Europe's New Anti-Communist Communists

...Another manifesto signed by the leading contributors to France-Observateur (a more high-brow version of the National Guardian), edited by Claude Bourdet, one of the heroes of the Resistance, and Temoignage Chretien (Christian Witness) denounced the Soviet action...

...Whether such individuals stay Communists, or begin, as Pratolini has, to follow the long road of Silone, Koestler et al...

...The job was begun by Khrushchev with his attack on the "cult of personality...

...If there once was the anti-anti-Communist, there is now the anti-Communist Communist...

...In the bewildering categories of contemporary politics, a new type is arising...

...Defections occur where there is a "bridge" to a nearby world...

...He is author of Work and Its Discontents, edited The New American Right, and has lectured on sociology at Columbia University...

...But what of the Communists who have defected...

...Even the CNE, headed by Louis Aragon, the novelist and director of Les Lettres Francaises, issued a statement asking the Kadar Government to safeguard the "life, physical liberty and moral interests of Hungarian writers and intellectuals.' Fearing even this breach, Humanite warned the party intellectuals they would be judged severely if they signed anti-Soviet petitions...

...Most important, the young intellectuals grouped around The Reasoner, an unofficial Communist discussion organ, have quit...

...For the past four years, the French Communist party has lived in severe isolation from the rest of the country...

...But Tito's equivocal support of Kadar and his arrest of Djilas have dashed the hopes of many dissident Communists...

...winner of the 1955 Goncourt prize, Pierre Seghers...

...Natalino Sapegno, Gaetano Trombatore and Vezio Crisafulli, three distinguished scientists...

...But the greater number of important Communists who have expressed dissatisfaction with the party's stand on Hungary, particularly the deputies and the trade-union officials, have not left...

...The Communists could mobilize less than 7,000 persons, and the crowds were easily contained around the Place de la Republique, far away from the center of the city...

...The analogy to Spain is relevant, and comes spontaneously to people's minds: The demands of the Hungarian people were simple, the nature of the Russian aggression clear, and, most important, the emotional ferment is taking place largely among students, writers and intellectuals, who traditionally have formed the Left in Europe, and whose emotional identification with the Russian Revolution had given the Communist movement, even after the Rajk hanging, the Slansky trial and the Jewish-doctors plot, some continuing semblance of intellectual respectability...

...No single answer is possible...

...And in Italy, Vasco Pratolini, whose novels of proletarian life in Florence had made him, along with Moravia and Vittorini, one of Italy's major postwar writers, announced his break with the Italian Communist party in the left-wing weekly Il Punto—after Unita, organ of the Italian Communist party, had refused to print his denunciation of Russia's actions...

...So far, in their bewilderment, most of the new anti-Communist Communists don't know where they are going...

...Among the "left intellectuals" many regroupings are taking place...

...Eleven editors of the "progressive" newspapers Il Paese and Paese Sera (published in Rome), all of them members of the Communist party, wrote a letter of protest to Unita against the party newspaper's version of the events in Hungary...

...I described the rejoicing of the people at their national revolution over a ruthless police dictatorship...

...But in France the workers particularly have no such outlets...

...Shortly before the events in Hungary, Aime Cesaire, a surrealist poet and a Negro Communist deputy from Martinique, resigned from the Communist party for its refusal to change its Stalinist habits...

...An old Talmudic remark has it that if you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there...

...Kings-ley Martin, editor of the left-wing New Statesman and Nation, writing in his column under the signature of "Critic," said: "Russia has, I think, finally destroyed the illusions of all but a handful of its fanatical partisans...

...It was finished by the Kremlin when the order to destroy the Hungarian Revolution was given...

...But few other figures have left...

...I described, without in any sense approving of mob justice, the lynching of AVH men [secret police...

...The reasons lie in the relationship of these parties to other "left" forces in their countries...

...Over 150 contributors to the liberal Catholic intellectual magazine Esprit, which is probahly the most influential magazine among intellectuals in France, expressed "their unequivocal indignation at the brutal intervention of the Russian army against the Hungarian people...

...And yet, while there has been much confusion and questioning among the French workers, few of the Communist-led unions, other than the printers, have expressed solidarity with the Hungarian workers, and thus far there have been few major defections...

...True, the party has been unable to mobilize any counter-demonstrations as it did consistently in the postwar years...

...Whether they defect—and lose their privileges—remains to be seen...

...They are gathering forces for the Italian Communist party congress which opens next month...

...In Paris, a mob of youths, stirred by a memorial meeting at the Arch of Triumph, marched on the offices of Humanite, the French Communist daily, and fired several floors of the building...

...It is likely that Togliatti, walking a careful tightrope, will retain control...

...Equally serious disruptions occurred in Italian Communist intellectual circles...

...Trucks containing thousands of Gardes Republicains rumbled through the cobbled streets, and groups in full pack took up strategic stations around Madeleine, the side streets near the Etoile and other central spots...

...The intellectuals have their magazines to provide havens...

...I asked: 'If the Soviet intervention was necessary to put down counter-revolution, how is to be explained that some of the fiercest resistance of all was in the working-class districts of Ujpest and Csepel?' " said Peter Fryer, the Worker's Budapest correspondent, in explaining which dispatches were omitted...

...to the understanding that liberty, not "the Party," is the basic prerequisite of socialism, remains to be seen...

...The Reasoner had been started by two young university lecturers, E. P. Thompson and John Saville, one at Leeds, the other at Hull, to discuss a reorientation in Communist ideology as a result of the Khrushchev speech...

...The setback was so severe that a week later Le Peuple, organ of the CGT, carried a front-page declaration claiming that all differing points of view about Hungary were compatible within the organization...

...They are still, ideologically, Communists, but the mystique of Russia has been destroyed...

...and the deputies Corbi and Giolitti, who lead a group of about 30 opposition members in the Communist Parliamentary group...

...however, to take a stronger stand led its most prominent non-Communists to stalk out...

...Eugenio Reale, the former Italian Ambassador to Poland...

...The deeply ingrained streak of suspicion of the other classes which has always marked French working-class attitudes remains the basic bulwark of Communist party strength...

...Even so, four of the leading Communist writers in France, Claude Morgan, an editor of Les Lettres Francaises, Claude Roy, whose book on China had been widely circulated, J. F. Rolland, a young philosopher, and Roger Vailland, signed a statement denouncing Soviet military intervention...

...This isolation doesn't make it less, but more dangerous...

...It is an entire people and not a handful of armed refugees that are being fired upon by the Red Army...

...In a unanimity rare in French intellectual life, almost every writer of standing was moved to protest against the threat to the Hungarian writers, the majority of whom, after all, were Communists who had supported fully the regime of Imre Nagy...

...When the Central Committee, before the events in Hungary, ordered Thompson and Saville to suspend The Reasoner, the party's intellectuals rallied to its support...

...People come out in groups, not as individuals, and, so to speak, with their guns...

...A group of 95 Communist and "progressive" intellectuals (ineluding Carlo Muscetta, former editor of the review Societa...

...Hundreds of individual Communists, principally from the professional groups, have resigned...

...The Communists have learned the psychological wisdom that in constant action they can keep their own doubters in line, that in conflict loyalties once again become engaged, and that in aggressiveness they can polarize a political situation and once again, perhaps, stampede the "emotional leftists" while splitting the political center...

...Despite the collapse of the intellectual periphery, however, the core of the party seemingly remains untouched...

...The party's political bureau, to avoid embarrassment, slipped the text to the Ansa Press Agency, which released it, whereupon the party accused the signers of a "breach of discipline," causing some of the individuals to repent...

...At this time, that isolation is, paradoxically, the source of its cohesion...

...Seven of the Daily Worker's staff of 30 have left the paper, including the paper's cartoonist, film critic and its Budapest correspondent—who protested the fact that the Daily Worker had cut and then refused to print his eyewitness dispatches on the Hungarian events...

...In England, the strong left wing within the Labor party offers a haven for the Communists disillusioned with Russia...

...For, if only to close ranks, the party will become more militant, more aggressive...

...At Oxford, Cambridge, London and Leeds, thousands of university students organized days of mourning, and, from meager pockets, contributed thousands of pounds for Hungarian relief...

...Not only was Sartre's invective blunt and final (" it is not and never will be possible to resume relations with the men who are currently running the French Communist party...

...A prudent man, it is unlikely that he will expel the dissidents...

...This spectacular and unprecedented declaration by the largest Communist-led labor movement in Western Europe became a rallying point for those who have been seeking to shake the leadership of Togliatti in the Italian Communist party...

...The defection of Pratolini is a sharp blow to the party's prestige in the literary field...

...These included Marcel Pagnol of the Academic Franqaise, Roger Ikor...

...The failure of the CNE...

...Among the quondam fellow-traveling groups, reaction was equally sharp...

...Many "new roads" are being discovered...

...Daniel Bell is on leave from Fortune magazine to serve with the Congress for Cultural Freedom...

...Does that mean the disintegration of the Communist parties of Western Europe, or the possibility that some parties might declare their ideological independence of Moscow and actually go on a road of their own...

...But it was an empty alarum...

...Jean-Paul Sartre, whose mercurial moods reflect the ideological unease of the French intellectuals, returned home from a friend's house, where he had seen some television films of Russian tanks in Budapest, and declared: "It is an abject lie to pretend that the workers are fighting at the side of the Soviet troops...

...Di Vittorio's follow-up statement that "those who imagine it will be possible for things to continue in the socialist world as before are mistaken" was endorsed by Dozza, the Communist Mayor of Bologna...

...Every one of their phrases, their every move, is the outgrowth of thirty years of lies and sclerosis"), but the events in Hungary exploded the Comite National des Ecrivains (CNE), the organization of writers which had grown out of the Resistance and which the Communists had controlled...

...Most of the French Communists read only the party press, and all other news is greeted with suspicion and hostility...

...I argued that there was no "white terror' in Hungary...

...Frangois Mauriac, the leading Catholic novelist, and Edouard Herriot, the "old man" of the Radical party, resigned from the Franco-Soviet Friendship Society...

...What remains is confusion, with the likelihood that the Communist parties of France and Italy will emerge as hard-core parties, stripped of any respectable intellectual support, yet powerful political entities nonetheless...

...Gomulka is their hero, and all hopes are now pinned on his ability to cut away from Moscow...

...The Communist party of Italy has suffered hard blows...

...In Britain, the Communist party is in shambles...

...Hence, in the next year the European Communist parties will take a "militant" left line, playing up colonial issues, exploiting all domestic discontents...

...Now all that is gone...

...The non-Communist Force Ouvriere and the Christian labor federation are weak...

...At best, there will be some erosion, some drifting away into apathy...

...the strike was a complete and dismal failure...

...I condemn the Soviet aggression wholeheartedly and without any reserve whatever...

...Soviet repression in Hungary antagonizes Western Communists Europe's New Anti-Communist Communists By Daniel Bell Paris Not since Spain has an event so quickened the emotions of Europe as the fighting in Budapest...

...The day after Humanite was burned, the Communist party announced a giant mobilization to beat back the "advancing forces of fascism...

...and many contributors to the weekly Il Contemporaneo) signed a statement which they asked to be printed in Unita...

...In Italy, the Nenni Socialist party, which has an influence within the Italian Confederation of Labor, is a possible stepping-stone outside the Communist orbit...

...the Communist Senators Terracini and Marchesi...

...The Reasoner had attracted the support of Professor Hyman Levy, a well-known mathematician and author of a standard volume on dialectical materialism, of Christopher Hill, a well-known historian, and other leading academic Communists...

...But in their last issue the editors call Russia's action a "criminal blunder" and dissociate themselves from the British Communist leadership...

...The night of the demonstration, Paris was tenser than it had been at any time since the war...

...In fact, with such magazines as France-Observateur, Il Punto and the New Statesman and Nation, the independent "Left" has an effective chain of magazine opinion...

...A few days later, the Communist-controlled General Confederation of Labor (CGT) called for a one-hour general strike, not in defense of the Communist party but against the "rising forces of fascism...

...John Horner, secretary of the Fire Brigades Union and a member of the party's executive committee, resigned, as did Alex Moffat, a party member for 32 years, who had been one of the Communist stalwarts among the Scottish miners...

...Rumors swept the city that the Communists were mobilizing "the Algerians" in the northeast sector of the city and would come storming down the Champs Elysees...

...in politics, there is no unconditional surrender, at least not ideologically...

...Resolutions expressing solidarity with Hungary were passed by Communist party locals in Udina, Mantua and Cueno, and received the approval of the Communist Mayor of La Spezia...

...Where will they go...

...In France, the most spectacular developments have taken place among the intellectuals...

...The Communist party's base in the British trade unions, which has been quite extensive, has been broken...

...Shortly after Erno Gero had called upon Russian troops to intervene, the Communist-led Italian Confederation of Labor (CGIL), at a meeting on October 27 presided over by its secretary, Giuseppe Di Vittorio, declared that "these tragic events constitute a historical and definitive condemnation of undemocratic methods of government," and deplored the fact "that foreign troops were called upon to intervene in Hungary and that they did so...

...If Tito had raised the banner of independence, substantial sections of the Italian, British and Norwegian Communist parties would have begun open struggles against the existing leadership...

...One reason seems fairly clear...

...and dozens of others...

...The Socialist party has no outstanding leadership, while Mollet's blustering position on North Africa and Suez has made him a comic figure among left intellectuals and workers...