Rajani Palme Dutt

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

Biography

Early years

Rajani Palme Dutt was born 19 June 1896 on Mill Road in Cambridge, England. His father, Upendra Dutt, was an Indian surgeon, his mother Anna Palme Dutt was Swedish. Anna Palme Dutt was a great aunt of the future Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme.

Dutt was educated at The Perse School, Cambridge and Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained a first class degree in classics after having been suspended for a time due to his status as a conscientious objector in World War I.

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

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.

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

Dutt first visited Soviet Russia in 1923, where he attended deliberations of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) relating to the British movement. 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. 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 communist 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.

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."

A critic of his book notes that "Students of fascism cannot understand the phenomena without reading R. Palme Dutt's classic, Fascism and Social Revolution. Dutt's genius was his ability to apply the basic principles of Marxist political economy to the European economic and political crisis of the late 20s and early and mid-30s, when the book was written. Dutt was prescient enough to understand the crisis of overproduction which propelled the growth of fascism in Europe, including Germany and Italy. He also understood that the resolution of the economic crisis would inevitably lead to war, and that war would not only lead to the destruction of the capital responsible for excess production, but also of "excess" population. When the book was written, in 1936, he noted that the crisis of overproduction was responsible for the destruction of food, but would eventually escalate to the destruction of people. More precisely he noted that "Now they are burning food, soon they (capital) will be burning people. Some argue that this comment was one of the earliest and most precise predictions of the Holocaust."

After Stalin's death, Palme Dutt's reaction to Khrushchev's Secret Speech downplayed its significance, with Dutt arguing that Stalin's "sun" unsurprisingly contained some "spots". 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 in 1974.

External links

• "Fascism and Social Revolution: A Study of the economics and Politics of the Extreme Stages of Capitalism in Decay" (1934)
• R. Palme Dutt Archive Marxists Internet Archive
• [1] Resistance to the Soul : Gandhi and His Critics

Media offices
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