Constant Reader Old Acquaintance

The following quotation from James P. Cannon’s ‘History of American Trotskyism’ (1944) is offered as comment on Peter Cadogan’s letter in The Listener of March 10. Cannon is describing the American Trotskyist movement in the early ‘Many people came to us who had revolted against the Communist Party not for its bad sides, but for its good sides; that is, the discipline of the party, the subordination of the individual to the decisions of the party in current work. A lot of dilettantish petty-bourgeois minded people who couldn’t stand any kind of discipline, who had either left the CP or been expelled from it, wanted, or rather thought they wanted, to become Trotskyists. Some of them joined the New York branch and brought with them that same prejudice against discipline in our organization. Many of the newcomers made a fetish of democracy. They were repelled so much by the bureaucratism of the Communist Party that they desired an organization without any discipline or centralization whatever.’

Coy Connexicn The reference in last week’s news item about the merger of the three Fascist organizations to the relationship between these people and certain elements in the Tory Party reminded me of a little-known fact about Henry Brooke, the Minister for Housing.

Between 1936 and 1939, while he was deputy director of the Conservative Research Department, Brooke was also chairman of ‘Truth’ Publishing Company. This fact he does not see fit to mention in his entry in ‘Who’s Who’. The reason may be that the weekly magazine Truth’, founded in 1877 by the radical Henry Labouchere to expose scandals without fear or favour, possessed in the 1930s the reputation of specializing in a rather significant way in those scandals with which persons with Jewish names happened to be connected.

Careful people who like to know the sources of statements like this may like to note that Mr. Brooke’s association with ‘Truth’ was mentioned in a letter by Horace B. Samuel to ‘Time and Tide’ for November 22, 1941, and this was reproduced in Claud Cockburn’s newsletter ‘The Week’ for January 21, 1943.

Anti-Fascism, 1914 ?

John Gollan, general secretary of Britain’s Communist Party, told the Daily Worker rally at the Albert Hall that ‘our rally takes place when, for the third time in history, we are faced with the menace of German militarism’.

When Khrushchev and Bulganin laid their wreath on the Cenotaph four years ago, with its tag referring to ‘two wars against German aggression’, a slight whirring noise was heard, possibly caused by a film camera or something. It gave an excuse, however, for one bright young man from the Foreign Office to remark to another: ‘That’s the vile German agent and defeatist Lenin turning in his grave’.

IEE FOE 5 eS OR eee Se What gives a special flavour of cynicism to these retrospective whitewashings of the 1914-1918 war is that the Stalinists concerned get angry when other people do the same thing ‘out of turn’, so to speak, i.e., otherwise than in accordance with the current needs of Soviet diplomacy. Thus, in the January number of ‘World Marxist Review’, a Bulgarian Stalinist blames the Yugoslav ‘revisionists’ for having organized in 1958 a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Allied break-through on the Salonika front, when imperial Germany’s ally Bulgaria was defeated!

The John Gollan nientioned here is, by the way, the same as the young Communist of that name who. was sent to jail in Edinburgh in 1931 for giving soldiers leaflets attacking British militarism.

Rome and Moscow Again Just because the Stalinist and Catholic Action ‘machines’ are at daggers drawn in the British trade union movement today one should not suppose that this must be so always and everywhere—at any rate so far as the Stalinists are concerned.

In the February number of ‘World Marxist Review’ an article on the preparations for the Italian Communist Party’s national congress contains the following phrases :

‘As to the Catholic movement, the draft theses point out that the main Catholic forces, as clearly revealed by the last congress of the Christian Democratic Party, are veering to new positions, insisting on decisive struggle against the monopolies and for far-reaching social changes. . .

‘The soundness of the traditional policy of our Party for agreement with the Catholic world is reaffirmed by the facts. ... And since the victory of socialism in Italy will depend on the formation of a much broader alignment of forces than the alliance of the workers with the poor peasant strata, actions for agreement with the Catholic world must be envisaged as a component of the Italian way to socialism, as a long-term perspective of joint struggle and of alliances not only with the Catholic followers, but also with their organizations’.

The following is reproduced from The Listener, March 10. A comment will be found in this week’s Constant Reader column.

Communism and British Intellectuals Sir,—Mr. Alasdair MacIntyre’s treatment of the subject of ‘Communism and British Intellectuals’ (The Listener, January 7) was, I thought, excellent. Three comments occur to me.

In the first place, most communists just did not know the truth about their own party. They never got near enough to the real leadership—concentrated in London—to find out what was really going on. So it was that for many years a high proportion of the best and most active socialists in Britain permitted themselves to be cut off from the main stream of socialism in this country which runs, of course, through the Labour Party. And for this happy release from militancy within their own ranks the leaders of the Labour Party were profoundly grateful to King Street, the Communist Party centre. Nevertheless, no body of people in Britain did more to keep the flag of socialism flying, albeit in a sectarian way, than the rank and file of the Communist Party, including the ‘intellectuals’.

In the second place Mr. MacIntyre himself, to some extent, falls victim to Stalinist ideas in the very use of the word ‘intellectual’. This term is incapable of definition. It was born and bred under Stalin as part of a theory of an élite required by the circumstances of a revolution betrayed. Marx himself, in the Communist Manifesto, wrote about the ‘bourgeois intelligentsia. The important thing about that label is that it identifies the class position of the people it describes.

Finally, it is quite wrong to give the impression that those who left the Communist Party found, and find, the answer in the Socialist Labour League. It did, at one stage, seem that this might be the case but Mr. MacIntyre knows perfectly well that a revolt has taken place in the S.L.L. just because that organization has demonstrated features identical to those of the Communist Party, and that a whole number of people like Peter Fryer and myself have either been expelled or quit in disgust.

Yours, etc., Cambridge. PETER CADOGAN.

-MarcH..19, 1960