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that the CP grew not out of the past of the British radical left but out of the international requirements of the Russian bolsheviks. This argument can be briefly dismissed. If anything is clear about the period 1917–21 it is (
a
) that the ultra-left passionately identified itself with the bolsheviks, (
b
) that it consisted of squabbling small groups, (
c
) that most of them wanted nothing more than to become the Communist Party, whatever the Russians wanted, and (
d
) that the natural and sensible course for the Russians was to see that a single unified party emerged. In fact, what happened was pretty much what might have been expected. The largest and most lasting of the independent marxist organizations of the British left, the British Socialist Party, became the main nucleus of the CP , absorbing politically important but numerically small groups of other left-wingers. The Russians used their prestige to knock some of the extreme anti-political sectarianism out of it, though the process of turning it into a ‘bolshevik’ party did not seriously begin until after Mr Kendall’s book ends.
    But how far was this radical left revolutionary? How far could it be revolutionary? It is evident from Kendall’s very full and scholarly account that only a tiny fraction of the smallish pre–1914 radical left consisted of revolutionaries in the Russian or Irish sense: mostly in Scotland, the East End of London (with its Russian connections) and perhaps south Wales. These few score, or at best few hundred, militants played a disproportionately large part in the years 1911–20, when the British labour movement, probably for the first time since the Chartists, showed signs of genuinely rejecting ‘the system’, including ‘politics’, the Labour Party and the trade union leadership. To say that it was revolutionary would be misleading.
    The immediate reason for failure was that the British left had neither a sense of power nor organizations capable of thinking in terms of power. The rebels merely faced the more modest choice of either capturing the traditional mass organizations of labourfrom the reformist leadership or refusing to have any truck with them. But the one course, though more fruitful in the long term, lowered the temperature of militancy in the immediate crisis; the other maintained it at the sacrifice of effectiveness.
    The south Wales miners – their union was essentially the produce of rank-and-file rebellion – chose the first, with the result that after the great 1915 strike there was no widespread unofficial movement in the pits which could link up with that in industry. But the miners held together, were radicalized
en bloc
(the South Wales Federation even thought of affiliating to the Comintern at one point), elected A.J.Cook in 1924 and pushed the whole of labour into the General Strike – at a time when this had ceased to have much political significance. As Kendall notes rightly, their success ‘staved off radical action during the war only to cause it to break out once the war was over’.
    The shop stewards, on the other hand, by their very grass roots syndicalism, their distrust of any politics and officialdom, wasted their efforts and produced – as Kendall also points out – a mere supplement to official trade unionism. They expressed rather than led a genuine revolt, though unable to give it effectiveness or even permanence. Hence their movement melted away, leaving behind only a few score valuable recruits to the new CP . ‘In 1918’, wrote Gallacher, ‘we had marched through Glasgow a hundred thousand strong. On 1 May 1924 I led a demonstration through the streets. A hundred was our full muster.’
    The trouble about the revolutionary left in stable industrial societies is not that its opportunities never come, but that the normal conditions in which it must operate prevent it from developing the movements likely to