SPGB Debate: "Which way to Socialism?" (1986)

 Party News from the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

I've posted this notice for the debate with the CPGB separately on the blog — away from the other meetings advertised in the December 1986 Socialist Standard  — for the rather mundane reason that I only just now spotted the notice in the original PDF. It was hidden away . . . which makes you wonder how many people saw the notice at the time when the Standard originally came out?

Unfortunately, I've no idea if there is an audio recording of the above debate but there is an audio recording of an earlier debate with Monty Johnstone. It dates from November 1982; the subject of the debate was 'Did Lenin distort Marx'; and the SPGB representative in that debate was Steve Coleman.

Monty Johnstone was an interesting political figure because he was, to the best of my knowledge, the only member of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party (1944-49) who returned to the official Communist fold. Interestingly, Eric Hobsbawm doesn't mention Johnstone's lost Trotskyist weekend in his 2007 obituary for Johnstone in the Guardian. Maybe he didn't know? Or, maybe, Hobsbawm right to the very end was doing that CPGB thing of always taking the opportunity to marginalise and hide any mention of the Trots.