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From International Socialism, No.56, March 1973, p.26.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Preparing for Power
J.T. Murphy
Pluto Press, £1.00
If, during periods of capitalist crisis, the mass of the working class can learn an enormous amount in a short period of time, so in periods of defeat and boom the converse is true. And it is not just the mass of the working class who forget. So do the revolutionaries. Thus the British left is only just re-discovering the great revolutionary wave that spread throughout the European working class and beyond in the years following the first world war and the Russian revolution. This is still mainly in the realm of theory – Lukacs. Gramsci, Korsch are known: the activities of the revolutionary workers of Germany, France, Italy, Bulgaria. Britain and elsewhere in that period are; still insufficiently appreciated. In many cases they still await their chroniclers.
In these circumstances the republication of J.T. Murphy’s Preparing far Power is welcome event. For it is in the main an account of that revolutionary wave as it occurred in Britain by one of its leading participants. In its pages the revolutionary activities of syndicalists, industrial unionists and the various Marxist parties of the period are vividly described along with the counter-revolutionary opportunism of such figures as Lloyd George and Ramsey MacDonald. But above all the book contains an outstanding critical account of the rise and fall of the shop stewards’ movement between 1915 and 1920.
Not that the book is above criticism. For as James Hinton points out in his all too brief introduction, the Murphy of 1934, writing after almost a decade of working-class defeat and Stalinist victory, had forgotten a lot of what he had learned in 1919. Hence his curious notion that the main reason for the decline in influence of revolutionaries in the twenties was the sectarianism of the left – a sectarianism most notably expressed in the founding of a seperate Communist Party. Surely to expect anything other than a decline of revolutionary ideas in a period of working-class demoralisation and retreat is to be wildly substitutionalist.
Nevertheless this is a volume that should be read by all revolutionaries. For the last revolutionary period in Britain contains many lessons for any coming one.
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Last updated on 29.6.2008