March 14th, 1951
To Maurice Cornforth,
I was sorry to read your letter to me. You are making a choice and it isn’t a good one. One grudging paragraph–shamefully wrung out of you–on what I say in my pamphlet, the rest–and I repeat, I am sorry to say it–distortion and plain calumny. You end your letter by saying: “As I told you when you saw me. it is perfectly possible to debate these points in the proper manner in Party discussion.”
What are the facts? I saw you last June, I showed you my material on Caudwell and Thomson. I showed you part of a file going back three years and more, material that had passed between myself and the Party–chiefly through Emile Burns. At our meeting I emphasised the role played by Dobb’s theories, and, finally, took up the question of the Australian Letter. That was when you dismissed me, the Australian comrades were beyond the pale! Now you glibly tell me channels are open in which matters can be discussed.
When Communists speak of discussion what do they mean? They mean the right to put their views in print before the Party during the period established for that precise purpose, the pre-Convention or Congress period.
Only after their views have been placed before Congress and condemned by majority vote are they expected to remain silent and loyally carry out orders until another Congress comes around when once again they can express their views in print, before the entire Party, and speak up for them at the Congress. Is this not so? In the years since I have been in the Party one letter of mine only has been allowed to appear in pre-convention discussion, and that on a minor topic–and emasculated at that, with its guts torn out! Even my short letters to the DW–and you are fully aware of these things–have been heavily censored or not printed at all.
Where are those channels for expression you speak of! There are no rights of discussion which differ on fundamentals from those held by Emile Burns, Palme Dutt and those these men dominate, and you, Maurice Cornforth, are fully aware of it.
And these views I persist in holding, what are they? They are views on the question of the State, the Dictatorship of the working class. They are derivatory questions dealing with Nationalisation under capitalism, dealing with the subject of a ’mixed economy,’ under capitalism, of the possibility of ’national-planning’ under capitalism, dealing with our own British brand of social democracy.
In my pamphlet I touch on Caudwell–am I right or am I wrong? I deal with Professor Thomson–am I right or am I wrong? I accuse John Lewis of bare-faced trickery–am I right or am I wrong? Finally, I take issue, sharply, on fundamentals, with Emile Burns–am I right or am I wrong?
Why are you silent on these things? Why are you silent that a bare two months ago I offered you my file on Maurice Dobb–after you had condescendingly told me you would, to please me! take up the question of Dobb with John Eaton. Is it not a fact that you never even answered my letter containing the offer? And did I not, in the same letter, offer you the material on Thomson now published in my pamphlet?
Why are you silent on the Communist Bureau of Information? You are fully aware of the attempts I have made to get the Party place the Australian letter before that body. Why hasn’t this perfectly simple and reasonable step not been done? And my own correspondence, finalised into my five questions, which the E.C. was forced to answer, why prevent this material from going before the Bureau of Information?
You know all these things, and there is much more you know of as far as the Party leadership is concerned, dreadful, unbelievable things, as the frame-up of splendid comrades, driving them out of the Party–all of these things you know, yet you remain silent. More, you couple my name with scum. I believe history will draw its own conclusion. Not I, but you, if you persist along the line you have chosen, will end in the Dock alongside the Hydes [MIA note: Douglas Hyde was the news editor of the Daily Worker until 1948, when he converted to Catholicism, resigned from the CPGB and became an anti-communist].
A. H. EVANS