"I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships. The notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. E. P. Thompson
The essays in this book by McIlroy and Flewers largely
provide Thompson and Saville with a Psuedo left cover for their anti-Marxist
positions. This review will show that while breaking organisationally from the
Communist Party, Thompson and Saville never broke from many of the ideological
positions held during their time in the Communist Party, one of which was their
hostility to Trotskyism.
In 1956 sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy turned on its
commander in chief and partner in crime, Joseph Stalin. Kruschev's "secret
speech" was hardly secret and was not so much a political break with
Stalinism but a mechanism to deal with the raging political and economic crisis
that gripped world Stalinism.
Khrushchev's speech was typical of a man implicated in all
the major crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. One subject all the
Stalinist bureaucrats agreed on was the correctness of the struggle against
Leon Trotsky, the only leading Bolshevik not to have been rehabilitated by the
Stalinists. Khrushchev said, "We must affirm that the party fought a
serious fight against the Trotskyists, rightists and bourgeois nationalists and
that it disarmed all the enemies of Leninism ideologically. The ideological
fight was carried on successfully ... Here, Stalin played a positive role.[1]"
Khrushchev had a very limited understanding of the social
forces he was inadvertently unleashing with his speech. Far from preventing
revolution, he opened the floodgates. His response was the same as Stalin before
him: to unleash terror on the working class worldwide.
Trotskyists inside Gerry Heally's Socialist Labour League
welcomed the crisis inside the Soviet Communist Party. Healy sought to clarify
the issues involved in the crisis of world Stalinism. However, Pseudo Left
groups such as the British Socialist Workers Party muddied the water and argued
that despite Khrushchev's Speech, there was "a process of
self-reform" going on under pressure from the working class Stalinism
would move in a revolutionary direction.
Thompson got a warm reception from the British SWP, who
broke from the Fourth International in the early 1940s. The SWP, from its
inception until the present day, has given these emigrants from Stalinism a
left cover and justified their reformist and nationalist adaptation and
orientation. According to SWP member David Mcnally E P Thompson, "was the
greatest Marxist historian of the English-speaking world and had a "political
commitment to freeing Marxism from the terrible distortions of Stalinism, a
commitment which originated in the battles of 1956 within the official
Communist movement.[2] "
It is perhaps an understatement to say that the speech
caused mayhem in the British Communist Party. It lost over 9000 members, most
of its important intellectuals, and nearly all its historians inside the
Communist Party Historians Group. The leaders of the Communist Party of Great
Britain attempted to deal with the crisis by suppressing any opposition occurring inside
the party.
Historians John Saville and EP Thompson were among many who refused
to bow down to the party line and issued the three magazines published in this
book. Saville and Thompson resigned their party membership, saying, "We
believe that the self-imposed restrictions upon controversy, the 'guiding' of
discussions along approved lines, the actual suppression of sharp criticism -
all these have led to a gradual blurring of theoretical clarity, and the
encouragement among some communists of attitudes akin to intellectual cynicism
when it has been easier to allow this or that false proposition to go by than
to embark upon the tedious and frustrating business of engaging with
bureaucratic editorial habits and general theoretical inertia" (p137).
While the Reasoner was critical of Stalin and some of his
crimes, it said nothing about the persecution and murder of hundreds of
thousands of left oppositions, including the state murder of most leading
Bolsheviks, including Leon Trotsky. They stayed silent on the Show Trials and
purges carried out by the Stalinist bureaucracy.[3]
Perhaps the worst aspect of this book among many is that it
continues the lie that Thompson or, for that matter, Saville were Marxists.
After leaving the party, Thompson cherry-picked which bits of Marxism he would
use while rejecting orthodox Marxism. His criticism of Stalinism was not from
an orthodox Marxist position; instead, he advocated a form of "socialist
humanism".
After closing down The Reasoner, Thompson founded the New
Reasoner in 1957 along with historian John Saville. The group was made up of ex
and current members of the CPGB. It also attracted a varied group of people who
had left the Fourth International and members of the Labour Party who wrote
articles for the magazine. Most ex Stalinists from the Communist Party dropped
out of politics altogether or found an easy life within the Labour Party and
trade union apparatus.
Thompson was avowedly hostile to an international revolutionary
perspective and sought to imbue his new publication with an "English
Marxist" tradition. Thompson
rejected orthodox Marxism, and in its place, he preached a form of utopian
socialism entitled socialist humanism. To protect his so-called Marxist credentials,
he launched "a series of reckless, stage-managed and convoluted polemics
against a series of academics, intellectuals who in one form or another had
been mistakenly labelled Marxists". Thompson held the belief that classical
Marxism was sectarian. He believed that this "sectarianism" and "purism"
dated way before the Russian Revolution.
While Thompson and Saville shared hatred of early classical
Marxism, they reserved their most vitriolic hatred for the Trotskyist's inside
the SLL. It must be said that the editors of this book share Thompson's attitude
towards the Trotskyists inside the Socialist Labour League.
The orthodox Marxists or Trotskyists in the Fourth
International, which was led in Britain by Gerry Healy of the Socialist Labour
League (SLL), saw the crisis within the British Communist party as an
opportunity to insist on the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism. Healy
went on an offensive to win the most important cadre from the breakup of the
Communist Party. According to Stan Newens," When the April 1957 Communist
Party Congress took place in Hammersmith Town Hall, many of them, including
Gerry Healy himself, were outside selling journals and lobbying delegates."[4]
Those figures who had not been entirely corrupted by the years of lies and
calumny of the Stalinist regimes throughout the world were won to orthodox or
classical Marxism. Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp and Peter Fryer.
Marxists inside the SLL were hostile to Thompson's politics
but were open to debate. Healy was mindful of the sharp polemics that Thompson
had been involved in and told Thompson that "The New left Must Look to the
Working Class"[5].
While cordial in tone, Healy did not mince his words when he
said, "What strikes one immediately on reading E P Thompson's article is
that he entirely omits the working class; consequently, there is no attempt to
analyze the relationship between the left of today and the working class. One
would imagine that the New Left had just arrived and existed in a world of its
own. The opposite, of course, is the case. The New Left is not just a grouping
of people around new ideas that they have developed independently. This new
development on the left reflects a particular phase in the elaboration of the
crisis of capitalism, which for socialists is the crisis of the working-class
movement. Like movements among intellectuals and students in the past, the
recent emergence of the new left is the warning of a resurgence of the working
class as an active political force in Britain. The crisis which is the basis of
such action finds its first reflection in the battle of ideas."[6]
During the early years of Thompson's magazine, the Reasoner
and later the New Reasoner, and later still the New Left Review, it is clear
that he had no intention of debating with the Trotskyists. Despite Healy trying
to secure cordial relations with Thompson and his supporters, it became
increasingly clear that Thompson did not see the Trotskyist's around Healy as a
part of the working class. Healy's response was to say that "Comrade
Thompson seems to have cast away all the luggage, he was equipped within the
Communist Party except one soiled old suitcase labelled anti-Trotskyism."
Thompson's response to the SLL was to accuse it of factionalism. An epithet I
might add that has been levelled at the Trotskyist movement throughout its
history.
This book is useful to future generations of revolutionaries
only because it is an example of how not to build a revolutionary movement. It
is important to study the history of the workers' movement both in Britain and
internationally. Students and workers could do no worse than a systematic study
of David North's The Heritage We Defend[7].
Postscript.
In 2014 several capitalist newspapers reported that MI5 had
been spying on many members of the British Communist Party starting in the
early 1930s. MI5 systematically followed, broke into their house and stole
documents of a significant number of academic members of the Communist Party.
MI5 even went so far as to plant large numbers of agents inside the Communist
Party. One agent, Olga Gray, succeeded in becoming secretary to Harry Pollitt,
Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Great Britain.[8]
How much disruption was caused by these agents is a moot point. Madeline Davis
seems to think not much. In her article, Edward Thompson, MI5 and the Reasoner
controversy: negotiating "Communist principle" in the crisis of 1956,
she downplays MI5 involvement in the aftermath of Kruschev's speech. My point
is why is none of this mentioned in Flewer's and McIlroy's book.
[2] E.P. Thompson: class
struggle and historical materialism-https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1993/isj2-061/mcnally.htm
[3] See Vadim Rogovin’s 1937:
Stalin’s Year of Terror-https://mehring.com/product/1937-stalins-year-of-terror/
[4] http://isj.org.uk/memories-of-a-seminal-year/
[5] Labour Review October
–November 1959 edition,
[6] "The New left Must
Look to the Working Class"
[7] The Heritage We Defend
(30th Anniv. Edition): A Contribution to the History of the Fourth
International-The work reviews the political and theoretical disputes inside
the Fourth International, the international Marxist movement founded by Leon
Trotsky in 1938. It is a devastating reply to former WRP General Secretary
Michael Banda’s document “27 Reasons why the International Committee Should be
Buried Forthwith and the Fourth International Built.”Contains a detailed and
objective assessment of the political contribution and evolution of James P.
Cannon, Trotsky’s most important co-thinker in the US, as well as the evolution
of the US Socialist Workers Party.The 2018 edition of the foundational 1988
work by David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World
Socialist Web Site, contains a new preface, photo section, and an extensive
glossary.
[8] https://www.mi5.gov.uk/the-soviet-threat-between-the-wars
