The Newsletter, vol. 3 no. 123

RACE violence blasted across north Kensington once again in the early hours of last Monday morning. Latest victim is Dill Simon, a 29-year-old West Indian labourer who was shot and wounded by an unknown white man.

Simon's assailant and his six companions, four men and two women, have still not been found by the police.

Less than 200 yards from Simon's single room in Golborne Road, W.10. is the junction with Southam Street, where last Whit Sunday, coloured carpenter, Kelso Cochrane was stabbed to death by race thugs.

Five months have gone by since that murder. The police have still made no arrests. Scotland Yard still remains non-committal about the disclosure made in the Sunday Pictorial on May 31. Then the Pictorial featured an article by a youth who claimed he had told Chief Superintendent Ian Forbes-Leith, that he had been asked by an anti-coloured political group to assist in the 'roughing up' of Cochrane.

After Cochrane's death, Alonzo Briggs another coloured man was badly beaten up by a white gang.

On Monday evening I met Simon at his home. There, with four of his West Indian friends, he told me: 'I was fired at because I am a coloured man.'

He pulled out a gun

Joseph, a slim-built man from San Domingo, interrupted us: 'Nothing was done about Cochrane. The police let the fascists talk anti-coloured and do nothing about it. So you know what happens? Every thug feels free to insult us, to try and humiliate us and now to shoot us.'

The others nodded their heads in agreement.

Mr Simon said: 'These people asked me did I know where a certain club was. Truthfully I told them no.

'Then one of the men, he was dark-haired, suddenly swore at me, "You dirty bastard" was what he said, grabbed one of the girl's handbags and pulled out a gun.

'We ran away. I had a friend with me, but the man fired and hit my wrist. I saw them get in a taxi and all drive off.'

When I left Dill Simon it was dark. The coloured people still on the streets were obviously anxious to get home.

As I walked along with my companion, a young Jamaican, I caught the odd expression of sullen resentment that flashed across the faces of some of the white youths who were loitering on the street corners.

North Kensington, with its dingy streets, its decaying houses with their high rents and its poorly paid jobs, is a fertile area for the race-haters to peddle their perverted ideologies. In this area the anti-coloured groups assiduously spread their theories in the bars, on the street corners and in the shoddy cafes.

Meanwhile the official Labour movement remains impotent. All the local member of parliament, George Rogers, can offer, is a suggestion to restrict immigration. A suggestion with which every racialist will concur.

If north Kensington is not to become Britain's Deep South, with the Harrow Road forming some Mason-Dixon line, then Labour must act.

White and coloured workers must come together now to form defence organizations which can give coloured people the protection that the police are so clearly unable and unprepared to provide. The Labour movement must be mobilized to support these steps.

By Our Industrial Correspondent REDUNDANCY is a key issue on the Clyde today. Workers in thre establishments are fighting the sack.

Maintenance and overhaul workers at Renfrew Airport are mobilizing support against the decision by Scottish Aviation Ltd to sack 500. For two years they have serviced sabre jets and CF-100s for the Canadian Air Force.

Now, because of public safety reasons the latter are being transferred to neighbouring Prestwick Airport. The sabre jets are to be replaced by faster aircraft over the next two years, and these too will be going to Prestwick.

Despite previous assurances that there would be no redundancy the cuts have been announced. These follow continuous pleas about the need to cut labour costs. A strong trade union organization has, however, maintained conditions on the airport.

Though not challenging public safety measures, the workers are pointing out that work of a suitable character can -bz transferred from Prestwick without endangering jobs there and that other alternative work can be provided.

The management is adamant—S00 workers must go. A. campaign is now in preparation to fight this threat and a link-up with workers throughout the Clyde is proposed.

Link-up needed At Redpath Brown’s, Cambuslang, 590 workers are on strike following the sacking of 92. These men, mainly members of the Constructional Engineering Union, do not accept the * employers’ statement on the need for this redundancy.

Faced with the sacking of 54 moulders and labourers, 230 foundry workers at the Parkhead Forge of William Beardmore & Co., Glasgow, are on strike. Here again the employers have pleaded lack of work, but refused the workers’ suggestion to share available work.

The fight is on. Now the need is to link up factory to factory and to mobilize support on a mass basis. No factory must be allowed to stand alone.

St'’Pancras Town! Hall London N.I

Telephone Macaulay 7029

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1959 remain silent on these struggles, and on the question of bans and proscriptions on the Socialist Labour League will all go the same way home with Gaitskell and Jay.

* ON the surface it might appear that in view of the

considerably to show just who are the socialists and who are the conservatives in the Labour Party.

Mr Douglas Jay, closely associated with Mr Gaitskell, last week blatantly announced the full gospel of the Labour conservatives. In order to win the next election the Labour Party should ‘accept the verdict of the electorate’ and drop the demand for any more nationaliZation.

He goes on to say: ‘It would not damage the basic aim of the movement if we agree to leave steel outside the bounds of compulsory public ownership . . . . it is not worth jettisoning the things for which we really stand—social justice, a fair deal for the old, real equality of opportunity, peace and disarmament—for the sake of a form of ownership in steel.’

This argument is full of distortions designed to mislead Labour supporters. The word ‘compulsory’. is deliberately inserted to give the flavour of dictatorship and control which the Tories try to associate with nationalization.

As for nationalization being just ‘a form of ownership’ as against ‘the things for which we really stand,’ the point is that the Labour Party was designed to bring those things nearer by the only effective method, the abolition of the profit system and the establishment of workers’ control.

Jay is doing the Tories’ work in the Labour movement, and at the same time trying to forestall the growing demand for a straightforward policy of social ownership in industry. This will be the basic demand of the thousands who are going to say in the very near future that the Labour Party must be above all a socialist party. Those who don’t think so should take their rightful place in the House of Commons with the Tories or the Liberals, and in history with MacDonald.

Jay also makes an organizational proposal: national executive could become a federal body with representatives elected to it by the Parliamentary Labour Party. This would prevent any apparent clash between the parliamentary party and the executive and make full parliamentary freedom plainer to the public.” (The Times, October 17).

Here again he tries to forestall the demand of the Left that the leaders of the party should be democratically elected, and that the parliamentary group must take on its original job, to serve the working class. Gaitskell and company want it the other way round, with the working people voting every five years to give power to the clique of careerists at the top.

The role of the working class is the crux of the matter. Jay says: ‘We are in danger of fighting under the label of a class which no longer exists.” On this question the left must stand firm, for many who parade as left-wingers basically agree with Jay on this point.

The test of every left-wing speaker must be his attitude to the industrial struggles which are going on every day in the mines, the factories and the docks. Those who

This is nothing more than a declaration of war against the

"THERE is no doubt that the election result will help bankruptcy of the Labour leadership, many militant workers might turn to the Communist Party as a ‘left’ alternative. However, because of their pathetic inability to break free from the dictates of Soviet diplomacy, they are in no position to offer a left lead.

Pravda remarked that the election victory of the Tories was an expression of the peaceful aspirations of the British people. If this were true, it would say little for the communist-inspired ‘fight for peace’, if it leaves its followers with the belief that peace can be brought nearer by electing a government of employers and imperialists! .

In case the excuse is that Pravda was just being diplomatic, let’s look at the verdict of Communist Party spokesmen in other countries.

The Observer for October 11 reported as follows:

‘The Peking Daily, the official Chinese Communist organ, noted today that the election results reflected the desire of the British people to end the cold war.

‘The paper’s London correspondent, although referring to the part played by the last Conservative government in the Suez crisis and the recent troubles in Central Africa as “shameful acts”, nevertheless praised Mr Macmillan for his positive policy in working successfully for the holding of a summit conference.’

In Japan both the prime minister and the reformist Social Democratic leaders made the same comment as the ‘Communists’ of Peking.

Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party, was soon to echo the call from the east. We quote from The Times of October 16:

‘Signor Togliatti (in the Parliamentary Chamber) did his able best to present a moderate, reasoned and almost pitying criticism of the government, drawing on the British general election among other examples of the growing awareness which he detected in many capitalist countries of the need for improving relations with the Soviet Union. Was it not the British Labour Party, after being so rude to Mr Khrushchev, which suffered defeat?’

.

The British CP is in the same trap. The September Labour Monthly, a CP journal, carried as its main feature an article by Robert Willis on the importance of summit talks. His willingness to fall in line with the current Soviet policy was sufficient to excuse his sellout of the printworkers’ strike only a few weeks before.

That is the real meaning of the ‘summit’ policy of the Communist Party. Deals at the top, and deals at the bottom too, and always against the working class.

This is a repeat of 1926 when the CP gave support to fake left-wingers who were prepared to be members of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. These same men sold out the general strike. .

Last Saturday’s Daily Worker reached nearer to the bottom of this trough by asking in its headline ‘What about the summit, Mac?’. Perhaps this-will be excused as a method of ‘exposing’ the Tories, but what it really does is to perpetuate the illusion that summit talks can solve the world’s problems. The attack on Macmillan must be as a leader of the strategy of the employing class, not as a traitor to hopes of a summit.

INDUSTRY STATEMENT By Our Industrial Correspondent THis weekend, Britain’s dockers will receive a leaflet from the National Joint Industrial Council in their pay packets. Headed ‘Amendments to the Dock Labour Scheme’, signed by Frank Cousins and Tim O’Leary for the workpeople’s side and Gifford and Crichton for the employers, it gives what it calls ‘the effects of the amendments agreed by the NJIC up-to-date.’

The first thing dockers will note is that word ‘agreed’. Union officials have been denying The Newsletter’s report that, behind the backs of the members, the officials on the NJIC had already agreed with the employers to amend the Scheme.

The leaflet admits that Local Boards can now disentitle men from benefits for 28 days. This is claimed as an ‘additional safeguard’. But surely the Red Oxide strike in 1948 proved that dockers consider that far too high a sentence to impose on any portworker.

Bad memory?

In the next paragraph there is the frank admission that Local Boards will now be permitted to delegate their powers.

The most peculiar statement in a very peculiar leaflet is the one which says: ‘Local Boards are given no new powers to authorize the engagement of unregistered labour.’ For some reason (perhaps bad memory?) the NJIC forgets to mention that the employers have submitted three amendments calling for the use of unregistered labour.

As reported in The Newsletter on October 3, the Minister of Labour ‘has been moved to consider the possibility of making such amendments.’

The NJIC leaflet assures dockers that only ‘Parliament can sanction any amendment’, but both Cousins and O’Leary must unions and a demand that unemployment TiN 'ncrease in the mines.

These steps follow logically from the retreat which the union leadership made at the end of 1958. Once they had opened the door and agreed to sackings it could be confidently expected that the Tory government would push as many miners as they could on to the tender mercies of the Labour exchanges.

The policy of the NCB and the Tories in relation to the mines is to maintain production as it is now, and even increase it, through the introduction of mining machinery which will be used to increase the rate of exploitation of a smaller number of miners than at present employed. In this way they will be able to serve the capitalist owners of industry in a cheaper and more efficient way.

This is the high cost of a capitalist export drive where a reduction of costs is on the order of the day in order to gain the lead in the rat race for a shrinking world market.

Once again, as in the early 1920s, the miner is called upon to shoulder the burden and if the miners are defeated, then the rest of the working class may well suffer as it did after 1926.

The policy of retreat practised by the miners’ union must be halted at once. The forty-hour week and three weeks’ hoiiday with pay become urgent demands which must be fought for immediately. Capitalist nationalization, which is nothing more than a conspiracy of Tory industrialists aided by a few tame ex-Labour leaders like Sir James Bowman, must be replaced by a drive for workers’ control throughout the coalfields. If this is done then the miners will make an invaluable contribution to halting the swing towards Toryism and prepare the Labour movement for an advance to socialism.

EDUCATION Ill: Intellectuals and Workers

A new wave of sackings threatens the mining industry. This is very clear from the cool reception which the fuel policy of the National Union of Mineworkers has received from the leading capitalist newspapers, notably The Times.

Its editorial of October 20 declared that ‘they (the NUM leadership) show no concern about the substance of what is proposed as a contribution to national development’, meaning of course the proposal of the National Coal Board to reduce the number of working miners in the pits . ‘The Board cannot be expected to go on producing coal which cannot be sold.’

leadership. The. alliance of such intellectuals with the party and trade uniqgppureauctats is‘one of the factors that leads to a suspicion all intellectuals among honest militants.

At the same time the Communist Party has equally perverted the role of the intellectuals... It has had a theory, but a rigid, mechanical and prefabricated. theory which has inhibited those intellectuals who have joined it.

-In a genuine Marxist party the theory is neither something simply brought from outside by the intellectuals to the party nor something already complete which the intellectuals have simply to accept. The theory is at once something to which the Marxist intellectual contributes.and something through which he grows.

Faced with the alternatives of. either acting as backroom boys for the Social Democratic bureaucrats or as office-boys for the Stalinists, many intellectuals have retreated into a socialism which lacks roots in the working class altogether.

Tv If workers without intellectuals tend to become narrow and lose sight of ultimate aims, intellectuals without workers become pipe-dreamers who see the ultimate aims clearly but can envisage no immediate steps which might lead towards them. (This happens among the ‘New Left’.) When such intellectuals realize their predicament, the danger is that they try to remedy this lack of working-class connexions by jumping straight into the existing, bureaucratized Labour movement and accepting this as if it were the authentic working class.

Another tendency which is sometimes an effect of this is that which separates ‘politics’ and ‘culture’. ‘Politics becomes restricted to the immediate objectives, ‘culture’ becomes a matter only of ultimate ends. .

The only way of fighting this is to start out from envisaging the relation between intellectuals and workers in a quite different way.

When theorists like Marx, Lenin and Trotsky (and no Marxist theorist can ever be only a theorist) came into the working-class movement..they achieved two different things. They both helped workers to generalize their experience and they helped them to use that experience as a guide to future Without the working-class experience they would have had we nothing to generalize from. Without the working-class revolt against exploitation they would have had so signposts into the future. Moreover it was’ Marx’s experience of the class conflicts of the present which was an essential part of his equipment in understanding the class conflicts of the past. Then by understanding the’ past he was able to throw still more light on the present and: the future.

A lot hangs here on the way in which intellectuals and workers come together. If Marx had approached the working-class movement from the outside as a middle-class sociologist, he would never have had working- class experience made available to him in the way in which it was.

Mere speculative curiosity leads nowhere. The only intellec~ ste tual who can hope to aid the working class by theoretical @-. work is the one who is willing to live in the working-class movement and learn from it, revising‘his concepts all the time in the light of his and its experience.

Finally, a more-fundamental point. The distinction between intellectuals and workers itself reflects the divisions of class society, rooted in the most basic division of labour and in the facts of exploitation.

‘One of the experiences which people have who work in the :

Marxist movement is that already in our: political work this distinction bégins to disappear... As workers: become increasingly guided by theory, as intellectuals become increasingly close to the workers’ struggle, so the two-groups become one.. This is our ‘continual experience in the Socialist Labour League as it was in-the experience of the Russian Bolsheviks.

To be concluded

recognize the danger of a situation where a Tory Minister of Labour can place amendments to the Scheme before Parliament, knowing full well that he is assured of a majority of 100.

Perhaps Mr Cousins and Mr. O’Leary believe that the Tories will support the dockers against the employers?

The sheer evasion being practised by the union leaders about the strike-breaking proposals of the London Chamber of Commerce shows that they are unwilling to prepare any resistance to the employers’ attacks. Cousins’ left talk in the Labour Party is revealed as so much talk and nothing else.

Meanwhile at rank-and-file level the dockers are organizing their resistance. In Hull last Sunday, members of the National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers and the Transport and General Workers’ Union voted to reject any amendments to the Scheme.

They also urged the setting up of rank-and-file committees in all ports.

Unlike their leaders, the dockers place no faith in Tory Ministers of Labour and Tory-dominated Parliaments.

By Our Industrial Correspondent IN the first two of these articles I argued that Marxist theory shows us the need for a politically self-conscious working class, which is aware of the possibility and the necessity of a break with the whole existing order of class society.

In this article I want to discuss the respective ro!es of intellectuals and workers in bringing this about. Lenin saw the unity of intellectuals and workers in a Marxist Party as a precondition of a proper unity of theory and practice. We can see what he meant by looking at what happens when each group tries to act alone.

Vv A working-class movement without intellectuals is apt to despise theory. Because it despises theory, it has no perspective, no sense of a way forward beyond immediate needs and demands. It fights upon this or that paticular issue and is defeated more often than it need be because it lacks any larger strategy. And because of the narrowness of its aims its working-class members are themselves hindered from developing intellectually.

The whole British Labour movement has been infected by this narrowness. One reason why it is not surprising that this narrowness has prevailed is that the two alternatives which have been most obvious seem equally unattractive.

The first of these alternatives is the recruitment of intellectuals to be mere technicians and propagandists for the Labour “movement. Since 1926 the Labour Party has increasingly had its shop-window full of bright young men, who are able to offer academic justifications for the policies of the trade union

THE ferment of ideas in University socialist circles is nothing, less than a movement toward the renaissance of Marxism.

’

These are serious times for the Labour movement. The employers’ offensive against the living standards and working condi-ions of people will be resumed after the election with all the arrogance and desperation of a ruling class bent on maintaining profits in the face of stiffening world competition. ~ ' Serious times demand serious policies and the ° ‘established’ political parties haven’t got them.

Unfortunately for these parties, the crisis: of Stalinism touched off by Khrushchev’s secret speech and the Hungarian Revolution coincided with mounting opposition to the H-bomb and gunboat diplomacy. The result has been the annexation of Marxism from the official Communist Parties.

The left in the Labour Party joined with the. dissident and expelled members of the Communist Party in a -reinvestigation of scientific socialism. This is: especially true of socialist studies. _ Never,. since the 1930s, has there been such a movement to put Marxism back in its correct place, as the most incisive method for investigating and solving the chronic problems of this epoch.

But the ‘new left’ of today is different from the left of the 1930s. History doesn’t repeat itself.

The working class has no recent heavy defeats to hold it back; the Communist Party has not the same influence to syphon off militant ideas into the channel of ‘popular fronts’ and ‘summit talks’.

Humanist tradition .

The great humanist. tradition among students and intellectuals must: face the facts of a class-divided society. Humanism. and socialism are united by the Marxist movement which. takes its stand by.the side of the working class. The anti-Hbomb campaign—most humane of all movements—will succeed. to the extent to which it is harnessed to the Labour movement, ‘The working class has:the:means at its disposal to prevent work on these monstrous weapons of mass destruction:-: Marx-. ists seek to link the everyday struggle of the working class with the campaign against the H-bomb and thus to unify the Labour movement around a real socialist programme. .

Socialist students are asked to aid the Labour movement, here and: now, in:the struggle against capitalism. Intellectuais have a vital role to play, especially in enriching theory. -A precondition, however, for intellectuals to play this great: theoretical part is that they earnestly learn from and _ participate with, the growing:body of Marxist workers in fashioning an organization for the overthrow of capitalism.

That is why we invite all. student and teacher socialists: to the National Assembly of Labour.

Ez MEETINGS Tuesday, November 3 at 8 p.m. . Co-operative Hall, 234 Westbourne Park’ Road;

North Kensington Surrey Hall, Manor Place, (off Walworth Road) SE E. 17 Friday, October 30 at 8 p.m.

Grant Road School, Wealdstone High Street, Harrow Wednesday, November 4 at 8 p.m.

SINCE this article was written a state of emergency has been declared and a Press censorship clamped on by the new government. These undemocratic measures however, will prove as effective as King Canute’s broom in stopping the high tide of revolution from sweeping the bastard régime of Dahanayake into oblivion and in installing an anti-capitalist government.

The author is a Trotskyist MP in the Ceylon Parliament.

To ascertain and understand the forces behind the assassination of Mr Bandaranaike, it is necessary to recapitulate some facts about the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna Government (People’s United Front) which came into existence in April 1956. The MEP was a petty-bourgeois front with a programme of bourgeois reforms.

This front received a socialist colouration by the presence of two ex-Marxists—Philip Gunawardene and William Silva— in the cabinet.

The Front comprised a number of groups, one, led by Dahanayake, called itself the Language (Sinhalese) Front. The largest group was the Sri Lanka Freedom Party of Bandaranayake—a party of the small capitalists. From the outset a militant Sinhalese Buddhist group, backed by a section of monks, sought in a determined manner to influence and control the Government.

Within two months of the formation of the government, this group, led by a parliamentary secretary and a university lecturer, together with certain prominent Buddhist monks, resorted to direct action by staging a hunger strike to prevent. the Prime Minister from granting ‘concessions’ to the Tamils on the language question.

This passive resistance was developed by them into open active resistance in anti-Tamil riots in June 1956 when the Sinhalese Only Bill was introduced in Parliament.

On the economic front this same group, with recruits from others, sought to oppose nationalization proposals and the limited land reform of the government—the Paddy Lands Act introduced by former Food Minister, Gunawardene.

Communal riots With their minds firmly set against economic reconstruction of the country in a progressive direction, they sought io prevent Bandaranaike from passing any measures that appeared as concessions to the working class and the peasantry.

The first concession to working-class pressure was in October 1957 when Bandaranaike gave in to the Government Workers’ strike of 80,000 led by the Lanka Sama Samaj Party —Socialist Party of Ceylon (Trotskyist).

With the forward movement of the working class, the _ Sinhalese Buddhist Group combined to fan the flames of communal hatred. The language issue was once again taken up.

Bandaranaike sought a solution of the communal question within the framework of his own policy. He was ready for compromise and concessions. But the racialists in the government opposed any such move.

parliamentary party, Ministers Dahanayake and Marikkar took the lead, while the Bhikkus (Buddhist monks) of the MEP came out in full force in this anti-Tamil campaign. The petty bourgeois opportunist group of Philip Gunawardene came into action and the communal capitalist reactionary forces outside the People’s United Front also played their part in the campaign.

The result was an unprecedented communal conflagration.

Over 1,000 people lost their lives. There was widespread looting and burning of property. The Public Security Act was brought into operation and a state of emergency declared which lasied 10 months—till February 1959. The serious rupture of communal] relations and the virtual break-up of society into Sinhalese and Tamil areas was a victory for the extreme racialist group.

Expulsion of the ‘Marxists’

Prime Minister Bandaranaike sought to resist the pressure of the united group of extreme communalists by encouraging the rival petty-bourgeois group of Gunawardene and William Silva.

The mass situation did not permit him to flirt any more with the so-called ‘left’. In spite of the serious communal riots and the 10 months state of emergency, which restricted democratic and trade union rights, the strike movement spread extensively. The strikes since October 1957 are unprecedented in the history of Ceylon.

The first political mass strike since the new government was set up took place in March 1959.

The racialist reactionary group now decided on firm action. They demanded the ending of Bandaranaike’s balancing tactics. They would no longer tolerate even socialist phrase-mongering This group decided to fight the Philip Gunawardene group to a finish.

May 1959 brought the biggest government crisis since 1956. The racialists utilized the situation arising out of the con- troversial Co-operative Bank Bill to demand the removal of the Gunawardene group from the Cabinet.

The prime minister sought to continue his balancing trick as before. But this time it was impossible. To do so wouid have meant -the resignation of nine Ministers and the possibility of losing the presidency of his own party.

At the threat of Dahanayake being made the president of his party, the prime minister yielded and threw out the ‘Marxists’ from the cabinet. The right-wing communal group won the day. At last it appeared as if Bandaranaike were under their control.

But the tendency of Bandaranaike to yield to mass pressure was very strong. The last Colombo Port Strike in August, which lasted 26 days, showed that he was still unreliable. It was the determined and continued pressure of the DahanayakeStanley de Zoysa group that prevented the prime minister from giving in to the strikers.

The Assassination The reactionary group could not take the bold steps needed to save capitalism with Bandaranaike as prime minister. He had to be removed if the working class and the peasants were to be effectively controlled.

The assassin brought victory to these forces. The prime minister was shot, killed and buried with the biggest funeral . ever. When the weeping and the government ceremonies were over one fact emerged in bold relief—the racialist, capitalist reactionary forces through former Education Minister, Dahanayake had usurped the power.

The Dahanayake government will not make any concessions to the masses. On the contrary, the general economic conditions in the country and the present financial situation of the government will push it to seek an immediate head-on collision with the working:class to pave the way for a military dictatorship, if necessary.

It is clear that a revolutionary situation is maturing in Ceylon. If the working class led by the LSSP is equal to its task, the setting up of a workers’ and peasants’ government in Ceylon is a real possibility.

THE proc&® of re-thinking in the Labour Party will prove as fruitless this time, as it did after the 1931 defeat, if it does not embrace the industrial as well as the political field and grasp the connexion between them. At the 1932 conference of the Labour Party, MacDonaldism was repudiated in words and left-wing policies for a future Labour government were endorsed. But little came of it, and the 1935 election brought in the reactionary government which helped to make the second world war inevitable.

Labour’s post-1931 ‘leftism’ made but small impact, and soon evaporated, largely because it was confined to the political side of the movement. ‘It is idle to suppose that industrial retreat can be combined with political advance. If the workers in the real contests of everyday life are being continually led to the rear, if their own spontaneous efforts at resistance are always discouraged, and often definitely thwarted, by their trade union leaders, the sounding of an advance on the political front can mean very little The words are John Strachey’s, in ‘The Menace of Fascism’ (1933).

We hope our friends in Tribune and Victory for Socialism circles will now rapidly come to agree with us on the need for a militant policy in industry as well as a socialist programme for Labour.

Here the lesson of 1932 is particularly apposite. Foremost in promoting the left decisions of the party conference of that year was—Ernest Bevin, who as a trade union leader was at the same time strangling militant tendencies as hard as he could go. The genuineness of any trade union leader who ‘talks left’ on political questions has to be judged primarily by his role in the industrial field. That.applies whether his name is Purcell, Bevin—or Cousins. Right-wing governments in the saddle in the principal countries of western Europe—in West Germany and France us well as here. The triumph of Adenauer in West Germany helped to prepare for de Gaulle’s success in France, and that in turn has not exactly made Macmillan’s task any more difficult.

To understand how the Right came into power in West Germany we have to look at the foreign policy of the postwar Labour government.

In his report to the House of Commons on May 15, 1947, Bevin said: ‘with regard to socialization [of the Ruhr], I have seen in the London press this morning some reports from America which indicate the powerful imagination of journalists’ minds. We adhere to the principle of public ownership of the basic German industries.’ He added, referring to the British management of the industries concerned: ‘It would be impossible if we wished it, or if any wished it, to return these industries to their former owners.’

Not long afterwards, these industries were in fact returned to the control of big German industrialists, including some who had been the bosses under Hitler. When the Parliaments of two states, Hessen and Rhineland-Westphalia, passed laws nationalizing the mines on their territories, these laws were vetoed by the occupation powers—America in the former instance, and ‘Labour’ Britain in the latter!

Thus the main basis for the return to power of the old gang was ensured (‘consolidated’?), in plain violation of Bevin’s promises.

In many a ward meeting and general management committee, Labour Party members are now discussing what happened and why. They should look deep, and examine how the turn came in Labour’s post-war fortunes, in 1948-1949, from which time the curve has tended generally downwards.

At the Scarborough conference in 1948, Herbert Morrison, introducing the National Executive Committee’s pamphlet ‘Production the Bridge to Socialism’ sounded the keynote of ‘consolidation’: ‘Parliament had done its job .. . . and Parliament having done its part, the ball was now passed back to the citizen .. . . Could the gains be held?’

In the following spring we had the document ‘Labour Believes in Britain’, of which the Times wrote in April 13, 1949:

‘Its main emphasis falls on consolidation .... The dispassionate elector next year is likely to find it harder than ever to choose between the contestants simply by reading their programmes.’

Sure enough, the 1950 election saw a sharp cut in Labour’s majority, and the 1951 election the end of Labour rule. The turn to the right had begun in the Labour Party itself, and inevitably it strengthened Right-wing trends in the country at large, at Labour’s expense.

Party members could do worse than look up what Socialist Outlook said at the time, during those years when the fiasco of 1959 was being prepared. Then let them reflect that Socialist Outlook was banned by Transport House in 1954, just as The Newsletter has been banned in 1959. Hasn’t the time come for reconsidering such bans, and the whole ‘keep-in-with-theJoneses’ line that lies behind them, in the light of what happened on October 8?

The right swing is not just a British phenomenon, either. Less than fifteen years after the end of the second world war, just as in the same period after the end of the first, there are Printed by Plowgh Press Ltd. (T.U.). r.o. 180 Clapham High St., S.W.4 _ Registered at the GPO as a newspaper are to be found in The Red Flag, British Trotskyist organ, for September 1933, October-November 1933 and January 1934. James Klugmann might find a place for it in some footnote to his keenly-awaited official history of the Communist Party.

Published by The Newsletter, 186 Clapham High St., London, swe

In his article in the Observer of October 18 on the Chinese Revolution, the Indian diplomat and historian Pannikar paid tribute to the leader of the ‘national awakening’ in China following the overthrow of the Manchus—Chen Tu-hsiu, who later became one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party and led it until 1927.

Panikkar wrote: ‘His name hardly appears in the history books of the West; yet he was one of the makers of modern China.’ Now this is more than a little unfair to ‘the history books of the West.’ There are, for instance, no less than 14 references to Chen Tu-hsiu in the index to the well-known ‘Documentary History of Chinese Communism’ by Brandt, Schwartz and Fairbank (1952), and the book indicates clearly enough Chen’s role in the building of the Communist movement in China.

When the Chinese workers and peasants were bloodily crushed by Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, Moscow made Chen the scapegoat. This was doubly cynical in that he had not only carried out a line dictated to him by the Stalin-Bukharin leadership of the Comintern, but had repeatedly protested against this line, though loyally restricting his protests to official channels. (There is interesting material on this subject in Isaac Deutscher’s new book).

In 1929 Chen joined the Trotskyist opposition. Chiang Kai-shek either did not know or did not care that, according to the Stalinist mythology, the Chinese Trotskyists were his ‘agents’, and a few years later he arrested Chen and sentenced him—then already in the middle fifties—to 13 years’ imprisonment.

The Stalinist-controlled International Labour Defence ignored the case of this ‘class-war prisoner’. In his personal capacity, Tom Mann, always something of a rogue elephant in the Stalinist camp, signed an appeal for protests to be sent to the Chinese Embassy, though Hary Pollit, who was also asked, ignored it.

I hope this episode will be duly recorded by whoever is continuing the biography of Tom Mann which Dona Torr had begun before she died. It was greatly to his credit. The facts