Walter Kendall was a socialist historian and labour movement activist who for more than fifty years combined his research with a commitment to active membership of the shopworkers’ union USDAW and the Labour Party. Politically, he was a a Labour Party Marxist and opponent of Communism who occupied the ground between reform and revolution, becoming involved in initiatives such as the Socialist Workers’ Federation, the Institute for Workers’ Control and Voice of the Unions. But as an historian, he is best known for his text, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-1921 (Allen and Unwin, 1969), in which he argued controversially that the creation of the Communist Party of Great Britain had been a mistake, driven by pressure from the Comintern, ‘which wrenched the whole course of the movement’s left wing out of one direction and set it off on another’.

In an article titled ‘The new left, the third camp, workers’ control and The Revolutionary Movement in Britain: the life and work of Walter Kendall’ for Critique: The Journal of Socialist Theory, John McIlroy, Visiting Professor of Employment Relations at University of Middlesex Business School, and an historian of the Communist Party and New Left, argues that the historiography of the British New Left has devoted little attention to working-class activists who pursued Third Camp and anti-Stalinist agendas before as well as after 1956. He singles out Kendall as one such whose work has been overlooked, and sets out ‘to recuperate and re-evaluate his career, with particular attention to The Revolutionary Movement in Britain’.

The article looks at Kendall’s early life (he was born in East Ham in 1926), early experiences in the Civil Service Clerical Association and the Labour League of Youth, his rejection of both the CPGB and Trotskyism, and involvement in the small, disputatious and short-lived Socialist Workers Federation, a significant group in the creation of the First New Left before the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. It goes on to examine Kendall’s critiques of CPGB-aligned historians, most notably the party’s official historian, James Klugmann, and examines Kendall’s The Revolutionary Movement in Britain in some detail. Kendall died in 2003, but as McIlroy notes, never wavered from the conclusions he had reached in that book. And he concludes that thinking critically about how past attempts to ‘create a disciplined, rooted organisation and particularly about how and why the CPGB was born and why it went wrong may help to deepen our understanding of at least some aspects of how we arrived at the impasse of the British labour movement and international socialism in the twenty-first century’.

‘The new left, the third camp, workers’ control and The Revolutionary Movement in Britain: the life and work of Walter Kendall’, by John McIlroy, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, Vol. 52, 2024. Available here as an open access article (accessed 5 November 2024).