Constant Reader Triple Alliance in a CLP

A MEMBER of The Newsletter’s Editorial Board had an interesting experience at the general management committee of his Constituency Labour Party the other evening.

It fell to him to move a resolution on behalf of his ward, with a view to its going forward to the annual conference ‘of the London Labour Party. The resolution ran:

‘That conference condemns the attacks which have been made on coloured people in the London area, and registers its opposition to all forms of racial discrimination and incitement, which can only weaken the Labour movement.

‘Recognizing that it is the responsibility of the movement in the London area to take the lead in preventing further incidents such as those which occurred in Notting Hill, it calls on the LLP, jointly with the London Trades Council, to initiate a campaign of meetings outside factories and employment exchanges, to explain the need for united struggle by all sections of the workers in defence of living standards and trade union organization, and for socialist measures to deal with unemployment and the housing shortage.’

Three in harmony To oppose this resolution there stood forth a quite classical grouping of different kinds of adversaries of the class-struggle approach. —~ There was the witch-hunting Right-winger who openly said he was against the resolution because it was moved by ‘a certain person’.

There was the smart young New Thinker from Oxford who argued that it was ‘old hat’ to presume any relationship between race-conflict and economic and social factors.

And there was the fellow-travelling delegate from the Electrical Trades Union who opposed the resolution because it was .. . badly drafted.

Lenin on the workers’ Press ‘Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology being developed by the masses of the workers themselves in or less, to acquire the knoweldge of their age and advance that knowledge.

‘And in order that working-men may be able to do this more often, every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers generally; the workers must not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of “literature for workers” but should learn to master general literature to an increasing degree.

‘It would be even more true to say “are not confined”, instead of “must not confine themselves”, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia and it is only a few (bad) intellectuals who believe that it is sufficient “for the workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions, and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.’

—Lenin, ‘What Is To Be Done?’, chapter 2B (‘Bowing to Spontaneity’)

The Red Army Dora SCARLETT, whose book ‘Window Onto Hungary’ will be reviewed in The Newsletter next week, had an excellent letter in the Daily Telegraph of January 8, replying to some Russophobes.

She described how she had personally seen or heard of cases of Soviet troops fraternizing with the Hungarian workers during the revolt of October 1956.

For the second intervention the Soviet leaders had to use troops who knew nothing of what the fighting was about.

‘I mention these facts,’ wrote Miss Scarlett, ‘in the interests of truth, not in support of Mr Y. Kinash’s letter, in which he drew the moral that in the event of war between the Soviet Union and the west “vast numbers” of Red Army men would desert.

‘If the Soviet troops felt they were defending their motherland against an aggressor, their feelings would be very different from those with which they faced the people of Budapest.’