British Communism and the Politics of Race by Evan Smith (review)

Evan Smith’s British Communism and the Politics of Race provides an excellent reference work for an under-explored topic, namely the Communist Party of Great Britain’s relationship to the anti-racist movements of post-war Britain. A growing body of literature focuses on the role of Black communists’ transnational networks in fomenting anti-colonial and anti-racist activism. Smith’s study serves as an important accompaniment to this work. He has previously written articles on, and edited collections about, the history of both the Australian and British far Left, often with a focus on the relationship between communist parties and marginalised groups. In this monograph he examines both how the CPGB responded to issues of racism in Britain, and how Black communities shaped the party.

Smith demonstrates that the CPGB’s anti-racist politics were influenced by Black activist networks, competing political methodologies within the party, the attitudes of the labour movement, developments in British capitalism, and state policies towards Black communities. He foregrounds the influence of Black activists, whose under-representation in the source materials is noted early on (20), and whose engagements with the party are traced through a close reading of secondary literature and contemporary publications. Smith has undertaken an impressive amount of primary research for this work, the strength of which is perhaps most evident in his sections on anti-fascist mobilisations.

The text shows how the CPGB, while leading anti-racist struggles in the 1940s, was eclipsed by more militant groups by the 1970s. Smith’s central contention is that the CPGB’s strategy, which aimed to mobilise the Labour Party and the trade unions to lead anti-racist movements, and to turn the state into an anti-racist tool, increasingly marginalised the party from Black communities. However, Smith also emphasises that the currents around Marxism Today developed a nuanced understanding of the intersection of different oppressions and experiences of identity. This, he contends, was a vital corrective to the British Left’s workerist Marxism (8–13).

The first chapter examines the CPGB’s approach to migration, post-colonial interstate relations, and anti-fascism in the context of decolonisation and the Windrush generation’s arrival. It establishes the prominent role of communists in opposing racial discrimination and post-war fascist movements, and their framing of this activism in long-established anti-colonial principles. However, it also highlights the party’s limitations, namely the opposition to Polish migration, the visions of post-colonial relationships that replicated imperial patterns of exchange, and the tempering effect of communist left-nationalism.

The second chapter examines the party’s anti-racist activism and understanding of “race” throughout the 1960s. Smith makes a series of sophisticated arguments about the influence of the CPGB’s political perspectives, as embodied in The British Road to Socialism, on the party’s anti-racist tactics. In the context of the first Wilson ministry’s anti-migrant legislation and trade union hostility to anti-discrimination laws, the CPGB’s focus on the labour movement created a divide with Britain’s Black communities, which increasingly turned to self-organisation. A sense of growing marginalisation is brought to the fore, which unfolds through the following chapters.

The third and fourth chapters deal with the mixed results of the 1970s for the CPGB. Early victories against the Heath government and the Industrial Relations Act were offset by the unions’ acquiescence to Wilson’s “social contract” and continued ambivalence regarding the 1971 Immigration Act, causing party members to challenge the strategic centrality afforded to the labour movement. Smith presents the adoption of the “broad democratic alliance” strategy at the 1977 party conference as motivated by this critique (162–66). While this strategy legitimised CPGB involvement in campaigns such as the Anti-Nazi League, it also watered down the party’s unique political intervention, ceding its militant reputation to the Trotskyists and the Asian Youth Movements. Furthermore, the CPGB’s perspective of reforming the state, manifested in calls to criminalise the far...