R. Palme Dutt

Rajani Palme Dutt (19 June 1896 – 20 December 1974), generally known as R. Palme Dutt, was a leading journalist and theoretician in the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Rajani Palme Dutt
Rajani Palme Dutt
Born19 June 1896
Cambridge, England
Died20 December 1974 (aged 78)
Political partyCommunist Party of Great Britain

Biography

Early years

Rajani Palme Dutt was born in 1896 on Mill Road in Cambridge, England. His father, Dr. Upendra Dutt, was an Indian surgeon, his mother Anna Palme was Swedish.[1][2] Anna Palme was a great aunt of the future Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme.[3]

Dutt was educated at The Perse School, Cambridge and Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained a first class degree in Classics, after being suspended for a time because of his deemed subversive propaganda as a conscientious objector in World War I.[4]

Dutt married an Estonian, Salme Murrik, the sister of Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki, in 1922. His wife had come to Great Britain in 1920 as a representative of the Communist International.[4]

Political career

Dutt joined the Labour Research Department, a left wing statistical bureau, in 1919. The following year, he joined the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and in 1921 founded a monthly magazine called Labour Monthly, a publication which he edited until his death.

In 1922, Dutt was named the editor of the CPGB's weekly newspaper, the Workers' Weekly.[4]

Dutt was on the Executive Committee of the CPGB from 1923 until 1965 and was the party's chief theorist for many years.[5]

Dutt first visited the Soviet Union in 1923, where he attended deliberations of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) relating to the British movement.[4] He was elected an alternate to the ECCI Presidium in 1924.

Following an illness in 1925 which forced him to stand down as editor of Workers' Weekly, Dutt spent several years in Belgium and Sweden as a representative of the Comintern.[4] He also played an important role for the Comintern by supervising the Communist Party of India for some years.

Palme Dutt was loyal to the Soviet Union and to Leninist ideals. In 1939, when the CPGB General Secretary Harry Pollitt supported the United Kingdom's entry into World War II, it was Palme Dutt who promoted Stalin's line, forcing Pollitt's temporary resignation. As a result, he became the party's General Secretary until Pollitt was reappointed in 1941, after the German invasion of the USSR and consequent reversal of the Communist Party attitude towards World War II.

In his book Fascism and Social Revolution a scathing criticism and analysis of fascism is presented with a study of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and other countries, he called fascism a violent authoritarian, ultra nationalist, and irrational theory. In his own words: "Fascism is antithetical to everything of substance within the liberal tradition."[6]

After Stalin's death, Palme Dutt's reaction to Khrushchev's Secret Speech played down its significance, with Dutt arguing that Stalin's "sun" unsurprisingly contained some "spots".[7] A hardliner within the CPGB, he disagreed with its criticisms of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and opposed the CPGB's increasingly Eurocommunist line in the 1970s, retiring from his party positions, although remaining a member until his death[8] in 1974. According to historian Geoff Andrews, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still paying the CPGB around £15,000 a year "for pensions" into the seventies, recipients of which "included Rajani Palme Dutt".[9]

The Labour History Archive and Study Centre at the People's History Museum in Manchester has the papers of Rajani Palme Dutt in their collection, spanning 1908-1971.[10]

Works

Works:[11] 1920: The Sabotage of Europe

1921: Back to Plotinus, Review of Shaw's Back to Methusela: A Metaphysical Pentateuch

1921: Psycho-Analysing the Bolshevik, Review of Kolnai's Psycho-analysis and Sociology

1922: The End of Gandhi

1923: The British Empire

1923: The Issue in Europe

1926: The Meaning of the General Strike (pamphlet)

1926: Trotsky and His English Critics

1928: Indian Awakening

1931: India

1931: Capitalism or Socialism in Britain? (pamphlet)[12]

1933: Democracy and Fascism (pamphlet)

1933: A Note on the Falsification of Engels’ Preface to “Marx’s ‘Class Struggles in France”

1934: Fascism and Social Revolution

1935: The Question of Fascism and Capitalist Decay

1935: British Policy and Nazi Germany

1935: The British-German Alliance in the Open

1935: For a united Communist Party : an appeal to I.L.P'ers and to all revolutionary workers

1936: In Memory of Shapurji Saklatvala

1936: Anti-Imperialist People's Front in India, written with Ben Bradley

1936: Left Nationalism in India

1938: On the Eve of the Indian National Congress, with Harry Pollitt and Ben Bradley

1938: The Philosophy of a Natural Scientist

1938: The Philosophy of a Natural Scientist, a Rejoinder to Levy

1938: Review of Marx & Engels on the U.S. Civil War

1939: Why this War? (pamphlet)[13]

1940: Twentieth Anniversary of the Communist Party of Great Britain

1940: India Today[14]

1947: Declaration on Palestine, at the Empire Communist Parties Conference, London on 26 February to 3 March 1947

1949: Introductory Report on Election Programme

1953: Stalin and the Future

1953: The crisis of Britain and the British Empire

1963: Problems of Contemporary History

1967: Whither China?[15]

Footnotes
  1. Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Of a Certain Age: Twenty Life Sketches, Penguin Books, pp. 135, 2011
  2. Faruque Ahmed, Bengal Politics in Britain – Logic, Dynamics & Disharmony pp. 57, 2010.
  3. Henrik Berggren, Underbara dagar framför oss. En biografi över Olof Palme, Stockholm: Norstedts, 2010; p.659
  4. Colin Holmes "Rajani Palme Dutt", in A. Thomas Lane (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995; vol. 2, p.284
  5. Francis Beckett Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party, London: John Murray, 1995
  6. Roberts, Edwin A. (1997). The Anglo-Marxists: A Study in Ideology and Culture. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780847683963.
  7. Rajani Palme Dutt - Biography Archived 15 March 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  8. J. Callaghan, Rajani Palme Dutt. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993.
  9. Geoff Andrews, Endgames and New Times, The Final Years of British Communism 1964–1991, Lawrence and Wishart, London 2004, p. 94
  10. Collection Catalogues and Descriptions, Labour History Archive and Study Centre
  11. Dutt, R. Palme. "R. Palme Dutt Archive". www.marxists.org. Retrieved 9 February 2018.
  12. Dutt, Rajani Palme (1931). Capitalism or socialism in Britain?. Communist Party of Great Britain.
  13. Dutt, Rajani Palme (1939). Why this war?. Communist Party of Great Britain.
  14. Dutt, Rajani Palme (1949). India today. People's Publishing House.
  15. Dutt, Rajani Palme; Britain, Communist Party of Great (1967). Whither China?. Communist Party.
gollark: Are trojan reindeer actually any good?
gollark: Mine too.
gollark: My theory on use of walls: I think if you're attacked you automatically fight back, yes? Presumably the walls just distract the automatic fighting mode.
gollark: Pfft, *defenses*.
gollark: Yet another problem with the event: it's cheaper to destroy and rebuild the snow cannons than it is to repair them.
Media offices
Preceded by
New publication
Thomas A. Jackson as editor of The Communist		 Editor of Workers' Weekly
1923–1924		 Succeeded by
J. R. Campbell
Preceded by
Idris Cox		 Editor of the Daily Worker
1936–1938		 Succeeded by
Dave Springhall
Party political offices
Preceded by
Harry Pollitt		 Acting General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain
1939–1941		 Succeeded by
Harry Pollitt
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