Hammersmith Congress of the Communist Party: The Militant, New York, Apr 29 1957
Whenever the rebel side looked like scoring a goal, the government side had a device for moving the goalposts back a few hundred yards. And when this failed, hidden machine guns mowed down the rebel team.
The Hammersmith Congress of the Communist Party was for all the world like that nightmare football match in Rex Warner's The Wild Goose Chase.
Not only did the team in power make the rules by which the Congress game was played out. They reserved to themselves the right to interpret them at every sign of a real challenge to their authority and domination.
Those who stage-managed this travesty of a Communist Congress managed to whip up quite an atmosphere of intimidation and hatred. Compare for instance, show-of-hand opposition votes, ranging between 20 and 70, with the secret ballot votes of 188 for working-class rebel Brian Behan, who had been sacked from the Executive Committee for daring to criticize, and 100 for "intellectual" rebel Hyman Levy, whose moving speech was the climax of the Congress.
How many more delegates would have voted for the right of free debate in their party or for solidarity with the Hungarian people - if those votes had been secret? Round the hall stood watchful stewards. District secretaries kept a menacing eye on their flocks. Delegates were extremely careful whom they spoke to. Those who wanted to read the literature sold or given away by enthusiasts outside went down into the lavatories to do so.
This sounds fantastic, I know. But it is true. One delegate who began helping me distribute my appeal against expulsion outside the hall was treated to a verbal lashing by Stepney Councillor Solly Kaye.
Screeched Kaye: "You're an enemy of the people." Immediately the delegate went to the Congress Appeals Committee. But someone else had been quicker.
"Yes, comrade, we've already heard about you," said the chairman sweetly.
There should be no misunderstanding either about the character of the CP today or about the nature of its 25th Congress.
The party is no longer a Marxist party. Marxism is based on a philosophy which bids its adherents start from facts, observation, experience, practice, and base their ideas and policies on these.
The King Street bureaucrats do just the opposite. Lacking the ability to start out from their own ideas, which they clothe, in the most threadbare gobbledy gook, they blindly adopt those of whichever of their big brothers happens to be on top at any time.
Those facts which don't happen to fit are suppressed or glossed over. This pattern was repeated at Hammersmith. Hence the fierce, rampant hatred of the hand-picked delegates - and more than half of them were handpicked for their ability to put their hand in the air at the right time.
The party has no longer any real claim to the title "Communist Party." Communist democracy, as Lenin practised it, does not mean packing a Congress with full-time party functionaries, who depend on their orthodoxy and docility for their bread and butter. It means a free, frank and hard-hitting exchange of ideas, with every tendency properly represented.
Out of the more than 2,000 amendments of the three main documents (the Draft Political Resolution, majority and minority reports of the Commission on Inner-Party Democracy, and the revised text of the party program, The British Road to Socialism, only a handful, chosen by the party bosses, were discussed. And the ones chosen for debate were - as one delegate asserted - those formulated in the most extreme way, i.e., those on which the opposition vote would be lowest.
Again, out of 257 delegates who asked to speak, only 87 could get in, and the balance was heavily on the side of the E. C.
Does anyone want more evidence? Look how the panel of recommended members of the new E.C. went through without a hitch. One factory delegate said to me: "It's quite clear the old Executive elected the new Executive." And a whole duster of hard-hitting branch resolutions was simply suppressed - neither debated nor voted on. It was only by accident that the press got hold of them.
Phony! And everybody knew it. Would the leadership have permitted it to be held if they had not been sure of a victory on every disputed point? But for all its "heads I win, tails you lose" character, this Congress did present certain positive and encouraging features.
It blasted once and for all the idea that the only rebels in the party are woolly intellectuals nursing bruised consciences. Johnnie McLoughlin, the victimized shop steward at Briggs Motor Works, scotched that one, especially when he shouted at Andrew Rothstein: "You are the enemy, you lying old swine." This was the voice of the working class raised in instinctive protest against the bureaucracy that battens on it, lies to it and betrays it. It was "Red Csepel" proudly defying the Russian tanks and the AVH. It was the Leningrad factory workers shouting down Mme. Furtseva
If there is any future for the British CP it lies in the hands of fighters like McLoughlin and Behan, who are mortally sick of being lied to and browbeaten.
There are hundreds more like them. Their impact was felt at the Congress, even though their few representatives were steamrollered on every issue.
But one thing is certain: they are not going to spring to attention to carry out the Hammersmith decisions. Many of them will openly declare their rejection of these decisions and their refusal to operate them. Instead of walking out they will challenge the Stalinists to do their worst. And a rank-and-file rebellion will do a power of good.
Yes, the opposition was weak at Hammersmith. But it was the weakness of infancy, not of old age. There has been no such Marxist opposition at any CP Congress for 25 years. It gave the bureaucrats several bad moments. It will give them more.
NO PROBLEM SOLVED
None of the problems the Congress was called to solve - subservience to Russia, stifling of discussion, deep anxiety about Hungary - has in fact been solved. The crisis is deeper than ever.
What is holding back those many delegates who, outwardly in agreement with the E.C., are in fact full of what party jargon calls "doubts"? Many of them are convinced that those who left the Daily Worker, for instance, are all insincere people, whose sole motive is lining their pockets.
It was sad to see the platform put up Bob Steward to say something along those lines, since Bob Steward's own son-in-law was murdered by Stalin in the late thirties. "I suppose you're rolling in money now," one delegate hissed at me as I was sipping my half-pint of bitter one lunch break. What's the answer to that kind of attack? Those who make it have been trained, like Pavlov's dogs, to snarl and dribble when they see a critic.
But the snarling and the slandering can't alter the truth. And I venture one prediction: that before the year is out Pollitt, Gollan and Dutt - oh yes, and Peter Kerrigan, too - will be finding their chairs growing warm beneath them.
And when the day of reckoning comes not even the portrait of Comrade Stalin they have put back on the wall of the downstairs office at King Street will be much consolation to them.
