COMMUNIST PARTY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 April 1941, Page 7

COMMUNIST PARTY

ACTIVITIES IN GREAT BRITAIN POLICY OF DEFEATISM. ! CHANGE TO ANTI-WAR ' POSITION. . (By Victor Gollancz, a noted British > publisher, a famous member of the . British "Left." and founder of the Left Book Club.) On the outbreak of the war the Communist Party of Great Britain took : up a passionate ‘.'pro-war” position. It could hardly have failed to do so, as for five years it had been foremost in demanding "a firm stand against Hit- ■ ler." This was the "Popular Front" period, when men and women such as the writer of this article were happy to cooperate closely with the Communist Party in their opposition to the ‘-appeasement" policy. That the “pro-war" position of the first month was the corollary of their previous five years’ work is shown by the following typical sentence from the pamphlet, “How to Win the War.” published just after the outbreak by Harry Pollitt, who was then supreme in the councils of the Communist Party. "Whatever the notices of the present rulers of Britain and France, the action taken by them —under considerable pressure from then- own peoples • —is . . . for the first time challenging the Nazi aggression which has brought Europe into crisis after crisis fox- the last three years." Then —after the conquest of Poland and the German-Soviet “peace offer”— came the sudden change to the antiwar position. Since then the Communist Party has not merely been “anti-war.” It has been “defeatest," in the sense in which Lenin used the term when advocating defeatism in his article “Defeat of One’s Government in the Imperialist War," and in innumerable other articles. This policy may be summed up as follows: —“Let the people of each country concentrate their attack on ‘their own’ government. The result will be, not the victory of one side or the other, but general international revolution and a socialist peace.” Lenin stated explicitly that “by attacking your own government” he means acting in such a way as to “facilitate” (that is his exact word) the military defeat of youx- government by the rival government. SHORTSIGHTED POLICY. This is the policy that the Communist Party of Great Britain has been pursuing—not because they want Hit-' ler to win, but because, like Lenin in 1914, they think that the result of their action now in 1941 would be a similarly effective and simultaneous action in Germany, and so, not the victory of either one or other of the “imperialist” governments, but a speedy peace of the peoples. The policy is an idiotic one, because it fails to take into account (a) Hitler's immense strength relatively to our own —but we are rapidly catching up; (b) the enormous speed of the modern war machine, which in 1914 moved at the rate of an infantryman, but in 1941 moves at the rate of an armoured division or a bombing aeroplane; (c) the terrible power- of the Gestapo to stamp out the first spark of incipient revolution. As a result, any serious action facilitating the defeat of the Government would not lead to a “people’s peace,” but to the immediate conquest of Britain by Hitler, the imposition of the Nazi regime and the total destruction of British working class and progressive movements. The defeatest policy of the Communist Party has been shown in different ways at different stages.

For instance, from February 1 until the attack on Holland, propaganda was put out to show that not Hitler but Great. Britain was the major aggressor. When France fell, there were violent attacks on American aid for Great Britain, and particularly on the transfer of the fifty destroyers. Further, when the bombing of London started, the Communist Press exploited its horrors to weaken the people’s will to resist. NEW LABEL ON OLD RECIPE. The People’s Convention, which is Communist-controlled, is simply part .of this defeatest campaign. It puts forward a number of proposals with which, considered in isolation, all socialists and progressives will agree; < but the fact that, both among its six points and in the manifesto with which they were put out, there is no mention whatsoever of the necessity for beating Hitler, shows that the underlying purpose of the Convention is simply to foment agitation against the Government, and so to weaken it in its prosecution of the war. A few “innocents” have been deceived by the convention, but there can be no doubt whatever about two things:—First, that the number of people whom it “represents” is exceedingly small; secondly, that the overwhelming majority even of this small number will drop it like a redhot brick the moment they understand that it is part of a defeatist campaign.

The country is unanimous in its determination that Hitler shall not conquer us and the world. Ajjy exceptions to that determination are grotesquely tiny. And foremost in this determination are the working class and the trade union movement.