The Reasoner
During the 20th Party Congress in February, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev launched an attack on the rule of Joseph Stalin. He condemned the Great Purge and accused Joseph Stalin of abusing his power. He announced a change in policy and gave orders for the Soviet Union's political prisoners to be released. Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, found it difficult to accept these criticisms of Stalin and said of a portrait of his hero that hung in his living room: "He's staying there as long as I'm alive". Francis Beckett pointed out: "Pollitt believed, as did many in the 1930s, that only the Soviet Union stood between the world and universal Fascist dictatorship. On balance, he reckoned Stalin was doing more good than harm; he liked and admired the Soviet leader; and persuaded himself that Stalin's crimes were largely mistakes made by subordinates. Seldom can a man have thrown away his personal integrity for such good motives." (1)
E. P. Thompson wrote to John Saville about the speech: "It is the biggest Confidence Trick in our Party's history. Not one bloody concession as yet to our feelings and integrity; no apology to the rank-and-file, no self-criticism, no apology to the British people, no indication of the points of Marxist theory which now demand revaluation, no admission that our Party had undervalued intellectual and ideological work, no promise of a loosening of inner party democracy, and of the formation of even a discussion journal so that this can be fought within our ranks, not one of the inner ring of the Executive felt that he might have to resign, if even temporarily." (2)
Thompson thought that Khrushchev's speech might allow more free discussion within the CPGB, and fellow historian, John Saville, began to produce the critical, but internally directed, journal The Reasoner. The masthead included the words of Karl Marx: "To leave error unrefuted is to encourage intellectual immorality". According to Thompson, "self-imposed restrictions" or even "actual suppression of sharp criticism" revealed the undemocratic nature of the CPGB. (3) Saville later admitted that "our main purpose in the first issue was to underline the backwardness, timidity and narrow bloody-mindedness of the leadership of the British party in their refusal to offer the opportunities for a serious analysis of the history of Soviet society." (4)
In its first edition Thompson and Saville highlighted the importance of freedom of expression in the Communist Party of Great Britain. "It is now, however, abundantly clear to us that the forms of discipline necessary and valuable in a revolutionary party of action cannot and never should have been extended so far into the processes of discussion, of creative writing, and of theoretical polemic. The power which will shatter the capitalist system and create Socialism is that of the free human reason and conscience expressed with the full force of the organised working-class. Only a party of free men and women, accepting a discipline arising from truly democratic discussion and decision, alert in mind and conscience, will develop the clarity, the initiative, and the élan, necessary to arouse the dormant energies of our people. Everything which tends to cramp the intellect and dull their feelings, weakens the party, disarms the working class, and makes the assault upon Capitalism - with its deep defences of fraud and force - more difficult." (5)
Typed onto stencils and the printed on a hand powered duplicator, E. P. Thompson and John Saville published about 650 copies of The Reasoner (that number included a reprint of 300). They had a small advertisement in the daily worker but their request for a further notice of a reprint was refused. The Collet's Bookshops in London and Glasgow took copies. They received hundreds of letters of support including from Lawrence Daly, the militant trade unionist, Hymie Levy the mathematician, and Malcolm McEwen, the left-wing journalist. (6) Rodney Hilton believed the journal might become the best bridge between the different tendencies inside the labour movement. (7) The novelist, Doris Lessing, wrote to them saying: We have all been part of the terrible, magnificent, bloody, contradictory process, the establishing of the first Communist regime in the world - which has made possible our present freedom to say what we think, and to think again creatively." (8)
Two more editions of The Reasoner were published. James Friell (Gabriel) of the Daily Worker, provided cartoons for the journal. It took Thompson five days to type the 40,000 words. There were articles by the American economist, Paul Sweezy, George Douglas Cole, a member of the Labour Party, on democratic centralism, Robert W. Davies on Stalin's Purges and the Soviet Show Trials and Ronald Meek on the need for independent publications. (9) The CPGB was unwilling to allow even this form of dissidence and on 31st August 1956, its political committee that included Harry Pollitt, Rajani Palme Dutt and John Ross Campbell, ordered the publication to cease. When they refused Thompson and Saville were suspended from the CPGB. (10)
Primary Sources
(1) E. P. Thompson and John Saville, The Reasoner (July 1956)
It is now, however, abundantly clear to us that the forms of discipline necessary and valuable in a revolutionary party of action cannot and never should have been extended so far into the processes of discussion, of creative writing, and of theoretical polemic. The power which will shatter the capitalist system and create Socialism is that of the free human reason and conscience expressed with the full force of the organised working-class. Only a party of free men and women, accepting a discipline arising from truly democratic discussion and decision, alert in mind and conscience, will develop the clarity, the initiative, and the élan, necessary to arouse the dormant energies of our people. Everything which tends to cramp the intellect and dull their feelings, weakens the party, disarms the working class, and makes the assault upon Capitalism - with its deep defences of fraud and force - more difficult... We take our stand as Marxists... History has provided the chance... for the scientific methods of Marxism to be integrated with the finest traditions of the human reason and spirit which we may best describe as Humanism.