Enter the Twilight Zone (2023)

Book Review from the April 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Twilight of World Trotskyism, By John Kelly. Routledge. 2023.

This is effectively the updated sequel to Kelly’s book Contemporary Trotskyism, which was reviewed in the October 2018 Socialist Standard. It is a lot shorter than the first, more international in outlook, a little repetitive in places and surprisingly polemical.

Kelly argues that after a period of significant decline, the Trotskyist movement worldwide entered a period of relative stability in the early 21st century which has in more recent years been shattered by another period of organisational sclerosis, bloodletting and waning membership. There are now no less than 32 international organisations claiming to be the Fourth International or its successor, and in the UK alone there are currently 21 separate Trotskyist organisations that openly identify as being such.

One of the most significant recent splits concerns the so-called Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW) and its international body, the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI). This split has been over the growth of identity politics linked to their Irish affiliate and led to the formation in the UK of the 200-strong Socialist Alternative group. Kelly estimates there are now around 9,000 Trotskyists in total in the UK, the majority of them in the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and SPEW, the only parties with over a thousand members – though in SPEW’s case only just.

Kelly identifies the main centres of World Trotskyism as being the USA, Britain, France and Argentina (based on parties, memberships, publications, electoral statistics, etc). The organisational issues noticeable in Britain are equally obvious elsewhere – the USA has 23 separate Trotskyist groups, France 15 and Argentina 16. He attempts to look beyond the sect-like nature of these groups to some of the more fundamental underlying issues with Trotskyist politics that we have often identified ourselves in this magazine. These include the dishonest and incredible nature of ‘transitional demands’; Trotskyists’ rigid adherence to Leninist methods while bizarrely expecting a different outcome to those achieved by Leninists previously in Russia, China, etc; their obsessive catastrophising (a massive world crisis and revolution is always just around the corner, yet somehow never materialises); and their conceptions of how members may be recruited and supporters gained that bear little relationship to the underlying reality.

Over the years we ourselves have had some political sport pointing these things out, and have sparred with more Citizen Smith clones occupying a Trotskyist parallel universe than we care to remember. Though it’s also fair to say that at least some of the failures and limitations experienced by the Trotskyists (and others that seek to position themselves more generally as anti-capitalists) could also apply to us. Indeed, Kelly emerges as something of a reformist in this book and takes a sideswipe in our direction, saying ‘Tony Judt’s remark about the British propaganda sect, the SPGB, applies with equal force to [many of the Trotskyists]: “Impervious to change, and too small to be adversely affected by its own irrelevance, it will presumably survive indefinitely”’ (p.98). This didn’t make much sense the first time we read it and it makes little more sense here. Also, it is a bit odd as nowhere does he explain to readers what the SPGB is (we’re not even in the List of Abbreviations included) and because his main argument in this section appears to be that many of the Trotskyist groups are actually ageing out of activity and existence completely: ‘It appears that instead of being carried forward to revolutionary triumph by the laws of history, the forces of Orthodox Trotskyism are being carried into oblivion by the law of biology’ (p.99).

Kelly ends by saying ‘After more than 80 years of Trotskyist activity, with no revolutions, mass parties or election victories to its name… the Trotskyist movement has become a dead end for socialists’ (p.105). We can, of course, agree. But it’s a shame he doesn’t seem to hold the view that the same comment could be applied – equally though for partly different reasons – to the Labour and Social Democratic parties. Their repeated failure to successfully reform the market economy has driven the politically frustrated into the hands of Leninists of all varieties for decades – and we suspect Keir Starmer’s likely pending government will keep them in business for quite a while yet.

DAP

Trotwatching (2000)

Book Review from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Adherents of Permanent Revolution: A History of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International’. By Barry Lee Woolley (University Press of America, 1999)

With the decline in the fortunes of the left-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus, books about the organisations of the radical left – once commonplace – are now much rarer. Here Barry Lee Woolley charts the rise and fall of the Fourth International in a largely narrative account of the coalescence of the Trotskyist movement at the International’s foundation in 1938 through its various sclerotic episodes in the post-war period until the mid-1970s.

Though much of it is well researched, this is an unusual work for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is rather US-centric, focusing overmuch on the role of the US Socialist Workers Party in the Fourth International. As Woolley is a former member of the American SWP and still has a great number of contacts in the US Trotskyist movement, this is perhaps understandable; whatever, Woolley certainly provides a good genealogical chart of the US Trotskyist movement and is able to calculate that in America alone three new Trotskyist parties have arisen on average per year.

Rather less understandable than all this is his current political orientation which seems to owe less to the political God Trotsky than the Christian Lord Almighty worshipped by the evangelicals in the American Bible Belt. This is evidenced in his peculiar obsession with ‘morals’ in general and male homosexuality in particular, the growth of which he claims was largely responsible for changing the outlook of the world Trotskyist movement in the 1960s:

“[a] change in recruitment patterns transformed the predominantly burly worker cadres of the early Trotskyist movement into the predominantly petty bourgeois, college-recruited, effeminate cadres of the world Trotskyist movement at the time of the tenth World Congress . . . [The Socialist Workers Party] even participated in the building of mass marches around the issue of special legal privileges for sodomites.”

Woolley would certainly appear to have an unhealthy preoccupation with this topic, with one chapter even having the bizarre, incomprehensible by-line “Socialist Sodomites and Sorcery”. Perhaps Woolley is living testament to the charge that membership of Trotskyist sects buggers up the brain.

Despite the large amount of time that has clearly gone into producing this generally well-referenced work, there are a number of factual errors too. The account of the British Trotskyist movement is good if only partial, but there really is no excuse for Woolley referring to British Trotskyist leader Tony Cliff as Ygael Gluckstadt when he is correctly mentioned elsewhere as Ygael Gluckstein. There are many other similar errors, so much so that they eventually become annoying.

Woolley is shortly to produce another volume, this time on the history of the American Trotskyist movement. For his sake and ours let’s hope he gets in contact with a good therapist before then, preferably one that can also give him a hand with his proof-reading.

Dave Perrin

A Trotskyist Oddity (2020)

Book Review from the July 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

I Want To Believe: Posadism, UFOs and apocalypse communism by A.M. Gittlitz. Pluto Press, 

The Argentinian Trotskyist J. Posadas is mostly known among left trainspotter circles for his belief in UFOs and advocacy of nuclear war. This book reveals a different story. Rather than a crankish outlier, he is revealed as pretty much a typical guru of a Trotskyist sect, with policies and positions typical of mainstream Trotskyism.

Born Homero Cristalli, in 1912 in Buenos Aires, he was the child of Italian immigrant shoemakers, who were themselves involved in left-wing politics. He grew up malnourished, and became an entertainer, and (briefly) a professional footballer. Football would be an enduring feature of his life, and his cadres at conferences would be required to have a match, leading in one instance to the French police being called to their supposedly secret meeting place because neighbours heard the shouting.

He became involved in the radical Buenos Aires milieu, and came to the notice of a group of Trotskyists after a short poem calling for unity with the Spanish government (during the civil war) he wrote was published in a left newspaper. The group, the International Communist League (LCI) had been typified as ‘coffee-bar wankers’ (the author, incorrectly, attributes this to Trotsky himself), and were seeking to break out of their intellectual ghetto and connect with the working class.

Cristalli proved to be an enthusiastic and energetic organiser, and made successful work with the shoemakers union. His working class authenticity made up for his limited theoretical grasp of Trotskyist positions. J. Posadas was a collective name of the group’s leadership, and Cristalli began to join in writing Posadas’s editorials. Eventually, he would possess the name entirely (the ‘J.’ was never defined).

Although Trotsky is venerated in many parts for his theoretical subtlety, in reality, his plans amounted to ‘go back to your constituencies and prepare for civil war’. His orientation was to try and form the command/control of a military force that could win that civil war, hence his and his followers focus on leadership. In practice this usually meant small groups trying to orientate towards and piggyback on bigger movements. In Argentina, this meant the strongman Juan Peron, who successfully co-opted the workers movement for his own ends.

Cristalli became a full time revolutionary, depending on the income his faction could bring in from its membership in the Fourth International, and he came to prominence in the internecine manoeuvring of the factions in the international, and became a supporter of Michel Pablo, who ostensibly led the International after Trotsky’s murder. This position, along with his energy and charisma, led him to being among the pre-eminent Trotskyists in Latin America, eventually with groups in Cuba, Brazil and Ecuador.

When the Second World War failed to bring about the revolutionary wave Trotsky predicted, the Fourth International’s leadership veered between trying to enter mass communist parties or supporting anti-colonial guerrilla movements. Cristalli visited Cuba after the revolution there and ended up being singled out as a leader of the Fourth International by Castro as he denounced and suppressed Cuban Trotskyists.

It was the Cuban missile crisis that developed Cristalli’s position on nuclear weapons. He was, though, not alone in wanting a nuclear confrontation with America: Che Guevara and Castro both wanted the conflagration. Cristalli’s position was that the imperialist states would not surrender to socialism without using their nuclear weapons, such a confrontation was inevitable; but that with the greater population of the communist world, only communism could emerge from the aftermath. This was simply a logical continuation of the basic position of Trotskyism to a world with nuclear weapons.

His other famous position, on extra-terrestrials being communists, was in fact not his position. Gittliz reveals that his notorious essay, ‘Flying saucers, the process of matter and energy, science, the revolutionary and working-class struggle and the socialist future of mankind’, was in fact written to close down debate from an enthusiast for UFOs in his party. In some senses his argument ‘We must appeal to the beings on other planets, when they come here, to intervene and collaborate with Earth’s inhabitants in suppressing poverty. We must make this call to them’ is simply a continuation of the notion of appealing to powerful figures to try and make changes.

 The UFOs simply became a distinguishing feature by which other Trotskyists could deride him and distinguish themselves from his organisation.

The secrecy of Cristalli’s organisation was essential in the face of real repression (some of the cadres were arrested and murdered by repressive regimes in Latin America). This, coupled with stern sexual moralism (including seeing homosexuality as degenerate) led to Cristalli controlling the sex lives of his cadres, separating married couples to work in different areas. He abandoned ‘democratic centralism’ in favour of his personal rule of the organisation, or ‘monolithism’.

It comes as no surprise to discover that he was caught receiving oral sex from a young female recruit. He responded in a fashion we are becoming accustomed to from the US president, of accusing all of his colleagues of being sexually promiscuous. He expelled them all, and then fathered a child with the recruit. As Gittlitz notes, this situation is not unique, and other Trotskyist sects had similar stories (Gerry Healy and the WRP springs to mind).

The book ends with an essay on the birth of the Posadas meme as a generation of young leftists rehabilitate the Ufological legend for the slogan ‘Fully automated space communism’, used ironically but still indicating a search for hope in a time of fallen ideas. Gittlitz points out that for a short period, references to Posadas outranked Trotsky himself in Google searches thanks to the memes.

Pik Smeet

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

The Fragmenting Left (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism and nothing less is our aim. Our opponents, “left” though they may be, stand in the way of its achievement. They help to keep the workers confused by presenting as revolutionary and Socialist, their way-out schemes that are no more than reforms to patch up capitalism. We do not doubt their sincerity but are convinced that they, the left, do not understand the problems they are trying to solve. Under capitalism the propertyless wealth-producers and their families suffer poverty . . . whilst the non-producing owners of the means of production enjoy the affluence derived from surplus value created by the workers.

Capitalism involves private property, production for sale with a view to profit, wages, rent, interest and profit. Experience has amply endorsed the proposition that this form of society cannot be made to work in the interest of the wage-earners. The answer to working-class poverty is Socialism. This will involve the means of production being held in common, with democratic control thereof in the interest of society as a whole and production solely for use. There will be no more employers nor employees, no more buying and selling, and no more working for wages.

The Socialist Party came into existence for the sole purpose of winning a majority for Socialism. The case was reviewed in the editorial of this journal for June 1905 and summed up as follows:

  The formation of a new party was rendered imperative by the falling away of the SDF from the paths of political right-doing . . . Looking around them [some members of the SDF] in the political world they saw that organisations of the half-way house character were obtaining a larger measure of support, . . . they set themselves to the task of winning their own organisation to a similar position and to the adoption of a similar line of action.
   In this they were highly successful . . . The founders [of the Socialist Party] were fully alive to the fact that such spade work had to be performed . . .  It is easier to gain adherents to belief in a small palliative reform than to gain them to a new philosophy based upon an understanding of the material foundations of modem industrial slavery. But in the former case the adherents are not adherents for Socialism, in the latter case they are.

The Social Democratic Federation continued its service to political confusion after the formation of the SPGB. It eventually became the British Socialist Party and helped to found the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. During the first world war, Hyndman, the founder and father-figure, was expelled.

An earlier split from the SDF occurred in 1903, when the Socialist Labour Party was formed in Scotland. It was modelled on the SLP of America, a party that came to emphasize the economic side of the class struggle to the detriment of the political. The SLP were very active in the day-to-day struggle in their early years and many of the “Red Clydesiders” came from their ranks. In the SLP scheme of things, all workers engaged in a particular industry would belong to the union covering it, regardless of their trade or profession.

These unions would organize the workers for the task of seizing and holding the means of production by “locking the capitalist out”. The union would then act as the basic unit of organization in the new society. The SLP look upon existing unions as reactionary by virtue of their acceptance of capitalism, their undemocratic organization and leaders who function as “labour lieutenants” of the capitalist class. What they do not understand is that these factors indicate a lack of Socialist consciousness among workers. Nor do they recognise that capitalists play no part in production and are in fact already locked out.

For their emancipation, the working class must capture political power. The perfecting of trade union organization is a Utopian dream; unions are part of the workers’ defensive organization within capitalist society and they naturally have many of the ugly features of that society. The lesson that the SLP and many others have still to learn is that shop floor organization can only palliate, not remove, workers’ problems. Practically nothing has been seen of the SLP in Britain lately. There were a number of resignations, mainly in America during the late 1960's and groups formed to rescue “Industrial Unionism” from a moribund SLP.

The 1914 War shattered the Second International to which the “halfway house” parties had belonged. Nearly all proved to be patriotic, and their internationalism consisted in urging workers to slaughter each other on battlefields. The Bolsheviks had stood out against the war and bitterly criticized those who turned patriot. Yet they took power in Russia and were convinced that capitalism was about to fall. However, the working class stayed loyal to the system that exploits them. They had never given any sign of doing otherwise.

The ranks of the would-be leaders of the working class were split between the followers of the Moscow-dominated Third International and national Labour leaders. Whenever parties of either group got power the consequences for Socialism were grim. The development of state capitalism in Russia and the efforts of Labour to run capitalism were mistaken for Socialism and added further confusion to be overcome.

By the early ’thirties two minority Labour governments had come and gone. Part of the leadership went into the National Government that was set up to cope with the economic crisis and record unemployment. Another result was that the Independent Labour Party split from them and set out into the political wilderness, and have never returned. They had helped to set up the Labour Party and many of that party’s leaders and MPs were from the ILP. The disaffiliated ILP was no more Socialist than the Labour party it had left. With capitalism in crisis certain prominent ILPers were confidently expecting its collapse. The Chairman of the ILP, a certain Mr. Fenner Brockway, predicted “a bloodless revolution possibly within the next four years” (Manchester Guardian 25 April 1932). There was no collapse and no revolution, but many years later Lord Brockway joined the Labour contingent in the same House of Lords that they had once been so keen to abolish.

Meanwhile the men of Moscow had been making heavy weather. The theory of “Socialism in one country” replaced their earlier plea for world revolution. This swapping of illusions did not go down well in some quarters and a “left opposition” under Trotsky developed. Splits followed in other parties of the Third International. Both sides were addicted to a belief in the need for leadership and were agreed on many essentials. Their differences centred on the quality and personalities of the opposing leaders, Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky lost out and was banished. He eventually concluded that the Third International had ceased to be an instrument of revolution and declared the need for a fourth international. In his The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938) he states:

  The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”, they have begun to get somewhat rotten . . . The Historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership . . . It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of Transitional Demands. 

And commenting on the social-democrats’ maximum and minimum programmes: “no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need for such a bridge, since the word Socialism is only used for holiday speechifying” (Merit Edition pages 5 and 7).

Pity the poor worker seeking leadership. For over the years “the crisis of the revolutionary leadership” has multiplied and there are now several Fourth Internationals competing with each other to supply that service. At present the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (formerly Socialist Labour League), International Marxist Group and Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist) all claim to be the British section of the Fourth International. There are numerous other groups offering variations on a theme by Trotsky.

He was wrong, of course. The objective prerequisites for proletarian revolution have not ripened. For it is not leadership that the working class needs but Socialist understanding. With it, they will establish Socialism. Nor will this knowledge come by means of transitional demands, for they are nothing but reforms. They do not form a bridge but a diversion. For in order to get support for these demands, their merits must be propagated and shown to be superior not only to other reforms but also to the demand that capitalism be abolished.

Organizations so engaged give all attention to the immediate and not the final demand and, as Trotsky put it, only mention Socialism in their holiday speechifying. They do not even do that nowadays if the urgent call to action published in the Mayday 1973 issue of Workers Press (daily organ of WRP) is anything to go by. To replace the Tories they wanted "a Labour government which is pledged by the mass action of the working class to implement socialist policies.” Even though the Labour party has never been Socialist, they could easily promise any of the policies advocated by Workers Press. In particular, the “Socialist United States of Europe” is so much eye wash; the alternative to the Common Market (and all other markets) is production for use.

The Russo-Chinese split arising from the conflict of material interests between these two capitalist countries was cloaked by a propaganda barrage that would have us believe that it was over the interpretation of Lenin’s views on the conduct of revolution.

More importantly, they exposed the non-Socialist nature of society in those countries by their mutual recriminations. The Chinese claim that capitalism is being restored in Russia, whilst the formerly "Maoist”

Marxist-Leninist Organisation of Britain claim that the same is happening in China. Both claims are nonsense. Capitalism has been developing all the time the so-called Communist parties have governed there. Just as the workers cannot be led to Socialism, nor can they be led away.

The Maoist split from the CPGB did not result in a united party. A great many mutually hostile groups proclaiming Maoism as the answer to the workers’ woes have come into being. The shock of the Sino-Soviet split and the need to rethink has produced such gems as this: “Despite the continued use of Marxist terminology the line of the Soviet leadership should be seen as being no different from that churned out for years by the social democrats — socialism and peace in words — bourgeois dictatorship and imperialism in actions”. (Documents of Communist Federation of Britain [Marxist Leninist], p.6). Once it is seen that the “Marxism” of the Soviets is no different from that of the Social Democrats, it is then but a short step to seeing that the same applies to the “Marxism” of Mao Tse Tung.

These breakaway groups (Trotskyites and Maoists) have directed much of their fire at the CPGB.(They believe that this would-be appendage of the Labour Party has deviated from the path of revolution. Neither the breakaways nor the CPGB were ever on it!) The pamphlet Ultra Left in Britain was the CPGB’S answer. The groups were treated as though they were separate entities; yet their point of departure was the “Communist International”. The CPGB is part of the “old block” from which all these chips have come. Whilst it is true enough that capitalism generates the discontent that is expressed in political protest, the nature of its fragmentation owes much to the illusions peddled by the Bolsheviks and their followers.

The Socialist Party after seventy years of consistent effort to win the working class to Socialism is still opposed by those who find “it is easier to gain adherents to belief in a small palliative reform”. All those years of experience have shown that “the adherents are not adherents for Socialism”. Over the years the evidence confirming the correctness of the Socialist Party’s case has accumulated. Much of it concerns the rise and fall of parties of the Left. Capitalism has done much of the work for us. Only the Socialist Party can impart the knowledge to overcome political confusion.

Joe Carter

The Workers' Internationals (1945)

From the March 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

Much has been written on the "lessons" to be learned from the efforts to set up an international organisation that would co-ordinate the national straggles of the workers against capitalism.

The first experiment arose out of a visit of Parisian workers to the London International Exhibition of 1862. when during the visitors' reception the London trades union officials, Odger and Applegarth, proposed that international congresses of workers be regularly held.

Thus was formed the International Working-Men's Association, whose committee invited Karl Marx to draft their "Inaugural Address," which was delivered at St. Martin's Hall, London, in September, 1864. While in the main dealing with the industrial struggles of Europe’s workers who became affiliated to it, the International essayed to shed light on the steps to be taken by the workers towards their emancipation. For instance, the second part of the Geneva resolution, dealing with the trade unions, might be written to-day. It states:

The trade unions hitherto concentrated their attention too exclusively to the local and direct struggle against capital. They ’have not completely realised their power to attack the very system of wage slavery and present-day methods of production. That is why they keep aloof from social and political movements. 

Born in the period of the turmoil of the bourgeois revolutions, feared and hated by European governments during its life, the International became the debating ground for the working-class thinkers of the day, the main cleavage being that of Marx and his supporters, who held that the workers must gain political power for Socialism, as against the Anarchist section led by Bakunin, which, while acknowledging the economic theories of Marx, argued that only by the forcible smashing of the state by direct action could the workers get their freedom.

Basically the division was that of the industrial workers whose mission is the remoulding of a complex capitalist society where the franchise can be the instrument to effect the economic change, as opposed to those who still had to fight against a despotic feudalistic state, as in Spain and Russia, where suppression led to assassination, insurrection and minority action.

Theoretically expressing these conditions, the anarchists, though hating capitalism, could only visualise a decentralised agrarian economy of individual owners relieved entirely of state interference.

Torn by these ideological differences, together with the reaction arising from the crushing of the workers of the Paris Commune, the General Council decided to remove to New York, where after some activity in workers' organisation, the I.W.A. died a quiet death in 1875.

The First International, though providing a valuable apprenticeship for the workers, and in spite of being guided by thinkers as brilliant as Marx and Engels, was premature in face of the political immaturity of the workers themselves. It nevertheless taught the world's workers how to "walk by themselves" tactically and theoretically in their struggles against capitalism.

With the growth in Europe of parties whose declared intention was the seeking of political power in the name of Socialism, a second International was set up at the Paris Congress in 1880, and by 1907 at Stuttgart 26 nationalities were represented: the British Labour Party joining in 1908.

While without doubt Marx’s Socialism meant the abolition of the wage system and the uncompromising class struggle, these parties very soon abandoned their "Marxism," or, like the Labour Party and Fabians, initially denied it altogether for reformism and revisionism. A brief survey of the principal parties will make this apparent.

At the German Erfurt Congress of 1891, which ratified the merging of the Marxists and Lassallians, William Liebknecht, who had effected this fusion, held the following view :—

The possessor of the means of production expropriates the man who has none, and must work for him for a wage; he pays in the wage only a part of the work performed; the surplus value, the unpaid performance, becomes in his hand (the hand of the possessor of the means of work) capital, and enables him to draw tighter and firmer the worker's chains. . . .  Nothing in the process can be altered by pious wishes. . . . All attempts to remove the "excrescences" of capitalism, while maintaining its basis, are Utopian. These “excrescences" are the logical results, the inevitable consequence of the capitalistic system; whoever wants to remove them must remove it, their cause. By this demand the social democracy distinguishes itself from all other parties, and stamps itself a revolutionary party, while all other parties, without exception, take their stand upon the private ownership of the means of production. ("Modern Socialism," A. C. K. Ensor, 1904, p. 7.)

This stand gave place later to the "revisionism" of Bernstein, within the party, and though countered by Kautsky, Germany's foremost Marxist, opened the door to a huge membership of elements which made it a shade paler than the British Labour Party. It had gathered numbers and votes at the expense of its former concept of Socialism.

While forming a Republican Government after the last war, its ministers Ebert and Noske were responsible for the murder by Government troops of such Marxists as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg.

M. Beer, in "Fifty Years of International Socialism," says: "Ebert and Noske saved Germany for the Nazis by exterminating all determined men and women of the Socialist movement! Thousands were killed by their mercenaries, thousands maimed and driven into exile." (p. 192.)

Britain's Social Democratic Federation, like the German, began with a display of "Marxism" by its founder, H. M. Hyndman. in 1881. The movement suffered several splits, William Morris breaking away and forming the Socialist League, an anti-parliamentary sect which was finally captured by the anarchists.

Max Beer, in his "History of British Socialism," makes clear how the S.D.F. tried to ride two horses, one the advocacy of "Marxism," the other the more popular one of vote-catching reforms and arrangements with capitalist candidates.

It was on this issue that Scottish members split away and formed the S.L.P., leaning towards syndicalism, while the London secessionists formed the Socialist Party of Great Britain to advocate Socialism in 1904.

The I.L P.. Labour Party and Fabian Societv had all by then been formed with the “practical" policy of reforming capitalism, thus leaving the S.P.G.B. the only party in the field advocating straight Socialism.

The German and British Labour Parties held the largest representation at the Copenhagen Congress of 1910, which confirmed an oft-repeated pledge in a resolution which ran: "If war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working class to use every effort to prevent war by all means that seem to them appropriate. Should, nevertheless, the war break out, it is their duty to intervene to bring it promptly to an end, and use the political and economic crisis to rouse the masses from their slumbers and hasten the downfall of capitalist domination." ("Everybody's Book of Politics," Odhams Press, Ltd.)

Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik section of the Russian Social Democratic Party, declared that this resolution had been betrayed, and in his "War and the Second International’’ wrote a scathing indictment describing how the "Socialists” had placed themselves behind their capitalist governments, voted for war credits, and made a patriotic case for doing so.

This onslaught on the Second International virtually declared dead by Lenin, together with the apparent success of Bolshevik methods in bringing "Socialism" to Russia, heralded the formation of the Third "Communist" International in 1919. The Leninists built up their organisation on the basis of an elite of professional revolutionaries who were to lead the slow-witted masses to revolution.

Disdaining democratic parliamentary methods as "bourgeois," and only to be used as a "platform," their main urge was to civil war, through which in a crisis such as a war the government would be thrust aside, the "Communists" assume the state power and establish the "dictatorship of the proletariat," as in Russia.

For years the respective national sections disciplined by the "Comintern" talked civil war or supported the Tories in turn, according to the needs of the foreign policy of Russia, even dissolving . completely, as in America. Eventually with Russia's state capitalistic development and its arrival as a “great power," the need for international "reds" fell away and was even an embarrassment to Russia's diplomatic concert with her allies in World War 2, whereby the Third International was formally dissolved by Stalin. Russia's national leader, in February, 1944.

History had played a cruel trick on Lenin's international, for it was killed by a capitalist war, as surely as the Second which he himself declared dead—a war which it declared to be imperialistic, only to change to one for freedom when Russia itself was attacked.

There is left to mention the “Trotskyists," who have declared a Fourth International based on the tactics and doctrines of Lenin. Believing that Socialism would have been established in Russia but for its betrayal by the Stalinists, they perpetuate the illusion that Socialism can yet be won by Bolshevik methods. With a logic all their own, they have demanded “Immediate despatch of arms and material to the Soviet Union," while at the same time stating the war to be imperialistic. The Trotskyists are but the faint echo of the Third International in its Lenin's heyday, and while they think that slogans and leadership can take the place of a majority of convinced Socialist workers in ending capitalism, they are on the same road as their predecessors.

The ruins of the "Internationals" testify to the workers’ urge to put into effect Marx’s injunction, “Workers of all lands, unite." But for what? The S.P.G.B., with its companion parties in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America, have stood outside the "Internationals" on the grounds that they were non-Socialist bodies, and the failure of Labourism, Fabianism and Sovietism to achieve Socialism is proof of the correctness of our position. We state this in no sectarian spirit, but as a part of the workers' movement struggling for emancipation. Meanwhile capitalism is still here, with its wage system, its national struggles for trade, armed or “peaceful," and the workers have but mentally reached the stage of thinking that state control of capitalism by “labour” is Socialism in practice.

That the workers must challenge the basis of capitalism and end this vicious circle is apparent to many, and we make no apologies to the organised workers in asking them to examine our record and fitness to form the nucleus of a true Socialist Workers’ International.

Frank Dawe

Death of a tendency (2006)

From the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent death of Ted Grant at the age of 93 has been a landmark, albeit a minor one, in British political history.

Grant was the last of the three great gurus of the British Trotskyist movement and the eminence grise of what became known as the Militant Tendency. Along with his two main Trotskyist rivals, Gerry Healy (of the Socialist Labour League/Workers' Revolutionary Party) and Tony Cliff (of International Socialism/the Socialist Workers' Party) he had a considerable input into what became - with the decline of the Communist Party - the most significant political trend to the left of the Labour Party. 

Born Isaac Blank just outside Johannesburg, he changed his name to Grant when he came to Britain during the turbulent mid-1930s with a small band of other South African militants, convinced that it would be more fertile political territory than his country of birth. Attracted to the political ideas of the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, this small group of South African émigrés had already been influential in the founding of South Africa's first Trotskyist organisation, the Workers' International League, and soon made a mark on the fledgling British Trotskyist movement. Of the two small British Trotskyist groupings of the time, the Balham Group and the Revolutionary Socialist League (later to be called the Militant Labour League, selling a newspaper called Militant), Grant and his colleagues were attracted towards the latter. In what became a tradition of the Trotskyist movement not only in Britain but internationally, they soon split from it though to form their own organisation, this time a British version of the Workers' International League they had left behind in South Africa. Among those joining them was the Scottish orator Jock Haston and a voluble Irish militant, Gerry Healy. 

Fourth International 

In 1938 Leon Trotsky and his followers set up an international organisation intended to rival the worldwide Communist ('Third') International. This 'Fourth International' cast around for a British section, but the tiny group around Grant, Haston and Healy was ignored and the franchise went instead to the larger Militant Labour League. For this key event in Trotskyist history then, Grant and his comrades were shunned and Grant himself never got to meet Trotsky before the 'Old Man's' assassination by Soviet agents in Mexico in 1940. 

During the Second World War, Grant's WIL was active on the industrial front and soon began to eclipse its parent organisation in both membership and influence - so much so, that by 1944 the Fourth International persuaded the two organisations to merge, in what was effectively a WIL takeover. The new organisation created was called the Revolutionary Communist Party and was the first (and last) time the British Trotskyist movement was united in the one organisation. 

Grant became editor of the RCP's paper, Socialist Appeal, and Grant and Haston were the organisation's first delegates to the Fourth International. The RCP existed for three years and grew to 500-600 members, being a thorn in the side of the Communist Party before, in true Trotskyist fashion, internal strife led to decline and a split. 

Significantly, in the late 1940s three main factions had begun to emerge which were to be the main tendencies within the Trotskyist movement in Britain in the decades thereafter. Those around the Palestinian émigré Tony Cliff developed a distinctive version of the theory that what existed in the Soviet Union was a form of state capitalism (though only after Stalin's accession to power in 1928) and therefore couldn't be supported by socialists, while the groups around Grant and Healy held on to Trotsky's own belief that what existed in Russia was a workers' state, albeit a degenerated one. Indeed, the Grant and Healy factions had much in common politically, and it was mainly the bitter personal hostility that developed between the two men that kept their groupings separate. 

Secret organisation 

In the early 1950s, Grant and his small number of followers started a magazine called International Socialist. Grant lived in London and worked as a night-time telephone operator, which left him free to pursue his political work as a Trotskyist during the day. At this time he began to build up a close political relationship with a Trotskyist from Birkenhead called Jimmy Deane, who was the driving force behind Rally, a paper popular with the youth section of the Labour Party in the North West of England (and soon edited from Liverpool by a teenage Pat Wall, later one of the Militant supporting Labour MPs). 

By 1955 Grant and his supporters decided that the time was right to found a new organisation. Harking back to the group Grant first joined on his arrival from South Africa, it was called the Revolutionary Socialist League and its first General Secretary was Jimmy Deane. It effectively fused two small Trotskyist bases in London and Liverpool where Grant had an influence, and was a tightly-knit organisation built on the Leninist principles of the vanguard party, being hierarchical and secretive in almost equal measure, operating like other Trotskyist groups before it as a clandestine faction within the Labour Party. 

Coincidentally, two years earlier the Trotskyist Fourth International had split. Healy's faction had the UK franchise but went off with the splitters, leaving a vacancy for a British Section which the leadership of the FI allegedly tried to fill by placing an advertisement in Tribune, which Grant answered. By 1957, the RSL was given the British franchise by the FI but advanced only sporadically, starting a new paper called Socialist Fight but otherwise being eclipsed by other Trotskyist groups, particularly Healy's. At the time the Healy, Cliff and Grant factions were all building up support by working inside the Labour Party as secret parties within a party, focusing especially on the Labour League of Youth, but Grant's faction was so unsuccessful that the FI forced it to merge with an up-and-coming young group of Trotskyists in Nottingham around Ken Coates called the International Group. When this marriage of convenience led to the inevitable divorce within a year or so, the FI took the opportunity to rescind Grant's franchise altogether, giving it instead to the Nottingham faction which by then had turned itself into the International Marxist Group (IMG), a current which went on to develop a strong student base under the leadership of Tariq Ali.

Militant 

The loss of the Fourth International franchise was an understandable blow to Grant, but around the same time his group had begun to take steps which were to prove more fruitful, the most significant of which was the creation of a new publication to be called Militant - for Labour and Youth. It's editor was a young Liverpudlian with strong organisatiuonal abilities called Peter Taaffe, who became Grant's lieutenant-in-chief, while Grant himself was political editor. The striking design of the paper was created by Roger Protz, later of the Campaign For Real Ale, but who was a notable activist at various times in each of the three main Trotskyist factions in British politics (later, in Cliff's International Socialists, he became editor of Socialist Worker). It was to be growing sales of Militant, combined with systematic, organised activity in the Labour Party, which was eventually to bear fruit for Grant's faction. 

By 1966 they were the only one of the three main Trotskyist factions still inside the Labour Party. Healy's group had, by the early 1960s, almost completely taken over the (now renamed) Labour Party Young Socialists and after several attempts they were eventually expelled, with Grant personally refusing at one stage to vote to keep Healy-ites in the Party. Cliff's faction disengaged from Labour in the mid-1960s, seeing propaganda opportunities in disassociating itself from Wilson's Labour government, leaving the field free for Grant. By 1970 Grant's RSL had a majority on the Labour Party Young Socialists Executive and from 1972 onwards always had one of its members on the Labour NEC as the LPYS representative. 

Throughout the 1970s, the influence of what by this time was becoming known as the 'Militant Tendency' grew apace, both in the Labour Party and trade unions. Grant's organisation moved from being the least well-known of the major Trotskyists sects to becoming the most well-known, with something of a 'workerist' face, placing less emphasis on building up student support than most Trotskyist groups and more on recruiting the skilled and semi-skilled working class, especially local government workers. 

By the 1980s Militant's growth and influence was such that it could claim scores of Labour councillors across Britain as 'supporters' (when in reality they were RSL members who couldn't publicly admit to being a 'party within a party'). In addition, they could claim several Labour Parliamentary candidates - three of whom (Dave Nellist, Terry Fields and Pat Wall) eventually became MPs, and - most controversially of all - they took effective control of Liverpool City Council, with Derek Hatton as the council's Deputy Leader and Tony Mulhearn (a long-time RSL member more trusted by Grant) as his aide de camp. 

The mid-1980s, when the Tendency claimed over 8,000 'supporters', was the peak of Militant's influence on British politics and the nearest Grant came to fulfilling his dream of creating a mass Trotskyist base within the Labour Party. But its size, influence and the notoriety attached to it by the mainstream press led to the first systematic attempt to deal with Trotskyist infiltration in the Labour Party since the expulsion of the Healy-ites. Earlier, in 1975, Lord Underhill had written a report on Militant's activities in the Labour Party for a left-wing dominated Labour NEC that chose at the time to do nothing about it. But in the 1980s the Labour leadership acted, first under Michael Foot and then under Neil Kinnock, with his famous attack on the Militants on Liverpool City Council at the 1985 Labour Party conference, after they had deployed the tactic of refusing to set a rate, issuing 30,000 council workers with redundancy notices. 

Labour initially started by picking on the most obvious candidates for expulsion, the five members of Militant's Editorial Board, including Grant and Taaffe, who were expelled in 1983. After this, large and increasing numbers of their comrades were systematically put outside the Party they claimed was 'the mass party of the working class'. 

Political positions 

Throughout the lifetime of the RSL, 'entryism' into the Labour Party was one of its defining characteristics as a Trotskyist current. Others used entryism as a tactic, including Cliff and Healy, but for Grant's group it appeared to amount to more than this - it was a defining political position. Sometimes called 'deep entryism' it was not simply about a Trotskyist organisation going into the Labour Party, building up support and effectively raiding it for new members before emerging into the outside world stronger and fitter. For Grant, as Militant's main theoretician, the task of his tendency was to 'win the Labour Party to socialism' on the grounds that a united Labour and trade union movement under a Trotskyist leadership was unstoppable. 

The means for achieving this goal was deep entryism plus a particular variety of Trotsky's 'transitional demands' programme, a strategy developed from Lenin's premise that the working class in capitalism was not capable through its own efforts of developing a socialist consciousness. This transitional programme was a carefully calculated list of demands - such as massive public works programmes, the nationalisation of the top 200 monopolies, and an implausibly generous minimum wage - which would be superficially attractive to supporters of reforms in the wider Labour and trade union movement, and which Militant thought contained the seeds of a future socialist society. The intention was a dishonest one, for Grant and Militant's other leaders knew that these demands were not generally capable of realisation within the normal politics of capitalism - indeed, that was the very point of advocating them. The resultant anger they expected within the working class when these demands were unmet would lead, they hoped, to a lurch towards the left under the leadership of the Trotskyist vanguard itself - the RSL. 

The desire to stay in the Labour Party at all costs coupled with distinctive transitional demands that could lead to a Trotskyist leadership introducing 'socialism' (really state-run capitalism based on nationalisation) via an Enabling Act in parliament - and supported by workers' councils in the industrial field - was what really defined Militant in relation to the other Trotskyist sects. Also, and uniquely, the RSL quickly identified the arena of local government as a means for criticising traditional, piecemeal reformist politics (saying they would always oppose rent and rates increases), raising its programme of more radical transitional demands instead as the 'bridge to socialism': 

"To lift the horizon of the local parish pump politicians on to the broader national and international field - this is the first task of the revolutionary Councillor . . . It is necessary within the Labour Groups and in open council to point out the limitations of particular struggles and reforms and show how (in theory and practice) reformism (nationally and locally) cannot resolve the contradictions of capitalism." (RSL 'Notes on Council Work', by Ellis Hillman, 1961.) 

These socialist-sounding phrases, in reality masking the advocacy of what were, in effect, just more radical reforms of capitalism, was typical of their entryist tactic, as later exemplified in Liverpool. Combined with their relentless workerism and disdain for non-economic issues, this constituted their 'Unique Selling Point' within the Trotskyist milieu (unlike others, Militant had relatively little interest in sexual or student politics, or supporting Third World nationalist movements). 

These were the key perspectives handed down by Grant himself, consistently over decades. Indeed, it was often said by his supporters and opponents alike that Grant was saying the same things in the 1980s as he had been saying in the 1940s, and his book, "The Unbroken Thread: the Development of Trotskyism Over 40 Years", is testament to this. This would have to include his oft-repeated claim (following Trotsky, and like his rival Gerry Healy of the WRP) that capitalist collapse leading to a Trotskyist leadership of a revolutionary working class was imminent in 'the coming period' of the next 10-15 years, somewhat in the perpetual manner of 'tomorrow never comes'. 

Post-Militant 

In the eventually, capitalism outlived Grant himself. Indeed, Grant's end appears to have been a rather sad one, in an old people's home, years after having been kicked out of the Labour party and then, rather more remarkably, the RSL itself. The campaign of the Labour leadership in the 1980s against Militant had been so successful that by 1992 the majority of the RSL, led by Taaffe, came to the conclusion that continuing with entryism was pointless and stood 'Militant Labour' candidates against the official Labour Party, with mixed success. A group around Grant and one of his protégés, Alan Woods, refused to accept this reversal of what the Tendency had always stood for, and were expelled. 

Just as Grant had borrowed from early Trotskyist groups when founding the Revolutionary Socialist League and its paper, Militant, so this expelled rump from the RSL started a new paper called Socialist Appeal, the name of the journal Grant edited while one of the leaders of the RCP just after the war. Never more than a couple of hundred at most, this group made little impact, while after a period of serious decline the slightly larger Militant Labour eventually voted in 1997 to dishonestly turn itself into the 'Socialist Party' (of England and Wales - SPEW to its enemies), effectively trying to usurp the name of the SPGB. This grouping has since declined further, though its leading elements in Scotland, such as Tommy Sheridan, were instrumental in forming the rather more successful but equally reformist Scottish Socialist Party. 

The modern legacy of Ted Grant is an interesting one, for in many respects he was the most successful of the three main British Trotskyist leaders, while still falling well short of his ultimate goal. From a socialist perspective, the Militant Tendency (like the other Trotskyist groups) did much to muddy the waters of revolutionary politics in the UK, posing as socialist while supporting the usual Trotskyist stew of radical reformist demands with the long-term aim of state-run capitalism organised by a Leninist vanguard party, another classic 'dictatorship over the proletariat', with Grant as leader-in-waiting. 

Grant knew full well of the real socialist alternative promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain and our companion parties overseas (he debated Socialist Party speaker Tony Turner in 1945 and was wont to deride us as 'ultra left' sectarians) but he rejected real socialism for the type of politics that cast him in the role of leader, manipulating the mass of the proletariat towards a 'revolutionary situation'. But, as history proved, the working class were not so easily manipulated by Grant's particular mix of Trotskyist tactics, and his lifetime was effectively wasted on an ultimately dishonest political cause. 

This was a shame, because like Tony Cliff, Grant had much energy and some talent as a writer and speaker. He was an obsessive analyst of - and collector of information about - the capitalist economy, though arguably (because of his unsupported belief in capitalist collapse) his best works were not in this field. His political tract Against the Theory of State Capitalism in 1949, for instance, was a relentlessly logical attack on the irrationality of the Cliff (SWP) position from an orthodox Trotskyist perspective, implying that the only coherent state capitalist theory applied to the Soviet bloc, etc came from those, like the Socialist Party, who rejected Leninist and Trotskyist politics altogether. And in more recent times, he collaborated with Alan Woods to write an excellent book called," Reason and Revolt: Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science", a history of science and scientific methods from a general Marxist standpoint. Grant will be remembered, above all else though, for founding a political tendency which hit the headlines and gained public notoriety but which otherwise did the socialist movement huge amounts of damage. His political heirs in Socialist Appeal and SPEW fittingly continue to peddle the same kind of elitist and outdated reformist nonsense now as Grant did when he first became a Trotskyist in the 1930s. Indeed, for years Grant was derided by many for sounding rather like an old, broken record - and today, his surviving political heirs most certainly stand out as badly scratched vinyl in what is a transparently digital age.

Dave Perrin