Radical historians will need little
reminding of certain 60th anniversaries coming up next year. At the
30th anniversary point, this rare interview with Ken Weller on the
subject of “Hungary 1956” – actually ranging widely to take in the Suez crisis
and the British left in the 1950s generally – appeared in Solidarity, last series (‘A
Journal of Libertarian Socialism’), Issue 15, Autumn 1987, pp. 6-14.
HUNGARY 1956
Moments of
mass apostasy
[Introduction as on the 1987 original] The Soviet suppression of the Hungarian
revolution in 1956 marked a turning point in post-war revolutionary politics
across Europe. Nowhere was this more true than Britain, which saw the collapse
of the Communist Party’s long domination of left-wing politics. Suddenly,
whether one supported the programme of the Hungarian Workers’ Councils became,
as it remains, the litmus-test for genuinely libertarian socialists. SOLIDARITY
asked KEN WELLER, then a member of the Young Communist League, to recount the
effects of the events in Hungary on the socialist movement here, and on
himself.
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| Photo accompanying the interview article |
SOLIDARITY: What
impact did the Hungarian uprising of 1956 have on the British Communist Party?
KEN WELLER: First
of all I think I ought to give you some idea of the political situation, before
1956, and show how different it was from the situation today. Apart from the
Communist Party, which had about 35,000 members, you had a couple of moribund,
fossilised groups like the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the Independent
Labour Party, which was still in existence, tiny groups of Trotksyists buried
deep in the Labour Party, and the anarchists. Militant struggle in industry was
completely dominated by the CP. They had the Fire Brigades Union, the Foundry
Workers Union, they were influential at a district level in many unions: for
example there were seven districts of the Amalgamated Engineering Union in
London, each with full-time officials and office staff, and with one exception
they were controlled by the CP. Hundreds of people owed their jobs to their Party
membership. I couldn’t understand, at one time, why an all-aggregate meeting [Editors: one which all members of the Party
were entitled to attend] used to vote automatically for the leadership when
ninety per cent of the membership were to a greater or lesser extent critical,
and then someone said, “Well, it’s the people who have the jobs”; and I started
counting up people who had jobs in London dependent on CP support that I knew
of, and when I reached eight hundred I stopped counting.
People can’t
realise how big an apparatus it was. There were the embassies, the Friendship
Societies, the printshops, the front organisations, the unions; 120 were
employed by the Electrical Trades Union
alone. There were all the agencies of the Soviet government, Tass [the Soviet news agency], the Moscow
Narodny Bank, all these sorts of things were full of people; I mean, the Soviet Weekly alone employed a network
of people who were distributing agents for the paper, and so on.
Culmination of a
process
Looking back at
it now, you can see that the ’56 events were just the culmination of a process.
You didn’t have an explosion out of nothing. There were things happening for
years before that were relevant. You saw the gradual degeneration of the CP.
The ethos and commitment were declining. Politically it was becoming more and
more diffuse. In industry there was a situation where it was the only organisation
which had any network through which militants could function on the left. It
either controlled the shop stewards’ organisation in virtually every plant or
was extremely influential: Fords, the Briggs plant in London, down on the
docks, the building, the Firth steel plant in Sheffield which was the largest
in the country, place after place up on the Clyde. They had a huge rank and
file presence; I mean they had about two hundred members at Fords [Dagenham],
they had the whole site, you know, the five factories, sewn up down there.
At the same time
they had a network of officials implanted in the unions, not only in the unions
they controlled, but unions in which they weren’t in control but had members on
the executive; and so on the one hand they had pushes towards militant struggle
from their members in industry organised on the shop floor, and on the other
hand they had to protect their officials. These officials were used. For
example, in the AEU Claude Berridge was the major Executive Committee member of
the Communist Party (I mean a member of the EC of the AEU), and whenever there
was a strike on dear old Claude would be sent down to tell them to go back to
work! There was a growing lack of confidence. Over and over again this
happened. What would happen would be that, say in Cossors or in Fords, where
there was an agreement signed by people including CP members or
fellow-travellers like Ted Hill of the Boilermakers, they would be pressurised
by the Party to give in and not fight against the agreements; and when you look
at some of these agreements and these betrayals, you could see that there was
within industry a growing tension between the national policy of the Party and its
compromises with union leaderships, and what its rank and file members wanted. This
was building up, there’s no doubt about that, for a very long time before the
’56 events.
The same thing was
happening outside industry. Although we see the CP as a monolith, in fact there
were whole areas and issues where discussion could take place, provided you
didn’t challenge the Soviet Union and Stalin, and that sort of thing. But there
were quasi-discussions going on, people beginning to question various aspects
of the CP’s policy or lack of policy. I remember they produced a pamphlet on
the motor car industry in which the sole policy they put forward as a solution
to the problems of the car industry was to increase the import tax on cars.
When you’ve got people actually up against Ford management it’s not very
helpful, in fact the Ford management would have agreed with them on that
particular demand!
Events leading
up to and in ’56
I’ve given all this as a sort of
background. Looking to events in ’56 itself: first you had the death of Stalin
in March ’53; then you had the events in Berlin and East Germany, which were
major, in June ’53; then the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February ’56, at
which Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s murderous purges in a secret session. I
remember the Sunday Times produced a
special issue which contained the full text of Khrushchev’s speech – it was about
an inch thick, it was a joke that someone had spent a whole week reading it and
he finishes reading and someone knocks on the door and it’s the next issue; and
then there were the Polish events where Gomulka came to power and the old guard
were thrown out with massive demonstrations in the streets. Then came the
Hungary events. You had these regimes which we’d been arguing were supported by
ninety-nine per cent of the population in Eastern Europe, collapsing in an
absolute shambles. Then you had the Suez events, where the British, French and
Israelis invaded Suez; it was a year of shock after shock. I think the impact
that Suez had in Britain has been largely forgotten – the demonstrations, there
were spontaneous strikes in various places against the Suez adventure. There
was a demonstration in Trafalgar Square which was the largest demonstration I
have ever been on, followed by riots in Whitehall, a massive pinch-up with the
police, the first of the big confrontations in Britain.
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| Photo from the interview article |
I remember being
in Whitehall when the mounted police came out of the entrance of Downing Street
and charged the crowd as it was forming – in other words you looked up
Whitehall and there was just a black mass, but near Downing Street there were
just a few people dotted around – and they charged and I saw one knocking over
a middle-aged couple who clasped each other in their arms for fear, knocking
them flying; and I looked in the gutter and there was a banner pole, like a
broom-handle, about five feet long, and I picked it up and the same policeman
on a horse came charging at me and I hit him as hard as I could with it, broke
the pole, and he turned round and went back into Downing Street. I don’t know
what happened to him; and then there was a battle in Whitehall which was quite
nasty; the police would grab hold of someone and there would be a battle over
their body; in one scuffle I ended up at the back of the crowd with a policeman’s
epaulette in my hand, minus the policeman; and then there were marches through
the streets with linked arms. It was an emotional event, caused by a
combination of factors. At the beginning of that demonstration, some CPers
turned up with banners, just a few, you almost had to respect them, and they
were booed! This was the party which had dominated left-wing politics,
effectively the only people who ever had demonstrations apart from the Labour
Party; they turned up for the Suez
demonstration and they were booed into the square. A massive change in
people’s attitudes and perceptions had taken place over those few months.
Explosion of
debate
These
events were followed by an explosion of debate. Everyone perceives it as an
explosion within the Communist Party, but it was a lot more than that, although
it was related to these events; but because of the centrality of the role of
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the Communist Party in left-wing
politics, they’d been acting as a sort of iceberg holding everything in stasis
– mixed metaphors I know – for twenty years, and when this started everything
came up for grabs. You had within the Communist Party the emergence of a
duplicated paper called The New Reasoner,
which was produced by Edward Thompson and John Saville. That started the discussion going. When they were expelled they
turned it into The Reasoner . At the same
time, a group around Raphael Samuel and a lot of other younger Communists
produced the Universities and Left Review.
Later on these two papers were merged; they were the origin of the New Left Review.
Side by side
with that, Peter Fryer, who’d been in Hungary during the struggles, wrote a
book, Hungarian Tragedy, which had a profound
effect. He also came in contact with Gerry Healy’s group of trotskyists, and
started producing a paper called Peter
Fryer’s Newsletter (it was actually called that, not The Newsletter [1]) which
was mainly about dissidence within the Communist Party, and later took a
broader political line. There was the quite spontaneous emergence of something
called the Forum Movement. In locations up and down the country something over
a hundred discussion groups emerged to become the Forum Movement, which had a
couple of conferences where people from the Party, trotskyists, Labour Party
and the non-committed, came together to have weekly meetings organised by the Universities and Left Review.
The ones I
remember most vividly were held in a hotel in Southampton Row. I remember one
on working class historiography, a pretty arcane subject, with Thompson
speaking, and there were something like eight hundred people. That wasn’t
exceptional; I mean, it was more than average, but you’d have hundreds, you’d
have a hall packed week after week after week, for, oh, two or three years. And that was only one of
the things. You had things like the Partisan Club; that was a club, founded by
people who had come out in this milieu and wanted to create a place where
people could meet, in Carlyle Street in Soho; they took over a building, and
the cellar was a sort of coffee bar and God knows what else, and that was a
centre where people over a whole range of political views could meet for the
first time. Because of that the left outside the Communist Party began to strike
roots, because they’d all had criticisms, and people began to respond to them.
CP domination
destroyed
The most effective was Healy’s outfit,
which didn’t have a name at that time. It had had a split a couple of years
earlier and was down to forty or sixty people. By ’58 or ’60 it had probably
six to eight hundred members. That was the sort of growth. Many other little
groups also grew, not to the same degree; I’m just saying that the situation
changed completely. The domination of the CP was destroyed. It was so
vulnerable.
I was in the
Young Communist League, an active member of the second-largest YCL branch, the
Islington branch, and we began to be affected by this dissidence. It wasn’t a
clear linear process. It was confused, bits here, bits there, and then suddenly,
often quite late, in my case in ’58, all this dissidence began to fit together
in a coherent whole. The YCL was the last political youth organisation in
Britain not to be against conscription.
All the others, including the Tories, were opposed to conscription, and the YCL
had a policy for a cut in the call-up with a view to its speedy abolition! There
was a YCL conference about ’57 where the dissidents actually won the day on a
couple of issues. One was opposition to the death penalty, which would be banal
now, and the other was calling for the abolition
of conscription. And the leadership said, “Look, let’s make a compromise. We
know we’re going to be defeated, but
let’s have a compromise, we don’t want a too-sudden change.” They suggested
a compromise which was a cut in conscription with a view to its speedy
abolition tagged on. That was accepted, wrongly, of course, and then for the
following year Challenge, the paper
of the YCL, never had a single reference to the speedy abolition part! I mean,
the political bankruptcy of that period! I remember the shock when the Daily Worker had its first criticism of
the Soviet Union, and you know what the criticism was about? There was a woman
shot-putter in some games in Britain who was arrested for shoplifting in the
West End, and the Russians used diplomatic muscle to get her released and back
to the Soviet Union. The Daily Worker
said she should have stood trial. People don’t realise the climate of that
time. The Party was frightened of putting forward policies which were different
from the Soviet Union. The reason it was not opposed to conscription was that
they had it in the Soviet Union, so they couldn’t in principle oppose it. The
same factor motivated their opposition to unilateralism.
Divergences and
realignments
All the movements which emerged in that
period declined. They were temporary. People were clarifying their ideas. What
I found quite interesting, quite shocking at the time, was that you were in a
debate inside the Communist Party, all you dissidents were standing together
shoulder to shoulder and fighting, and then you’d go down to the café
afterwards and have a discussion and realise that many of the other dissidents
were going in completely different directions. One group were dissident because
they thought the Party wasn’t liberal enough and wanted to go into liberalism,
whereas others wanted a more coherent line on class questions, if you want to use the jargon.
So the things
that emerged in that period, the discussion forums and the papers, of which
there were quite a few others as well, were temporary phenomena because people
were clearing out their ideas, and these divergences and realignments were
taking place, but in fact there were quite a lot of ongoing connections. It’s
often forgotten that the first Aldermaston March was organised by an alliance
of pre-existing radical pacifists, coming out of the Pacifist Youth Action
group and the Direct Action Committee on the one hand, and on the other hand
dissident ex-CPers like Raphael Samuel and a whole group of people around him. In
industry you had the cracking of the wall, the debacle in the ETU where the CP
were caught trying to rig the ballots; they were nailed by ex-CPers who’d been involved in previous waves of
ballot-rigging and who knew what they were doing. Up until recently the present
day the whole leadership of the ETU has been ex-CPers. You see that with a
whole lot of trade union leaders who’d been tied to the CP by self-interest. You’re
a CP member or fellow-traveller, you’re in a union which has elections; being a
CP member, the CP will turn out votes for you, they’re the only people who can
really do it, they’re the only people who are really organised.
What you had to give them was relatively
limited: resolutions at your conference on East-West trade, that sort of thing.
A lot of people used this opportunity to skip the prison and left, some of them
for sincere reasons; others just didn’t see that it was of any value any more,
it was in such disarray that it was of no value to them.
What I’m trying
to say is that from then on the movement wasn’t the same. The CP wasn’t the
same. When I went into Fords, the jewel in the crown, if you like, of the CP,
in the late sixties, you found that there were only about seventy CPers top
whack in the place; that they were probably divided into about five or six
different factions who didn’t have the slightest inhibition about talking to
outsiders about their disagreements. It was no longer a homogeneous
organisation; and it’s true to this day.
End of Part One; Part 2 to
follow after a short intermission
1. Ken later wrote that he’d got this
wrong: “Peter Fryer’s paper was just called The
Newsletter..."
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