When I began reading this remarkable book about an extraordinary political figure, I was prepared for an unusual biography. But I had not anticipated a book which makes an important contribution to our understanding of the strengths and the failings of the British left, as well as the demise of the Communist Party and many of the other often-enigmatic shifts in our politics. Roger Seifert and Tom Sibley succeed in telling the Bert Ramelson story, with its courage, apparent successes and final failure of his dream to transform Britain into a socialist society. The problem is their failure to come to grips with a confusing, often contradictory decade of ideological in-fighting which wrecked the CP and left Ramelson isolated and disillusioned.
Baruch Rachmilevitch – Bert Ramelson’s original name – was born in the Ukrainian shtetl (Jewish community) of Cherkassy just across the river from Kiev. He was seven when Lenin launched the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, aiming to change the world. No matter that his father was a Talmudist scholar qualified to be a rabbi and wishing to escape communism’s rejection of religious doctrine; young Baruch was destined to be a Leninist revolutionary. Had he remained in Cherkassy – as his three older revolutionary sisters did – instead of emigrating to Canada in 1922, it is a fair bet that Comrade Rachmilevitch would have graduated to sit alongside Stalin or maybe Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev and the other discarded Bolshevik pioneers as part of the Soviet Union.
Instead he became a leading British communist who only in his later days developed doubts about Lenin’s doctrine of “democratic centralism” – the corepiece of Soviet communism. Between those dramatic beginnings and his death in 1994, Ramelson rose to become one of the most influential figures in the Communist Party in Britain. The irony was that this revolutionary, who played a key role in developing the party, was a controversial figure in its collapse in 1991.
Ramelson became the party’s national industrial organiser in 1965. From a modest office in King Street, just off the Strand in London, he masterminded an industrial strategy through a disciplined network of communist trade unionists across the movement. In that role, to 1977, he sometimes seemed to exercise more influence on Britain’s industrial system than the governments of Harold Wilson and Ted Heath. It was a critical time for politics, especially on the left, and by 1974 one in 10 full-time union officials were members of the CP – largely due to Ramelson’s exceptional organising ability and his dedication to creating an industrial force capable of determining, or changing, government economic policy, Labour and Conservative. Communists in Britain had an influence in industry quite out of proportion to the party’s membership and despite their failures in parliamentary elections. Much of this was due to the boy from Cherkassy.
He had come a long way since moving with his parents to Canada where he studied law. By his early 20s, he was working at a law firm but, influenced by Zionism as well as Marxism, he joined a kibbutz in Palestine where he could combine Marx with a Jewish experiment in collective living. It was there he learned how to use firearms. His attachment to Zionism was brief and he went home planning to join the Communist Party, then illegal in Canada. Instead he went to Spain to fight Franco’s fascists as part of the International Brigades. He joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and, in 1938, formally became a member of the Canadian Communist Party (in Spain). He fought on various fronts, was wounded and went to England in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War to join the British Army, train as a tank driver and was sent to North Africa. In the Battle for Tobruk in 1941 he was captured and spent six months in a desert prisoner of war camp from where he was shipped to Italy.
After the war, he got a job as a salesman at Marks & Spencer in Yorkshire which, from 1946, became his political base. It was there, as a member of the shop workers’ union USDAW, that he teamed up with local communists, married his first wife Marion, who was also actively involved in party affairs, and became Yorkshire district secretary of the CP.
But it was as national industrial organiser that he became really influential. He was, in effect, the strategic commander of the Communist Party in its ideological battle against the capitalist state, using communist strength in the unions. Ramelson was an archetypal revolutionary in the Leninist mould until he was removed from the post in 1977. That was a turning point for him – and for the Communist Party in Britain which was riven with ideological and personality disputes. Orthodox communism was in decline across Europe, with the Soviet Union badly damaged by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which Ramelson opposed in defiance not only of Moscow but of those British comrades known as “tankies” for supporting the suppression of Alexander Dubcek and “socialism with a human face”.
In the end, Ramelson failed for a range of reasons. By the time he departed from his role, two years before Margaret Thatcher was elected, the Communist movement, in Britain and Europe, was split between reformists and remaining revolutionaries, and Ramelson’s uncompromising views on wages policy, Harold Wilson’s Government’s Social Contract, and any creative collaboration with the state, even under Labour, were collapsing under the weight of immense practical difficulties.
A more liberal model of Euro communism, in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, was fashionable, even among British communists. Ramelson, on the editorial board of the World Marxist Review, based in Prague, was under attack from old comrades, partly for his policies but also for his style. Serious rifts opened within the party hierarchy and between them and their daily newspaper, the Morning Star, while the party’s theoretical journal, Marxism Today, had a makeover and, with its new-found passion for Gramsci, made a remarkable impact on the intellectual left.
Ramelson was stunned by these developments and, with his influence dissipated, he later spoke of his disillusionment with the way Soviet communism developed under Stalin; his favourite sister, Rosa, was a victim of the Gulag. This book struggles effectively to analyse these upheavals, but concludes that Ramelson’s final years helped reinforce his “growing conviction that democratic centralism was a system prone to corrupt misuse by party leaderships anxious to stifle debate and repress opposition”.
He left a parting conviction that some form of socialism would eventually triumph – yet no belief that his own strategy might be part of that process.
