Pat Dooley’s Letters

[p031] Pat Dooley’s Letters The obituary of Pat Dooley in the Daily Worker omitted any reference to his criticisms of Stalinism, which were based on first-hand experience of the Cominform apparatus im eastern Europe. These criticisms were embodied in letters, here printed for the first time, which were duplicated, circulated and passed from hand to hand by Communist Party critics. They are an important part of the history of the 1956-57 Opposition in the British Communist Party. December 12, 1956. DEAR MRS B , It was kind of you to remember me and to write. Forgive the delay in replying. I have been ill—and also I wanted to contact Peter Fryer and Basil Davidson, both of whom were in Budapest, before replying. Yes, on my return from Roumania and from Prague in 1953, I told Pollitt, Campbell and Gollan all that is now publicly being said. (I didn’t see Pollitt on my final return from Prague—I returned after a heart attack in Prague—and with a broken one.) Pollitt didn’t want to know—treated me as a naive boy who we continue to advise our own adherents to persuade serious militants in the Communist Party to get out and join the Labour Party ‘so that its members can strengthen the work of those who are building a Marxist movement in the trade unions and the Labour Party’ we shall do a job worthy of communists. Leave the job of destruction of the Communist Party to the Gollans and Rothsteins. Let their guilt be proven by the thousands of socialists that they have driven out and smeared through their diseased ‘policy’. Against this viewpoint may be the objection that the party still claims over 25,000 mem- bers and can still do a lot of damage. Possibly. But we must examine the nature of the process that has decimated the Communist Party, taken its best thinkers and robbed the Daily Worker of its most talented journalists, Peter Fryer did not leave the Communist Party because he wanted to do so. He was expelled because among other things he attacked the Stalinists over Hungary. It is the job of LABOUR REVIEW to find a Marxist alternative for the Peter Fryers (and the Tony Guthries). Let us keep it that way. In our historical circumstances only one person in a hundred has the psychological make-up to stay in a party in order to dissolve it. Let us think again—in order that more and more members of the Communist Party will be alienated from the Stalinists and ‘strengthen the work of those who are building a Marxist movement’. The alternative, suggested in the editorial, will alienate from us many Communist Party mem- bers already well on the way to supporting LABOUR REVIEW, as it has already done my wife. May I conclude by congratulating LABOUR REVIEW on its high standards and especially for its role in spreading the conception of undogmatic, unfettered Marxism. Event- ually this journal will drive Labour Monthly, together with the rest of the Communist Party periodicals, where they be- long—into the dustbin.