ABSTRACT
Desert and accident have combined to make Mr. William Gallacher the most representative British Communist. He was in the thick of all the frays out of which the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was born; he was a delegate at the second congress of the Communist International in Moscow in the summer of 1920, when the main lines of guidance for the then embryonic CPGB were laid down; he has been a regular member of the central committee of the party and of its Politbureau; and he was an M.P. for three or four times as long as any other member of the party, having sat for West Fife as a Communist for 15 years. It is not, therefore, surprising that he should have been invited to write a companion volume in the “Penguin” series to the recent volumes on the Labour and Conservative Parties, The Case for Communism. His previous writings consist of two volumes of reminiscences, Revolt on the Clyde, published in the 1930s, and The Rolling of the Thunder, published in 1947. 1
