ABSTRACT
For the Communist Party the 1970s marked its concern to reverse the downward trend in its membership through forming a broad democratic left alliance. The concept of a tightly unified and narrowly focused British Communist Party had gone forever. Party membership had fallen in the late 1950s and the late 1960s, as a result of the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and regaining this loss became a primary objective of the CPGB. To this end, the Party became associated with three main campaigns which, in the end, brought it nowhere near its primary objective. The first was its opposition to the anti-trade union policies of the Heath Conservative Government and the almost equally reactionary policies of succeeding Labour Governments. The second was to participate in the re-emergence of a vibrant feminist movement, often referred to as either ‘second-wave feminism’ or the WLM, in the hope of increasing the representation of women within the Party. The third was to reexamine Party policies and structures – The British Road to Socialism and the application of democratic centralism – in the desire to offer policies, more right-wing policies, which might attract wider support. This last campaign led to serious internecine conflict between two fairly right-wing movements within the Party largely as a result of the emergence of a new communism, Eurocommunism, which challenged the old Party which had been governed by its association with Moscow. British Marxism, and particularly the CPGB, did modestly well in dealing with the first two of these issues, winning wide support for its policies, but disintegrated when faced with British support for the Eurocommunist ideas first advocated by Santiago Carrillo and F. Claudin in the mid-1970s.
