[Marxism] George Matthews dies

["Jack Cade" <jack.cade@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

        George Matthews, a long-time leadership member of the
British CP has died. Matthews was generally believed to have been
a police agent by the more intelligent CP members. He was
certainly well-placed throughout his entire life to be so. At
every key stage of its rotten evolution he was present.

        He was a farmer and studied agriculture at Reading
University yet wrote nothing about it, ever. What was that all
about?

        The MI5 bug story was a disgrace. Bugs in those days were
quite large devices, mainly because of the size of the battery.
The EC conference room at 16 King Street was on the ground floor.
On the street side there was a platform that could sit 3 or 4
people. The bug was hidden in a batten that was screwed to the
back (not in a table leg), as if it were reinforcing. It was only
discovered when the platform was demolished. I'd heard that
someone in the postroom (on the other side of the building) had
been playing around with one of those Soviet multi-band radios
and had picked up the EC meeting. Yet nothing was done about it.
(The Political Committee met in the General Secretary's office
upstairs).

        The nonsense of the 'secret fund' is more bullshit.
Frances Beckett, a former Labour Press Officer, who wrote a CP
history 'The Enemy Within' was also taken in by this:

"The leadership suppressed Russell's report, and also fell into a
deeper trap. With only one or two other British Party leaders in
the know, Matthews became complicit in the receipt of a secret
fund provided by Moscow to Parties across the world after a
collapse in membership in the wake of the Stalin revelations.

        Only when Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost
opened the ledgers in the Kremlin in the late 1980s did the
secret come out. The Party leadership group refused the money
after 1972, but the fact that Matthews's successor as Assistant
General Secretary had regularly visited Baron's Court tube
station in west London to collect a shopping bag of used fivers
from an unseen Soviet contact, had trapped the leadership in a
relationship with the Soviet Union."

        The CPSU international department apparently gave them
£40,000 (approx $75,748) a year. You would have expected the CPSU
to donate solidarity to its fellow parties to some extent. A
sizeable chunk of it was for pensions for old CPers who worked
for the Comintern etc. What were they expected to do with this
paltry sum? Even at old prices once you'd rented an office and
paid a couple of people there wouldn't be much left. It would be
interesting as an exercise for some bourgeois political
campaigners and some PR people to put together a package of what
would be needed to run a political party of any consequence. I
doubt if they would be able to design anything for less than
about a million a year. If someone came to you and asked you to
run a revolutionary party for £40,000 a year you would laugh at
them.

        The truth is that the British CP was not a poor
organisation. Most of its money came neither from Moscow Gold or
membership dues and literature sales but from the businesses it
ran. The mystery is not where the money came from but how they
wasted it all. They were not trapped by financial dependency or
orders from Moscow. The CP became more and more right-wing from
the 60s. It got so bad there were even members who seriously
argued for incomes policies in its publications. The leadership
and significant parts of the membership were openly anti-Soviet
for years. They were embarrassed by communism. Paradoxically they
wanted the recognition of the world communist movement because it
gave them some status. 'Marxism Today', supposedly the CP
theoretical journal, (editor Martin Jacques, CP EC member since
1968) became the house magazine of the Kinnockite precursors of
New Labour.

Farleigh Press was the CP printing operation that not only
printed its own material but was a commercial operation that
printed religious tracts and all sorts of stuff.

Progressive Tours (still exists) was its travel agency that
reputedly brought in over a million a year to the party coffers.
It was sold to its managing director for a token pound.

Central Books (exists as a distributor) was its bookshop and
distribution arm that had sole rights to imports of books from
socialist countries. Collets bookshops and distributors was also
owned by party members.

Lawrence and Wishart (still extant) were its publishers but it is
unlikely that great amounts were made from them.

It is understood that there was also an import/export business.

None of these firms (most of them formally owned by the Party)
profits ever appeared in the CP accounts nor did members ever ask
questions about them.

        Where did it go? Well a lot of it went into keeping up
appearances in elections. The old rule was that if you stood 50
candidates in a General Election you got a five minute TV
broadcast. So the CP made sure they qualified for that.
(Electioneering is a very expensive activity as the Respect Party
are finding out. Once about to break the mould of British
politics they will consider themselves lucky if they get George
Galloway elected next month.)

        The fact that the Morning Star still manages to survive
as a daily paper without the Soviet orders shows that the Moscow
Gold factor was a myth.

Jack

========================================================
>From the London Independent by Chris Myant, former assistant
Editor of the Morning Star and part of the CP right-wing.

George Lloyd Matthews, political activist and journalist: born
Sandy, Bedfordshire 24 January 1917; Assistant General Secretary,
Communist Party of Great Britain 1949-57; Assistant Editor, Daily
Worker (later the Morning Star) 1957-59, Editor 1959-74; married
1940 Betty Summers (died 2002); died London 29 March 2005.

        For three decades in the middle of the last century,
there was a café round the corner from Covent Garden fruit and
veg market in London where you could sit at a table next to the
leaders of the Communist Party of Great Britain. You would not
have been able to hear much; the noise in the cramped quarters
would have daunted even the most assiduous of MI5 listeners.

        And they did not need to try. As was revealed in 1975 by
George Matthews - one of the regulars at that small lunchtime
get-together for over 30 years - MI5 had planted a listening
device in a leg of the table on the rostrum in the meeting hall
at the nearby headquarters of the Communist Party at King Street.
Of course, Matthews was well aware, long before then, that
everything he did and said was followed - and not just by the
readers of the Daily Worker (later the Morning Star), which he
edited for 18 years, or the audiences he addressed through
leaflets, pamphlets or speeches at halls and street corners up
and down Britain.

        What he found less comfortable as the years went by was
the contradiction between his intensely human view of other
people and the mounting evidence that the political ideal through
which he had tried to express his commitment was shrouded in the
terrible consequences of Stalinist brutality. This contradiction
eventually took the individuals round that lunch table in
different directions in the 1980s and 1990s - in Matthews's case,
into conflict with the group that had control over the Morning
Star. For many of them, the Soviet Union could do little wrong.

        George Matthews was born in 1917 in the Bedfordshire
village of Sandy, where his father ran a 500-acre farm. He went
up to study Agriculture at Reading University as the Spanish
Civil War was in full swing. First, he was involved in the
university Labour Students Federation, and then privately joined
the Communist Party in 1938. He served as National Vice-President
of the National Union of Students and was adopted as the Labour
Party candidate for Mid Bedfordshire, which would have been
impossible had his Communist Party membership been made public.

        On the outbreak of the Second World War, he announced his
Party membership at a time when the British CP leadership was
supporting the idea of an anti-Fascist war - only to see the
"line" changed to one of opposition, on orders from the Comintern
in Moscow. Matthews went back to farming as a "reserved"
occupation, which meant he was never conscripted. Out of uniform,
but producing food for the war effort, he could still engage in
politics. At the Party Congress in 1943, he was elected on to the
Central Committee. Six years later he was appointed Assistant
General Secretary. "He looks young, but he's a great boy," the
General Secretary Harry Pollitt told Congress delegates.

        In this role Matthews was essentially the most senior
internal Party worker, co-ordinating the network of branches,
factory members and trade union activists running all kinds of
organisations and campaigns which made the Communist Party such
an important target for surveillance.

        Among his first responsibilities was helping Harry
Pollitt prepare a new programme for the Party. This was the era
of the show trials through which Joseph Stalin secured the
execution of many popular Communist leaders in Eastern Europe, so
there is a deep irony in the fact that the basic idea of this
programme, for a broad alliance of people engaged in open
political rather than conspiratorial work, was put to the British
Party leadership across the Kremlin table by Stalin.

        Negotiating with the ageing Stalin over a new political
programme was a far cry from nurturing the turnips in the green
fields of Bedfordshire, but George Matthews never lost his link
with the land. With his wife Betty, he created a magnificent
garden around the cottage they bought in Gloucestershire. He also
had a passion for good food (each day at his editor's desk at the
Daily Worker he would eat a roast pigeon washed down with black
tea) and a love of great music (his final role for the paper was
as opera critic).

        This did not make him a claret socialist, but he was no
grey functionary either. Like all who worked for the Party or the
paper - where everyone was paid the same wage - he earned little.
But you could not stay in the Communist leadership as long as
Matthews did and avoid responsibility for supporting things which
hindsight told you were wrong and, on many occasions, profoundly
evil. Matthews had made his choices fuelled by anger over what he
saw around him: the rise of Fascism, the Second World War, the
Empire, poverty and privilege.

        He spoke and wrote about these with verve and wit. A
capable editor, he had a natural way with ideas and words, but it
was not easy running the so called "miracle" of Fleet Street. The
paper, despite the intentions behind its change of name from
Daily Worker to Morning Star in 1966, could not find a proper
place for itself in the modern British media. The huge investment
of time and energy by supporters did not compensate for the
failure to break decisively with the burden of the past.

        Matthews had moved to the paper as Assistant Editor in
the wake of the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Congress in 1956,
at which he had been present. Like other international Communist
leaders, he had been shunted off on a factory visit while Nikita
Khrushchev gave his "secret speech" that shattered the myth of
Stalin's virtues. With other members of the British Party's
leadership, he was told only a few weeks later of the contents of
Khrushchev's address by the Daily Worker correspondent in Moscow,
Sam Russell.

        The leadership suppressed Russell's report, and also fell
into a deeper trap. With only one or two other British Party
leaders in the know, Matthews became complicit in the receipt of
a secret fund provided by Moscow to Parties across the world
after a collapse in membership in the wake of the Stalin
revelations.

        Only when Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost
opened the ledgers in the Kremlin in the late 1980s did the
secret come out. The Party leadership group refused the money
after 1972, but the fact that Matthews's successor as Assistant
General Secretary had regularly visited Baron's Court tube
station in west London to collect a shopping bag of used fivers
from an unseen Soviet contact, had trapped the leadership in a
relationship with the Soviet Union.

        In the head offices of the Party at King Street, a
decaying rabbit warren of old staircases, hidden basements,
fading files and intense discussion, this leadership wrestled,
for instance, with opposition to the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968. They pulled the rug from under their own
feet when it came to the delivery of a vision of a more
democratic Britain. Matthews invested great energy in leading the
preparation of the new vision in 1976 and 1977. This redrafted
"British Road to Socialism" split the Party and paved the way for
its eventual demise.

        This did not stop Matthews from responding eagerly to new
ideas. When, in the late 1970s, a motion that the Party executive
committee give its support to the nascent gay rights movement
looked like facing defeat, Matthews gave a sharp statement of his
belief in the inherent value of everyone with whom he shared the
planet. The motion was passed.

        Unfortunately, as with most of Matthews's words in the
cut and thrust of these arguments, whether in the committee room
or around the café table, no record of them remains - other than
that possibly provided by the nearby table-leg.

Chris Myant 



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