Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the evolution of the British Communist Party’s approach to trade unions and the ‘economic struggle’. It argues that Party engineering activists were in a particularly good position to take advantage of the opportunities which government orders with guaranteed profits offered for economic struggle. The book discusses the fortunes of the two most successful rank-and-file movements, the London Busmen’s Rank and File Movement and the Aircraft Shop Stewards National Council. It focuses on the wartime economy looks in some detail at how Party activists responded to the circumstances of wartime engineering factories and charts the varied and sometimes conflicting initiatives to take advantage of extraordinary opportunities. The Party Centre made intermittent gestures towards implementing the Leninist model of tightly disciplined democratic centralist factory cells.