The Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation (APCF) was a communist group in the United Kingdom. It was founded by the group around Guy Aldred's Spur newspaper – mostly former Communist League members – in 1921. They included John McGovern.
History When Sylvia Pankhurst's Communist Party dissolved itself into the newly founded Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in January 1921, many libertarian communists refused to join due to the CPGB's policy of parliamentarism. Guy Aldred's Glasgow Communist Group immediately responded by publishing the Red Commune paper, in which they advocated for anti-parliamentarism in the form of election boycotts and abstentionism, inviting fellow libertarian communists to a conference at which the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation was established. Rose Witcop was sent as a delegate to the Third Congress of the Communist International, where she received an offer of financial backing on the condition that the APCF joined the CPGB and abandoned any anti-parliamentarism, which the Federation refused and cut ties with the International.
During the 1922 United Kingdom general election, Aldred stood in Glasgow Shettleston on a platform of abstentionism, in a move that was opposed by anarchists within the APCF, with the Federation refusing to lend official support to the campaign. Aldred came last in the election, with only 470 votes. The APCF subsequently distributed propaganda calling for workers to participate in an election boycott during both the 1923 and 1924 general elections.
After the Communist Workers' Party (CWP) dissolved in June 1924, the APCF became Britain's sole anti-parliamentary communist organisation. This led the British anti-parliamentary movement to move away from the internationalism that had influenced the CWP and focus more on local issues, particularly events happening in Glasgow, the headquarters of the APCF. It even rejected the idea of building a new political international, with the Communist Workers' International later complaining that the APCF had made no attempt to contact them.
Opposition to the Labour Party After the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International decided to advance the tactic of a united front between the Communists and the Labour Party, the APCF further rejected the International's policy, arguing that the Labour Party was an "anti-working class movement, the last earthwork of reaction."
When Labour formed its first government with Liberal support, the APCF's changed the masthead of its newspaper the Commune to "An Organ Of His Majesty's Communist Opposition", indicating their opposition to the Labour government and publishing lengthy criticisms of the new government ministers. Labour's "parliamentarian" policies were further criticised by the APCF as what amounted to a "continuation of capitalism", which the Federation contrasted with several of its own "anti-parliamentarian" policies that were to be implemented for the "overthrow of capitalism". Following the electoral defeat of the Labour government and Ramsay MacDonald's resignation as Prime Minister, the APCF published in the Commune a report of the government's time in office, in which it claimed that the MacDonald ministry had "functioned no differently from any other Capitalist Government".
In their October 1926 issue of Commune, the APCF reviewed the record of MacDonald's first Labour government, highlighting its use of the military to suppress strike actions and concluding that it had "functioned no differently from any other Capitalist Government". The APCF also criticised the Labour government's nationalisation policies as a form of state capitalism, instead advocating for social ownership as an alternative to state ownership, claiming that workers had "nothing to gain" from nationalised industries. The APCF also targeted attacks against individual members of the Labour Party, such as the Secretary of State for the Colonies J. H. Thomas, the jingoistic trade union leader Ben Tillett and the Glaswegian anti-parliamentarist turned politician John Clarke. The APCF also disrupted a number of meetings that hosted Arthur Henderson, who they condemned for his participation in David Lloyd George's war government, leading to seventeen people being arrested. The APCF declared that "there exists as much Socialism in the constitution and the activity of the Parliamentary Labour Party as there is divinity in the priesthood" and criticised the CPGB for its continued attempts to affiliate with the "anti-Socialist" Labour Party, reiterating its opposition to the Comintern's united front tactic.
Having previously opposed the National Minority Movement's tactic of working within reformist trade unions, by the time the 1926 general strike broke out, they again opposed the CPGB's collaboration with the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), instead advocating for power to be transferred directly to strike committees and mass meetings. After the TUC called off the strike, the APCF condemned the actions of the TUC's leaders, which they believed had proven their own position that reformist trade unions had become another part of the capitalist system.
The waning of the Revolutions of 1917–1923, rise and fall of the Labour government and the defeat of the general strike had all contributed to a sense of pessimism regarding the prospects of any coming social revolution. Despite entering a period of decline, the anti-parliamentary communist movement was maintained throughout the late 1920s by the APCF, which continued to uphold the communist programme that it had developed since before the Russian Revolution had ever taken place. But before long, the APCF suffered a split.
Split
The fallout from the Great Depression led the APCF to proclaim that the end of capitalism was imminent, as the economic collapse had destroyed the material conditions that incentivised reformism and - by extension - parliamentarism. In the APCF's appeal To Anti-parliamentarians, they argued that concessions could only be granted to the working class during a period of upswing, but following the economic crisis it had become impossible to secure reforms, concluding that "grim necessity will compel the workers to social revolution."
In 1929, Aldred correctly predicted the formation of a National Government by a coalition of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party and Stanley Baldwin's Conservative Party, to which he responded by declaring that "Anti-Parliamentarism has arrived." The free speech fight in Glasgow had also provided an impetus for the split within the APCF, as various different organizations had come together to form a Free Speech Committee, in order to engage in a direct action campaign to re-establish freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in the city. The Committee eventually evolved into a workers' council to maintain the unity that had been achieved, but it quickly declined until the council was effectively another front of the APCF. Those that had participated in the movement, including Aldred, became convinced of the necessity to unite the various disparate workers' organisations into a single movement capable of defeating capitalism. They saw the workers' councils as a means of achieving an end to sectarianism, as they could allow the participation of all factions "without impeaching the integrity of any", concluding on the necessity of abandoning anti-parliamentary agitation in favour of building a workers' council movement. Arguing that, since parliamentarism itself had collapsed with the establishment of the National Government, it was no longer necessary to propagate anti-parliamentarism, Aldred resigned from the APCF in February 1933.
The remaining members of the APCF disagreed with Aldred's conclusions and maintained the organisation as it was, causing a split within the movement that divided anti-parliamentarists throughout the 1930s. In spite of the APCF's continuation, Aldred claimed that it had, in fact, dissolved following his departure and considered his new organisation - the United Socialist Movement (USM) - to be the APCF's direct successor. The APCF had been in a temporary hiatus, but resumed activities in 1935 with the publication of two pamphlets. One was The Bourgeois Role of Bolshevism by the Dutch Group of International Communists (GIC), which argued that the Russian Revolution had from the outset been a bourgeois revolution, aiming to transform the Russian economy from agrarian feudalism to industrial capitalism, where the Bolsheviks had used the mass movement of peasants and workers to seize power and overrule both of them.The Bourgeois Role of Bolshevism: Its Relation to World Communism The other was Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy by Rosa Luxemburg, which they gave the name Leninism or Marxism? to.Leninism or Marxism by Rosa Luxemburg The text criticised Vladimir Lenin's view on the role of democratic centralism in a vanguard party to lead a revolution, arguing that revolutionary spontaneity was the driving force of any labour movement and emphasising that any dictatorship of the proletariat should be a mass movement of the whole working class rather than the work of a minority political party.
Despite the split, the APCF attempted to co-operate with other like-minded groups both in Britain and abroad. After Paul Mattick's Chicago-based United Workers' Party (UWP) rebuffed Aldred's attempts to unite it with the Communist League of Struggle (CLS), the APCF worked actively to maintain its links with the UWP and their magazine, the International Council Correspondence. The APCF came together with the USM, as well as the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), to establish the Socialist Anti-Terror Committee in Glasgow, a short-lived organisation formed in order to oppose the ongoing "Great Terror" in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Aldred's "domineering personality" brought a number of people to resign from the USM, with some joining the APCF. Nevertheless, the APCF's influence within British politics remained small. By this time, a wave of pessimism regarding the revolutionary prospects in Britain and around the world permeated through the weak and isolated anti-parliamentary movement, now confined to merely analyzing political events from the sidelines. European council communist ideas began to work their way into the APCF's ideology, which started to pick up decadence theory, on display in their May 1936 issue of Advance, in which one members analyzed the Italian invasion of Ethiopia as a product of Italy's capitalistic need to expand in the face of bankruptcy. They also made use of decadence theory in their article Capitalism Must Go!, in which they explained overproduction, coupled with a rise in unemployment and a reduction in demand, to be the key reason for the Great Depression.
The outbreak of the Spanish Revolution was welcomed by the APCF, not only a key challenge to the rise of fascism, but one which had also caused a resurgence in the activities of the previously declining British anti-parliamentary communist movement.
Spanish Civil War