Breaking With The Party
His decision to leave the CPC in 1971 was primarily based upon his experiences within the Party from 1956 (the year of the Hungarian Revolution) up to, and after, the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968. During his 35 year tenure in the CPC, Ryerson was routinely asked to augment his historical writings in order to meet the prevailing philosophy at the time. After the internal party crisis between 1956 and 1957, Ryerson was forced to write an article stating his previous books and articles had given “a rather idealised treatment of the bourgeois democrats Lafontaine and Baldwin.” Blaming this on “liberalism,” he essentially turned his back on his earlier beliefs concerning 1837 and sought to align himself with the new revisionist tendencies within the CPC that came about during the post-Stalin debate. Ryerson’s beliefs concerning Marxism-Leninism differed greatly from that of the CPC of the late 1950s and early 1960s. His vision was brought to the forefront when in his article In France: “The Week of Marxist Thought”, he agreed with the leader of the French Communist party who argued:
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- that among the shoals to avoid, …, is the narrow, ‘cramped conception of Marxism-Leninism simply as a position to be defended, a fortress to be held, with every portcullis closed while one peers out over the battlements at all who are not ‘our people’ wandering on the distant plain’
This sentiment did resonate with the leadership of General Secretary Leslie Morris, who viewed the sentiments of the Popular Front in a much more favourable light than would be seen under the leadership of William Kashtan; it was under the stifling leadership of Kashtan that Ryerson made his final break with the CPC.
Read more about this topic: Stanley Brehaut Ryerson
Famous quotes containing the words the party, breaking with, breaking and/or party:
“Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;Mnot to be reckoned one character;Mnot to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“We are the party of all labor.
The whole earth shall be ours to share
And every race and craft our neighbor.
No idle class shall linger there
Like vultures on the wealth we render
From field and factory, mill and mine.
Tomorrow’s sun will rise in splendor
And light us till the end of time.”
—Eugène Pottier (1816–1887)