An Unreasonable Reasoner

[p006] An Unreasonable Reasoner ‘Not only were the leadership unwilling to take part in the discussion, they were also unwilling to see the dis- cussion take place at all, —(‘Statement by the Editors’, The Reasoner, no. 3, p. 41, November 1956.) S with most previous communist oppositions, two A main tendencies rapidly became apparent among those who broke from the British Communist Party in 1956-57. Some, wishing to remain communists, em- barked on a study of earlier Marxist criticisms of Stalin- _ ist theory and practice, continued and intensified their activity as industrial militants, joined the Labour Party with the aim of strengthening the Left and fighting for a socialist policy and programme, and, in the course of their study and activity, derived benefit from discus- sions and joint work with Trotskyists. Others, retaining from their Stalinist conditioning only the firm beliefs that Trotsky wrote nothing worth reading and that Trotskyists are, if not quite ‘fascist agents’, at any rate ‘undesirable elements’, turned their backs on revo- lutionary theory, especially its application to the history of the USSR and the world communist movement. By and large the.organ of the first trend has been LABOUR REVIEW (most of whose contributors and supporters are in fact recent ex-members of the Communist Party), and the spokesman of the second trend has been E. P. Thompson, co-editor of the New Reasoner. the slightest desire to widen the gap between these two trends; on the contrary we have desired, and still do desire, the utmost co-operation on matters of Or the part of LABouR REVIEW there has never been 34 common concern, while naturally reserving the right to criticize certain views expressed in the New Reasoner and elsewhere, more especially on matters of theory and principle, in an atmosphere of comradely discussion. We had hoped that such friendly discussion and polemic might be fruitful for all of us, helping to clarify in all our minds the way forward for British Marxists. Un- fortunately Comrade Thompson has made it only too clear that he does not want such a discussion; that he will not even accept for publication a reply to Harry Hanson (it will be published in the next issue of LABOUR REVIEW); that he prefers to make a series of hostile comments remarkable only for the distorted picture they give of Trotskyist policy. We profoundly regret that not even an elementary measure of comradely co- operation and discussion has been possible. But the goodwill is lacking. It is not lacking on our side, and we feel it is time our readers were given the facts. N the latest issue of the New Reasoner, we read: ‘The Right has speculated upon revolt or collapse behind the “Iron Curtain”. The Left has awaited the classical slump which would awaken old-style revolutionary res- ponses among the Western working class. The Trotsky- ists have hoped for a coincidence of both. All views have led to a common conclusion: the British people must wait for something to happen, somewhere else, for some other nation to move first.) It would be difficult to construct a paragraph more at variance both with Trotskyist views and policies and with recent practical confirmation of the validity of their analyses and their forecasts. As Marxists, the Trotskyists ‘hope’ for noth- ‘Beyond the Bomb’, New Reasoner, vol. i, no. 4, p. 1, Spring 1958.

[p007] AN UNREASONABLE REASONER ing; they make predictions based on a scientific analysis of social forces, and suggest appropriate action for the working class and its organizations to take. Events since 1956 in the countries ruled by Stalinism have shown that working-class struggle is the key to the achievement of socialist democracy there; Malcolm MacEwen, in this same issue of the New Reason?r, puts a much more realistic point of view than his colleagues on the editorial board when he forecasts for the Soviet Union an intense internal struggle to overcome the resistance of the ruling bureaucracy in party and State . . . There are forces at work in socialist society .. . that are stronger than Khrushchev, and will carry the movement for democracy further than he wants to go.2 With every word of this LABOUR REVIEW is in agreement. GAIN, the slump which was announced by the American authorities, no doubt at the same time as this issue of the New Reasoner was being printed, may not be ‘classical’ enough for Comrade Thompson, but the 5,200,000 unemployed in the USA are proof that Marxist economics have not quite been superseded yet. Moreover it is quite misleading and ludicrous to accuse British Trotskyists, either now or in the past, of advocat- ing passivity, of advising the British workers ‘to wait for some other nation to move first’. Has Comrade Thompson never heard of the demand that British Labour take a lead in an international working-class campaign against the H-bomb? Has he not heard of the current campaign for the British workers to set an example to the workers of other countries by ‘blacking’ work on missile sites and on nuclear weapons? Has he not heard of the struggle for trade union democracy on the docks, of the fight against redundancy in the Mid- lands motor industry, of the struggles around Socialist Outlook till it was banned by Transport House? UT the really unwarrantable gibe in the above- quoted paragraph is its separation of the Trotskyists from the Left. It is high time that Comrade Thompson got a few things straight, and one of them is this: only those who learned in the Stalinist school to hate, vilify, persecute, beat and frame up Trotsky- ists? could or would contest the right of the latter to be counted among the Left. Comrade Thompson seems to have cast away all the luggage he was equipped with in the Communist Party except—one soiled old suitcase labelled ‘anti-Trotskyism’. He retains his 2Malcolm MacEwen, “The Two Camps’, ibid. p. 15. Cf. Mac- Ewen’s earlier statement (‘The Soviet Changes’, ibid. no. 2, p. 108, Autumn 1957): ‘The further development of the Soviet Union in the direction of freedom and democracy is inevitable, although it will take place by a process of struggle.’ 3See, e.g., the pamphlet by William Wainwright (now assist- ant general secretary of the Communist Party), Clear Out Hitler’s Agents (1942), wherein workers are advised: “They hide their black aims with “red” talk ... They are called Trotskyists . . . They are a greater menace than enemy paratroops . . . You must train yourself to round up these -. . Cunning enemies . . . They should be treated as you would treat a Nazi.’ spleen against the Trotskyists, who were contesting Stalinist lies, slanders and betrayals of socialist prin- ciples at a time when one had to swim against the tide to do so, when anti-Stalinism was not the fashionable pastime it is on the Left today, when physical courage and moral steadfastness were needed to stay the course, when Comrade Thompson himself was .. . a Stalinist. PLEEN? Yes, it is a harsh word. But we have been exceedingly patient in the face of quite un- deserved and unprincipled sneers, which no one who really believed that ‘we have a great deal to learn from the analyses of Trotsky’4 and who had set himself to learn from them, could possibly utter. In the first sentence on the first page of the first issue of the New Reasoner came a remark about ‘the State orthodoxy of “Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism” ...and.. . its stunted opposite, dogmatic Trotskyism’.° We were told that the approach to Stalinism ‘which sees it not as an ideology so much as a hypocrisy . . . is the general view of most Trotskyists’ and that Trotskyism therefore ‘fails to present a serious theoretical confrontation [what a frivolous book that Revolution Betrayed is!], and instead . . . descends to personalities or to abuse of “the personality”.’ Caricature was piled on caricature: There might be some danger ... of the Trotskyist ideology taking root and, if victorious, leading on to similar distortions and confusions. Trotskyism is .. . at root an ‘anti-Stalinism’ .. . arising from the same context as Stalinism, opposing the Stalinist bureaucracy but carrying over into opposition the same false conceptual framework and attitudes—the same economic behaviour- ism [read ‘historical materialism’], cult of the élite [read ‘belief in the need for a revolutionary party’], moral nihilism [Their Morals and Ours, for instance?]. Hence the same desperate expectation of economic crisis [5,200,000 unemployed!], denunciation of movements . . . which find expression in constitutional [read ‘class- collaborationist’] forms, attacks upon the world-wide movement for co-existence [read ‘co-existence between exploiters and exploited, between slave-holders and slaves’] .. .7 OMRADE THOMPSON, it is your magazine. You have the right to write in it as you please. No one asks that decency, that respect for the blood of countless Trotskyist victims of Stalin’s GPU terror, should restrain your facile comparisons, your putting an equals sign between Stalinism, with its theoretical decay and terrible crimes against the work- ing class, and Trotskyism, with its record of resistance to these crimes and championship of Marxist theory. ‘The same . . . false attitudes.’ ‘The same .. . moral nihilism.’ You equate the murderer and his victim. You put the torturer and the tortured on the same moral level. You refuse to let even one Trotskyist put his case in your columns. It was out of moral revulsion that you left the Communist Party. If these are your own moral principles, so be it. You who once chafed at censorship, you who launched the New Reasoner as a 4E. P. Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism. An Epistle to the Philistines’, New Reasoner, vol. i, no. 1; p. 108, Summer 1957. ‘Ibid. p. 2. 6Ibid. p. 107. MIbid. pp. 139-40. 35

[p008] LABOUR REVIEW means of securing free discussion for your point of view—you will discuss with anyone, even with King Street. But you send back a Trotskyist’s typescript, though his in fact was the only piece offered to you for the discussion section of your fourth number. Pre- Khrushchev anti-Stalinists are too ‘dogmatic’, too fond of raising questions of principle, to be permitted to rub shoulders with William Blake, Harry Hanson and Konni Zilliacus .. . As unwilling as King Street even to acknowledge the existence of LaBour REVIEW, you omit our journal from your list of magazines which welcomed the birth of the New Reasoner. (In fact we told our readers how interesting the contents looked like being, and encouraged sales by giving them your address.) You promise a reply to unnamed critics of your ‘Socialist Humanism’ article; a fundamental criticism of your views on Marxist philosophy appeared in Lapour REviEW so long ago as last September.® Two issues of the New Reasoner have come out since then, and the challenge has not yet been taken up. We are sure that you do not accept our criticisms; is your silence due to the fact that it was in LABoUR REVIEW that they appeared? ; Y all means let us accord Comrade Thompson B the right not to discuss with Trotskyists, just as King Street did not want to discuss with Comrade Thompson. But perhaps he has room for a small cor- rection of a factual mis-statement by Joseph Clark about the U.S. Socialist Workers’ Party? Not a bit of it. According to Clark this party expounds ‘dogmatic -sectarianism’.° It was suggested to Thompson that an- ‘other view of this party (and of the American Left) might in all fairness be obtained from one of its mem- -bers, Joseph Hansen, who after all was battling against Stalinism when Clark was still in political diapers, and who ought to be given a chance to set the record ‘straight. Sweetly reasonable was Thompson’s reply: the American Left was not really big enough or im- ‘portant enough to warrant another article; the New 8Peter Fryer, ‘Lenin as Philosopher’, Labour Review, vol. ii, no. 5, pp. 136-47, Sept.-Oct. 1957. 9Joseph Clark, ‘A Letter from America’, New Reasoner, vol. i, no. 3, p. 88, Winter 1957-58. 36 March-April 1958 Reasoner was moving round the world in its foreign coverage. Now comes the Spring 1958 issue with a quotation from a letter of John Gates (*. . . splinters on the Left ...’) and the announcement: ‘Ties with America are being maintained. Joseph Starobin is booked to write in our next number. (Starobin’s views are known to be essentially similar to Clark’s.) In place of discussion, abuse and distortion. In place of the common courtesies of the revolutionary Press, silence. reasons. First, LABOUR REVIEW itself has never been afraid (and never will be afraid) to open its columns to root-and-branch criticisms of its own stand- point—a 4,500-word article by R. W. Davies was en- titled ‘The Inadequacies of Russian Trotskyism’!!—- since it believes that such free and frank exchanges can only help the Left and, in particular, educate young people and foster respect for ideas, for theory, for socialist principles. (We gladly offer Comrade Thomp- son the space for a 5,000-word reply to this present article.) Secondly, the New Reasoner claims to speak for ‘the revolutionary Left in Britain’;!? this claim is nugatory if an increasingly important section of com- munist opinion is denied even the briefest of contri- butions to its columns. Thirdly, several contributors to the New Reasoner have mentioned the existence of a Marxist analysis of Soviet history;!3 if the editors have any regard at all for Marxism and its enrichment they should permit, we do not say a full-length exegesis of this analysis, but at least the participation in the discussion of those who accept it as valid. Lastly, in our view the time has come to challenge those who under the guise of opposing “Trotskyism’ are in reality opposing Marxism, to ask them to grapple with that which they oppose from the standpoint of political and ideological principle, and so educate their readers, instead of setting up and knocking down cheap and sleazy Aunt Sallies for their amusement. W. have spoken plainly. We have done so for four 10‘Letter to Our Readers’, ibid. no. 4, p. 138. \lLabour Review, vol. ii, no. 4, pp. 111-15, July-Aug. 1957. 12°Can We Have a Neutral Britain?’, New Reasoner, no. 4, p. 3. 13See, e.g., John St John, ‘Response to Harry Hanson’, ibid. no. 3, p. 104: ‘Deutscher and Trotsky .. . have presented Marxist analyses which do the very opposite to excusing what has happened [in the USSRY’.