The Communist Movement I-II. [antikvár]

PREFACE 'It seems,' wrote Isaac Deutscher in 1950, in one of the articles collected in his book Heretics and Renegades, 'that the only dignified attimde the intellecmal ex-Communist can take is to rise au-dessus de la melée* At first sight this seems strange advice. Let us examine it more closely. In these pages, written in 1950, Deutscher analyses the reflections on Commimism published by certain writers - Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, André Gide, Louis Fischer, Richard Wright and Stephen Spender - who had been either members or fellow-travellers of the party, and he comes very quickly to the conclusion that it would have been better if all of them had remained silent. It is obvious that Deutscher does not like the intellectuals who were expelled from the party, or at least not those who were expelled after 1929, that is, after the defeat of the left opposition. They find it too easy, he seems to be saying, to play the role of renegades, towards which all circumstances impel them - the objective conditions, the anathemas of the expulsion procedure, and the condescending sarcasm of those whose expulsion took place a litde earlier. Actually, one is always expelled at the wrong moment, either too late or too soon. Too late in relation to the objective facts about Stalinism, the USSR and the societies that have resulted from the expansion of Russia's sphere of influence in the world, facts that one has concealed from oneself over a long period, in the ideological haze surroimding the priorities of action and the tricks played by 'historical reason'. Too soon in relation to the possibilities of being understood and followed within the party itself, where one wages a batde in which one is always in the minority, a batde that is lost in advance. But this twofold lateness - delay in achieving awareness in relation to the objective density of the