Letter: Shut Up and Shut Out (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Shut Up and Shut Out

At the meeting of the "Hackney Committee Against Racialism”, controlled by the IMG, I explained to the chairman that I wished to explain the Socialist case. Though I was invited, as my name is in the Hackney Council brochure, the chairman stated that I was not to speak. I did not quarrel at all but suggested a speaker from the Socialist Party. "Oh dear no, Tariq Ali is our man.” In brief, red fascists are no different from black fascists.

Recently a poster on the wall at the London School of Economics announced a meeting of IS. I knocked at the door and asked if it was all right to sit and listen. They knew I was a member of the Socialist Party. The answer was "No”. I suppose they’re a secret society.

S. Highams

London N.1

Life and Times: Way back when (2025)

The Life and Times column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was a ring on the bell. When I opened the door, a smart looking young man wearing suit, collar and tie and carrying a brief case told me he was selling insurance (those were the days when insurance was still sold door to door), but then he quickly added that what he was really interested in was the Socialist Party of Great Britain. He was very polite and said he knew about the SPGB and had found my name as a contact. I was surprised but also pleased to have someone actually coming round to the house to find out about socialism. So I invited him in and we sat down in the front room. He asked me to tell him about the Party and I tried to sum it up as quickly as possible. I said we stood for a moneyless, wageless democratic world of free access to all goods and services, without leaders or led, based on the idea that this will happen when the majority class in society – all those who had to work for a wage or salary – develop the consciousness necessary to democratically take power from the tiny minority in society who own and control the wealth and to establish the new society. Or something like that.

Andrew – that was his name – seemed enthusiastic and I showed him some of the Party’s leaflets and pamphlets. He appeared particularly interested in certain ideas and positions – for example our attitude towards the use of violence as a political instrument (I told him we were opposed to it) and what was going on in Ireland at the time (it was the period of ‘The Troubles’). He appeared satisfied with this and asked if he could become a member and he would pay the subscription there and then. I told him there wasn’t a joining subscription and I couldn’t enrol him, but, if he came to our next branch meeting at the Swansea Central Library, he could apply to join then. He kept apologising for being an insurance salesman while patting his briefcase and telling me he needed to do that to keep the wolf from the door for himself and his family. I said I understood and he left, telling me he’d see me at our next Monday evening branch meeting.

I felt somehow exhilarated about this – until, that is, my wife emerged from the adjacent room, where she’d been listening to everything that had gone on. ‘He’s a policeman’, was the first thing she said. Wow! It took a moment to sink in, but then it dawned on me that his coming to the house and asking questions in particular about violence and Northern Ireland had to be a bit peculiar. It dawned on me that I’d been naïve. But maybe that was to the good, because, if he was a policeman – an undercover policeman – he might have had a weapon in that briefcase for if and when he might be challenged. And that felt a bit scary.

But was that over-dramatic? Well, I never really found out because Andrew never came to one of our meetings. But I did see him again – about a year later when I attended an indoor public meeting in Swansea put on by the organisation called the International Marxist Group. A group of us were selling our magazines and handing out our leaflets before we went in. As we did, I found myself faced with a casually dressed man who seemed to be one of the organisers. He wasn’t someone I recognised but he said hello to me, looked embarrassed and then sort of blurted out that he was out of the insurance game now and how was I? I realised it was Andrew and reciprocated his ‘hello’ before sitting down.

Make of that what you will. Was I (am I) being paranoid in regarding this as confirmation that he was a police spy? Maybe. But when in 2022 I read and reviewed for the Socialist Standard a book entitled Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century by David Caute, my mind went back to that time. The book’s author had drawn on official but publicly available documents which gave startling insights into the enormous efforts (and massive resources) put into tracking the activities and affiliations of an extraordinarily wide range of people and organisations suspected of being subversive, of constituting a possible ‘threat to national security’.

All this was brought back to me by a recent investigative series on BBC Radio 4 presented by Mark Steel and entitled Shadow World. The People Versus McDonald’s. It was largely about the so-called McLibel case in the 1990s when two anti-McDonald’s Greenpeace campaigners were pursued through the courts by that company for making claims about their activities and methods which McDonald’s said were libellous. The series was an interesting one in itself, but one of the things that emerged from it was the discovery by one of the campaigners that a member of her group she’d engaged in a two-year relationship with was a police infiltrator. He then vanished, but when she later tracked him down, it emerged that, while he was with her, he was married to someone else. She also discovered that other undercover policemen had had relationships with other female activists (over 60 of them in all) from small ‘suspect’ groups. One of these policemen had been involved with four different women, with one of whom he fathered a child. Finally, Mark Steel revealed that, as a member of one such ‘suspect’ group himself in the 1980s, his local branch of the Socialist Workers Party had discovered that one of their members was a police infiltrator, and that records now available showed that, from 1968 to 2008, Special Branch oversaw what he called the ‘massive expensive palaver’ of spying on more than 1,000 different organisations in Britain.

So why not the SPGB as part of that? Just in case. After all it would only be a small part of the massive expensive (and wasteful) palavers of every description that capitalism is full of.

Howard Moss

Smash! (1974)

From the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

A New Election Programme?

The most hilarious buffoonery of the election was the International Marxist Group’s putting up three candidates. At a press conference their representative was reported saying hopefully: “In an atmosphere of confrontation a few hundred votes can turn into tens of thousands” (Times, 13th Feb.). A different view from the one in their leaflet distributed on 1st May last year: May Day — End or New Beginning.

Shorn of all its flowery phrases (like “Mass Action”. “Mobilization”, “Confrontation”, “Counter-offensive” and all the boring old stuff about the failure of the wicked trade-union leaders who won’t “mobilize a united struggle to smash through Phase 2”), what this leaflet does is advise strikers to fight the police. It actually says this explicitly. We quote:

To do this [defend the picket lines] the local Trades Councils have to centralize our resources for fighting the police.

The absurdity of the entire content of this ridiculous document is apparent, for instance, in the first paragraph :

A large majority of the working class are striking work together and coming out onto the streets.

In paragraph 2, however:

Millions of workers feel that this stoppage will have no immediate effect on the Government policies. In this they are correct.

We also would say that the millions of workers are quite right. Not only did the General Council of the TUC know this very well, as they showed by deferring their strike-call date till after the Government had passed the Phase 2 Bill; but we now know that the TUC leaders were having secret meetings with Prime Minister Heath one day before the May-day marches, to be followed by the open meeting to fix a deal.

What concerns us here is the dangerous folly of the baloney being peddled by the IMG. Why on earth they have the insufferable impudence to call themselves “Marxist” only they can know. Everything in this nonsensical and pernicious propaganda is utterly foreign and contrary to all of Marx’s teachings, and especially to his actions in the International Workingmen’s Association, of which he was a founder member and author of its address, or policy statement.

We would highly commend to the IMG the statement by Marx in that address which they would do well to deeply and quietly ponder:

One clement of success they [the workers] possess, that of numbers, but numbers weigh only in the balance if united by combination and led by knowledge.

Is there the slightest sign that, amidst all the hysterical outpourings about “smashing Tory governments” and “treacherous trade-union leaders”, the IMG have given one moment’s serious thought to the meaning of what they are spreading?

Read through their leaflet! The workers must centralize their forces to “develop a General Strike to get rid of the Government itself”. The central task in holding the line is to “prepare the counter-offensive in the autumn" because the Government “presented the leaders with a clear choice, either accept pay restraint, or mobilize a united struggle which would smash Phase 2, bring down the Government and so raise the hopes of the working population that the social order itself would be threatened”.

As was pointed out explicitly in a recent Socialist Standard (and even that was re-quoted from 1919 and has been confirmed by history ever since), in every strike, above all the 1926 General Strike:

The masters are in a far stronger position than the workers on the economic field and will beat them, at will, any time they wish.

This is why Marx wrote in the Inaugural Address of the International Workingmen’s Association that

To conquer political power has become the great duty of the working class.

(Selected Works of Karl Marx, Moscow, p. 440)

As for all the other rubbish about smashing (these idiots are obsessed by the word SMASH; it recurs repeatedly in their manifestoes) Tory or Labour governments, this cannot be done by strike action alone. If a government feels that it has lost popular support, as shown in Italy or Denmark, and estimates that it may lose the next election, it may well resign, go into opposition, and laugh its head off at the troubles of the new government trying to grapple with the problems. So far from being “smashed” by resignation, there is every sign that they positively enjoy it.

As for “threatening the social order”, this probably is the stupidest nonsense of the lot. Trades unions are organized on a job basis: the vast majority of trade- unionists are not Socialists and have no desire whatever to threaten the social order — they uphold it. Neither would “threatening the social order” mean any real progress in changing it in orderly fashion. It could merely lead to chaos.

As for all the other tripe about the naughty, wicked trade-union leaders, we have pointed out repeatedly that they operate by the approval and consent of the members.

Let all strikes be called at the most favourable moment — when the bosses are doing allright-thankyou and don’t want them. Let them be short and sharp; if they are not won quickly they won’t be won at all. Let the members decide by democratic vote and, if things go wrong, democratically decide to retreat back to work in an orderly united fashion.

Above all, ignore and reject the dangerous, meddlesome folly of these academic hot-heads and professional hooligans who run about “smashing” everything and call on trade-unionists to “fight the police”. This plays straight into the hands of the authorities and is in fact all they need to crush strike action. On the industrial field the workers’ strength is in the withdrawal of labour. This may get them a rise in wages; but only political action can control the police (and the army) and establish Socialism.

Horatio.

"Revolutionary" Left unite behind Labour (1974)

From the March 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sham socialists show their true colours

Ever since the SPGB was founded we have at all times resolutely opposed all other political parties. We maintain that political parties are the expression of class interests and that the party seeking working- class emancipation must organise consciously and politically for the capture of political power for the abolition of capitalism, and its replacement by Socialism. The Socialist Party must work only for Socialism as this is the immediate task facing the world working class. No other political party in this country holds this revolutionary position.

The blood-and-thunder left consistently cloud and confuse the clear-cut issue — capitalism or Socialism. Bitter experience has amply borne out the correctness of our long expressed judgement that the Labour Party is a reformist capitalist party and has nothing to do with Socialism. However the period immediately prior to the February 28 General Election saw pseudo-socialist organizations and parties advocating and encouraging workers to vote for the Labour Party. Examples of this confusing and cynical exercise in political futility are documented below.

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN.

(Aim: to achieve a socialist Britain in which the means of production, distribution and exchange will be socially owned).

‘‘Three aims need to be achieved [says the CP Manifesto]: a Tory defeat, the winning of a Labour Government, and the return of Communist MP's . . We need a different type of Labour government — one that would bite into the power and profits of big business” (Morning Star 14 February 1974).

INTERNATIONAL MARXIST GROUP

(Aim: the overthrow of the capitalist system).

‘‘Of course, in any election called now socialists must argue for a vote for the Labour Party where there is no revolutionary alternative. The victory of the Tories would be seen by the working class as a set back and would decrease confidence and combativity. A victory for Labour would have the opposite effect . . . The slogan ‘Vote Labour but rely on your own struggles’ must be the key one for any election campaign” (Red Weekly 8 February 1974).

INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS

(Aim for independent working class action for the abolition of capitalism. ‘‘The struggle for socialism is the central struggle of our time”).

“KICK OUT THE TORIES VOTE LABOUR”

“No worker should have any doubt about what is at stake in the election . . . The working class has to respond [to the Tory campaign] with a massive anti-Tory vote. And that means a Labour vote . . . Labour is as much committed to keeping capitalism intact as the Tories ... So while fighting for a Labour victory, we have to step up our efforts to build a real alternative, a revolutionary worker’s party, by arguing the full-blooded socialist case” (IS National Committee Statement, Socialist Worker 16 February 1974).

WORKERS FIGHT

(Aim: to build a party which stands firmly for the interests of the working class and which preserves its political independence.)

"Until we have the possibility of a genuine, socialist working class government it is in workers’ interests to elect Labour . . . ACTIVE and unconditional support for Labour against the Tories !” (Workers Fight No. 43, 9-15 February 1974).

WORKERS REVOLUTIONARY PARTY

(Formerly Socialist Labour League).

“We call on all Labour Party members and trade unionists to vote Labour in constituencies where the WRP is not standing. We call on the electors to return a Labour government. In the struggle to compel the Labour leaders to implement the socialist policies we have outlined, they will be exposed and will be driven out.” (WRP Manifesto).

SOCIALIST CHARTER MOVEMENT

(‘Labour’s Revolutionary Voice’. Aim: to build a new revolutionary leadership in the Labour Movement to defeat the Tories and their system.)

“CAMPAIGN ON A SOCIALIST PROGRAMME”*

“. . . Labour Party leaders must present a programme for their next government which really offers a way forward for society out of its present impasse . . . A production plan based on common ownership . . . For this programme we need look no further than . . . the Constitution of the Labour Party, Clause four, Paragraph four.” (Chartist February 1974).

YOUNG COMMUNIST LEAGUE

“Join in the fight now to rout the Tories and elect a Labour government with Communist MPs to back it up . . . mobilise a great mass movement to sweep away the Tory government and return a Labour government compelled to carry out Left policies . . . This is the great issue of 1974.” (Challenge February 1974).

Gwynn Thomas

50 Years Ago: Fascism, violence and the Left (2024)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Saturday 15th June in London the National Front held a march to a meeting to protest against an amnesty for illegal immigrants. An attack on the march was made by left-wing groups, culminating in a battle with mounted police in Red Lion Square, and a young student was killed.

The inevitable accusations of “police brutality”, the headlines and questions in Parliament ensued. All this followed the National Union of Students’ resolution to prevent “fascists” and “racists” speaking. On 18th June the International Marxist Group announced that unless a July march of Orangemen supported by National Front is banned, it will attack that too.

The policies and attitudes of the National Front are detestable. So are those of the International Marxist Group and its collaborators. The latter include the Communist spokesmen for the National Union of Students who have expounded its policy of forcible suppression, and the Labour fools in the scarcely-known but ill-named “Liberation” group.

Their assertion is that unless “fascism” is crushed we are in danger of the rise of a dictatorship party, which would suppress democracy and persecute its opponents and those it did not favour. If that danger exists it is represented equally by the IMG, the Communist Party and other organizations of the left. What is THEIR aim? To suppress democracy and put down rivals.

Like the Communist Party when it made a policy of attacking British Union of Fascists marches in the nineteen-thirties, IMG hope to obtain support by posing as the defenders of freedom. But the CP’s policy then did not apply only to fascists. At one period Labour Party meetings were ordered to be broken up. At other times our own meetings have been shouted down and disrupted. Make no mistake about this: these protesters are not Marxists or liberationists or democrats, but power-seekers wanting to suppress whoever disagrees with them. (…)

The problem for the working class is not fascism but capitalism. Racism and other forms of oppression are symptoms of it. Socialists feel as strongly as anyone about them; and we know the solution of them to be the abolition of the capitalist system and its replacement with Socialism.

[from Editorial, Socialist Standard, July 1974]

Letters: Insularly aloof? (1974)

Letters to the Editors from the September 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Insularly aloof?

It appears that in this society you are either meek and humble, or aggressive. There is no other, no middle road under capitalism, in the world at large.

Which of the above categories do socialists come? What do socialists do outside the political arena? Do they stand insularly aloof within?

(Unsigned.)

Reply:

Socialists oppose the capitalist system uncompromisingly. Many have undergone hardships through doing so, particularly in wartime but also through adherence to their convictions at any time. We leave to our correspondent to decide whether that makes us “meek and humble” or “aggressive”.

We oppose reformist and direct-action activities which mean the banging of heads against brick walls. Addicts of those policies have accused us of “standing aloof”: we say anyone can get a sore head.

“Outside the political arena” Socialists go to work, are trade-unionists, read, watch tv, and do other common-place things.

Editors.

Lenin and lies

We have had enquiries about the source from which an article in February Socialist Standard stated that Lenin advocated “lies, trickery and deceit” as methods for Communists to use in the trade unions.

The version of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism published by the American Communists (“Workers’ Party of America”) in the early nineteen-twenties with the title Should Communists Participate in Reactionary Trade Unions? contains the following passage:

Communist must be tactful 

There is no doubt but that the opportunist leaders of the unions will resort to all the dirty tricks of bourgeois diplomacy, invoking the help of the capitalist governments, priests, police, judges, etc., in order to prevent the Communists from penetrating into the trade unions, to force them out of the unions, to make their work within the unions as dangerous as possible, aiding the police to persecute and run them down. But we must be able to withstand all that, to be ready for any and every sacrifice, and even if necessary, to practice trickery, to employ cunning, and to resort to illegal methods, to sometimes even overlook or conceal the truth—all for the sake of penetrating into the trade unions, to stay there and by every and all means carry on the work of Communism.

This publication led to strong condemnation of Communists in America, and they found it difficult to defend these intentions laid down for them by Lenin. Consequently the Communist Party of Great Britain’s edition of Left-Wing Communism had a watered-down version of the passage, as follows:

It is necessary to be able to withstand all this, to go the whole length of any sacrifice, if need be, to resort to strategy and adroitness, illegal proceedings, reticence and subterfuge, to anything in order to penetrate into the trade unions, remain in them, and carry on Communist work inside them, at any cost.

Editorial Committee

"Isolated itself from the real world"

Once again the Socialist Standard has aligned itself with the most reactionary elements in society. The article “Fascism, Violence and the Left” in the July edition was not only factually incorrect but also dangerously wrong in its analysis.

Firstly, the various left-wing groups involved in the Red Lion Square demonstration were not attacking the National Front. The left-wing groups were marching to a meeting to protest against the neo-Nazi N.F.’s march. You ignore the fact that the police only took action against the left wing demonstration. This ignoral of the police’s tacit support for the right wing and repression of the left is sadly not an isolated incident but in complete accordance with the S.P.G.B.’s record of no comment on the increasing state repression of socialists and trade unionists.

Secondly, the article gives the impression that the death of Kevin Gately was the result of the “violence of the Left”. In fact it was the police attack on the march which caused Kevin’s death. .This attack began before the N.F. had entered the square, the police were not protecting the N.F. against left-wing violence but engaging in a senseless action that even the liberal capitalist papers such as the Guardian were forced by the facts to admit was unnecessary.

The unwillingness of the S.P.G.B. to face the reality of the state’s repressive role is not an isolated phenomenon. Rather than become involved in class struggle the S.P.G.B. has remained on the outside producing a series of dogmatic dismissals of partial economic struggles, women’s lib, gay lib, fights against racism and fascism, student politics, etc.

In its rejection of any partial demand the S.P.G.B. has isolated itself from the real world and developed an internal conservative inertia. It has failed to answer the question of what should revolutionaries do in a non-revolutionary period by completely failing to intervene in such a way as to develop revolutionary consciousness and to strengthen the organisation and self-confidence of the working class. As such the S.P.G.B. has not developed in the last seventy years, degenerating into a group of philosophical utopian socialists incapable of bringing their ideas into relevance to non-socialists, only by achieving this by relating the struggle for socialism to the day to day struggles of the working class can socialist conscious develop.

G. Wright,

Wirral.

Reply:

Thank you for so ably confirming everything in our article “Fascism, Violence and the Left”.

Your rebuttal of allegedly “factually incorrect” statements consists of not facts but inferences — “tacit support”, “gives the impression”, and that we "ignore” this and that version. As a fact, we did not attribute Gately’s death to anyone. The article said: “and a young student was killed”.

It is strange you should say the SPGB does not “face the reality of the state’s repressive role” and, earlier, “increasing state repression” of socialists (so-called) and trade unionists. These events took place under a Labour government for whose return the left-wing groups in the demonstration had all worked at the last election. Who does not face reality?

The same can be said of your reiteration that through not supporting “partial economic struggle” and reformist movements the SPGB “has not developed in the last seventy years”. If — as you say — the working class now lacks revolutionary consciousness, organization and self-confidence, and — as you say — reformists and trade unionists are being repressed under the Labour government they elected, that is the outcome of seventy years of the struggles and activities you nevertheless still advocate. If it were not pernicious it would be laughable.

Editors.

Other letters and replies held over to next month through pressure on space.

What’s all this Trotsky business ? (1977)

From the April 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A professional revolutionary called Bronstein adopted the then fashionable idea of a nom de guerre (Ulianov became Lenin; Dugashvili, Stalin) and became the Trotsky who is now having such a mysterious rise to fame thirty years after his death at the hands of a thug employed by his former comrade Stalin. He must at least have had a sense of humour for he took his new name from his Tsarist gaoler at the beginning of this century. And before we finish with it, the new name did not quite succeed in rubbing out the old one. When he fell foul of Stalin, the latter used to see to it that '“Bronstein” used to appear in brackets after “Trotsky”. Thus, without laying himself open to the charge of anti-semitism, Stalin was able to inform ignorant readers of Pravda that his opponent’s real name was obviously Jewish. (The Trotskyists in turn used to refer to “that dog Dugashvili”. Much good it did them. The Bolsheviks inherited the anti-semitism of the Tsars. And cherish it to this day.)

At the time of the abortive 1905 revolution, Trotsky was an opponent of Lenin. In due course he changed his mind and by the time of the 1917 revolution was Lenin’s chief supporter in the seizure of power. Not of course from the Tsar. That job had been done six months before by risings in St. Petersburg and Moscow while Lenin was in Zurich (he not only had no hand in the overthrow of the Tsar; he did not believe it when they told him). The Bolsheviks overthrew Kerensky who stupidly tried to keep up the slaughter in the war with Germany. Trotsky himself never made any special mark while Lenin lived except as his faithful henchman. The only episode he stamped with his own brand was the massacre of the Red Sailors at Kronstadt — the very sailors who had enabled Lenin to smash Kerensky in the Winter Palace but had the audacity to ask: “What about some freedom and democracy now we have overthrown the Tsarist tyranny?” In opposing the modern Trotskyists, a Labour Minister called Mrs. Williams has dug up the Kronstadt story. She forgot to mention (or didn’t know) that when the anarchist Goldman tried to stir up the Labour Party about the massacre shortly after it took place, her party — the thuggish Bevin and the pacific Lansbury — turned their backs on her.

After Lenin’s death, Trotsky and Stalin fought for the crown. As to what the quarrel was about, all the pundits used to write incomprehensible twaddle about revolution in one country, permanent revolution, etc. etc. ad nauseam. The Bolshevik Stalin murdered his rival gangster in the same way that the Nazi Hitler murdered his rival Roehm in the same grisly era. And is there any real point in retelling the story now? Hardly. It is merely that when one wonders what all the Trotskyist splinter groups are doing in the current recrudescence, it is as well to see who the original Trotsky was. And then we might know the explanation of the current Trotsky epidemic? Quite the contrary. We merely know that Trotsky was just another Leninist opportunist and had no special theory to contribute to present-day thought whatever. That he twisted and turned like any Stalinist, right to the end. And that the .imbeciles who now proclaim themselves his posthumous followers (and would cheerfully murder the other Trotskyists who do likewise) have no more connection with Trotsky than they have with Socialism. They would be horrified to hear it but Stalin and Trotsky were just Tweedledumski and Tweedledeeski.

So who are the Trots? A number of groups (some a bit bigger than the Socialist Party, some a bit smaller) who seem to hate each other’s guts as much as they hate the Communists and Maoists. There was a hilarious piece in the Observer (16th Jan.) describing a meeting in Friends’ House at which Gerry Healy, of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, was denounced, in his presence, for writing a book actually accusing the leaders of the American Socialist Workers’ Party (the babble of names of all these Trotsky splinters is quite bewildering) of a crime. What crime? Why, nothing less than being accomplices in the murder of the old villain himself way back in 1940!

As the police haven’t bothered to arrest anyone and as the victims of the alleged libel don’t seem to have sued, either, one assumes that this is all some idiot game in which these fools — having nothing to contribute to Socialism — re-enact the feuds in Moscow in the ’20s. Tariq Ali was in the chair on behalf of the International Marxists (who are neither international nor Marxist) and play-acted a silly drama in which a gang of young asses marched in front of Healy so Ali couldn’t see him from the floor and the chairman then took a motion (carried? You bet!) refusing to hear the enemy. And these are the types who join in parades with banners demanding “Keep the fascists out.” What on earth do they think they are themselves? The meeting had brought over another of their stars from Belgium, Ernst Mandel, complaining that Healy was rocking the boat just when they were “getting accepted as a genuine force in the working class movement”. Were they now? Somehow one hadn’t realized it.

Phrase-mongers of the world unite. You really all stand for the same thing. Reform of capitalism. However much some of them prattle about Russia being state-socialist (but Trotsky insisted it was worth defending every acre with working-class blood right to the end), they all stand for “involvement in the workers’ day-to-day struggles” and similar claptrap. And not only is it difficult to detect the difference between the various warring groups and tendencies; it is quite impossible to see where they differ from the older gangs of capitalist reformers masquerading as socialists — the Communist Party and the Labour Party. A Guardian ignoramus called John Cunningham attempted to define the various splinters (4th Feb.) but left us groping in the dark — for which the poor devil could perhaps be excused. What was, though, quite inexcusable was that he had the nerve to state that the Trots were adopting “entryism” — more phrases — into the Labour Party even though they did not hold with Labour’s Constitution of which “the Marxist part” was Clause Four — “the common ownership of the means of production”. Now that’s Marxist right enough. But only the SPGB has ever advocated it and even the Guardian creep must know that Clause Four refers to the means of production and exchange. The last phrase is the give-away. What the devil would you want with means of exchange if all was socially owned? What these fools refuse to see is that the epitome of Clause Four has long been achieved in Russia. Which even Trots will now admit is state-capitalist and has not the remotest connection with Socialism.

Only one thing is certain. In a few years, all these groups will have joined those of times past in “the dustbin of history” (favourite phrase of all these? lefties). New insects will emerge to take their place in lousing up the working class. Large or small, the only Socialist Party will still be there. Hasten the day when the workers will start to see the wood for the trees.

L. E. Weidberg

Our GLC opponents (1977)

From the June 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fact that all other parties are reformist is fundamental to the case of the SPGB. This means they seek not to abolish capitalism with its class division, wages system, state and frontiers, but to modify it a little this way or that in a futile effort to legislate away its problems and inhuman consequences. It follows that there can be only one party seeking to end capitalism and to establish democratically an entirely different world system, called Socialism. The abolition of the wages system, the end of trade, profits and frontiers follows naturally from the new basis of common ownership of the means of production and distribution. These unique principles of the SPGB can be amply demonstrated by reading the manifestos of all or any of our opponents, and then reading ours. Though our opponents may differ on what they see as most important in the continuing evils of capitalism the common approach of them all is reformist. Doctor the effects — leave the cause alone.

The Labourites

After their abysmal efforts at running capitalism they still have the audacity to present themselves to the workers and seek their votes. They were even brazen enough to charge 20p for their manifesto. This offered the usual reforms aimed at making poverty more tolerable, instead of seeking a mandate to end the system which generates poverty. In their clash with the Tories over “free” bus rides for old people they cynically exploited the poverty of the elderly to gain votes. If workers would only see the contradictory position of the Labour Party they could understand that ministering to poverty pre-supposes its continuation. After fifteen post-war years of Labour government old people still cannot afford bus fares. One of Labour’s own leaflets quotes a Mrs. Kitchener of Leatherhead on concessionary fares: “The passes are rotten value, and people can’t afford them anyway.” Can anyone imagine Wilson, Callaghan, Foot or Castle, or the head of any nationalized industry, spending their last years of life worrying about cheap bus rides in off-peak periods? These people have done quite well out of capitalism. They posed as your champions, to fight for you. Now they are well off and you are still poor and needy!

The same with housing. Where they find workers willing to be photographed smiling outside those little boxes of bricks called working-class “dwellings”, shown in the Labour candidate’s address, is hard to imagine. They called them “decent homes”. The blurb underneath should have read “good enough for workers but not fit for Labour leaders". Labour’s boast on education included:

  “We are now doing much in the education field for the training of young people for industry . . ."

Training workers for wage-slavery. Not a word about closing down teacher-training colleges, slum schools, and crowded class-rooms. No mention of the class-divide in education. The children of the ruling class are not trained “for industry”. The typical Labour leader is educated at Oxford. Lady Falkender, for example, was reported in the Daily Mirror (22nd April 1976 to be choosing Westminster public school for her two sons. The fees were £1,254 per year for a boarder and £789 for a day boy.

The Tories

With seventeen post-war years of Tory government and four years at County Hall and all the horrors of capitalism remaining to testify to their political bankruptcy, the Tories tried to counter Labour reformism. It is easy for them to make capital out of workers’ misery by saying “the GLC is probably the largest slum landlord in the world”. It was no different with them in power. In Lambeth Central the Tory candidate was Roy Hatter; he drew attention to two thousand houses in Lambeth boarded up, and seventeen thousand people on waiting lists. His claim to working-class support rested on having broken the world record by making a political speech that lasted over twenty-nine hours. If only words could build houses! Like most Tories, Mr. Hatter has the habit of calling Labourites “Socialists”. If he does not know the difference his long speech must have been painfully boring. He is himself an employee, a member of the working class, yet he embraces the system of his masters which exploits him as well as the rest of us.

The "Communists''

The election address of the so-called Communist Party followed similar reformist lines to the rest. Full of platitudes, promises and catch-phrases. A typical example was:

  "Pensions. End the scandal of poverty, neglect and deprivation for the elderly. They fought for and built London for us”.

Poverty! Neglect! Deprivation! Yes, under a government they urged workers to vote for. Poverty is produced by capitalism. It is glib and cynical nonsense to promise to end it while retaining the system.

These political commotionists can never resist the chance to pose as patriots. They might do better to ask themselves whether slums and poverty are worth fighting for? If by “us” they mean the working class, London was never built for them but for the capitalist class who own it. Much of London is so old that no elderly worker suffering poverty today had anything to do with its building.

Those former intrepid “revolutionaries” who used to train with broom-sticks for “heavy civil war” have become law-and-order men. They are now demanding that the Metropolitan Police should be under the control of the GLC instead of the Home Secretary. What relevance that has to “Communism” is impossible to conceive. They also demand “More Democracy” — a prime piece of hypocrisy for a Party built on reverence for Russian State-capitalism, the biggest and longest-running police-dictatorship in the world.

National Front

With the flag of British capitalism appropriately upside-down, the National Front leaflet, launched a tirade of bunkum about immigration. By “immigrants” they mean black people and ignorantly gloss over the fact that most immigrants are of white skin. Blaming the blacks for everything is a favourite get-out for the simple-minded. They claim that “Inner London is now a multi-racial slum”. Much of London has always been a slum. National Front only recognize slums when they are “multi-racial”. Black people did not create the slums. Many of them live in them, as do many of their “white” fellow-workers. Slums arise because capitalism produces cheap housing for workers. Overwhelmingly, slums are built as slums.

They seek to “immediately repatriate” any immigrant convicted of a crime. What an idiotic idea. Nearly half the black people in Britain were born here. If every country adopted the same policy, then all those Britons who have emigrated would be sent back here if convicted of a crime. As the emigrants outnumber the immigrants, there could well be a higher “criminal” population here at the end of the process! Their attitude betrays complete indifference to the social causes of crime.

They advocate segregated education. Anything that further confuses and divides the working class. As we have seen in dealing with the Labour Party there is already class-segregated education.

The “village pump” narrowness of the National Front is a snare for unthinking workers. Nationalism is an ideological disease. The Labourites, Tories, Liberals and “Communists” all sponsor nationalism. National Front merely carry the nonsense further.

The I.M.G.

This group makes the fraudulent claim to be Marxist and Socialist. Their manifesto sought only to outbid the others in the number and range of their reform proposals. They openly set out to gain “protest votes” from Labour. The fact that the National Front draws much of its support from disillusioned Labour voters did not seem significant to them. Such voters are politically muddled, and having despaired of the Labour Party are looking elsewhere for easy answers within capitalism. Nothing lasting or worthwhile can be built on such a base.

The IMG wants capitalism without its economic consequences. Their concentration on wages, prices and jobs shows they are void of any ideas beyond the present system of buying and selling and wage- labour. They seek to ‘nationalize all firms creating redundancies”. They have forgotten the redundancies in British Rail, state education, the mines, etc., and have yet to learn that state-capitalism works no differently from private capitalism. Far from being extreme in any way, IMG stand roughly where the Labour Party stood sixty years ago, still demanding a “national minimum wage”.

Their policy of “No platform for National Front” is absurd. False ideas cannot be banished by such methods. IMG linked up with the Communists and various Constituency Labour Parties in a group called alarm (All Lambeth Anti-Racial Movement). With each affiliated party seeking votes at the others’ expense, this can be only a very tenuous alliance. “Alarm” invited our candidate for Lambeth Central to address a meeting in support of their limited objective, jointly with the other candidates, excluding National Front. We circulated an open letter giving our reasons for not joining them to fight the effects of capitalism and arguing the need to end this system. In opposition to the platform our candidate was allowed to state the Party case from the audience. Copies of their invitation and our reply were sent to the South London Press but were not published. The Guardian also failed to publish a similar letter dealing with the rival demonstrations in North London on 30th April despite the publicity they had given the event for two days before.

The SPGB stands alone (in this country) as the one party which rejects the system the others want to reform and retain. Socialism depends upon understanding. Only a conscious majority gaining political power can achieve a world of common ownership where production will be solely for use with free access. Class rule and subjugation will then be replaced by human society.

Harry Baldwin

A Siberian Winter in Trottingham (2020)

Book Review from the May 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Winter at the Bookshop. Sylvia Riley. Five Leaves. 2019

Essentially a book of short stories and anecdotes, this has been put together by the writer of Switchboard Operators, which years ago was made into the 1990s TV series The Hello Girls starring Letitia Dean.

The bookshop in question was based in the poverty-stricken St Ann’s area of Nottingham and was run by Pat Jordan. Riley was one of the volunteers who helped out. Jordan was one of the leading lights of British Trotskyism, founding the International Group which was for a time the section in Britain of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. This was the current that was linked to veteran Trotskyist writer Ernest Mandel and to Michel Pablo, who argued that the revolutionary struggle should always take as its starting point the particular situation prevailing in each country concerned. This meant in many cases an emphasis on ‘Third World’ struggles for national liberation and also student revolt, rather than the more usual Trotskyist pre-occupation with the traditional working class.

The International Group – after early dalliances with Ted Grant’s Revolutionary Socialist League (the ‘Militant Tendency’) – eventually morphed into the International Marxist Group and became dominated by Tariq Ali during the student revolts of the late 1960s, which is when the book ends. It is necessarily a highly personal account but generally well written, rather twee on some occasions and moving at others. It tells of a world of backroom duplicators and yellowing pamphlets, of student rebellion and fluid relationships. An air of grinding poverty hangs over it all, in an area long overdue for slum clearance (which happened shortly afterwards).

Nottingham at this time was known nationally as a hotbed of Trotskyist activity in a period when the so-called ‘New Left’ was making its mark as a challenger to the conventional Communist Parties. Pat Jordan and Ken Coates (later to become a Labour MEP) were the most central characters in this milieu and Sylvia Riley writes engagingly about the movement they led, the people in it – and their foibles. Let us say it doesn’t entirely align with the more glamorous image the IMG seemed to have cultivated at the time.

The IMG eventually split and its main successor organisation became ensconced in the Labour Party – with several former IMG members going on to become prominent Labour parliamentary figures, including ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling and Kate Hoey. A long way indeed from Pat Jordan’s tumbledown bookshop, with its bare light bulbs, Marvel comics and Trotskyist tracts.

DAP

Russia: Leftists in Dispute (1976)

From the January 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1968 was published an English translation of Ernest Mandel’s monumental work of Trotskyite orthodoxy, Marxist Economic Theory. This was reviewed in International Socialism and led to an exchange of pamphlets between I.S. and Mandel’s supporters in Britain, the International Marxist Group. IMG have republished this controversy with the title Readings on State Capitalism, which has a certain interest for Socialists as discussion centres on the view that Russia is State capitalist.

Mandel, Kidron and Harman (who took over the IS banner half-way through the controversy) agree that Russian society is not Socialist. Mandel, however, maintains that Russia is a very degenerate workers’ state, which has begun a transition towards Socialism with an economy “marked by the contradictory combination of a non-capitalist mode of production and a still basically bourgeois mode of distribution”. A capitalist mode of distribution on the basis of a non-capitalist mode of production is not only contradictory but, from a Marxist point of view, an absurdity; for it is the mode of production which in the end determines the character of all other aspects of society, including the mode of distribution (i.e. the way the social product is divided).

Kidron and Harman describe Russia now as state capitalist, but think that “Russia in the 10 years after 1917 . . . was not itself capitalist”. What then was it?

Discussion about the nature of Russian society is discussion about the meaning of both capitalism and socialism, and Mandel has well grasped the nature of Socialism as a moneyless, wageless, stateless society, with the “free distribution of goods and services”, existing on a world scale: “Socialism means a classless society. It therefore presupposes not only the suppression of private property of the means of production, henceforth managed in a planned way by the associate producers themselves, but it also calls for a level of development of the productive forces which makes possible the withering away of commodity production; of money, and of the state”.

Kidron, on the other hand, describes “socialism” vaguely as “workers’ control of production”, with the implication that this could be control of the production of commodities.

So we have Mandel denying Socialism properly, but saying that a world Socialist revolution is an impossibility and that instead the working class of each country should aim at establishing “a society in transition from capitalism to socialism”, based on nationalization under workers’ control; and we have Kidron saying correctly that no transitional society between capitalism and Socialism is possible (“socialism is a total system; it cannot grow piecemeal within the interstices of a capitalist society”), but defining Socialism wrongly and meaning by it precisely the same as Mandel’s impossible “transitional society”!

If Mandel were claiming that Russia cannot be described as capitalist, but some new form of exploitative society, then his argument would be stronger. But he is claiming that Russian society is better and more progressive than what exists in the West: basically a society which workers should support. This is dangerous nonsense. To suggest that Russia, where trade-union rights like strike action and democratic rights available in the west are denied, offers a precedent for future working-class development, is to mock the sufferings of the working class there.

But the main reason for saying that Russia is capitalist is the existence of the wages system there. As Marx pointed out, wage-labour and capital presuppose each other. Wage-labourers produce value, some of which returns to them in the form of wages, the rest going to those who monopolise the means of production as surplus value; this surplus value is re-invested in production and so becomes capital, wealth invested in production with a view to profit.

That capital accumulation out of the surplus value produced by wage-labour has never ceased in Russia since 1917 should be obvious enough, but Mandel puts forward the view that what has governed production in Russia has been “the consumption desires of the bureaucracy”. He paints Russia as a society where usurpers (the bureaucracy) have come to power and live off the workers who continue to produce under non-exploitative conditions. Mandel actually says that Russian workers, though paid wages, are not exploited at the point of production as in the West; but that they are robbed as consumers by a “parasitic and pilfering” bureaucracy

Mandel says the IS view is essentially a Menshevik one. According to Mandel the Mensheviks held that “a socialist revolution in a backward country is impossible and that whatever you do, capitalism, and only capitalism, can flower there,” and that “whatever one did, capitalism was on the agenda in that country (as long as it would not have been overthrown in all or most of the industrially advanced countries of the world)”. The Mensheviks may have held these views, but the fact remains that it is an analysis and in accordance with the Marxian materialist conception of history. Socialism can only be established on a world scale and on the basis of an advanced industrial economy; in the absence of the Socialist revolution all that can develop in so-called backward countries is capitalism.

We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain have always been logical on this point. Yes, we reply; Russia is state-capitalist and, yes, the Russian revolution was not a Socialist revolution, but a seizure of power by a political party which later came to form the nucleus of a new state-capitalist ruling class. This was inevitable, given the absence at the time of Socialist consciousness amongst the majority of the workers of the world. This is what we said at the time and subsequent developments in Russia have proved the soundness of the Socialist Party’s analysis.

Adam Buick

The Latter Day Followers of Leon Trotsky (2018)

Book Review from the October 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain by John Kelly (Routledge 2018)

Those seeking to change the way society is organized will at some stage come across a fractured group of people with ideas about it. They are quite active and visible, though perhaps not so much as they once were. Demonstrations and picket-lines, selling papers at universities and outside tube stations is their stock-in-trade. These days they are not in the best of health and struggle to make the impact they once did. They are the followers of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

Trotsky played a significant role in the 1917 Bolshevik takeover in Russia led by Lenin, but after Lenin’s death was squeezed out by his successor Josef Stalin, went into exile in Mexico and then was murdered there by Stalin’s agents in 1940. It is perhaps a little odd that his modern acolytes are as well-known and persistent as they are. Not unlike the splintered religious sects that offer a regimen of activity and surety of doctrine, with each one microscopically different to the other.

A new book by John Kelly called Contemporary Trotskyism (Routledge, 2018) has set out to examine this phenomenon. Perhaps surprisingly, it is the first book-length analysis of the Trotskyist movement in Britain for over 30 years. It is meticulously researched and packed with detail. ‘Left-wing train-spotters’ everywhere will cherish it dearly.

What is Trotskyism?

Political ideas – especially complex ones – often struggle to be defined coherently. Trotskyism is no exception. Kelly identifies nine ‘core elements’, though a number of these are actually beliefs held in common with Lenin and the Bolsheviks (Trotskyists see themselves as their true heirs) together with their advocates in the various ‘Communist’ parties and regimes across the world this last century or so.

One of the core elements is more fundamental than most of the others and – despite the excellence of the book in other respects – has not been brought out quite as clearly as it might have been. This is the idea that while the working class is considered to be the agent of social change – as in Marxist theory generally – it is deemed incapable of doing this while capitalist rule dominates. This was the view taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, including both Stalin and Trotsky, and so unites them all.

From this viewpoint much else follows. If the working class is unable to understand capitalist exploitation and overthrow the capitalist system because the dominant ideas are literally always those of the ruling class, then how can a socialist revolution ever occur? All those in the tradition of Lenin came up with an answer, based on adapting the Russian Bolshevik model of a minority political coup d’etat. This idea was to build up a political party of professional revolutionaries (the ‘vanguard’ or ‘advanced guard’ of the working class) that could overthrow the capitalist government. It could then try to create the economic and political conditions for a socialist society – including the desire of the working class for it – after the event. Rather like having the pregnancy after the birth.

But to build up the vanguard party of professional revolutionaries within capitalism there’s no point advocating socialism, as that would be to cast pearls before the proverbial swine. What is needed instead is a tactical approach that can form an ideological bridge between where we are today and where we could end up. And this, in most respects, is where Trotsky and his followers developed a set of theories – most of them really tactics – that have distinguished them from others in the tradition of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. In particular:

Transitional demands. These are reforms of capitalism advocated with the sole purpose of demonstrating that the system can’t deliver them. This creates tension with genuine reformists like those in the mainstream Labour and Social Democratic parties who know they are unattainable and unrealistic, so prefer not to pursue them. But for Trotskyists the point is to create disillusion with the system and its established leaders so that the more critical, questioning members of the working class will turn away from them and towards the leadership of the vanguard party instead.

The ‘united front’ tactic. Like advocating transitional demands, this has been a means of winning recruits from other parties as it involves putting forward specific demands and campaigns that will enable Labour, Communists, Trotskyists, etc to work together on certain issues such as anti-fascism, while enabling Trotskyists to remain critical of their partners in other respects. This is just slightly different from the old Communist Party tactic of the ‘Popular Front’ which had often involved overtly pro-capitalist parties too, like Liberals.

A critical stance towards the former Soviet Union and its satellites. This is the big issue that has created more disagreement in the Trotskyist movement than probably any other. This is because while all wish to be critical of the regime Stalin went on to build up while Trotsky was in exile, they nevertheless hold very dear to the political methods that created it in the first place. Trotsky’s own formula was to label Russia a workers’ state that had degenerated under Stalinist leadership. Some still adhere to this, while others have moved from this position over time to create greater distance, adopting the view that these countries became state capitalist, or were some other form of class society.

A ‘catastrophist’ interpretation of capitalism. Trotsky’s seminal text in 1938 was The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International and most Trotskyists believe capitalism has been in its death throes ever since, 80 years and counting. This view is not entirely exclusive to them, but they link it vigorously with the need for working class ‘leadership’ i.e themselves as the vanguard party that can rescue the working class from crisis.

The need for a ‘Fourth International’ or similar. This is as a successor to the old Third International or ‘Comintern’ associated with Stalin and the Soviet regime. It would be an international body linking and uniting Trotskyist vanguard parties across the world with common perspectives, and also under a broadly common programme and set of tactical approaches.

The idea of spreading ‘permanent revolution’. This stands in distinction to the Stalinist idea that socialism could be built in one country and by stages, as Trotsky held the view that revolutions – if they were to succeed – needed to spread and not become isolated, hence the need for a Fourth International.  Nevertheless, the idea of a socialist revolution being one where a minority vanguard party takes power and then nationalizes the economy (as in Soviet Russia and China) is the same as the conventional Leninist and Stalinist view.

Trotskyism in Britain

One of the most notable features of the Trotskyist movement in Britain and other countries has been its tendency to fragment over time. From its origins in the tiny Balham Group of former Communist Party members in the 1930s it was united for a short time towards the end of the Second World War in an organization called the Revolutionary Communist Party, but since then has been split asunder many times.

Kelly has identified seven Trotskyist ‘families’ that emerged, though this is perhaps a little over-theorized. In reality, four main tendencies surfaced in Britain in the post-war era after the split of the RCP and these were led by four dominant individuals. This is perhaps not surprising. Trotsky himself had claimed that ‘The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat’ and Trotskyist organizations (like Lenin’s Bolsheviks) are characterized by top-down structures based on the principles of what they call ‘democratic centralism’, effectively designed to ensure self-perpetuating leaderships.

The four main Trotskyist organizations that emerged in Britain from the 1950s and 60s onwards may be familiar:

The Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), formerly the Socialist Labour League, which was founded and led by Gerry Healy until it split into myriad fragments in the mid-late 1980s. This tendency has been characterized by Kelly as Orthodox Trotskyism, and it is hard to disagree as it holds rigidly to what it sees as Trotsky’s perspectives and recommendations before his death and has been known for its extreme sectarianism and hostility to other organizations.

The Militant Tendency (really called the Revolutionary Socialist League), led by Ted Grant and which became the most well-known Trotskyist organisation through its control of Liverpool City Council in the mid 1980s and its ‘deep entryism’ inside the Labour Party, even at one stage having three Labour MPs. It split in the early 90s and its successor organizations are the Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW) and Socialist Appeal. Kelly calls this tendency ‘Institutional Trotskyism’ because of its adherence to supporting Labour and use of parliament, though most of its attitudes, perspectives and ingrained sectarianism are not dissimilar to the Orthodox Trotskyism of the WRP – the main difference being that the WRP/SLL in its early life used entryism into the Labour Party as a tactic (as did the other main Trotskyist tendencies) whereas Militant made it a point of principle.

The International Marxist Group (IMG) led by Tariq Ali. This became the British section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (for a while the dominant semi-official one), hence Kelly’s description of this as Mainstream Trotskyism. This is perhaps a little confusing as it was mainly noted for attempts by its international leaders Ernest Mandel and Michel Pablo to revise and update Trotsky’s ideas in an era of Third World revolts and student agitation. Again it splintered into various competing sects, some inside the Labour Party and some outside it, the most well-known survivor probably being Socialist Resistance.

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), formerly International Socialism and led until his death by Tony Cliff. This is currently the largest of them all, even though it has suffered more splits and splinters than most, including in recent years. It was originally influenced as much by the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg as by Lenin and Trotsky and its distinguishing feature is its view that the Soviet Union and its satellites became state capitalist when Stalinism took hold, adopting a standpoint previously alien to the Trotskyist movement and pioneered by non-Leninist organizations like the SPGB. Kelly categorizes the SWP and most of its offshoots as ‘Third Camp’ Trotskyism.

Upwaves and downwaves

Kelly argues with some evidence that there have so far been four distinct phases in the British Trotskyist movement: 1950-65 which were the ‘Bleak Years’ of limited growth while inside the Labour Party, the ‘Golden Age’ of membership growth and influence from the mid 60s to mid 80s while the traditional Communist Party declined, then a period of ‘Fracture and Decline’ from the mid 80s until around 2005, when a period of ‘Stasis’ has endured.

There are currently 22 separate Trotskyist organizations in the UK though their total membership is less than 10,000 – well under half of the combined peak membership of the mid 1980s. Some organizations have splintered off over time and have moved away from Trotskyism such as the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG), though these, along with Stalinist and Maoist-type groups, also have memberships that tend to be numbered in the low hundreds at best and more typically much less than that.

The commitment expected of members of Leninist organizations generally can be considerable, with many Trotskyist groups mapping out their members’ free time in any given week and expecting significant financial contributions – the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) had average annual membership contributions per head of over £330 a year in 2014 and Workers Power has effectively charged a ‘tithe’ of 10 per cent of income. This is in large part what enables Trotskyist groups to publish a very regular press and many even now are built around the sales of their newspapers and magazines. The WRP famously received funds from Libya and other Middle East states but this is exceptional – most Trotskyist organizations lurch from internal financial crisis to crisis, being repeatedly bailed out by their membership to keep their loss-making publications going. Nevertheless, the Revolutionary Communist Party of the 80s and 90s (a grandchild of the IS/SWP) and publisher of Living Marxism was bankrupted by a £1 million libel action from ITN. Today only two papers have regular print runs (not sales) of over 2,000, these being Socialist Worker (SWP) and The Socialist (SPEW), with print runs of 20,000 and 10,000 copies respectively per week. Some organizations are so small they only produce irregular magazines or concentrate on maintaining a web presence.

Staffers

One of the more intriguing details to emerge in Kelly’s book is how much activity is stimulated and supported by paid officials. During the Militant Tendency’s peak of 8,000 members it had no less than 250 full-time equivalent staff (a not dissimilar total to the entire Labour Party). More recently, SPEW has the highest number of staffers with 45 full-time equivalent workers, compared to 32.5 in the SWP. Most of these are employed in publications-related work, with some being national, regional or campaign organizers.

Given all this, and the campaigns both initiated and hijacked by Trotskyist groups (from the Anti-Nazi League in the late 70s to the Stop the War Coalition more recently), it is perhaps surprising they remain as small as they do. Even more surprising perhaps given their relentless work in the trade unions, including trying to gain positions of influence at all levels, again meticulously detailed by Kelly. Similarly, in the last couple of decades there has been a generally increased focus on election campaigns as a means of generating publicity, from Respect to the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC). This has led to some long-term sworn enemies like the SWP and SPEW temporarily bury their differences, but with little practical effect.

Prognosis

The current state of flux in the Corbyn-led Labour Party has seen a number of Trotskyist groups identify a chance to engage closely with people who could be like-minded. The paucity of Trotskyist candidates standing against Labour in the 2017 General Election was a reflection of this, reversing the trend towards greater electoral participation since the 1990s. The evidence presented by Kelly suggests that the far left tends to do better on average (both in terms of electoral support and in party membership) when Labour is in government rather than in opposition. But it still does badly, and even organizations in other countries including some Trotskyist elements within them at various stages such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain only succeed when they build far wider leftist coalitions, dwarfing the Trotskyist contribution to the extent that it becomes almost invisible. And almost inevitably these parties have a tendency to end up – like Syriza – being respectable parties of capitalist government.

This is interesting, because Trotskyist groups have long argued that they do this because to do anything differently, such as advocate real socialism (common ownership, production for use, the abolition of the wages system, etc) is a waste of time. In fact, most of them only pay lip-service to this as being their long term goal at very best, and most take the traditional view of the Communists (ie Stalinists and Maoists) that socialism is really a nationalized, planned economy under the control of the vanguard party. But as in Soviet Russia this leaves all the economic features of capitalism intact – such as wage labour, production for sale on markets, etc – and is really just state-run capitalism.

It all gets to the essence though of why socialists oppose the Trotskyist movement and have long warned of the dangers of being involved in it:

• they do not advocate (or in many case really believe in) socialism but actually believe in a form of state run-capitalism under their own leadership
• they are elitist organizations that are dominated by small and generally unaccountable groups of leaders who see themselves as potentially great historical figures, guiding the masses with their supposedly superior political tactics
• they are politically dishonest as they advocate demands (the ‘transitional programme’) in the full knowledge they cannot be met within capitalism and will only create disillusion – indeed that is the entire point of advocating them
• they will periodically enter and otherwise give support (however ‘critical’) to anti-socialist organizations like the Labour Party
• they have a well-known history of hijacking trade union and other struggles for their own ends.

Of course, we are well aware that they don’t have a high opinion of us either. We are usually guilty of things like ‘abstract propagandism’, which means not arguing for reforms of capitalism and they have sometimes derided us as the ‘Small Party of Good Boys’ and similar.

While we are far smaller than we would like to be and can certainly learn lessons from the last century and more, John Kelly’s book has thrown an interesting spotlight on a few things. And one of them is that despite the fact that we in the SPGB advocate the ‘maximum programme’ of socialism and nothing but – and despite all the tactical manoeuvrings and reform campaigns of the various Trotskyist groups over the years –  there are only two of them (the SWP and SPEW) that are actually bigger than us! Every other party and group from the WRP and Socialist Appeal to the AWL and Counterfire are smaller than we are. And so were former (and very visible) Trot groups like the RCP at their peak in the late 80s/early 90s.

Just think, then – if a few more of them had spent their considerable energies advocating real socialism rather than playing tactical games of footsie with the reformists, the movement for social change in this country would be a lot stronger than it is. That’s not to crow, as we of course wish we were a lot bigger than we are – but just to point out that the tactical genius of Leon Trotsky and his latter-day followers has been rather misdirected and somewhat over-rated. And that’s us trying to be polite.

Dave Perrin

Revolution and reality: Why Left wing organizations are anything but revolutionary (1977)

From the August 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is unique among political parties in this country because unlike all others we propose a revolutionary change in the basis of society. We stand for the establishment of Socialism, a society in which the means of wealth production and distribution will be owned and controlled in common in the interests of the whole of society. Such an idea is not new, but this does not detract from its value and relevance. We argue that a system of world-wide common ownership can only be introduced with the conscious political action of the vast majority and to achieve this a revolution in thinking must first occur. We make this point because other political parties who claim to represent working class interests seem not to regard it as important.

The social system under which we currently live, capitalism, is popularly portrayed by spokesmen for the so-called left and right wings, as an entity which can be modified in such a way as to meet both the requirements of that minority who own the means of production and distribution; and the vast majority who must work for the owners in order to live. Such a picture may be likened to a group of car salesmen who each promise that their particular model can travel forward and in reverse at the same time. In fact the economic interests of the owner are fundamentally opposed to the interests of the non-owning worker.

The capitalist requires a profit from the production of commodities and will not allow production to take place unless there is a good chance of success in this. The workers, on the other hand, need not worry about the extent of their personal profit—they get none. Instead a worker receives a wage, referred to in more genteel circles as a salary, which basically accords with the amount it costs him and his family to live. It needs hardly be said that the standard reached by workers compared with that of the owners is a poor one.

A point worth emphasizing here is that a worker is one who depends on a wage in order to live. Some self-styled “socialists” regard the “middle class” as a group with interests other than those of workers. They offer no evidence to support this moonshine, but it is used by them as a justification for their playacting as minority vanguards who are going to lead the workers along the chosen path. The SPGB has always opposed the idea of a leadership.

Social problems which confront all workers are not imaginary ones; poverty in all its multifarious forms is literally a fact of life for the great majority. But it should be made clear that we are not arguing for the fanciful “redistribution of wealth” as proclaimed by the supporters of capitalism. The profit motive which is the mainspring of capitalist production in fact restricts production to that which can be sold in the markets. The removal of this “incentive”, far from removing the motive to produce, will mean that production will become unfettered and goods and services will become freely available. Whether ownership today rests in the hands of the state or “private” employers is an irrelevance, for the basic pattern remains. Anyone who doubts this may look at the Post Office Chairman’s recent comment that “Profit must be the heartbeat of the economy”, or on the other hand consider how different are the lives of telephone operators and engineers from his. The necessity for profit means that there is a constant struggle between capitalist and worker over the division of wealth. Workers must attempt to resist pressure from employers to push wages down, or to hold them in check, while the owners attempt to increase their share of the wealth which has been produced by the labour of the working class alone. It is accurate to say that members of the capitalist class have no need to work, and play no part in the productive process as such. It is their ownership of the means of production which puts them in this position, and it is a position in turn preserved and defended by the capitalists’ executive — the State and its coercive forces.

It is at this point that the “left wingers” go completely wild. Having no Socialist understanding to guide them, they hit out wildly and seize sporadically upon the effects of private-property society without appearing to recognize the cause of social problems. They, like the proverbial empty vessel, make noise. Workers are advised “to take away the property of the capitalist class at the point of production” (IS): to “Smash the State” (IMG) and to “Smash the Bosses” (ALL). Apart from displaying a dangerous ignorance of the capitalist world, people who go in for this sort of empty sloganeering reveal themselves as essentially half-hearted about the need for social change. They have not thought the thing through. This becomes even more obvious when considering that all the “left” parties support the Labour Party at election times, and spend most of the time in between advising it on the day-to-day tactics of capitalism, usually critically.

Far from adopting the revolutionary stance of the Socialist—the abolition of property ownership whether private or State—they seek minor modifications within a system founded upon private property ownership. The essentially non-revolutionary attitude of the “left” really begins to show when they attempt to define an independent object of their own. The Socialist Workers’ Party, who among other things stand for “the abolition of capitalism”, tell us that in “socialism” workers (yes, there will still be a working class apparently) will be paid something called socialist wages; and their right to strike will be defended by a Workers State. They appear not to recognize that with the abolition of capitalism goes the abolition of wages and the means of exchange, because wealth will be owned in common. The fact that they envisage strikes (against whom and for what?) taking place underlines their confusion.

The International Marxist Group, whose aim sounds similar ("the overthrow of the capitalist system”), appear no less muddled. Their candidate for Islington North at the May elections went about his part in this “overthrow” in a most peculiar fashion:

I stand for a socialist solution. Inflation proofing of wages and social services . . .  A national minimum wage of £50 a week, payable to the unemployed, sick, infirm and pensioners. Freeze all prices, rates and rents. Cut the working week, with no loss of pay, to end unemployment . . . etc. etc.

So much for their revolutionary aspirations; these measures are aimed at “improving” capitalism. One other thing emerges, and that is that IMG candidates do not trouble to read Marx. If they had, they would at least be aware that wages are prices. The ill-named Workers’ Revolutionary Party are no better. Their revolutionary demand earlier this year was uncompromising “Full employment now!” which is again a utopian plea for an “improved” capitalism and is precisely what they are all about. No Socialist argues for full employment; we argue for an end to the wages system.

A questioner at one of our meetings the other day chided the speaker for seeing things as black and white. We can only comment that if things are black and white, it is no bad way to see them. The choice before members of the working class is a straightforward one — capitalism or Socialism. While the “lefties” may pretend to have a foot in both camps, it only conjures up a picture of the man with one foot on the shore and the other in an unfastened boat; and the consequences for them are likely to be the same.

Alan D'Arcy