A Letter to a member of the Communist Party

[p010] A Letter to a Member of the Communist Party ..... DEAR FRANK, Your letter, after these six years, was an unexpected pleasure. I say unexpected—yet the truth is that in these last eight months I have received, “unexpected- ly”, over twenty letters from comrades whom I have not been able to see for some years. All of them ask one question—“What do you think about the present crisis through which the Party is passing?” In writing you this letter, I thought first of trying to bring you up to date with the news of what is actually going on inside the Party. The most powerful weapon in the hands of those leaders who have brought the Party to this sorry state, has always been their tight hold on the channels of communication between one branch and another, between one area or district and another. As a result, for years every area has been lab- ouring under the delusion that everywhere the Party is healthy—except in their own area. There flourished the “theory” of “District Exceptionalism.” “Our problems here in Blankshire are altogether different from yours.” T suppose, however, that you are now aware of what is going on inside the Party, the factional groupings that have sprung up here and there—each groping for- ward but lacking any centralised co-ordinating body. I now consider these factions to be healthy signs. So I came to the conclusion that it would be better to write you about some general features of the Party crisis as I see them, to state some of the broader ques- tions which the crisis poses and perhaps to point to those directions where I think the solutions may be found. However it is obvious that every question raised in our inner Party discussions today needs not a letter but a book to encompass an adequate reply. There are,

[p011] I think, two key questions. J. The question of discovering the true history of the Soviet Union and of making a Marxist analysis of the causes of its degeneration. 2. The question of the complete revision of the Party’s programme “The British Road to Socialism”, and of preparing a new programme bascd upon the fundamental principles of Marxist internationalism, that is, upon Revolutionary Socialism. TURN-OVER IN MEMBERSHIP I can, however, well understand your deep anxiety at the present crisis. In our twenty-odd years of member- ship of the Communist Party, we have experienced “crises” before. Remember the huge losses in member- ship we had in 1939 when the E.C. switched the line on the character of the war. These losses increased as the events in Finland unfolded themselves and by 1940 we were, once more, reduced to a tiny,isolated sect. The entry of the Soviet Union into the war in 1941 initiated a period of numerical growth, a growth more rapid than at any time in the Party’s existence. At one point the membership figures topped the 60,000 mark. It is sig- nificant to note that, though the periods of growth and decline of the British Communist Party have partially been correlated with the growth and subsidence of working-class struggles in Britain, they have been much more directly correlated with the twists and turns of Russian foreign policy. This fact, incidentally, explains why, at so many Party meetings over these last 30 years, this sort of opening to the main speech has be- come so hackneyed. “Never have the times been more favourable for the building of our Party—the fault for the slow growth of the Party is in our failure to go out and recruit.” Yet we did recruit members to the party. We explained how workers power and Socialism would bring an end to exploitation, unemployment, poverty, national oppression and war. But we failed to hold these members. The turn-over of members in the Bri- tish Communist Party, as you know, has been enor- mous. If we are to understand the present crisis, it is important to discover the reasons for this turn-over of members. There are some comrades who believe that the Party is going through yet another of those temporary set-backs we have had before—a sort of major “Ame- thyst” incident. They believe that if only the “staunch, loyal comrades” “hold on”, and “stick together until the difficult patch is over”, the Communist Party will once more regain and surpass the influence which it had, say, in 1945. I am certain, however, that the present crisis is different in kind from all previous periods of “strain”. This is not to say that the British Communist Party will just collapse and fold up in a matter of weeks or months—or even that the leadership will try to liqui- date it. I think it may very well go on for years and even enjoy short periods of relative stability. What I mean is that the Party will degenerate even further theoretically and become more and more isolated, poli- tically, unless in the next few months the healthy trends prosper and capture the leadership. The most important thing now is to discover how the best elements of the Party can be brought to Marxism—how to prevent them dropping out of politics altogether, disillusioned, lonely and bitter. Of course, some ex-party members are bound to experience a kind of sadistic satisfaction when they see the pathetic helplessness at the present time of those local party bosses who once seemed so cock- sure and omnipotent and who used to behave like little tin gods in their District Offices, treating ordinary party members like pawns or serfs. In the same way, the ruling’ class and its newspapers are chuckling with glee at the debacle of Stalin’s Communists. But they are also allow- ing their enthusiasm to spill over and have written, in recent weeks, a hundred epitaphs not only to Stalin’s. Communist Party but also to Marxism and revolution- ary socialism in Britain. I believe these epitaphs are, as Mark Twain said about reports of his death, “greatly exaggerated”. Personally, I do not know of a single in- dividual who has resigned from the Communist Party who has declared his opposition to Marxism. On the contrary, both the “opposition” groups inside the party and those who have left it, are convinced that what thev are doing is rescuing Marxism from the hands of a gang of leaders who have betrayed it. It is for these and other reasons that I believe we are entering a period which will see, not the death, but a great revival of Marxism and Socialist thinking. I see the crisis of the Communist Parties of the world as a sign of a rebirth of Marxism —the future looks brighter than ever before. DANGER OF LIQUIDATIONISM On the other hand the “new” Kruschev line of “Peaceful Co-existence” and its counterpart in Britain “The British Road to Socialism” led to the emergence inside the leadership of strong tendencies towards wind. ing-up the party, and to sinking the revolutionary movement inside the Labour Party. This liquidationist tendency was particularly strong amongst the full-time Trade Union officials who were members of the party. The “new twist” of Soviet foreign policy made neces- Sary by, and also exemplified by, the Red Army’s offensive against Hungary makes the continued exist- ence of Communist Parties in Western countries an es- sential part of Soviet foreign policy. That is why I think the Gollans, Campbells and Dutts will hang on to this party for dear life. They are “Stalin processed men” who can only change their disguise but not their aims and methods. This new turn in Soviet foreign policy left high and dry those who stood for the break-up of the party. You have read in the press how, as a result of the Hungarian events, many full-time Trade Union Officials have resigned from the party. It will be interesting to watch the political development of these people. Some of them are no doubt sincere socialists, but others, I think, will show themselves to be merely careerists. You will remember how much energy and money the Party spent carrying out election propaganda to “cap- ture” these official positions and how we tended to esti- mate the strength of the Party by the number of full- time Trade Union officials “we ‘succeeded in getting elected. Alas, this was only one of the many illusions we have had to shed. I think that the defection from the Party of some of these full-time T.U. officials is quite a different thing to the resignations of rank and file mem- bers. THE DEBASEMENT OF MARXISM Let me also say here and now that I am not writing this letter to try to persuade you to leave the Com- munist Party. Far from it. There are reasons why I

[p012] think that you should stay inside the Party and put up a principled, political fight against this leadership. Firstly (and I regard this as the most important reason) in fighting for a new Marxist, Socialist policy inside the ‘Communist Party, you will come up against all those distorted ideas which for so long imprisoned us all and reduced the party to an isolated sect. It is necessary for all of us to learn in the struggle against the legacy of Stalinism which still dominates the British Com- munist Party, the full measure of the ideological de- basement of Marxism which Stalinism represents. There could be no greater error than to believe that Stalinism is just the “cult of the individual” plus a number of “mistakes” and a few “breaches of socialist legality”, and that once the Party has renounced the methods of the frame-up trials and the godlike adula- tion of the leader, Stalinism has been eliminated. In fact the frame-up trials, ‘the mass deportations to Siberia and the sickening “cult of the individual” were only the horrible, but still superficial, features of the deep-rooted practical and theoretical degeneration of the great socialist revolution of 1917. In struggling against the subservience of the leader- ship of the British Communist Party to the Kremlin, we shall all have to shed a good many illusions fos- tered during these 30 years. In other words, staying in- side the Communist Party to fight inside for Marxism will teach us a lot about Marxism and about its dis- tortions. The second reason why I think it best to remain inside the Party concerns those who, on resigning, you would leave behind in the hands of the old leadership. The Communist Party consists of various strata, each with their distinctive features. Each strata reacts to the present crisis in different ways and at different speeds. As things have transpired, those who are remaining inside the Party are, mostly, working-class men and women. Now, I know you would agree that, ultimate- ly, it is especially important to win the worker-mili- tants now inside the Party away from the present party leadership, away from the policy of “accommodation” to capitalism. It is essential to develop them politically into revolutionary socialists, into mass leaders of the working people. But for various reasons, these worker- militants are developing more slowly and rather dif- ferently than are the intellectuals. INSTABILITY OF THE INTELLECTUALS It is not an accident that the intellectuals have re- acted to the present party crisis in the sharpest and speediest and often (let’s face it) wildest fashion. In this, they are only showing the characteristic features of the petit-bourgeois who has come to Marxism, and especially of those who have come via the Communist Party—a certain instability, a tendency to see things in black and white or in terms of static labels, a tendency to reject dialectical for metaphysical methods of think- ing. The intellectual lacks the characteristic steadiness and thoroughness of the working-class militant. He meets each new phase of the crisis with a search for new definitions, with a re-fixing of labels, with a fresh set of formulae. For example, in the first phase of the unmasking of Stalinism, many intellectuals immediate- ly laid the blame on “centralist features: of party or- ganisation” and turned to Rosa Luxembourg for spiri- tual guidance. Then, in the next phase they felt the need for a new label to describe the Russian social system, whose grosser features they had just begun to grasp. “Naturally”, ignoring dialectics, they began to flirt with the theory of “State Capitalism” as an ex- planation of Russian development. The intellectual tends to imagine that armed with “new” definitions, the logic of his case will, of its own momentum, “change the world.” But of course, as Marx shows with all the thoroughness of the profound scientist, life is much too complex to be contained within the confines of any one definition or any one formulae. “Grey is every theory; Green is the living tree of life”. (Goethe) This characterisation of the “natural” reactions of petit-bourgeois intellectuals to the present crisis of Communism should in no way be construed as an attack upon them, or as a denigration of their import- ance to the socialist movement. We must recognise that, on the contrary, it is the Communist Party leaders who have always tried to divide working-class members of the party from the intellectuals and to inculcate a spirit of “anti-intellectualism” in the worker members. The attitude to the intellectuals which filtered down from King Street was: “Welcome, comrade intellectuals, to our ranks—our party must be doing well if such back- ward elements as you are coming to us”. The unfor- tunate truth is that, in spite of the fact that, as Lenin showed, the intellectuals have an important crea- tive role to play in the socialist movement, particularly in helping the working class to become conscious of its real aims in the class struggle, the intellectuals in the Communist Party permitted the empiricists of King Street, first, to argue out of them and later to browbeat out of them the fundamentals of Marxist theory. I suppose you remember the passage in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? where it is shown that it is the special role of the bourgeois intellectuals to bring socialism to the working class from outside. The leaders of the Communist Party have never come to grips with the implications of this remark. If you think about a minute it is obvious why. This failure to see the creative role of the intellectuals has meant that the great gifts which many of our Party intellectuals undoubtedly possess, have been harnessed to doing a good deal of trivial dirty work for Stalin. How many of our cap- able historians were reduced to the sorry role of em- bellishing the lies of the Short History of the CPSU? I am pleased to see that in these days many of these same historians are playing an important part in help- ing to re-assess the recent past. REVOLT OF THE INTELLECTUALS In the present crisis the leadership have found it easy to exploit to their own advantage, antagonism between the intellectuals and workers in the party. It is obviously true that, at least in some respects, the intellectuals have moved further and faster away from Stalinism than the worker-militants of the party. (It should perhaps be noted that there are in the party a number of people who can best be called worker- intellectuals and that these have always tended to move, usually with fewer zig-zags, with the intellectuals.) It was very noticeable that in the first days after the XXth Congress the bulk of the letters to the Daily Worker attempting to draw the lessons of the criticisms made of Stalin were from university lecturers, teachers and

[p013] other members of the learned professions. Today every- where, from Moscow to Oxford, the intellectuals are setting the pace in the drive against bureaucratic “Marxism”. The magazine The Reasoner, published by two university dons, for some time became the main rallying ground for the intellectuals in the Party. A comparison of the first and third issues of this journal also shows how far and how fast they travelled in a few short months. Professor Hyman Levy has been the leader in the movement inside the Party to uncover and denounce the anti-Semitism of the Soviet leaders. Dozens of different round-robins are being circulated among party and ex-party specialists, as, ‘or instance, the letter which appeared in Tribune prepared by the party historians. Witness also the resolution on the need for inner-party factions to be organised, circulated by the educationists and psychologists group. There are of course a number of reasons for this far reaching revolt of the intellectuals and perhaps the most important reason is connected with the tools of their trade. It was quite “natural” for the intellectual when Kruschev dropped his bombshell, to turn to books for the answers. Those people who could find the right books at this stage could not help discovering very quickly the major distortions of Marxism which Stalinism represents. It was inevitable that in the first stages these theoretical criticisms tended to be rather abstract. The contributors to The Reasoner in the first two issues saw the major problem as one of party or- ganisation and even went so far as to say that they had no disagreement with the political line of the party. It was not until some time later than some of them began to see the connection between the revisionism and re- formism of The British Road to Socialism and the bureaucratic despotism of King Street. I know that, for several comrades, the watershed was reached when they read Trotsky’s book The Revolution Betrayed. This book has saved more people for Marxism in these last few months than any other single book. I suppose you have read it? It’s a must. In recent months, this sharp contrast between the speeds of development of the worker-militants and the intellectuals has become acute. I find that one of our greatest difficulties in talking to party workers about the situation in the party is that we have been able to spend so much time reading books that we are choc- a-bloc with so much information about this and that series of events in China, Russia, the Comintern, so agog to communicate this information, and we have so many books to quote from that all we succeed in do- ing is overpowering our friends. I can always tell when this happened for, at best, some faintly sarcastic re- mark is made about our erudition and, at worst, some contemptuous retort is made about “arm-chair social- ists’. One of our most important tasks is to discover ways of eliminating, rather than strengthening, the British workers’ dislike of theorisers. But there is an- other aspect to this problem of worker-intellectual dif- ferences and one which puts the whole matter in an entirely different perspective. WORKERS AND COMMUNISM Workers seldom, if ever, join the Communist Party because they have been convinced by Marxist economics that they are being exploited. Text-books of historical materialism have few proletarian recruits to 10 their credit. Workers usually join the Communist Party because they have become acutely aware of the class struggle “at the point of production”, in the fac- tory and mine. Moreover, through their everyday strug- gles, they can come fairly easily to see the reformist leaders of the Labour Party and the Trade Unions as people who, though ostensibly elected by the workers to lead the class struggle on their behalf, have de- serted to the enemy and who are content to live a life’ of ease and calm as a sort of labour aristocrat. Work- ers who arrive at this stage of insight are ripe for re- cruitment to any party with a reputation for uncom- promising class struggle. The Communist Party has recruited thousands of worker-militants on this basis. The Communist Party has gained a reputation for be- ing different from all other political parties because it never “lets the workers down’, never “sells out” and its leaders are self-sacrificing on the workers’ behalf. The leaders of the party have consistently striven, at every stage, and above all else, to preserve this reputa- tion. The strange quirk of history is that their best allies in keeping up this reputation for them is the capitalist press with their hysterical anti-Communist propaganda and industrial scare-mongering. Now it is not the party intellectuals who are like- ly to be the first to discover that this reputation, which the leadership of the party now rest on, is even more empty than their reputation for being Marxist theore- ticians. On the contrary, it is the worker-militants who are the first to find this out through their day-to-day experiences. I dare say that you, Frank, are more than somewhat surprised that I should make this charge against the Party leaders. You will want to remind me that on many occasions the Communist Party has given its support to strikes when all the other parties have been antagonistic. Of course this is true. A reputation cannot exist for long without some factual basis. In the factories, communists are often the most devoted and self-sacrificing leaders of struggle against the bosses. I would even go so far as to say that when the party has been in one of its left- sectarian phases (phases reflecting chiefly changes in Russian foreign policy) the leadership has sometimes indeed provoked wild-cat and ill-prepared strikes which have weakened rather than strengthened the workers and their organisations. But in their right-opportunist phases, such as the one they are passing through to- day, King Street has often acted in the closest co-opera- tion with the right wing leaders of Transport House, selling out, in exchange for some petty “party” gain, the workers engaged in struggle in the factories. Their attitude to trade union struggle is always seen in the narrow framework of Communist Party politics. I am not objecting to the introduction of political issues in industrial struggles. Far from it. I am objecting to their equation of “politics” with Russian foreign policy. All this has meant, from time to time, terrific upheavals and a great deal of acrimony between the worker-militants in the factories and the party leadership. The most glaring example, in recent years, of the united front of King Street and Transport House was the dockers’ strike of 1954. What eventually emerged into open daylight was that the Communist leaders, in the mood of “peaceful co-existence”, were prepared to force the dockers into the T.&G.W. Union rather than allow them to join the “Blue Union”, in the hope that, in

[p014] exchange, the leaders of the T.&G.W. would relax their witch-hunting rules against Communist Officers. THE B.M.C. SELL-OUT But the most glaring sell-out which the Com- munist Industrial Department assisted in carrying through was the Standard Motors and then the B.M.C. strikes of the engineers against redundancy. Ask any party engineer in the motor manufacturing industry how this betrayal was carried through .. . against the wishes of the union members and against the wishes of the party members in the industry. The up-shot of this was that the engineers returned to work defeated on their slogan of “No sackings” and with a redundancy grant of exactly half of what they had been offered before the strike was called. Do you remember how the Daily Worker called this a “great victory”? In dozens of factory branches of the party, in prac- tically every industrial group, especially in those indus- tries which have a number of full-time Communist trade union officials, there has, over the last ten years, been a growing dissatisfaction with the party’s indus- trial policies. At first, the worker-militant regarded those policies, foisted upon the membership by the In- dustrial Department, as a series of “errors”. Later when they came to see that the leaders ignored all warnings and pressed always their own policies regardless of what was happening in the factories (often pressing them with the crudest of threats), the worker-militants began to express the opinion that, I quote a comrade I met accidentally in the pub the other night, “As soon as a man gets a penny in wages from the Union or the Party, he’s gone over to the bosses’ side”. Strong words. No doubt an exaggeration. But they are words which reveal a growing attitude of our rank and file members. Now I think, Frank, that you can begin to see that this series of bunglings and betrayals of the class struggle in the factories and pits, which are so dis- turbing to large numbers of worker-militants, are really all of a piece with the party leadership’s rejec- tion of revolutionary Marxist politics. Class collabora- tion in the factories is yet another product of the ap- proach to politics that produced the revisionist “par- liamentary” British Road to Socialism, the theory of “peaceful co-existence” (or socialism in only one coun- try), and the reliance upon UNO, “the thieves kitchen”, to defend the world from atomic war. They all derive from King Street’s subservience to the need of the Russian bureaucracy to defend its own special interests. I see that John Gollan in his latest pamphlet “End the Bans” says that the aims of the Communist Party and the Labour Party are identical. Could any- thing be clearer? What Gollan wants is a new united front of revolutionary class struggle, for the establish- ment of workers power and socialism, led by Gaitskell, Tewson, Kerrigan and Gollan. No wonder the party is in a crisis. Now, as you know, the current crisis inside the Party, especially in its early phases in the summer of 1956 was decribed by the leadership as “a storm in a teacup engineered by a group of intellectuals.” Party members in the factories were led to believe that what was hindering the Party’s fight in the factories for jobs and for higher wages were the “antics” of the party in- tellectuals who were “damaging the party” by “kicking up a fuss about their bad consciences resulting from the exposures of Stalin’s methods of rule.” I suppose you have heard in the aggregate in your District the full time officials of the party say something like this —Jl am quoting my own aggregate: “What’s all this fuss about Kruschev’s speech? Party members in the fac- tories will tell you that the workers are not interested in Kruschev or Stalin—they are interested in redun- dancy, the cost of living, and the rises in rents. It’s time we stopped this ‘inexcusable luxury’ (fancy daring to quote Lenin in this demogogic way) of interminable recriminations about the past. It’s time all these carp- ing intellectuals got down to the job of helping to organise the workers and their wives against increased rents, or got back to selling the ‘Daily Worker’ on the knocker, or back to carrying out street propaganda on the line of ‘Out with the Tories’. Then you intellectuals would be doing something really valuable for the Party and the working class. As it is all you are doing is un- dermining the unity of the Party.” How many times since February, 1956, has Harry Pollitt entered the columns of the Daily Worker to say something on this theme. “All right boys, we have had our discussion ——it’s done us good ‘to have a good wrangle’. Now let’s get united again for the job of defeating the Tories.” COMMUNIST PARTY AND SUEZ Unfortunately for Pollitt, after each effort of this sort, life itself has given him his answer. Things were getting back to “normal” in late September when the Polish and the Hungarian events posed, even more sharply than ever before, the future role of the Com- munist Party in Britain. Yes, it’s “one world” alright. The paralysis of the Communist Party during the great days when the Labour Movement stopped in its tracks, British Imperialism’s attack upon Egypt, was in marked contrast to the practical leadership of this struggle shown by the non-Communist Left. Did you notice too how the Daily Worker, as usual, presented the news of this struggle against Eden, as if the people were just following the lead of the Communist Party? This “climbing on the band wagon”, always the Party lead- ership’s favourite device for “proving” its own effective- ness, deceived many Communist Party members. They said, “Anyway, the Party did a good job on Suez.” In point of fact, in the early days of the Suez crisis, whilst the Soviet Union was trying to do a deal with Britain, swopping “internationalization” of the Canal for the liquidation of the Baghdad Past, the Daily Worker sat back and said nothing. The hypocrisy of Party speakers on that fateful week-end when Suez and Hungary were both invaded, of using the vote in UNO as an argument against Britain and France on the Suez issue while ignoring this same UNO’s vote on Hungary, passes comprehension. The workers saw through the hypocracy at once. In point of fact, the Communist Party in Britain hindered the movement against Eden, not helped it. Now I come to the crucial point of my argument. What the leadership has been trying to do in these days, above everything else, is to prevent the linkage, by the party membership as a whole, of the betrayals (“mistakes”) of the Communist leaders of the class struggle in the factories (which the worker-militants know about) with the political and theoretical betray- als of Marxism (“mistakes”) about which the intellec- tuals are complaining.

[p015] The urgent task of revolutionaries in the British Communist Party today is precisely this—to bring to- gether these two streams, the worker-militants and the Marxist intellectuals. Once the workers in the Com- munist Party can be brought to see clearly that the be- trayal of the B.M.C. strike derives directly from the theoretical revisions of Marxism, the theor'es of Stalin- ism, which the Communist leaders still cling to, and which the intellectuals are now rejecting, no power on earth can stop them destroying this decadent leadership once and for all. Once the intellectuals in the party be- gin to see that the fundamental revision of Marxism represented by “Peaceful Co-existence”, “the parlia- mentary road to socialism”, ‘People’s Democracy”, “Socialism in one country” and by those falsifications of history and science which sustained these “theories” leads to the isolation of the worker members in the labour movement and that this, in turn, leads directly to sectarianism (the chronic disease of the British C.P.) and, in the latest stage, to deliberate collaboration with the right-wing sections of the trade union bureaucracy, against the workers, against uncompromising class struggle, once the intellectuals realise this, then their theoretical researches will be a hundred-fold enriched. You see, Frank, as Gomulka said in his famous speech after he had returned to leadership of the Polish Workers’ Party: “After the 20th Congress people began to straighten their backs, silent enslaved minds began to shake off the poison of mendacity. Above all, the working people wanted to know all the truth without embellishments and omissions.” MINDS OUT OF CHAINS The Daily Worker’s technique of the Big Lie on Hungary cuts little ice today. Yes — what Kruschev initiated (and don’t under- estimate the importance of his unwitting contribution to Marxism in making his famous revelations), was nothing less than a mass return to Marxism. Every- where the “enslaved minds” which we ourselves re- presented, began “to shake off the poison of menda- city”. But the after-effects of poison are different in different people. We all reacted in different ways. A large number of different and even divergent trends have appeared inside the ranks of the Communist Party. Yet whilst it-is true that many people, including myself, said (a hundred years ago—last April) that Kruschev’s speech opened up again all those problems which we had long considered to be settled, even Marxism itself, only a few, in rejecting the line of King Street, have defected from the Party to the right —away from Marxism. In point of fact, the events of the last year have been a triumphant vindication of Marxism. Our Marxism but failures caused by our own substitution failures in the past have not been the failures of of empirical, non-dialectical methods for the method of Marxism. You will see that in this letter I have not gone into details about the “mistaken policies” of the Com- munist leadership. I have only suggested that I think a number of incorrect revisionist theoretical proposi- tions have led to the thorough degeneration of the Com- 12 munist Parties of the world, and particularly of the British Party. Each one of these propositions needs full and detailed study by us all. Each needs at least one big book writing on it. These are some of the important questions which, as I see it, need to be given this thorough critical examination. Firstly, it is essential to try to get clear about the historical origins of Stalin- ism. What we have to see is how Stalinism is more than a practical degeneration of a Workers’ State, but also a basic revision of Marxist theory. This means. also that we have to discover the true history of the Soviet Revolution from 1917 up to the present day. Our ignorance of this history, after years of Stalinist falsification, is truly gigantic. Incidentally, it is interest- ing to see that Kruschev wants us to start “rewriting” history only from 1933. Surely it is obviously of much greater importance to get straight the history of those crucial years from 1923 to 1928 during which Stalin consolidated his power. INTERNATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF STALINISM Secondly, I think it important to study the three great proletarian revolutions of fairly recent times which were defeated, and defeated, I believe, primarily be- cause of the influence of Stalinism upon the Com- munist Parties in these countries — Germany, China (1926) and Spain. Here we shall be seeing working it- self out in practice the international implications of Stalin’s revisionist theory of “socialism in one country”’. Y know that you will not be misled as some people have into thinking that this is now a dry and unim- portant question. I think it is the most serious question of all—the central question of our theoretical investi- gations. Thirdly, we need to study all over again the post- war period—the defeat of the French and Italian work- ers who had, in 1945, power within their grasp. We need to achieve a satisfactory definition of the distortions of Socialism represented by the People’s Democracies. We need an analysis of Titoism, of the colonial revolution and of the impact of all these upon the Communist Parties of the world. Fourthly, on the groundwork of our studies on these themes, we need to make an entirely new assess- ment of the tasks for revolutionary socialists in Britain today. For us, in particular, this means making a de- tailed Marxist criticism of the Communist Party’s pro- gramme, The British Road to Socialism as a pre- paration for drawing up a new programme for a re- volutionary party that still remains to be built. You will remember that it was the glaring con- tradiction between this party programme and Leninism which led me into political opposition to the leadership some four years ago. I saw then that The British Road to Socialism is, first and foremost, a re-hash, for Bri- tish consumption, of the works of the leading Polish Stalinist, Hilary Minc, on People’s Democracy (East European brand). The naivete of the compilers of The British Road in basing the programme of a British re- volutionary party exclusively on the “discoveries” about a “new” road to Socialism which allegedly had been made in Poland and elsewhere (in fact, the Communist Parties in these countries were placed in power by the Russian Armies as the Nazis retreated) is, to me, quite past comprehension. The fact that the Communist Party

[p016] accepted this programme without a murmur is a sign of its political backwardness. The central error of the British Road is that it slanders the basic idea of Soviets ——whereas the main contribution of Lenin to Marxism was his demonstration that Soviets (with of course their own specifically national features) had been and always would be necessarily the new organs of prole- tarian state power in any modern revolution. It is be- cause they have no Soviets in Eastern Europe that they have not got workers aemocracy. THE NECESSITY OF SOVIETS In the recent revolution in Hungary, Soviets (Re- volutionary Committees of Students, Soldiers and Workers) inevitably appeared and proved this thesis of Lenin yet again. Soviets are the necessary expression of the participation of the masses in making history. In © this they are fundamentally different from Parliaments. The British Road to Socialism rejects the idea of Soviets and states that a Parliamentary majority will do the job of building socialism better than would Soviets, in Britain at least. If I had time I could also begin to show you how the British Road is national- istic rather than internationalist. This shows itself very clearly in the sections on the British Empire. In fact, in a hundred and one different ways, this programme may be shown to be anti-Marxist, reformist revision- ism. Of course I would be the first to agree that every- one of these criticisms of it that I have made need con- crete substantiation. In order to make these reassessments of revolution- ary socialism in Britain it is absolutely essential for us to be able to conduct a literary debate. We badly needed this new theoretical magazine, Labour Review, which will break away from the sterility which characterized our party theoretical organs these last twenty years. More than that, this debate cannot be confined by any means to Marxists inside the Communist Party. It is a sorry fact that small groups of courageous Marxists in different parts of the world outside the Communist Party have done more to preserve our Marxist heri- tage than any of us inside it. We shall need these same people to help us to reach proper understanding of the tasks of socialism in Britain. As I said at the beginning of this letter, when I began to plan it I thought that I ought to concentrate upon the chaos and confusion that now reigns inside every Communist Party branch and committee. A storm of criticism has spread far and wide and touched every cranny of the British party. At times, the leader- ship has become so confused that as each new catas- trophe hit them, they stood petrified like a rabbit before a snake, unable to commit themselves on any point. They were like frail plants bending all ways to ride the storm. I believe that the present leaders of the party will make concessions without end in an effort to reach a compromise with the membership. They will compro- mise on every point except one. They will resist to the end the demand that they themselves get out, so that the members can freelv elect a new leadership uncom- promised by the shame of the past and able to tackle the task that lies ahead in a flexible, principled way. The development of the various trends inside the Com- munist Party into a coherent body of revolutionary theory will certainly take a number of years. The most important thing that we can do today is to play our part in this rescue of Marxism in order to reinstate it as the guide to the practice of revolutionary leadership. Finally, may I ask you to give your support to this new journal Labour Review, which a group of Marx- ists are getting out. We want you to read it, we certainly want you to write for it. but, most important of all, we want you to take the initiative of setting up in your town an informal Labour Review discussion group. Bert wrote to me yesterday saying that the tragedy of the present crisis in the Communist Party is this—that we in Britain, as in 1926, are moving towards a new revolutionary crisis but we haven’t yet got a Bolshevik party capable of leading the working class to power. There is some truth in what Bert says—but it’s not the whole truth. I think that the crisis in the Com- munist Parties of the world has come just in time—in time for us to achieve that unity and clarity as Marx- ists which will enable us to build “parties of a new type”, Leninist Parties, to lead the working class to power and to socialism. But this means that you, Frank, have an important part to play. All the best, John Daniels