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Yours in the Struggle —

Reminiscences of Tim Buck _

“Yours in the Struggle”’, edited
_ by William Beeching and Phyllis
Clarke and published by NC
Press (1978), Toronto, is based on
a Series of taped interviews given
by- Tim Buck to John Reynolds
for the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation in 1965.

Needless to say there is a wide
gulf between a printed book and
taped interviews. If the editors do
their work as they should with
great care, and essential research
to check facts and other relevant
evidence the gulf would narrow.

_No doubt taped interviews can

aid in imparting a certain flow and
Color to writing, But this is ac-
Companied with grave disadvan-
‘tages. It is difficult in an interview
to always state details with suf-
_ ficient accuracy of recollection.
And, taping provides little time to
sure that one has formulated
One’s thoughts with adequate
Precision. In addition, to rely only
On oral history has its own pitfalls,
Particularly if the book is a politi-
Cal piece. For even the best minds
are apt to remember events selec-
tively.

Tim Buck led the Communist
Party for 33 years as its general-
Secretary. He became known
through the length and breadth of
Canada as Mr. Communist. As an
outstanding political leader and ©
organizer, a creative Marxist and
writer he authored a total of 37
books and pamphlets during his
lifetime. He wrote about the
many and varied problems facing
the working people of our coun-
tty, elaborating the proposals of
the Party he headed for the solu-
tion of those problems in
Capitalist-ruled Canada.

_ Tim Buck was an outstanding
‘Internationalist for he understood
Well the dialectical relationship
between proletarian inter-
Mationalism and genuine pat-
Nlotism. He was an ardent champ-
10n of the Soviet Union and of the
World socialist system. Many of
1S Major writings were devoted
to the problems of peace and
Socialism on a world scale which -
he ably related to the problems
Confronting Canadian workers, as
Well as the present and future of
anada.

Communist Party general-
S€cretary, William Kashtan in the !
foreword to the book ‘“Tim Buck
— A Conscience for Canada’’ by
Vscar Ryan, wrote: ‘‘Tim’s name
IS bound up with every. stage of
the Struggle of the working class
i Canada, to which he made a
Signal contribution’’.

Members of the Communis
Party appreciate fully the role
Tim Buck played in helping to de-
Velop policy, strategy and tactics
for the working-class and prog-
Tessive movement in Canada.

€y are well aware of the sub-
Stantial contribution he made in.
the. building of the Communist

arty of Canada —a party built in
Struggle not only against capital
ut also against alien trends in the
Working-class movement, such as
“l8ht opportunism and left sec-
tarianism typified by Trotskyism
_Maoism. Canadian Com-
- Munists are conscious that Tim’s

own personal history is tied
closely to the history of the Party
he helped to found and loved, and
to the history of Canada and her
working people. :

All of this stands as testimony
to the fact that’if Tim Buck had
edited, or supervised the editing,
of his taped interviews to make a
printed book, the loose formula-
tions and inaccuracies of which
the book under review has many,
its one-sided or -not fully
rounded-out versions of happen-
ings of great historic significance
would have been corrected.

Unfortunately for the Canadian
and international working-class
movement this was not to be. He
was stricken by serious illness
and finally death before work on
the book had got fully underway.
And, equally unfortunately, the
editors of the book displayed a
lack of political acumen, a lack of
knowledge of the history of the
Communist Party and _ the
working-class movement, and of
significant political events, suf-
ficient to enable them to measure
up to the greatness of the man
whose reminiscences they under-
took to edit.

‘*Yours in the Struggle”’ is not a
fitting tribute to Tim Buck; it does
not reveal the true dimensions of
this remarkably brilliant Marxist
and consistent. champion of the
working-class of our country.
The editors of this book have
produced a product that gives
Tim into the hands of the enemies
of socialism and the Communist
Party; it provides ammunition to
attack socialism where it. exists,
particularly the Soviet Union as
the first land of socialism.

These attacks are now well un-
derway as the book reviewers for
the bourgeois press take full ad-
vantage of ‘“Yours in the Strug-
gle”’ and do so in the name of Tim
Buck. The Globe and Mail review,
January 7/78 by Morris Wolfe de-
picts Tim Buck as while ‘‘care-
fully defending the Moscow line
in public had serious reservations
about that line in private.’’ To
back up this characterization he
cites several quotes from *‘Yours
in the Struggle’’ including one on
the Moscow trial of Nikolai
Bukharin (more on this later).

Wolfe writes: ‘“What’s most
fascinating about ‘Yours in the
Struggle’ is the material left out by
Ryan and the Communist Party of
Canada’’. This is a reference to
“Tim Buck — A Conscience for
Canada”’ which does not pretend
to be an autobiography. He goes
on to say: ‘“‘No doubt, the
Peking-oriented NC Press takes
considerable pleasure in thus em-
barrassing its Moscow oriented
left-wing rival’.

A review of ‘Yours in the

Struggle’ by Desmond Morton:

for The Canadian Forum, which
in total amounts to a strong attack
onthe Communist Party, and par-
ticularly of Tim Buck, whom he
pictures as a Stalinist but lacking
“Stalin’s resources for dealing
with dissenters’, says of the
editors: ‘‘they have plainly
stretched party discipline by mar-
keting the manuscript with an

“openly schismatic publisher
... The review ends on the note
that the book having appeared
“under Magist auspices could
hardly have escaped his (Tim’s)
wrath.”’

The following distortions, par-
ticularly in the last chapters of the
book, would have been corrected
by Tim Buck if he had edited the
typescript. For instance, the sec-
tion of the book describing the
20th Congress of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union is con-
fined to exposure of the cult of the
personality around Stalin, and the
alleged run-around treatment the
fraternal delegates received at the
hands of their Soviet hosts. In the
first place, this alleged situation is
just not true. This reviewer was
present at that historic congress

as a guest and has personal know- -

ledge that the general secretaries
of fraternal parties present at the
congress were all personally
briefed on the exposure of the Sta-
lin cult.

More-over, in dealing only with
the negative aspects of the cult,
the book fails to take into account
the critical statement of the 20th
Congress on the cult of the per-
sonality, its condemnation of the
cult, and the measures im-
plemented to overcome its nega-
tive effects, including the full re-
storation of the principle of
socialist legality which was seri-
ously violated under the influence
of the cult. Further, there is not a
word in the section on the 20th
Congress of the tremendous im-
pact it had on world development,
and on the strategy and tactics of
Communist and Workers’ Par-
ties.

Another instance of the faulty
nature of taped interviews is the
way the book deals with the 1946
“*spy trials’’, directed to under-
mining the reputation of the
Communist Party, as part of
world imperialism’s preparation

‘for its cold war assault against
socialism and against peaceful
co-existence between states with
differing social systems. The re-
lating of this event is certainly
ambiguous and open to misrep-
resentation about the nature of
this case. The Communist Party
has always charged that this was a
politically-inspired case against a
then Communist Member of Par-
liament and others put on trial.
The one-sided and subjective ac-
count of these trials can only

leave confusion and doubt in the -

minds of the book’s readers.

To come back to the afore-
mentioned Bukharin trial, here
too, the situating of the trials in the
reminiscences leave much to be
desired. This quote taken from
the book has Tim saying, “‘Over
and over in my mind there went

the question: if Nikolai Bukharin °

joined an opposition group ...
thete had to be something wrong,
something which he considered
quite evil.’’ The reviewer (Wolfe)
states that ‘‘Buck was asked to
prepare a pamphlet about the
trials. He agreed, but despite sev-
eral attempts couldn’t bring him-
self to write it.’” As the editors

could have discovered by some re-
search, Tim Buck in collabora-
tion with R. Page Arnot, a British
Commutist, co-authored a pam-
phlet, ‘Fascist Agents Exposed
— In the Moscow Trials’’, pub-
lished by the Communist Party of
Great Britain.

‘The treatment of the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW)

likewise needed rounding-out. It

needed a more comprehensive
treatment of the limitations of the
TWW as an anarcho-syndicalist
organization. The way it stands in
the book leaves the reader with an
unbalanced political appraisal of
the role of anarcho-syndicalism.

_In dealing with the socialist
breakthrough, the book contains
loose formulations which tend to
slur over the Leninist law of the
uneven development of
capitalism and the law of revolu-
tion, that the socialist break-
through is most likely to come in
the weakest link in the chain of
world imperialism.

There are evident weaknesses
in the sections dealing with the
concept of socialist revolution.
The peaceful and non-peaceful
path, the transfer of political
power from the capitalist to the
working class, and the form and
content of working-class rule,
i.e., dictatorship of the pro-
letariat, are not dealt with suf-
ficiently and could lead to confu-
sion, particularly in the thinking
of young revolutionaries. The de-
finition of the proletariat given in
the book is not precise when it is
stated that “‘it means those who
are committed to the establish-
ment of socialism’’, when it is
generally understood to mean the
industrial working class.

The treatment of the struggle
against the right-wing position of
“‘American exceptionalism’,
which propagated the unscientific
notion that capitalism on the
North. American continent was
immune to the general laws gov-
erning capitalist production rela-.
tions, is not fully rounded out. It
tends to leave out important
forces involved in the Communist
Party’s struggle against that
right-opportunist line, particu-
larly the decisive role of the
Young Commuinst League.

As already mentioned in thts
reveiw, Tim Buck, being an up-
holder of objective truth, would
have completed his thoughts re-

sd

corded at the time of the inter-
viewing sessions. However, the
editors, no doubt enamored with
the subjective idea of “‘telling it in
Tim’s own words’’ in the in-
stances given, left these incom-
pleted thoughts of Tim Buck’s as
they were. However, this criter-
ion did not hold true for the
editors in all cases.

Here is an extract from the first
transcript of the tapes before edit-
ing: ‘One of the characteristics of
Slavic people, and I’ ve noticed it
particularly of the Russians as a
people, in big things they don’t
count cost. I’m of the opinion that
they accepted them in somewhat
that sense. They give themselves
to the achievement of something,
and they achieve it regardless of
cost. Very often it costs them a
great deal more than it costs us
here to achieve the same object.”’ ©

From the final book as repro-
duced on page 398: ‘‘The truth is
that these people had given so
much to the revolution, they
didn’t count costs, especially in
big things. Once they felt that
leadership was correct and was

‘fighting, there was no limit to

what they could do.”’

This example speaks for itself.
If the editors allowed themselves
this instance of editorial preroga-
tive, why did they not take into
account the need for more precise
formulation in other instances?

One has to ask why the editors
allowed such an important work
to go to print without exercising
their editorial right of seeking for
truth and objectivity in the mate-
rial they were editing? It is hard to
understand why, faced with what
would be a most difficult task to
fill in the uncompleted thoughts of
a comrade then deceased, and not
least, to check the facts, the
editors did not seek assistance
from Tim Buck’s closest col-
leagues throughout the years of
his leadership of the Communist
Party.

In this way a book could have
been produced from Tim’s re-
miniscences that would have
been a credit to the man and the
Party he led for so many years.
There is much that is good in
these reminiscences. But there is

‘also much, due to the editors’ in-

adequacies, that does little credit

_ to Tim Buck who stood as a polit-

ical giant among men.
— A. Dewhurst

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FEBRUARY 10, 1978—Page 9