Throughout the Cold War, Communist Parties in western Europe were broadly understood as appendages of Soviet foreign policy interests. The Soviet Union was, when it came to Europe, typically more oblique than the US in the manner by which foreign policy objectives were pursued. There was no confusion about the function of a non-Bloc Communist Party being the recipients of large amounts of cash from Embassy staff until the Sino-Soviet split engendered the phenomenon of ‘anti-revisionism’, subsequently followed by the development of Eurocommunism on the opposite end amongst certain Moscow-attached ‘official’ Parties. In a sense the relationship between Perestroika and Eurocommunism relates to a kind of Maoist logic, the periphery anticipating and determining the transformation of the centre, whether consciously or not; in any case, the ends of these endeavours tended ultimately to liquidation. It's not incorrect to say that the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was responsible in no small way to significant ruptures and transformations in British institutions; the ex-Trotskyite Peter Hitchens makes a quite compelling case that CPGB operatives in the teachers union, for instance, were instrumental in pushing for comprehensive education and the abolition of grammar schools. That this development in actuality led to a marked decline in education standards, principally among the working class, is by the by. It’s clear enough that a Communist Party like the one in Britain, in circumstances such as those of the Cold War, will eschew to some degree or another the interest of its domestic population in favour of the geopolitical interests of another country, while pursuing adjustment and reform in certain sectors when and where it can. The other uncontroversial point is that this basic fact , that a Communist Party would put Soviet interests before domestic working class interests, will be evident to the workers themselves, and therefore won't permit the formation of a mass popular Party capable of performing revolution (notably in the French case, whereas the Party did establish itself in certain electoral base areas, developed a party culture, familial loyalties, and wielded a formidable trade union which still holds an exalted position in contemporary French industrial relations, the ends achieved were ultimately those of a rhetorically militant adjunct of social democracy, as an ‘institution’ of established French political, media, and labour culture).
The CPGB, while not being totally unique in this regard when compared to the other European Communist Parties, had at its centre a well educated intellectual core, the type epistomised by Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Allen Hutt, Monty Johnstone, and so on. All this is to say that the kind of large Communist Party Europe saw in the Cold War shouldn't be looked at with particular reverence. When old CPGB members reminisce about the Party, they end up describing a heady postliberal picture of semi-informal association, networks of plumbers, carpenters, etc. who would give you cheap rates, or lawyers who'd represent you for free, and so on. There isn't much in the old Party to look back fondly on except for the aspects of prior working class life eschewed in our current circumstances, and which were more prevalent in general during the last century regardless of the Party. Besides broader sociological distinctions between then and now, the most fundamental ‘loss’ for domestic Communism has been the Soviet Union, in particular Soviet money. The Chinese, first during the ‘split’ and then more profoundly after Reform & Opening Up, have become completely ambivalent to a foreign organisation’s professed politics when it comes to handing out wads of cash. The Russians, who some still look to out of a perception of their ‘anti-imperialist’ or ‘multipolar’ character, are equally disinterested, financing any group of any position so long as they can demonstrate some capacity to challenge the economic interests of Brussels or Washington. In that sense they're closer in position and strategy to Elizabethan foreign policy, financing a diverse range of Protestant networks on the continent to avert the formation of a Catholic universal order regardless of a group's particular credal or sacramental obligations. From the standpoint of domestic Communism, any and all financial crutch has been obliterated. The forces of counter-hegemony today look to anything and everything besides Communists to advance their geopolitical ambitions, with the sole exception of Russian-financed left-populist parties in Eastern Europe, all of which take a decidedly conservative character; they are only ‘socialist’ in the sense that their nostalgia draws on the days of the Bloc, rather than the British Empire or Gaullism or what-have-you.
All this is to say that the revival of Communism in the Party-form is a dubious wager. On the one hand you have the persistent Maoist-LeftCom-Trotskyite axis, groups which have never received any wads of cash but were principally founded in opposition to the cash-endowed Soviet-financed official Parties. On the other, you have the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) which limps on in the afterglow of Cold War dynamics, international seminars and symposia granting suppositional legitimacy in lieu of any substantial class grounding. In both cases, each contend and vie for authority principally within the Trade Union movement’s bureaucracy, carving out factional bases within which a Marxist might arithmetically deduce as ‘the place where production happens’. This phenomenon was cynically described by the RMT’s Bob Crow as the ‘sandpit’: When the RMT agreed to sign on to Dave Nellist’s Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), Crow and his clique understood the operation as a means of keeping Communists busy while the parameters of activity and the purse strings were held tight by the Union centre. This was a polar reversal of the Leninist conception of Party-building, where Unions were supposed to become adjuncts subservient to the political interests and objectives of the Party. This is not to say that had the roles been reversed TUSC might've become anything more than it did – it would be much safer to assume that had TUSC been in political control of the RMT, that the result would have been disastrous for both. The Party-form has been reduced to simulacrum, where Communist operatives contend within a cloistered arena of partial, discrete labour struggles and the interests of Union members inevitably supercede any notional project for socialist power. As ever, this begs the question of what the class is, and the viability of the designation at all.
The dissolution of working class power can be looked at by observing its opposite, the old bourgeoisie and its Conservative Party. The Tories died principally because they eschewed their class basis under Cameron, vied for the support of New Labour’s base and continued the New Labour program towards the inevitable unseating of the bourgeoisie, the class which at one time was its raison-d’être. Labour won't die like the Tories, however. In many ways Labour has remained true to itself as the political extension not of industrial labour as such, but of the Fabian Society, of the well educated and well intentioned intelligentsia directing the levers of industrial labour. Since the Party’s inception they've been helmed by “economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind,” desirous of “all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom.” Here they're identical to the Greens, albeit with a remainder of Marxism that makes them marginally less insidious. The brilliance of Reform is that their project rattles this frame in a manner similar to what Marx supposed might happen, by the crudeness and vulgarity of a proletarian political force (or, more precisely, a coalition wherein the working class holds a significant if not determinate position). In a certain way Labour has ‘grown up’ with its voters – the singular marker for a Labour voter in the last General Election was holding a degree. This doesn't necessarily speak to an ‘abandoning’ of the working class but more so to what the working class (or a section thereof) has turned into. The ‘lanyard class’ isn't so much the working class’ opposite, but the actual result of the successes of the Fabian-led labour movement, the concessions from capital to labour in the form of the modern education system, the health service, and the monumental bureaucratic state born directly to facilitate the rise in political potency of organised labour through the institutions of Trade Unionism. Starmer as Labour's leader is perfect for this period in the party's history, a man without qualities who by chance fits the biographical requirements of the model working class ‘striver’ (Streeting is similar, albeit with a very noticeable chip on his shoulder which makes him appear like a fanatic, deeply envious of the ‘Eton toffs’ which still weigh on the brains of ‘done-gooders’, despite this strata now being a rather atrophied and anachronistic element in Britain's social relations).
The ungrounding of political concepts from their prior class bases is evidenced in the presence of Blue Labour and other novel variants of political patchworking. Viable ‘radical’ politics, whatever its stripe, must now operate according to the Thatcherite wager: the task isn't to locate an existing subject, but to cultivate from the remainder and raw material of a shattered polity the basis of a hypothetical new social agent. The ‘Mondeo Man’ was invented, not found. In hindsight one might say it was inevitable that this determinate social agent emerged by the blind forces of necessary historical development, but it is altogether equally plausible to say he could have not emerged at all. It took the political will of the Thatcher project to bring him into existence, and it appears to be the will of the present Labour government to grind him out again. The same cultivation and invention is also apparent in the Blairite drive towards a ‘knowledge economy’, the production of a new element out of the broken fragments of demobilised and formerly determinate social agents.
With all that said, what then is the point of Communism in light of the decoupling of political characteristics from blind historically-instantiated economic conditions? Despite just now calling it a Thatcherite wager, the willful invention of classes isn't unique to her project or to our time. The title Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, Manifesto of the Communist Party, refers to something non-existent. The ‘Party' materialised decades after the Manifesto, in two places simultaneously around 1918: in Russia when the Bolsheviks dispensed with the ‘Social Democrat’ label, and in Germany where the Communists announced a final, irreversible split with their moderates, in the turnover from the Second to the Third International. The preamble to the Manifesto speaks of Communism as an emergent property of capitalism, first as ‘spectre’. In the Manifesto Marx and Engels are eager to clarify Communism, that its quality on the terrain of politics is commensurate with its material economic reality, something which emerges in one instance ‘organically’ by the contradictions within the economic order, but also (and of equal significance) consciously and voluntarily, a class emerging by will, taking the reigns of these ‘organic’ contradictions and asserting a particular interest therein. This is less so the location of an already determinate social element, but rather its invention. Making a class determinate is the project of making the class itself; everything else is post-hoc justification and myth-making. The persistent language of ‘consciousness’ eschews and obscures this decisive willful creation of a political subject. Now, after Thatcher, Communists can emphasise the voluntary aspect of invention which has previously been incorrectly subordinated to and overshadowed by the apparently determinate role of historical factors and happenstance.