Hammersmith and After

[p007] HAMMERSMITH AND AFTER THESE LINES are written under the immediate impact of the 25th (Special) Congress of the Communist Party. Some of the conclusions here set forth are tentative, and will require further discussion and elaboration in the light of the developments of the next few months. Hammersmith brought to an end the first stage in the struggle within the party which began with the Krushchev revelations. That first stage itself fell into three phases. From the 24th Congress, held at Easter 1956, to the Executive Committee statement of July 15 was the initial phase: a period of growing dissatisfac- tion, during which John Gollan replaced Harry Pollitt as general secretary, Togliatti’s suggestion about the degeneration of Soviet society was flirted with and commissions were set up to discuss inner-party demo- cracy and a new draft of The British Road to Socialism. The ‘hard’ statement of July 15, following a visit to Moscow by Pollitt, Gollan and Bert Ramelson, fully endorsed the CPSU decision to halt de-Stalinization. There opened the second phase, during which the lead- ership strove to turn the members’ attention to ‘positive’ topics of discussion, while the discontent, heightened by Poznan, continued to simmer and found its most articulate expression in the publication of The Reasoner. The third phase opened with the Hungarian revolution of October 23-November 4. Another 5,000 members joined the 2,000 who had already resigned. Despite some wavering inside the Political Committee on the first Russian intervention the decision was taken to steamroller through the line of uncritical support of Soviet policy, while agreeing to the holding of the special national congress for which a large section of the membership was clamouring. The leadership had four months to prepare for the congress. With over half the critics out of the party it was comparatively easy to stage a congress where the opposition could be isolated and shown as incapable of presenting itself as an alternative leadership. Nationally and at district and area level, despite the workers’ growing mass strug- gle, party functionaries devoted their main efforts to securing the election of delegates who could be trusted to back up the Stalinists. The congress was thus rigged, and its decisions pre-determined. 7 I A congress of re-Stalinization The first outstanding feature of the 25th Congress was that no concessions of any description were made, either political or organizational. In its policy declara- tions the congress endorsed down to the last comma the current Kremlin line of re-Stalinization, denouncing ‘national communism’ as ‘the denial of working-class internationalism’, reaffirming the leading rdéle of the CPSU, praising incontinently Stalin’s ‘great services’, attributing his ‘mistakes’ to his personal defects of character (Gollan) and repudiating the use of the word ‘Stalinism’. The panel of 42 recommended for election to the new Executive, and later endorsed with minor changes, threw not a single sop to the critics. Not even the middle-of-the-road critics, such as Jack Gaster and the group around him (Maurice Cornforth, Margot Heinemann, Chimen Abramsky) were granted a seat on the E.C. The solitary consistent critic, Brian Behan, was unceremoniously thrown off. The new. E.C., like the old, consists of the Old Guard of bureaucrats, plus an assortment of regional functionaries, plus: several workers chosen for their docility and thrown in for shop window purposes. The dismissal of Emile Burns for age reasons, and of Phil Piratin for refusing to continue as Daily Worker circulation manager while circulation was falling, can hardly be construed as concessions to the opposition. Not content with arranging a congress where 44 delegates were full-time party workers and at least as many again dependent on the party and its ancillary organizations for their: bread and butter, a congress where 257 out of 547 delegates had been in the party sixteen years or more, King Street made doubly sure of its victory by packing the committees which sat permanently during the proceedings and in which the real business of congress was transacted. The endorsement of these committees by the congress itself when it began its work was a mere ‘formality; in fact they had already met the previous weekend. The main responsibility for steering the pro- ceedings fell on the Congress Arrangements Committee, run by William Lauchlan, the national organizer. it was this which chose the speakers—87 out of the 257

[p008] who applied to speak—and which made sure that the balance was heavily on the side of Stalinist orthodoxy. Other committees, dominated by James Klugmann, R. Palme Dutt and Burns, selected the amendments for discussion. Out of 2,246 amendments (plus many - more that. were.<lost’, or.that .cauld.not be printed for ‘technical’ reasons!) scarcely twenty were discussed. Bertha Sokoloff charged those who made the selection of the amendments to the report of the commission on inner-party democracy with deliberately selecting amendments of an ‘extreme’ nature, on which the op- position vote would be least. The treatment of branch resolutions, too, was curious. Only one was discussed, out of 58 submitted; many of the others dealt with such embarrassing subjects as independence from Russian control, the treatment of Lukacs and Harich, the exe- cution of a twenty-year-old girl in Hungary and the distortion and suppression of unpleasant facts by the Daily Worker. The solitary branch resolution discussed called on the USSR ‘to show moral leadership to the world by announcing the cessation of all future H-bomb tests’. This was defeated on a show of hands, but about eighty delegates appeared to support it. Pollitt as chairman, however, refused to have a count taken, saying this was ‘not necessary’. Last but not least, the congress was refused the right to change the rules of the party. Even this organizational gerrymandering and stage-managing did not exhaust the rich inventiveness displayed by the Stalinists. They impudently came forward with brand-new ‘theoretical’ and ‘ideological’ justification for their root-and-branch condemnation of the critics. Hence the words ‘revisionism’ and ‘liquida- tionism’, ‘revisionist’ and ‘liquidationist’, never before heard at a British party congress, which ran like a gurgling drain through the speeches of the faithful. ‘The reports of George Matthews on The British Road to Socialism and of John Mahon on inner-party demo- cracy, as well as Gollan’s political report, were worthy of a party. whose ignorance of its own past history is only surpassed .by..its, abject theoretical poverty. These contributions to latter-day Stalinist ‘theory’ were piti- fully threadbare, yet speakers seized on them gratefully to fill the hole in their minds left by the withdrawal of the History of the CPSU(B), Short Course. Since The British Road to Socialism, in its first, second and third versions alike, is a model of the revisionism condemned by Lenin, and since the King Street bureaucrats have succeeded in liquidating a fifth of their membership in the course of a year, the choice of these particular labels could, to say the least, have been happier. Clearly, the leadership’s principal aim at the congress was to show its machine in full working order again, thus restoring the confidence of its own sup- porters, rallying those important layers of members which have not yet drawn general conclusions from their own specific and often hesitant disagreements, isolating as far as possible the opposition and provok- ing critics to walk out.2_ In the main the leadership succeeded in thus consolidating itself, for the time be- ing, on a narrower basis. But it was not able to prevent explosions. And it was not able to resolve the crisis. II The opposition The second outstanding feature of the 25th Con- gress was the emergence, for the first time at any Communist Party congress since 1932 (and then the oppositionists were expelled before the actual congress took place) of a genuine Marxist opposition. It would of course be idle to exaggerate the strength and in- fluence of this opposition. It had no effect on the pub- lished decisions of the congress; but it did have some effect on such delegates as had gone prepared to listen to arguments before casting their votes. One of the greatest obstacles the opposition had to meet was an unmistakable atmosphere of intimidation which inhi- bited not only the free exchange of views but also the free casting of votes. One has only to compare the open votes with the secret votes to see the attractive power of the ideas for which the opposition was campaign- ing, and of the personalities with whom those ideas had become associated in the minds of uncommitted delegates. - There voted for the minority report on inner-party democracy 23; for the reinstatement of Peter Fryer 31; for the rejection of the official line on Hungary about 50; for the condemnation of the second Russian inter- vention about the same; for the appeal to the Soviet government to stop hydrogen bomb tests about 80. All these were by show of hands. But there voted for Hyman Levy as candidate for the Appeals Committee 100, and for Brian Behan as candidate for the E.C. 188. According to the Election Preparations Commit- tee’s report to the closed session there had been objec- tions to practically every one of the leading Stalinists. Syd Abbott, Campbell, Mick Bennett, Dutt, William Gallacher, Gollan and Arnold Kettle were objected to ‘for political reasons’. Bennett was objected to by Phil Piratin for ‘telling members of the Daily Worker staff too much’, Bennett was objected to by Syd French, Surrey district secretary, for his ‘attitude to Surrey’, whatever that might mean. Kettle and Matthews, putative heir to the editorship of the Daily Worker, were objected to ‘for handling the intellectuals wrong- ly’. Klugmann was objected to for his attitude to Yugoslavia, and for the state of party education, for which he is responsible. John Moss, secretary of the Young Communist League, was objected to for his attitude to conscription. Peter Kerrigan and Pollitt were objected to for the situation that had developed in a ‘mass organization’—i.e. in a trade union under Communist control whose affairs are supposed to have become complicated. Forty members of the recom- mended list received between 410 and 493 votes (it is significant that Mahon got only 410, Matthews 415 and Klugmann 423—a clear sign of plumping). The other two were Pascoe, Behan’s’ successor, who received 380, and Bennett, whose journalistic skill as Daily Worker assistant editor earned him a contemptuous 274. That Behan was runner-up; that a swing of only ————_,_-—xwoewewaowssa 1A ‘theoretical’ contribution of some interest, however. was J. R. Campbell’s somewhat impish assertion that he had just been reading the discussion on the national question in Vols. V and VI of the Works of J. V. Stalin. Was this intended to convey that Campbell regards Stalin’s chauvinistic treat- ment of the Georgians, criticized by Lenin, as a model for British Stalinists? 68 2Not merely is the leadership content to lose another 4,000 or more members. At the present stage it does not want the party to grow. How else to explain the absence of any re- cruiting drive? Even Gollan, the party builder, who not long ago said he and his colleagues should be judged by the growth of the party, made only slight and muted references to this one-time leitmotiv of party congresses.

[p009] - 43 from Bennett to Behan would have defeated -the panel: this is the clearest evidence of the disquiet which not even such a rigged congress could conceal. This disquiet found unequivocal expression in the speech made by Levy and in the spirited interruptions by John McLoughlin, the victimized Briggs shop steward, during the speech of Andrew Rothstein. In Levy’s speech, expressing the anguish of an honest man whose illusions were shattered by what he himrself saw and heard in Russia, there came to a focus all the misgivings of the rank and file. Levy was one of the few-speakers who addressed himself to the purpose for which the congress had been called. His questions to the leadership on why they had kept quiet themselves and told others to keep their mouths shut were never answered—unless Lauchlan’s demagogic reference to the rise of fascism (on which ‘Pollitt’s eyes had been fixed’) can be called an answer. But the lasting importance of Levy’s speech lay not so much in its passionate outburst of indignation and revulsion, but in the way it raised the whole question to the level of philosophy. To show, as Levy did, that Stalinism is, epistemologically, idealism of the purest water; that its practitioners, rather than start from facts, from objec- tive reality, proceed from a dream-world of ideas, wishes, preconceptions; that this compels them to con- ceal or twist uncomfortable facts, facts which contra- dict their cosy illusions—this was to challenge Stalinism in the name of Marxism, in the name of dialectical materialism, in the most profound and principled way. Levy understands what Stalinism cannot understand, that the workers need materialism and need the truth if they are to accomplish their historical mission. It followed from what he said that the Communist Party aS it is at present is not a Marxist party, because its leaders are philosophical idealists, and because they tell lies. Nor was this understanding confined to an ‘intel- lectual’. It was grasped, too, and expressed with dra- matic sharpness, by McLoughlin. What essentially was the meaning of McLoughlin’s outburst (“You are the enemy, you lying old swine!’) when Rothstein began bespattering the intellectuals with insults? It was the crossing of Levy’s T’s and the dotting of his I’s, in workshop language. All the instinctive revulsion of the working class towards the bureaucrats who batten on them, delude them and crush them with tanks welled up in this worker’s outburst. It was the clearest possible warning to the platform that the proletarian members of the party, once they see what has been and is being done, will settle accounts with the GPU, the AVO, the aristocracies of functionaries, the lies, the corruption, the rottenness—which Rothstein personifies. McLoughlin’s outburst smashed once and for all the crude attempt, renounced in words by Gollan, but repeated in practice by Reg Birch and Rothstein, to pretend that only the intellectuals are opposed to Stalinism, its crimes and its defenders, to drive a wedge between the intellectuals who revolt against Stalinist betrayal in the international field and the workers who revolt against Stalinist betrayal in the domestic indus- trial field. Levy the intellectual spoke up on behalf of the workers. McLoughlin the worker spoke up on be- half of the intellectuals. Levy defended the workers against the deceptions practised on them by the bureau- crats. McLoughlin defended the intellectuals from the 69 bureaucrats’ smears and slanders. Thus together Levy and McLoughlin did precisely what the Stalinists have been mortally afraid of since the Twentieth Congress: they built a bridge between the revolutionary intellec- tual’s understanding of and revolt against Stalinism and the worker’s understanding and revolt against it. On the strengthening of this brigade depends the awakening and re-education of a whole further layer of members of the Communist Party in the coming months. Ill A faction in power The third outstanding feature of the congress was its exposure, in the very midst of a heated debate on what was called inner-party democracy, of the fundamentally factional nature of the Stalinist domination of the party. Many delegates had been studying—and this study is going to deepen and bear fine fruit—just how the Bolshevik Party operated in the days before its bureaucratic degeneration began. The contrast be- tween this vision of a party where all Marxist tenden- cies could find full and free expression, in open, com- radely debate, could find representation on the leading bodies, could campaign for their points of view, and the sordid reality of bureaucratic centralism that clogged the pores of party life at Hammersmith—this contrast was inescapable. Whatever the shortcomings of the minority report on inner-party democracy, it did provide for a break with the misuse of authority, the — suppression of debate, the denial of members’ rights, the one-way traffic in ideas, which enable the Stalinists to retain their dominating position. The leadership so bitterly opposed the minority report for the very simple reason that the leadership is a faction, whose position would be made untenable the day Leninist practice was introduced into the party. It reserves and exercises rights which it denies to the membership. It meets weekly at a committee, the Poli- tical Committee, which is not even mentioned in the party rules. In the pyramid of party power all author- ity, all rights, all political wisdom, all initiative, are concentrated at the apex. By imposing its authority in this way, by denying to minorities the rights of asso- ciation, publication of views, setting forth of platforms, factional discipline—all the rights it exercises itself— this faction blocks any possibility of minorities becom- ing majorities. It is a faction in power. All talk of fighting it by ‘constitutional’ means is so much day- dreaming; Hammersmith was the final proof of this. If there is any reader who finds this characteriza- tion harsh, let him ponder the following instructive fact: the one and only amendment the E.C. was pre- pared to accept to anything during the whole course of the Congress was one deleting a provision in the majority report that no more than fifty per cent of the E.C. should be full-time party workers. If anyone wishes to claim that the oh, so demo- cratic debate on the future of the British Empire, or the free vote on conscription (with the odd result, incidentally, that the Communist Party is alone in supporting conscription), were the heart and soul of this congress, he is at liberty to do so. But the task of Marxists is to go further than appearances, and the amount of democracy vouchsafed to the floor at Hammersmith could, like the schoolmen’s angels, dance on the point of a needle.

[p010] IV The future of the Communist Party From the foregoing it might appear that we are disappointed with the results of the congress. Certainly the opposition could have been more effective. But we expected no. spectacular. victories. And we are per- suaded that these four days have accelerated the al- ready advancing Marxist re-education of the com- munists who retain their belief in communism and who do not look to social-democracy for shelter. Examining the congress quite soberly, no Marxist could say that the crisis is over. It has merely passed over into a new stage, in which there will be new problems, new tasks for the communist Left, new opportunities for winning clarity, new ways of uniting working-class and intel- lectual members in a single powerful stream of opposi- tion. This, we suggest, is the fourth outstanding feature of the Hammersmith Congress. It is too soon to say how many members will leave. The figure will almost certainly run into thous- ands. We suggest, however, that the convinced Marxist, who has the future of the socialist movement in Britain at heart, should not yield to the feeling of disgust and frustration which this congress is bound to engender. He should not surrender to the leaders his right to fight as a communist against this new betrayal of communism. The task of conscious Marxists inside the Com- munist Party is not an easy one. But if they are to lay A Congress Document the foundations for the breakaway from Stalinism of fresh layers of militants, and at the same time to assist their own Marxist understanding, they should place the responsibility for their own break from the party squarely on the shoulders of the leadership. One thousand, two thousand individuals turning in their cards are a symptom of the disease; five hundred Marx- ists frankly rejecting the decisions of a phoney con- gress and convincing their branches that they should refuse to operate them are the beginning, at least, of a cure. There are times when form is just as important as content, and the shape of the Marxist movement of the future, the speed of its development, the assurance and skill with which it leads, the calibre of its cadres, may well depend to a very large extent on how this inevitable break is made. Labour Review puts forward these considerations with all humility, but believing that so serious a problem demands the attention of a serious Marxist journal. Each day of the Communist Party congress a duplicated paper, Congress Special, was handed to delegates outside the congress hall. Produced by the editors of Labour Review, it discussed the problems facing the congress from a Marxist point of view. The day after Professor Levy spoke, it pro- vided delegates with a verbatim report of his speech, a ser- vice which was widely appreciated. Some 400 delegates accepted Congress Special each morning, and the extra issue published at the close of the congress. There were many favourable comments on these five issues, and on Labour Review’s initiative in producing them. An Undelivered Speech This is the text of the speech which Peter Fryer would have delivered to the 25th National Congress of the Communist Party if he had been allowed to make his appeal against expulsion before the full Congress. THIS CONGRESS will almost certainly confirm my expul- sion. That grieves me. I cannot feel any other emotion at being excluded from a movement I joined fifteen years ago because I wanted to fight for the emancipation of man from every kind of chain that fetters him. I joined the Communist Party because I saw in every man who fights for liberty a brother and a comrade. The African who fights for liberty against the hideous crimes of imperialism, the Hungarian who, though his chains are decked with ‘people’s democratic’ flowers, fights for liberty against bureaucracy and tyranny —these are my brothers and my comrades. Do you ask of me that I should stay silent while one or the other is crushed and broken by his oppressors? Much as it grieves me to be cast out from the party, it would grieve me still more to stay silent about the sufferings and gallant resistance of the Hungarian workers. _. You can cross out my name from the membership list with a stroke of the pen. But you cannot cross out the truth about Hungary with a stroke of the pen. Mark Twain said that a lie goes half-way round the world while truth is tying up its boot-laces. But in the long run truth always overtakes even the biggest lie and smashes it. The truth about Hungary is known perfectly well to many of you who will vote for the rejection of my appeal. In the privacy of his office J. R. Campbell speaks of Kadar as a puppet. I am expelled for blazoning abroad what Campbell knows to be the truth. But he is not the only one. Pollitt has been to Russia fifty times since 1917. Of course he knew about the degeneration of the Soviet State! Of course he knew about the crimes of the 70 bureaucracy, of which Stalin’s crimes were only the most terrible expression. He knew these things and excused them in his heart. Therefore he long ago ceased to be a communist. He and his faction, for a faction is what they are, are no more communists than Rakosi is. Stalin the murderer; Rakosi the pupil; Pollitt the accom- plice and defender: this is the Unholy Trinity of British Stalinism. To be expelled for protesting against imbecile docility and subservience to bureaucrats and murderers; for protesting against an utterly vicious and obscurantist system of mass deception; for fulfilling the elementary duty of a communist journalist—telling the truth: this is a matter of pride to me. The London District Committee, the Appeals Committee, the Executive Committee, have honoured me. How could it be anything but an honour to be expelled for standing unequi- vocally in support of the real communists of Hungary— George Lukacs, Julius Hay, Laszlo Benjamin, Miklos Gemes? Any communist who stands aside and lets these comrades rot in jail is guilty of the vilest betrayal of the most elementary requirements of international solidarity. Officially I was expelled for using the Daily Express as a platform from which to declare my support for these com- tades and to tell the truth about the revolution they helped to prepare and lead. But if I were given the task of sticking up posters in a town to warn the inhabitants about an outbreak of plague, ought I to refrain from sticking my posters on the walls of gambling dens and brothels? Our party had to be told of this plague that was eating at the heart of the Hungarian

[p011] party, even if many comrades refused to believe the truth ‘when they heard it. And how little it becomes this leadership to complain of my using the capitalist Press for this purpose ‘when they themselves welcome to this very Congress a repre- sentative of the... Daily Express, while refusing to issue a Press ticket to Tribune, a Socialist weekly! Not a single delegate to this Congress, if he had seen what I saw at Magyarovar last October 27 — the bodies of eighty men, women and children vilely murdered by a Stalin- ist police force — would have tolerated any gag whatever which the British Stalinists sought to impose on him. STALINIST INHUMANITY Not a single delegate, with the bodies of those victims of Stalinist inhumanity and terror lying there before him, would have failed to vow to wage the most implacable fight against every rotten trace of Stalinism inside the British Communist Party. This crime, and the incomparably greater crime of Nov- ember 4, were committed in the name of resistance to a fascist conspiracy, to protect the Hungarian people from counter- revolution and White Terror. But in a report on the present situation in Hungary The Times wrote on April 15: ‘With so little co-operation from the people, the regime is having to make use of almost anyone, even those with fascist backgrounds, in its administration.’ So the Kadar government, like the Rakosi-Gero regime whose worthy successor it is, must recruit fascists as officials. The new AVH like the old is composed of Horthyite dregs of humanity who would serve any regime that paid them well. On October 23, 1956, the Hungarian workers rose to free themselves from the domination of these thugs and their masters. Had it not been for Russian aggression they would have won, and the workers’ councils — this magnificent re- awakening of the Hungarian soviets of 1919 — would have taken over control of their country’s economy and brought into being socialist democracy. While the fascists are rallying to the support of Kadar there are sinister signs of an approaching show trial of the Hungarian communists who resisted Stalinism. In a speech in the Kremlin Palace on March 27, reported in No. 3599 of Soviet News but not in the Daily Worker, N. A. Bulganin spoke as follows: ‘One must make particular mention of the sinister role which was played by the Imre Nagy-Losonczy group in the staging of the counter-revolution in Hungary. The undeni- able facts make it abundantly clear that long before the October events in 1956, Imre Nagy, masquerading as a Communist, was in fact in the service of the enemies of the Hungarian people. He and his group, while coming out under the false banner of “a new deal in building Social- ism”, were in fact working to weaken the young people’s democratic State and push it off the road to Socialism. But it was not until Imre Nagy took the reins of power that the true face of this group was revealed completely. Everyone remembers. the tragic days of October last year when the Imre Nagy and Losonczy men came out into the open in an attempt to destroy the very foundations of the people’s democratic State.’ Bulganin went on to accuse ‘the Imre Nagy group’ of organizing ‘a reign of murderous terror against the revolu- tionary forces of the Hungarian working class’, described Nagy and Losonczy as ‘traitors’ and compared them with ‘the ring- leaders of the counter-revolution of 1919.’ _ Now these accusations are quite new. This is the first time that Nagy (who was the one communist leader who could have united — indeed had already largely united — the whole Hungarian people around him) and Losonczy (who was jailed for several years by Rakosi and ‘rehabilitated’) have been spoken of as counter-revolutionaries, in language all too re- miniscent of the well-worn phrase invented by Stalin, ‘enemies of the people’. _ . If Nagy and Losonczy were placed on trial while the infamous Rakosi, Farkas and Gero went scot-free this would be a crime no less monstrous than the murder by Stalin of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party and of Rajk, Kostov and Slansky. And should we then be told, after five. ten, twenty 71 years, that Nagy and Losonczy, too, were victims of a ‘viola- tion of socialist legality’, of a ‘mistake’? When, comrades, do we have the right to say that we can no longer and shall no longer countenance these perversions of everything soci- alism has ever stood for? I suggest that we have the right now, and must exercise it. POLITICAL REVOLUTIONS Hungary tore the last veils off the decay and degeneration of the political life of the Socialist States. It was the third in the series (but the first really full-scale, mass example) of ‘political revolutions by the proletariat of these States. These revolutions, forecast by those who in the dark years of Stalinist theoretical decay kept alive the priceless heritage of the Marxist tradition, are in essence attempts to overthrow a bureaucracy which has usurped the rule of the workers. They are not aimed at restoring capitalism, but at preserving and strengthening the socialist economy and allowing it full scope for its development by removing those bureaucratic obstacles which fetter it. The Hungarian revolution was ruthlessly crushed. But it was the harbinger of further political revolutions, which will not be confined to the outer rim of the Stalinist regime, where national oppression is blended with bureaucratic des- potism to make the peoples twice oppressed. One day the Russian workers, too, faithful to the glorious traditions of 1905 and 1917, will settle accounts with the gang of unscrupu- lous vodka diplomats and hucksters, filing clerks and ideo- logical fortune-tellers who have robbed the Russian proletariat of its power. And the guarantee of this act of historical justice in the land that still bears the proud name ‘Soviet’ is twofold: First, the Russian workers have retained (however warped in inessential aspects) the one imperishable, fundamental, epoch-making achievement of the October Revolution: a socialist economy, a social system which has done away with capitalism and capitalist relations of production. Secondly, and no less important, the Hungarian revolu- tion has once again proved the resilience and viability of the soviets as organs of insurrection and of popular self-govern- ment, as the highest expression of the creative initiative of the proletariat. The political revolution in Russia will see the flowering once more of this long-buried but unquenchable form of working-class struggle. There will be soviets again in the Soviet Union. The contradictions between the socialist economy and the rule of the bureaucracy force the latter to twist and turn, to make concessions, to make admissions about the past, to zig- zag between de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization, to adopt grandiose plans and scrap them. But the contradictions re- main, and will be solved by the workers in their own way. Then the flames of freedom lit at Berlin and replenished at Poznan, flames which sprang up afresh in Hungary for twelve unforgettable days, will become a cleansing fire that no secret police, no censorship, no imprisonment, no tortures, no murders, no yellow Stalinist terror, will extinguish or with- stand. When that day comes British Communists will have to ‘decide whether they are on the side of the workers or the bureaucrats. With or without Peter Fryer in the party this problem will face you! If the party continues to be dominated by Stalinists, then it will once again cover itself with dis- honour and will irretrievably lose any chance of winning the respect of the British workers. If it throws off this bankrupt, discredited faction it can yet become a real Communist Party, practising genuine international solidarity. This is my appeal to the Congress: not for my own re- instatement, but for something infinitely more important — the transformation of this Party into the revolutionary Marxist vanguard of the British working class, exercising the right to interpret and apply Marxism for itself, giving to members the right of free and forthright controversy. Such a party, cleansed of the filth and dross and poison of Stalinist theory and practice, its members enriched with an understanding of the real Marxism that Stalinism sought, but failed, to destroy, would take its rightful place at the head of the mass movement, - would flourish and go forward.