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In December 1920, J. T. Murphy returned to Britain after attending the Second Congress of the Comintern in Russia. While in London, he paid a visit to his ex-girlfriend Ethel Morris, who had been actively involved in the pre-war suffragette campaign as the organiser of the Sheffield branch of the Women's Social and Political Union. In the late spring of 1922, Murphy moved to London with Morris, who was already his wife. This chapter examines Murphy's involvement with the Red International of Labour Unions, his influential role directing the British Communist Party's industrial work, and his relationship with the Labour Party. It also looks at his approach towards the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the Labour Party in 1923–1924 as well as his attitude towards the Trades Union Congress General Council and the ‘left’ union leaders prior to the 1926 General Strike. In addition, it discusses the influence of the Comintern on both Murphy and the Communist Party of Great Britain.

J. T. Murphy's strained relationship with the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from the mid-1920s onwards was evident in a number of contentious issues. For example, Murphy denounced the party's acceptance of the Trades Union Congress's instruction to trades councils to disaffiliate from the Minority Movement. There was also the bitter and protracted dispute to gain the party's acceptance of the need to adopt the Comintern's ‘Third Period’ new line. These tensions worsened in early 1931 over a conflicting assessment of the Labour Party's fortunes, culminating in Murphy's expulsion from the CPGB in May 1932 over a disagreement about credits to the Soviet Union. This chapter examines the factors that contributed to Murphy's expulsion from the CPGB, his subsequent involvement with the Socialist League inside the Labour Party, and his political trajectory towards left reformism.

The wartime shop stewards in Britain were more concerned with industrial tactics than class struggle. Even J. T. Murphy did not, at least during the war years, progress beyond tactical thinking. Murphy's The Workers' Committee and other writings set out the practice of the shop stewards' movement and its theory of rank-and-file organisation. At first, Murphy attempted to clarify the revolutionary attitude towards the trade unions, arguing that the growing level of class struggle and the dynamic changes of the war period meant unions were increasingly becoming a transitory form of labour organisation. This chapter examines Murphy's theoretical contribution to the Shop Stewards' and Workers Committee Movement. It first looks at his pioneering wartime attempt to advance revolutionary tactics on the shopfloor and within the unions before turning to his political development. It also considers his anti-political stance in relation to World War I.

After World War I, J. T. Murphy became full-time chair of the Sheffield Workers' Committee and assistant secretary of the National Administrative Council of the Shop Stewards' and Workers' Committee Movement. He also became active in the Sheffield branch of the Plebs League, which offered study classes among trade unionists and conducted two weekly Labour College lectures on Marxist economics and industrial history. Murphy was also elected an executive committee member of the Socialist Labour Party. This period of 1919–1920 witnessed Murphy's political evolution from syndicalism to communism and his development of a new form of revolutionary socialist politics wherein he combined his own wartime shop steward experiences with the events in Bolshevik Russia. This chapter examines Murphy's political evolution from syndicalism to communism and towards the need for a Bolshevik-type revolutionary party. It also considers his appreciation of the soviet as the chief agency of socialist revolution and his insistence that the working class must conquer state power. Furthermore, it looks at Murphy's wartime analysis of bureaucracy in trade unions.

During J. T. Murphy's stay in Russia as the representative of on the Executive Committee of the Communist International, his relationship with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) leadership, already strained in the wake of the post-General Strike debate, continued to deteriorate. This internal party conflict culminated in the CPGB's adoption of an ultra-left ‘new line’ in which it refused to collaborate with social democrats. This chapter examines the nature of these arguments and their implications for the CPGB's policy, along with the internal struggle for power in Russia and the Comintern and how it shaped Murphy's role in the whole process. In particular, it looks at Murphy's role in pushing the CPGB to accept the Comintern's ultra-left ‘new line’.

After he was expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), J. T. Murphy increasingly distanced himself from the working-class movement in Britain. As a member of the Socialist League's national leadership, he began to encounter a predominantly public school and university educated group of people. Murphy also began to write for, and closely associate with, a number of liberal reformist journals such as Adelphi and New Britain. During the 1930s, the most dominant political issue in Britain was foreign affairs and the approach of war, and Murphy found himself increasingly at odds with the Socialist League regarding the strategies and tactics to be used in the fight against fascism. This chapter explores Murphy's transition from left reformism towards popular frontism during World War II, his embrace of a cross-class alliance, and his eventual abandonment of socialist politics.

John Thomas Murphy was born in 1888 to a poor family in Wincobank, a small village on the outskirts of Sheffield. He received his elementary education at the Wincobank Council School, where he took his studies seriously, but left school at the age of thirteen to work at the Vickers engineering factory in Brightside. Murphy's work as a lathe turner in Vickers would make him one of the British working-class movement's most prominent intellectuals in the twentieth century. This chapter focuses on J. T. Murphy's early years as a militant engineering shop steward in Sheffield during World War I and how he became attracted to militant trade unionism in Britain. It considers the formation of the Independent Labour Party, the rise of the syndicalist movement in Britain, Murphy's attraction towards Tom Mann's syndicalist formula, the nature of the syndicalist politics outlined by James Connolly and his conception of the role of the industrial union in the struggle for socialism, and Murphy's involvement with the shop stewards' movement.

The role of the Comintern in Russia influenced the political development of J. T. Murphy and the Communist Party of Great Britain. In turn, the Comintern's role was dependent on the changing nature of the Russian workers' state in the first few years after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Indeed, the activities of Murphy and the Communist Party inside Britain must be placed within the much broader context of the rise to power of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia. As Russian state interests began to undermine the Comintern's original mission of world revolution, the latter became a mere instrument of Joseph Stalin's foreign policy. This chapter examines the support provided by Murphy and the Communist Party leadership to Stalin in his fight against Leon Trotsky inside the USSR and the Comintern. It considers the reasons for such loyalty and how the rise of Stalinism inside the USSR influenced Murphy's political development.

J. T. Murphy died of a cerebral haemorrhage on May 13, 1965 at the age of seventy-six. In his lifetime, he had been only one of a generation of autodidact Marxists in early twentieth-century Britain. An extraordinary worker-intellectual, Murphy combined an avid theoretical enquiry with a long-standing commitment to the working-class movement. He was a leading figure in the fight against capitalism and his political trajectory, characterised by his transition from syndicalism to communism, from left reformism to popular frontism to anti-Marxism, mirrors some of the strengths and weaknesses of the British revolutionary left. Undoubtedly, Murphy's primary legacy was his formulation of revolutionary strategy and tactics within the trade unions. This chapter discusses some of the main general themes related to Murphy's life and politics.