CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

direction and this reinforced my decision that I should stay on, although I was well aware of a lot of
things still being wrong. I always retained good personal relations with the people like Christopher
Hill who left, which was not a typical position as far as the party was concerned. People on Socialist
Register like Ralph Miliband and John Saville were personal friends over the years; similarly with
the New Left Review, people like Robin Blackburn and Perry Anderson. I was never tempted to
join the trotskyists. I was much more favourable to the trotskyists in the ’45 period, when the
communist party made right-wing errors. By the ‘56-’57 period, in which the trotskyists were
recruiting a certain number of people, I never felt any inclination to join them.
For a job I began lecturing in a college in South East London. Politically, I took part in some of the
‘new left’ events. I was blocked from having anything serious published in the party press. After the
twenty-first congress of the CPSU, which Gordon McLennan was one of the delegates at, and wrote
an enthusiastic article about, I contributed an article for Marxism Today in which I was much
more critical and they refused to publish it. There was a big hoo-ha that went right up to the level of
Gollan, but they still refused to publish it; whereas New Left Review, for instance, published my
stuff. So it was an anomalous position where I was a party member but the party journals wouldn’t
publish my stuff, but the New Left and other things like Socialist Register did publish my stuff. I
did make a point of not criticising the current policies of the communist party in New Left Review
and so on. Historically, when I did a review of Macfarlane’s book on the communist party in the
1920s, of course I was critical of the communist party’s line in the 1920s; but nobody could do
much about that, because that would mean that they would have to defend the third period line
themselves, which they obviously couldn’t do. But I made a point in the non-party press – New Left
Review, Tribune, things like Socialist Register – of not making a specific attack on the current
policies of the communist party, which denied them a handle to get me out on the basis of that. I
was anxious to stay in because I still retained this perspective that sooner or later it would be
possible to change. You asked what would have been my alternative if I’d been outside of the
communist party. Precisely because I didn’t think there was any particularly viable alternative, I
stayed in. At communist party congresses I used to sometimes be a lone voice with resolutions from
my own branch.
T
his continued until ’67-’68, when I was rehabilitated in practice. A number of things
happened. First of all there was the Czechoslovak business, the initiation of the Dubcek
line. Alongside of that, with the imprisonment of dissidents in the Soviet Union Gollan
actually made a critical comment much closer to the positions that I had taken. So I was then
invited to come onto the national cultural committee of the party; I was invited to do education
classes at district schools. Already in October 1967 there was a programme on Daniel and
Sinyavsky on the BBC and there was a late-night line-up thing afterwards, in which I was asked to
participate. Gollan had publicly criticised the condemnation of Daniel and Sinyavsky, so before I
went on the programme I rang him up and said, ‘Listen Johnny, are you prepared to let me say that
you still hold to your position.’ He said, ‘Yes, I’ll work out a form of words that you can work into
your contribution to the programme’. The Guardian then published a thing referring to this and
saying that they had checked with King Street and that Mr John Gollan had said that what Mr
Monty Johnstone said in that programme was said with his full knowledge and approval. Well at
that stage, of course, a lot of people in the communist party were saying, ‘What the bloody hell is
happening? This revisionist bastard who [we] wanted to keep away from everything is coming and
making statements on behalf of the communist party leadership.’ This was the beginning of a
certain rehabilitation as far as I was concerned.
I could argue within the party, and did argue within the party at congresses and in pre-congress
discussions. I helped to argue and got my branch to support resolutions on a whole number of
issues, which included also the Sino-Soviet dispute. But I couldn’t develop these things in the party
press at any length until ’68. After ’68 that changed and they were prepared to publish the stuff; in
fact they published a pretty long article of mine which ran to three issues of Marxism Today on
socialism, democracy and a one-party state. This then initiated a big discussion in which I was
attacked with bell, book and candle by all the hardliners, and then was able to reply in a subsequent
issue. That went on till ’72, I think, that particular discussion. The national cultural committee later
became the theory and ideology committee, and I was able to play a certain role over the years.
The invasion of Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968 actually pushed the issue right into the
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