R. Palme Dutt | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Palme Dutt, 1943. | |
| 4thGeneral Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain | |
| In office October 1939 – June 1941 | |
| Preceded by | Harry Pollitt |
| Succeeded by | Harry Pollitt |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Rajani Palme Dutt 19 June 1896 Cambridge,Cambridgeshire, England |
| Died | 20 December 1974(1974-12-20) (aged 78) |
| Party | Communist Party of Great Britain |
| Spouse | |
| Parents |
|
| Relatives | Olof Palme (first-cousin, once removed) |
| Education | The Perse School |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Occupation | Editor ofWorkers' Weekly |
Rajani Palme Dutt (Bengali pronunciation:[rɔd͡ʒonipamdɔtːo]; 19 June 1896 – 20 December 1974) was a British political figure, journalist andtheoretician who served as the fourth general secretary of theCommunist Party of Great Britain duringWorld War II from October 1939 to June 1941. His classic bookIndia Today heralded theMarxist approach in Indian historiography.[1]
Rajani Palme Dutt was born in 1896 onMill Road inCambridge, England. His father, Dr. Upendra Dutt, was aBengalisurgeon, his mother Anna Palme wasSwedish.[2][3] Dr. Upendra Dutt belonged to the family ofRomesh Chunder Dutt.[4] Anna Palme was a great aunt of the future Prime Minister of SwedenOlof Palme.[5] Rajani's sister was the statistician Elna Palme Dutt, who went on to become an official of the International Labour Organization in Geneva. He, along with his older brother Clemens Palme Dutt, was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Dutt was educated atthe Perse School, Cambridge andBalliol College, Oxford[6] where he obtained afirst-class degree in Classics, after being suspended for a time because of his activities as aconscientious objector inWorld War I, during which his writing was deemed subversive propaganda.[7]
Dutt married anEstonian,Salme Murrik, the sister ofFinnish writerHella Wuolijoki, in 1922. His wife had come to Great Britain in 1920 as a representative of theCommunist International.[7]
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Dutt made his first connections with the Socialist Movement in England during his school days, before the outbreak of the First World War. He was expelled fromOxford University in October 1917 for organising a socialist meeting. He joined the British Labour Movement as a full time worker in 1919, when he joined theLabour Research Department, a left-wing statistical bureau. Together withHarry Pollitt he was one of the founder members of theCommunist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920. In 1921 he founded a monthly magazine calledLabour Monthly,[4] a publication that he edited until his death, and also visited India.
In 1922, Dutt was named the editor of the party's weekly newspaper, theWorkers' Weekly.[7]
Dutt was on the executive committee of the CPGB from 1923 to 1965 and was the party's chief theorist for many years.[8]
Dutt first visited theSoviet Union in 1923, where he attended deliberations of theExecutive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) relating to the British movement.[7] He was elected an alternate to the ECCI Presidium in 1924.
Following an illness in 1925 which forced him to stand down as editor ofWorkers' Weekly, Dutt spent several years inBelgium andSweden as a representative of the Comintern.[7] He also played an important role for theComintern by supervising theCommunist Party of India for some years.
Palme Dutt was loyal to theSoviet Union and to the Stalinist line. In 1939, when the CPGB General SecretaryHarry Pollitt supported theUnited Kingdom enteringWorld War II, Palme Dutt promotedJoseph Stalin's line and forced Pollitt's temporary resignation. As a result, he became the party's General Secretary until Pollitt was reappointed in 1941, after theGerman invasion of the Soviet Union cause a reversal in the party's attitude on the war.
His bookFascism and Social Revolution presents a scathing criticism and analysis offascism, with a study of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and other countries. He defined fascism as a movement, that historically developed without any guiding theory - a movement that substitutes for its theory "a ragbag of borrowings from every source to cover the realities and practice of modern monopolist capitalism in the period of crisis and of extreme class-war." Dutt fiercely criticizes engaging with fascist "theory" and ideology on its face value and finds causes of fascism in the reality of world economic crisis of 1914 and 1929. According to Dutt, capitalist crisis created a situation, where capitalism could no longer justify itself on rational grounds and the irrationality of fascism was a consciously used tool to direct people into a movement popular in form, but anti-popular in content that serves to destroy the working class revolution and chain the workers to the capitalist state while claiming to be "anticapitalist". In Dutt's analysis, fascism, like liberal democracy or social-democracy is just another form of bourgeois dictatorship, a tool of the bourgeoisie that is used when capitalist crisis is extremely severe and all other methods of gathering working-class support for capitalism have failed. In the book Dutt also directs a lot of attention towards post-war social-democracy, which he blames for betraying the workers' revolution and directly helping the advance of fascism by disorganising the working class from the inside and preventing any militant action: "Fascism operates primarily by coercion alongside of deception; Social Democracy operates primarily by deception, alongside of coercion."[9]
After Stalin's death, Palme Dutt's reaction toNikita Khrushchev'sSecret Speech played down its significance, with Dutt arguing that Stalin's "sun" unsurprisingly contained some "spots".[10] A hardliner in the party, he disagreed with its criticisms of theSoviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and opposed its increasinglyEurocommunist line in the 1970s. He retired from his party positions but remained a member until his death[11] in 1974. According to the historian Geoff Andrews, theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union was still paying the CPGB around £15,000 a year "for pensions" into the 1970s, recipients of which "included Rajani Palme Dutt".[12]
The Labour History Archive and Study Centre at thePeople's History Museum inManchester has Palme Dutt's papers in its collection, spanning from 1908 to 1971.[13]
In 1946 the British Indian Government permitted RPD to visit his father's country for the first time since 1921, this time as a special correspondent for theDaily Worker. The visit lasted four months, during which he spoke at several rallies in different cities of India, all organised by theCommunist Party of India. During this time he also interacted with many of that Party's workers, along with senior leaders includingPC Joshi. During this visit he also met several important leaders of India includingMahatma Gandhi,Jawaharlal Nehru,Vallabhbhai Patel,Mohammad Ali Jinnah andStafford Cripps. He was also invited by newly-builtAll India Radio for a broadcast.[14][15] His visit had such a profound effect upon Indian Communists that when they established the headquarters of their “People’s Publishing House (PPH)” in Jhandewalan, Delhi, between 1956 and 1958[16][17] they named the building the “R. Palme Dutt Bhawan” (Bhawan meaning Building) after RPD.[18] On that building's second floor stairwell hung a portrait of RPD taken during his 1946 visit to India, remaining there until very recently and now possibly hanging in the Party's headquarters at Ajoy Bhawan.[citation needed]
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| Media offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Editor ofWorkers' Weekly 1923–1924 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Editor of theDaily Worker 1936–1938 | Succeeded by |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by | Acting General Secretary of theCommunist Party of Great Britain 1939–1941 | Succeeded by |
