Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation
[5][6] 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.
[10] 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.
[19] The APCF also targeted attacks against individual members of the Labour Party,[20] 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.
[26] 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.
[27] 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.
[39] 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.
[40] 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.
[41] 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.
"[46] But they swiftly took on a notably constitutionalist approach towards the nascent civil war by focusing on the nationalists' breaking of "international law" and describing the Popular Front as an "orthodox democratic government".
[57] The APCF took the position that the policy of the united anti-fascist front was one of collaboration with capitalism, publishing an article by MacDonald which stated that "Anti-Fascism is the new slogan by which the working class is being betrayed.
In a subsequent issue released after the nationalist victory in the war, they published an article by the Friends of Durruti Group which concluded that "Democracy defeated the Spanish people, not Fascism.
[65] In the Winter 1940/41 issue of Solidarity, the APCF argued that "the recent Spanish tragedy [in which] the incensed ruling class repudiated even their own bourgeois legality and unleashed the most bloody butchery of the proletariat the world has ever witnessed" had proven their case of parliamentarism being a dead-end.
They criticised the Socialist and Communist Parties for their respective insistence on the need for a "revolutionary parliament" or "workers' government" to replace the Churchill war ministry, declaring that "at the first threat of resistance to their will, they would immediately establish a military dictatorship and by sheer weight of arms smash any attempt at progressive legislation.
[68] A conscientious objector from the WRL, William Dick, defended himself in front of a military tribunal in June 1942 on anarcho-pacifist grounds, declaring his moral opposition to war, the state and violence in general, which granted him an unconditional exemption from conscription.
[71][72] John Taylor Caldwell commented that the closure of the Open Forum marked the end of an era, one in which public speaking began to die out as audiences left the inner cities for the suburbs.
[76] They also argued that parliamentarism was a distraction, in which working class voters were dealt with "the impossible task of discovering honest representatives to play at capitalist legislation, instead of addressing itself to the Socialist education of the masses".
"[78] This view was supported by Ernst Schneider, a seaman and veteran of the German Revolution that had joined the group following his departure from Nazi Germany, who stated in 1944 that "under the smokescreen of freeing Europe from "totalitarianism", this very form of monopoly capitalism is developing everywhere.
[81] Like Pannekoek's conception of a revolutionary organisation, which the APCF sought to emulate, its goal would not be to seek power for itself but to serve as a propaganda organ to "educate, agitate and enthuse; perhaps even to inspire" the working classes to take self-organised direct action.
[82] In their arguments against vanguardism, the APCF stated:[70] Instead of struggling for supremacy, revolutionary parties should aim as far as possible at complete liquidation into the workers' soviets, where they can advance their policies by courage, initiative and example.
We will find, in practice, that the Vanguard interpenetrates and overlaps all existing parties; and that workers, previously of no party at all, are able to contribute in a surprising degree and to over-shadow many who were previously considered as indispensable and of the elite!The APCF took a hardline against sectarianism during World War II, opening up its journal Solidarity as a platform to a variety of left-wing positions and personalities, including anarcho-communists, council communists, De Leonists, Trotskyists, Marxists and members of the ILP.
[87] But as more evidence of state repression accumulated over time, Aldred and the APCF were no longer able to continue ignoring or disputing reports of persecution and finally started to denounce the Bolsheviks.
[88] By November 1925, the APCF had denounced the October Revolution as a "counter-revolution" and finally began to display solidarity with its "comrades rotting in Soviet prisons", taking up the defense of Gavril Myasnikov, whose Workers Group had formed a left-communist opposition to the New Economic Policy.
