ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1980s the bitter conflict between the pro-Soviet wing of the Eurocommunists, both inside and outside the CPGB, became more intense. This conflict was fought out against the background of the Thatcherite offensive against the trade union movement and, from 1983, an increasingly reformist Labour Party. The internal conflict, which had emerged in the late 1970s, weakened the ability of the Party to respond more positively to Thatcher’s offensive and Britain’s falling industrial output, thus limiting its ability to respond effectively in the miners’ strike of 1984-5. However, there was no doubting this threat with the Labour Party deflated and the trade union movements losing about a third of its members in the 1980s. Divided and retreating, the CPGB and British Marxism were faced with a perilous decline which they could not easily survive once Marxism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. By the early 1990s, then, the end of the CPGB and the practical irrelevance of Marxism in British politics seemed almost guaranteed and it is doubtful whether it could have developed a viable alternative other than to have developed the Socialist Alliance movement further.
