ABSTRACT
He came back fighting. He fought with logic, like the lawyer he was, carefully refuting with evidence, one by one, each charge against him. That same month, September 1931, he typed up a sixteen-page letter to the ‘Comrades of the Communist Party’. In the end, though, he decided not to send this to his South African comrades, but to the Comintern. He began the missive with the question: ‘who is responsible for the expulsions?’ Responsibility, he baldly stated, lay chiefly with Douglas Wolton, ‘who … came from Europe last year with the mission of putting me out of “leadership” and eventually, it seems, membership’. The only others voting for the resolution, Sidney had learned, were Moses Kotane and Lazar Bach. The latter’s ‘membership of the “Political Bureau”, of the Party Executive, or even of the party, I for one, and I think most of you, had never heard before, indeed his authority to vote expulsions calls for investigation’. But the remaining members of the political bureau and the Central Executive members, ‘knew nothing of the expulsions. Under the Party constitution’, Sidney observed, ‘no such body as a Political Bureau is provided for, certainly not with powers of expulsion – that seems perhaps a matter to be brought up rather by rank and file members in the branch or group’.
