Rajani Palme Dutt

Early life and family

Rajani Palme Dutt was born in 1896 on Mill Road in Cambridge, England. His father, Dr. Upendra Dutt, was a Bengali surgeon, his mother Anna Palme was Swedish. Dr. Upendra Dutt belonged to the family of Romesh Chunder Dutt. Anna Palme was a great aunt of the future Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme. 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 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 activities as a conscientious objector in World War I, during which his writing was deemed subversive propaganda.

On 5 August 1924, Palme Dutt married Salme Pekkala-Dutt, an Estonian-British communist politician, essayist, writer and translator, in Stockholm. Palme Dutt had come to Great Britain in 1920 as a representative of the Communist International. Palme Dutt was the brother-in-law of the Finnish–Estonian writer Hella Wuolijoki and was the great-uncle of the Finnish politician Erkki Tuomioja.

Political career

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 from Oxford 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 the Labour Research Department, a left-wing statistical bureau. Together with Harry Pollitt he was one of the founder members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920. In 1921 he founded a monthly magazine called Labour Monthly, 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, the Workers' Weekly.

Dutt was on the executive committee of the CPGB from 1923 to 1965 and was the party's chief theorist for many years.

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. 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 the Stalinist line. In 1939, when the CPGB General Secretary Harry Pollitt supported the United Kingdom entering World War II, Palme Dutt promoted Joseph 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 the German invasion of the Soviet Union cause a reversal in the party's attitude on the war.

His book Fascism and Social Revolution presents a scathing criticism and analysis of fascism, 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."

India visit

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 the Daily Worker. The visit lasted four months, during which he spoke at several rallies in different cities of India, all organised by the Communist Party of India. During this time he also interacted with many of that Party's workers, along with senior leaders including PC Joshi. During this visit he also met several important leaders of India including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Stafford Cripps. He was also invited by newly-built All India Radio for a broadcast. 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 they named the building the “R. Palme Dutt Bhawan” (Bhawan meaning Building) after RPD. 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.

Works

1920: The Sabotage of Europe

1920: The Two Internationals

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

1925: Empire Socialism (pamphlet)

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)

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