational Change and Social Mobility in Europe 1840–1940 (Manchester, 1993), 3, which refers to 'the careful use of such texts to qualify and elaborate findings derived from … statistical sources'. 16Jürgen Kocka, White Collar Workers in America 1890–1940. A Social-political History in International Perspective (London and Beverly Hills, 1980), 23. 17See Miles, op. cit., 188. 18Jürgen Kocka, 'Social mobility and the formation of the working class' in Kocka, Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society. Business, Labor and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany (New York and Oxford, 1999), 213. 19Notably, for example, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), chaps 6–10; see also Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839), chap. 2. 20Payne, op. cit., 12 ff. 21See e.g. Thompson, op. cit., 189 ff. 22Kocka, 'Social mobility', op. cit., 213–17. 23Kaelble, Social Mobility, op. cit., 25–9; Kaelble, Historical Research, op. cit., 15–22. 24Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People. Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1994 edn), 4. 25John Goldthorpe (with Catriona Llewellyn and Clive Payne), Social Mobility and Class Structure in Great Britain (Oxford, 1980), 5. 26C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956), 188–9. 27G. D. H. Cole, Fabian Socialism (London, 1942), 18–19. 28For such a treatment see, for example, Hippolyte Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine. Première partie: l'Ancien Régime, 2 vols (Paris, 1900 edn), book 4, chap. 3. 29Key texts are Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906; London, 1976 edn), especially 115–19; see also Thernstrom, op. cit. and Kaelble, Social Mobility, op. cit., chap. 1, for an overview. 30As noted by Kocka, 'Social mobility', op. cit., 208–30. 31For a discussion of some of these issues, see Joyce, op. cit., 1–12. 32K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1960 edn), 6–7; see also Mannheim's discussion of the importance of 'fresh contacts' in 'The problem of generations', Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1952), 289–90. 33Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley, 1966 edn), 5. 34See ibid., 64. 35Crosland, op. cit., 196. 36Goldthorpe, op. cit., 10–11. 37Crosland, op. cit., 200. 38 ibid., 195. 39G. D. H. Cole, The People's Front (London, 1937), 268. 40For a classic account, see Stuart Macintyre, Little Moscows. Communism and Working-class Militancy in Inter-war Britain (London, 1980). 41Kenneth Newton, The Sociology of British Communism (London, 1969), 46–7. 42See Andrew Thorpe, 'The membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920–1945', Historical Journal, xliii, 3 (2000), 777–800. Sharp membership increases among the miners and unemployed workers respectively were recorded during the miners' lockout of 1926 and unemployed agitations of 1931–2. If these did represent real gains, they were not sustained. 43John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The Slump. Society and Politics during the Depression (London, 1979 edn). 44Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn, Communists in British Society 1920–1991 (London, 2007), chap. 1. 45These also deserve exploration, and it remains as true as in Cole's day that local and regional variations in the 'prestige scale' of occupations are inadequately understood; see G. D. H. Cole, Studies in Class Structure (London 1955), 7. The difficulties of subjective ascriptions of prestige may be gauged from John H. Goldthorpe and K. Hope, 'Occupational grading and occupational prestige' in Keith Hope (ed.), The Analysis of Social Mobility. Methods and Approaches (Oxford, 1972), 19–79, which even as a pilot study presented ahistorical and exclusively quantitative rankings of fixed occupational categories with little sense of how different ascriptions might reflect different life histories. Miles and Vincent ('The past and future', op. cit., 3) have correctly noted how different occupational classifications can inhibit meaningful comparison across national boundaries. But at the same time, if the constructedness of mobility is once accepted, then variations in these 'lines … drawn across "social space"' may be seen as themselves at the heart of any meaningful comparison. 46David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker. A Study in Class Consciousness (Oxford, 1989 edn), chap. 4; C. Wright Mills, White Collar. The American Middle Classes (New York, 1956 edn), chap. 11; Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974), chap. 15. Kocka, White Collar Workers in America, op. cit., chap. 1 includes a discussion of the early German literature on the subject. 47Lockwood, op. cit., 101. 48Braverman, op. cit., 130–1, citing Michel Crozier, The World of the Office Worker (Chicago and London, 1971). 49Kaelble, Social Mobility, op. cit., 126–7, 133; Miles and Vincent, 'The past and future', op. cit., 11. 50Geoffrey Crossick, 'The emergence of the lower middle class in Britain: a discussion' in Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870–1914 (London, 1977) 30–1. 51Geoffrey Anderson, Victorian Clerks (Manchester, 1976), chap. 7 and passim. 52R.K. Kelsall, D. Lockwood and A. Tropp, 'The new middle class in the power structure of Great Britain', Transactions of the Third World Congress of Sociology (1956), vol. iii; cited George Sayers Bain, The Growth of White-Collar Unionism (Oxford, 1970), 81. 53Miles and Vincent, 'The past and future', op. cit., 16. 54Newton, op. cit., 2–3. 55Vincent, 'Mobility, bureaucracy and careers in early twentieth-century Britain' in Miles and Vincent, Building European Society, op. cit., 217–39. 56Mike Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation (Buckingham, 2000), 73, 102–3. 57Sombart, op. cit., 10–12, 116–17. 58Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), chap. 2. 59James Friell, interview with author, 25 August 1988, transcript deposited in the Working Class Movement Library, Salford. 60Mannheim, op. cit., 296–301. 61Miles, Social Mobility, op. cit., 16–17. In a comparative context, national variables like compulsory military service might also be accorded greater weight as representing more than a simple career interruption and offering possible insight into patterns of radicalization in different European countries. 62 It Can Be Done. Report of the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Battersea, May 29–31, 1937 (CPGB, London, 1937), 216–77. Apart from the impossibility of correlating age and class, analysis is further complicated by the categories of housewife, unemployed, party functionary and student. 63Unless otherwise stated, subsequent citations are taken from these interviews, which with the exception of James Friell (see n. 58 above) were recorded between 1999 and 2001 and are deposited in the National Sound Archive at the British Library. The interviewees were Dorothy Wedderburn (née Barnard); George Barnard; Stanley Forman; Hymie Frankel; Geoff Hodgson; Florence Keyworth; Dave Marshall; Jimmy Oates; Stan Robertson. 64David F. Crew, Town in the Ruhr. A Social History of Bochum, 1860–1914 (New York, 1979), 99–101. 65Kocka, White Collar Workers in America, op. cit., 254 and chap. 5 passim. 66Henretta, op. cit., 167. 67See Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal, 'Stalinism: workers' cult and cult of leaders', Twentieth Century Communism, 1 (2009), 20–9. 68Harry Pollitt, Serving My Time (London, 1941 edn), 30, 289–90 and passim. 69See, for example, Kevin Morgan, Harry Pollitt (Manchester, 1993), 158–9; also Pollitt speech reported in the Daily Worker, 18 June 1951. 70Peter Cadogan, interview. 71Morgan et al., op. cit., 81–5. 72Both through individual defections and through recruitment of second-generation socialists from Labour family backgrounds; see Kevin Morgan, 'A family party? Some genealogical reflections on the CPGB' in Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn (eds), Agents of the Revolution (Bern, 2005), 173–96. 73See George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London, 1938). 74See Alec Brown, The Fate of the Middle Classes (London, 1935), chap. 1. 75Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (London, 1957), chap. 7. 76Eden and Cedar Paul, 'Introduction' in Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London, 1926 edn), 13. 77R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (London, 1935 edn), 86. 78Pollitt, Daily Worker, 6 November 1943; Pollitt, Looking Ahead (CPGB, London, 1947), 41–2. 79A. A. Purcell (leader of TUC delegation), Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1925; see also, for example, George Lansbury, 'Russia revisited: the progress of six years', Socialist Review, November 1926, 16. 80Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (London, 1937 edn), chap. 10. 81Pat Sloan, Soviet Democracy (London, 1937), chap. 1. 82Hewlett Johnson, The Socialist Sixth of the World (London, 1939), book IV, chaps 2–3. 83Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934 (Cambridge, 1979), 2, 16–17. 84Johnson, op. cit., 234. 85Lion Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937 (London, 1937), 28–9, 50–1, 108. 86Webb and Webb, op. cit., 807. 87 Russia's Story Told in Pictures (CPGB, London, 1942), 34–5. 88Mills, op. cit., 265–72; see also Braverman, op. cit., 34–5. Though Mills was aware of the appeal of communism to some white-collar activists, it is indicative of prevailing associations that in this context he referred only to fascism. 89Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures. England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 2000 edn), 248. 90See, for example, the CPGB biographical project interviews with Mike Jones (by the author), Dorothy Kuya (by Andrew Flinn) and William Lauchlan (by Alan Campbell and John McIlroy); with the author's thanks to the interviewers. 91Kaelble, Social Mobility, op. cit., 6. 92McKibbin, op. cit., 503. 93David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 1993 edn), 134. 94F. Zweig, Men in the Pits (London, 1948), chap. 20. 95See Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, op. cit., 258–67; Kevin Morgan, The Webbs and Soviet Communism: Bolshevism and the British Left, Part Two (London, 2006), 158–9. 96Morgan et al., op. cit., 85–7; Kevin Morgan, 'Cambridge communists 1930s–40s', Socialist History, xxv (2004), 40–78. 97Lockwood, op. cit., 210. 98See, for example, the author's CPGB biographical project interviews with Sam Apter, Betty Reid and Sid Kaufman. 99McKibbin notes that girls attending grammar school were three times less likely than boys to go on to university (Classes and Cultures, op. cit., 262). 100Lipset and Bendix, op. cit., 16–17. 101See Alistair Black, A New History of the English Public Library. Social and Intellectual Contexts, 1850–1914 (Leicester, 1996), 175; Thomas Kelly, A History of Public Libraries in Great Britain 1845–1965 (London, 1973), 53, 145–6, 248–9. 102On this, see Morgan et al., op. cit., chap. 5. 103Miles, Social Mobility, op. cit., 138, 144. 104David Goldstein, CPGB biographical project interview with the author. 105McKibbin, op. cit., 45. 106See Lockwood, op. cit., 101; Mike Savage, 'Sociology, class and male manual working class cultures' in John McIlroy, Nina Fishman and Alan Campbell (eds), British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics. Volume 2: 1964–79 (Aldershot, 1999), 35. 107Labour History Archive and Study Centre (LHASC), Manchester, CP/YCL/1/5, Asher of Fabian Nursery, YCL eighth congress, 1936. 108Thanks also to Dylan Murphy for interview recorded with Geoff Hodgson, 12 February 1996. 109Mills, op. cit., 243. 110Steve Parsons, 'British communist party school teachers in the 1940s and 1950s', Science and Society, lxi, 1 (1997), 47. 111Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism (Harmondsworth, 1937), 140. 112Robertson was citing chapter ten of Huxley's Antic Hay. His communist associate was Eric Edney, who later went to Spain. 113Pollitt, Serving My Time, op. cit., 30. 114Robert Michels, Political Parties. A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1915; New York, 1999 edn), 284. 115Annie Kriegel, The French Communists. Profile of a People (Chicago, 1972), 189; Brigitte Studer, Un parti sous influence. Le parti communists suisse, une section du Komintern 1931 à 1939 (Lausanne, 1994), 299–304. 116For example, Marc Lazar, Le Communisme: une passion française (Paris, 2005 edn), 45–6. 117See Brigitte Studer and Heiko Haumann (eds), Stalinistische Subjekte. Individuum und System in der Sowjetunion und der Komintern 1929–1953 (Zurich, 2006). 118Morgan et al., op. cit., 112–19. 119Alison Macleod, CPGB biographical project interview with the author. 120Pollitt cited Francis King and George Matthews (eds), About Turn. The Communist Party and the Outbreak of the Second World War (London, 1990), 209; exchange between Tom Bell and Khitarov, Comintern presidium, 13 February 1929 (microfilm in LHASC); Pollitt, Serving My Time, op. cit., 14. 121 Report on Organization (CPGB, London, 1922), 22. 122Morgan et al., op. cit., 119–23. 123CPGB biographical project interview with the author. 124See Joseph Melling, 'Red under the collar? Clive Jenkins, white collar unionism and the politics of the British left, 1947–65', Twentieth Century British History, xiii, 4 (2002), 412–48; Melling, 'Leadership and factionalism in the growth of supervisory unionism: the case of ASSET, 1939–1956', Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 13 (2002), 37–82; Parsons, op. cit. 125Mills, op. cit., 318–19. 126 ibid., xvii. 127See Bain, op. cit., 102; and for contrasting accounts Bob Carter, Capitalism, Class Conflict and the New Middle Class (London, 1985); Joseph Melling, 'Managing the white-collar union: salaried staff, trade-union leadership, and the politics of organized labour in post-war Britain, c. 1950–1968', International Review of Social History, 48 (2003), 245–54. 128See Michael Justin Davis, 'Introduction' in Alfred Williams, Life in a Railway Factory (1915; Stroud, 1984 edn), xx–xxxiii. 129Henry Ford with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (London, 1931 edn), 103. 130Jürgen Kocka, 'New trends in labour movement historiography: a German perspective', International Review of Social History, 42 (1997), 74. 131Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (London, 1913), chap. 1. 132Cole, Fabian Socialism, op. cit., 14. 133Bain, op. cit., 93, 134-5. Bain himself describes a Scottish firm sacking thirty unionized foremen and then re-employing all but four union activists. Though acknowledging employers' attitudes as a factor affecting union growth, his quantitative research showed no appreciation of the significance of lay activists whose motivations were not primarily 'instrumental'. 134John Kelly and Edmund Heery, Working for the Union: British Trade Union Officers (Cambridge, 1994), 21–7, 164–5. 135Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhart Haupt, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe 1780–1914: Enterprise, Family and Independence (London, 1995), 134–8. 136See Mills's discussion, op. cit., chap. 15. 137Born in 1918, Frankel wrote a book on the philosopher A. N. Whitehead, published in the USSR in 1959, and another on Capitalist Society and Modern Sociology. Forman became a director of the Soviet bloc film importer Plato Films. 138Cited David Mitch, '"Inequalities which every one may remove": occupational recruitment, endogamy, and the homogeneity of social origins in Victorian England' in Miles and Vincent (eds), Building European Society, op. cit., 158. 139Miles and Vincent, 'The past and future', op. cit., 5.