From Lawrence Daly

[p026] Lawrence Daly N ecessary and Salutary PETER FRYER’S article in the last issue of Labour Review was the finest piece of philosophical writing we have seen in the British Marxist Press for many years—and it was long overdue. It is interesting to note how two ex-Communist Party members have moved in opposite directions over the last year. There are important lessons in this. I was an eager reader of the first cyclostyled Reasoner for I was myself in the process of breaking from the Communist Party. Yet, in spite of its impressively courageous stand against the King Street bosses, The Reasoner gave me an uneasy feel- - ing that its editors and contributors were reacting to the crisis of Stalinism by moving, by easy stages, over to Fabianism— which, let us not mince words, means ultimately deserting socialism. This Right-wing tendency was simply, I can see now, an acceleration of the Right-wing revisionist trend which the Communist Party leaders had been encouraging, in response to Moscow’s ‘peaceful coexistence’ line, ever since I joined the party in 1944. Reasoner No 1’s revolt against Communist Party stereotyped phrase-mongering (an excellent thing in itself) seemed, even at that stage, to be leading towards the theory that Marxism- Leninism does not really apply to Britain. British “exceptional- ism’ (like its American cousin) has always been a theory, what- ever its special form, associated with Marxists moving away from revolutionary socialism to Right-wing, parliamentarian - reformism. The best example, strangely enough, is the 1951 version of the Communist Party programme, ‘The British Road to Socialism’. And, as always, political revisionism of Marxism soon becomes associated with the rejection of, or an eclectic modification of, the fundamental principles of dialectical materialism. Subsequent issues of The Reasoner and the two issues of The New Reasoner have confirmed and strengthened my original impression. The same .Left-Fabian, petit-bourgeois ‘Liberalism’ (especially when the question of the Marxist theory of the State came up) which I felt in Reasoner No 1. was worked out more comprehensively in Thompson’s discus- sion article in New Reasoner No 1. In New Reasoner No 2 (incidentally, why did no Left-wing critic of Thompson’s dis- cussion article appear in that issue?) H. Hanson, the impetuous whole-hogger who has, apparently, passed right over from the Communist Party to Fabianism, had Thompson at his mercy when he drew the perfectly logical anti-Marxist con- clusions from Thompson’s confused questionings and ‘novel’ formulations. Peter Fryer’s sharp reminder of where Thompson’s views are eventually leading was a necessary, salutary and most thorough piece of work and was all the more effective because Fryer chose deliberately to challenge Thompson’s views at the funda- mental, philosophical level. Thompson has a good deal of prestige amongst ex-Communist Party comrades which quite properly derives from his early public stand, with John Saville, against the disgusting intellectual Prostitution of the King Street hacks after the publication of Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ speech. But this only enhances the value of Fryer’s contribu- tion. He, of course, had the courage to speak up on Hungary. But he has also spoken up (and this was more difficult) when he felt that friends were in danger of leading the movement astray. When the history of the next few years of socialism be written, the splendid contribution of

[p027] Peter Fryer’s article ‘Lenin as Philosopher’ to the building of a Leninist party in Britain will be much clearer than it can possibly be today. London