CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

one accepted the term, there were different trends within eurocommunism, including one trend
which wanted to go much further in rejecting the leninist heritage, and another trend that believed
that a large part of the democratic elements in the leninist heritage could be saved and used. The
Italians certainly were a pole of attraction; the French, less so. It is true, in ’76 the French made a
turn, but they made it in a completely undemocratic way and you have Marchais on the television,
without any consultation, outlining a completely different approach from the one previously.
Certainly they’d moved on a number of issues, but it still remained a pretty hierarchical sort of
party. But the Italians certainly were very much in the vanguard of all this, along with the Spanish
to some extent. There was this sort of Rome-Paris-Madrid axis of which Rome and Madrid were
rather more attractive than Paris. There was a demand for more stuff on the Soviet Union of a more
critical character, and the fact that Jean Elleinstein was a member in good standing of the PCF, and
that therefore his book had been published with the approval of the PCF, made it easier for people
who wanted this sort of more critical book to be published here, to appear that they were
respectable. But by that time King Street was not against publishing those things; we’re dealing
now with the late 1970s, by which time you’d had the Gollan thing in ’76 and so on.
The problems in the party partly related to developments in the world communist movement,
partly to the general decline in the membership of the party. The sort of things that people had
hoped for in terms of the development of the party’s strength, support and membership were going
in the other direction; and of course the hopes that people had in terms of development of
democratisation in the socialist countries were also going in the other direction. It wasn’t until
Gorbachev in ’85 that those things began to become optimistic as far as the Soviet thing was
concerned; and the Soviet thing has always been an important element in the history of the
communist party. There was also a big controversy over the business of ‘Labour’s forward march
halted’, the Hobsbawm thing. The development of the communist party was never seen as being
separate from the development of the labour movement. To the extent that the Labour Party and
the labour movement was losing out, that certainly affected the optimism that existed in the party,
although it was interpreted in different ways by different people. In general I think the problems of
the labour movement in the 70s did certainly contribute to a less optimistic perspective of the
communist party.
I
personally was very much concerned with the whole Polish business. I think we got a two to
one, or two-and-a-half to one majority, at the congress of 1982, where we criticised the calling
of martial law. But it didn’t necessarily mean that we approved of everything that Solidarność
did; it meant that we opposed the suppression of Solidarność and the introduction of martial law.
It’s true there was a minority that was very much in support; but these were basically the minority
who supported the Soviet Union and East European countries all along the line on everything. I
was invited up to Scotland after the declaration of martial law and got very big party meetings,
particularly in Glasgow and in Edinburgh, in which there was enormously strong feeling generated
on the issue. It was not in my opinion a generational thing. One would need a more profound
analysis of this, but on the basis of my experience and knowledge you found some of the older
people being very critical and developing and moving; I can think of many cases of this. You can
also think of some of the younger people who were linked with the hardliners because they thought
this was being radical. So I don’t think that one can categorise it generational terms.
I didn’t accept as inevitable that the party was going to self-destruct, though I was well aware of the
direction. I was in favour of moving to a broader sort of party which would be formed through
negotiations with other left organisations; and I opposed the winding up of the communist party,
because I didn’t think that that was brought about by dissolving the party into an amorphous
organisation like Democratic Left. The leadership was just looking for any way to change the
situation, but without looking at the actual content, in my opinion, of what was involved. The
Democratic Left in my opinion was launched without any clear perspective. All the expulsions and
that sort of thing I thought was an expression of the general lack of perspective politically, and
therefore trying to solve problems organisationally which in fact could not be solved in that kind of
way. This whole plethora of expulsions, championed particularly by David Green, who was the
London district secretary and subsequently left the movement anyway, seemed to me to contribute
to a bad atmosphere and a lot of bickering around organisational questions which I didn’t like at
all. I clashed on the executive committee with Dave Green and others on this issue on numerous
occasions.
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