Constant Reader Oh, Chancellor!

Church and State

In the February issue of New Hungary, organ of the British-Hungarian Friendship Society, a report of a discussion in the Hungarian National Assembly includes the following:

‘Chancellor Janos Mate, a Catholic priest, spoke appreciatively of improved relations between Church and State.

“The counter-revolutionaries damaged. .and. . destroyed churches, while the revolutionary workers’ and peasants’

government is restoring them”, he said.’

Well, there it is. You may have thought hitherto that the Hungarian rebels were a lot of Catholic Action boys, rarin’ to put Cardinal Mindszenty in power.

But it turns out that more probably they were Spanish-type : anarchists, intent on church-burning.

Whichever way. you slice this stuff, it’s still boloney. -Dr Kettle’s advice ‘The people of Hungary live to fight another day,’ writes Arnold Kettle in the March Marxism Today. But he doesn’t mean what you and I mean; for he goes on to tell us that ‘at a grim. cost the socialist. revolution has been saved’.

In the same article, by the way, he makes a mysterious teference to some recent British ex-Stalinist having made ‘a passage from communism. to open bourgeois. liberalism via Trotskyism’. No name, of course.

Incidentally, I hear that Dr Kettle recently shouted to a friend who was offered a Newsletter leaflet: ‘Don’t read it— it’s Trot stuff!’

One. wonders. if he has. applied this. principle to what some ; : consider a major Marxist: contribution to his own subject— ‘Literature and Revolution’, by L. D. Trotsky. (What -prospects, by the way, of a review in Marxism Today of the recent teprint of that remarkable book?)

Lenin on the Jews Hyman Levy’s study of the Jewish question reminds me of a-once-famous statement. of Lenin’s, made -in a lecture he gave in Switzerland .on.the Russian revolution of 1905: -Bo ae ‘The Jews provided a particularly. high percentage (compared with the total Jewish population) of leaders of the revolutionary movement. In. passing, it should be said to their credit that today the Jews provide a relatively high percentage of representatives of internationalism compared with other nations.’

:

This statement, though included in the useful pamphlet “What Lenin Said about the Jews’, compiled by R. F. Andrews (Andrew Rothstein) and published by the Communist Party in 1936, practically disappeared from circulation in Stalinist literature after 1937. .

It had. become one of those items from what were still called “the immortal writings of great Lenin’ which it was not done to publicize, because they reflécted too sharply upon the practice of would-be-great Stalin.

Worker’s Notebook chaavinism

In the same connexion, I note that Walter Holmes, in his “Worker’s Notebook’ in the Daily Worker of February 28, refers to the economist Paul Einzig as ‘the Transylvanian oracle. of the Financial Times’.

That Einzig is an enemy of the working class is undoubted, but to use his. national -origins against him is tog much like the Mosleyite approach to politics, which would make the most significant thing about the Cohen Council the name of its chairman.

Chauvinism of this sort; previously anathema, began to be injected into the British Communist Party in 1935, and de-veloped rapidly in the years immediately following.

Challenge, the organ of the Young Communist League, used to refer to Franco’s soldiers from Morocco as ‘black troops’ and publish ‘anti-wog* type cartoons about them. :

That Franco was able to use these Moorish regiments at all was, of-course, a result of the Spanish-communists’ refusal to call for recognition of the right of Morocco to. self-determination, ‘in order not to antagonize’ the Spanish (an€ French) bourgeoisie. : :

William Paul’s best-seller’

WittiaM Paul, a. famous communist propagandist of the 1920s, has died. The Daily Worker of March 11 recalled that ‘his book on the State... was a. best-. sellér towards the end of the first: world war’.

It was indeed, and ‘The State, Its Origin and. Function’ makes good: reading even today. Thus: ‘The revolutionary socialist denies that State ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism .. . Industry can only

‘be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees.’ :

: -_ Another famous. work of Paul’s was ‘Communism and Society’, published in 1922. Communist Party branches now discussing ‘The British Road to Socialism’ would. find it stimulating. For example:

La ‘If the communists did get a majority in -the House of Commons they would destroy the political power -of capitalism and hand over all governmental functions to the new industrial. government. that would have its being in the local and national administrative committees’ created and built up by the working class...’ .

Rothstein and Ulbricht

THE recent troubles in Ulbrichtland ‘remind. me of- a curious incident at the ‘brains trust’ held by the’ BritishSoviet Friendship Society’in London’s Conway. Hall, . shortly after the Twentieth. Congress of the Soviet Communist. Party. , :

Pat Sloan, John Platts-Mills. and Andrew Rothstein disgraced. themselves by the frivolity and evasiveness of their replies to questions; the only. member of -the- panel. who seemed to appreciate the seriousness of the occasion was the Rev. Stanley. Evans.

‘One persistent questioner: Rept. demanding to know what-the . - : : ‘brains’ thought of the statement then just. made by Ulbricht that ‘Stalin had done a lot of harm to the Soviet Union’.

At length Rothstein replied: ‘Yes, Ulbricht was reported as saying that, and you, being a Trotskyist, agree with him.’ ’ The Reasoner pamphlet by Joseph Redman on the changes in the British Communist Party in 1929. and how they were made contains. the probable reason why Rothstein was so ‘bitter against Ulbricht. What a whiff from the Stalinist snakepit!

Too : - :

On workers’ councils ..periences of. Hungary, Poland and: Yugoslavia in recent years, would be a useful contribution to the literature of the movement just now. I wonder if anybody is writing one? — Looking through a file of. the Daily Worker recently I noticed a letter in the issue of September 28, 1936, from Pat oan:

; ‘For the purposes of a book which I am writing on “Soviets”, I want all thé material I can get on Soviets outside Russia—dealing with Germany in 1918, the Hungarian and Bavarian Soviet Republics, the occupation of the factories in Italy in the autumn of 1920 and Saxony in 1923, and anything that has been published on Soviets “in Cuba in- 1933-34 and Asturias in 1934.’

This book appears never to have been completed. © Presumably developments in Spain made Sloan realize that ‘to be keen on ‘Soviets’ was ndéw ‘anti-Soviet’—so instead he gave us, in May 1937, his book ‘Soviet Democracy’ in praise of the Stalin. Constitution which — had liquidated the last vestiges of the original Soviet system in Russia!

.— BRIAN PEARCE — Marcu 15, 1958 To. this is now added our opposition to the establishment of bases anywhere in this country and support for the blacking of the bases.

: - The issue. of the bomb and the bases is not a question of . national salvation alone, but a -question of action by the British working-class movement, linked with their comrades all over the --world in the fight against the threat of war. A National. Anti-H-Bomb Week, if it puts forward such a policy, can be a powerful weapon in our fight against the Tories.

London, S.E.27 Vivienne Mendelson