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Core Argument¶
Here, Jock Haston, General Secretary of the British Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), addresses a formal complaint to the editors of Quatrième Internationale and the Fourth International regarding the June 1946 issue, which published the report of the April International Conference alongside the RCP’s ‘Proposals for Amendments’. The core of the grievance is a serious editorial misrepresentation: the RCP’s proposed amendments were rough notes drafted in response to the original resolution text, not the amended resolution that was ultimately published. By failing to indicate that numerous alterations, additions, and deletions had been made to the original draft before publication, the journal rendered the British proposals incomprehensible to any critical reader.
Haston substantiates this with two concrete examples. First, the original text contained substantial statistical data. The RCP proposed condensing these statistics, retaining only the general conclusions. The final draft did precisely this, cutting the majority of statistics. Consequently, a reader encountering the British proposal against the published text would find it senseless, as there were no statistics left to condense. Second, and more politically significant, the original resolution contained a passage arguing that the USSR could be fatally undermined without direct military intervention, simply through the combined economic, political, and diplomatic pressure of American and British imperialism. The RCP proposed eliminating this “conflict” in the report between the USSR’s strength as a world power and the probability of the bourgeoisie destroying its economic base through penetration and manoeuvres. This targeted passage was deleted from the final text. A reader of the published amendments would find no corresponding passage about the USSR being overthrown by mere diplomatic and economic pressure, making the British objection appear baseless.
The letter thus exposes a failure of editorial transparency that distorted the historical record of the International Conference’s deliberations. The polemic is not against a political opponent but against the journal’s own editorial board for a procedural and presentational error that undermined the RCP’s fraternal contribution. Haston frames the letter as an attempt to clear up confusion, promising further written discussion on other examples. The subtext, however, is a sharp rebuke: the journal has published the British proposals in a form that makes them look foolish, by silently removing the very textual targets they were designed to correct.