Willie Thompson, a longstanding Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) member and activist, has written this book to show the history of the Communist Party, from its formation to its present crisis of identity. The character and methods of the Party are explored in detail, from the Russian Revolution through the "popular front" of the 1930s, the heyday of the war period to Socialism to the crisis of 1956, disintegration, loss of industrial base and near collapse in the 1970s and 1980s. The dual nature of the infant CPGB - as an expression both of the international revolutionary wave and the specific crisis of British state and society - is interpreted as the central contradiction at the heart of the Party's subsequent career.