Gerry-built (2025)

Book Review from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Party is Always Right. By Aidan Beatty. Pluto Press. 2024.

This is sub-titled the ‘Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism’ though in truth most of it has been told before. The interesting addition is the number of interviews that have helped to add colour and richness to a grim story of political failure and an even grimmer tale of internal strife and abuse.

Alongside Ted Grant of the Militant Tendency and Tony Cliff of the Socialist Workers Party, Gerry Healy was one of the three gurus of the British Trotskyist movement. While all three led organisations that had authoritarian tendencies, Healy’s outfit was by far the worst. Called the Socialist Labour League until it changed its name to the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in 1973, it became a byword for cult-like sectarianism and was infused with a rancid, hierarchical political culture which was framed and dominated by the leader himself. Healy was a tyrannical bully who often directed and oversaw violence against his political opponents (both inside and outside the party) and who was an expert manipulator. Indeed, that was arguably his main ‘talent’ such as it was and what kept him at the top of the organisation for so long.

Unlike Grant or Cliff, Healy was no theoretician with a knowledge of Marx, even though he liked to paint himself as such. Most of his attempts at establishing this sort of reputation for himself only served to expose his limitations, which were considerable. He was obsessed with Marxist dialectics, but his forays into this were generally just nonsense (Beatty quotes a few examples in case anyone was in any doubt).

Healy also seemed to possess relatively little knowledge of Marxist economics. He was the perennial catastrophist, constantly predicting that capitalism was in its final death agony and that the revolution was imminent. He was effectively saying the same thing in the 1970s and 80s as he had been in the 1950s. Yet the collapse never came.

Some argue that he had a certain charisma, which is why he was able to keep his hold on the party for so long. It was certainly enough to woo a number of high-profile celebrities into the orbit of the organisation, starting with the actor Corin Redgrave and then his more famous sister Vanessa, but including many others from Frances De La Tour to former Spurs football player Chris Hughton.

But this charisma – if that is what it was – was ultimately to prove the downfall of both Healy and the WRP. In 1985, Healy’s secretary Aileen Jennings wrote to the Political Committee of the WRP alleging that Healy was a serial manipulator and sexual abuser of women, naming 26 female victims, mainly party members. This eventually led to a predictable slew of lurid tabloid headlines and was a proverbial ‘hand grenade’ against its supreme leader from which the WRP never recovered. It split into myriad warring factions over the following years.

Healy himself then founded the Marxist Party with loyalists Vanessa and Corin Redgrave but died aged 76 in 1989 and this party – never more than about 50 or so – dwindled away to nothing. The surviving WRP led by Sheila Torrance is also now tiny (estimated at around 120 members at most) though still stands General Election candidates, as periodically does another small surviving faction, now called the Socialist Equality Party and linked to a US organisation of the same name led by David North (a Healy protégé).

At its peak the WRP may have had 3,000 members but when the split happened the party’s finances became one of the biggest bones of contention as it emerged that many of its assets were not actually registered in the name of the party itself, but through other byzantine and opaque structures – allegedly for security reasons. There was a Head Office (with no signage) on Clapham High Street in a building now occupied by Caffé Nero, eight apartments around the corner in Clapham Old Town (Healy himself lived in one of them), a ‘College of Marxist Education’ in rural Derbyshire, and a state-of-the-art printing works in Runcorn that had enabled the WRP to produce the first colour daily newspaper in Britain, News Line. There were also several ‘Youth Training Centres’ it had set up, at one stage several bookshops, and also fleets of vehicles including Healy’s BMW.

The party’s finances were actually another Achilles Heel, as it over-extended itself in a way that couldn’t be sustained through membership income and paper sales alone, however hard the leadership pushed the members and gave them impossible targets to meet. Hence Healy’s well-known soliciting of money from Iraq and – in particular – Colonel Gaddafi’s Libyan regime (which also gave the WRP printing works considerable contracts, including for mass copies of the Green Book). Beatty is sceptical of some of the wilder claims that have been made about links with Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and the PLO as well, but there is little doubt that money came from both Iraq and Libya and was not unconnected with the virulently pro-Arab nationalist tone of much WRP literature.

This then leads us on to another theme – the paranoia and secrecy at the heart of the organisation. Healy was obsessed with the security services, spies and moles, and saw them everywhere. Anyone who crossed him was lucky to be called a ‘subjectivist idealist’ or similar, the alternative was that they were really a spy. Anecdotes about speakers at WRP meetings being asked to speak with their backs to the window (in case MI5 listening devices could pick up sensitive vibrations from the glass) were not entirely unfounded. In fact, the British state did show an interest in the WRP (especially in the 70s and 80s) though this was more because of its links to industrial disruption in the early 70s and then later links to foreign governments and their money, than any assessment of them being a credible domestic revolutionary threat.

Beatty says that the standard description of the WRP as a cult has something going for it, but is, of itself, inadequate because its internal practices were directly a product of its elitist political outlook:

‘Dismissing the WRP as a cult means ignoring the connection between the WRP’s authoritarian culture and the party’s Leninist structure. The WRP can and should be understood also as an extreme manifestation of Leninist vanguardism and its anti-democratic praxis’ (p. xvii).

We could not have put it better ourselves.

Dave Perrin

Capitalists, Tremble! More Nonsense From the “Workers’ Press” (1973)

From the June 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Labour League, in a May-Day Manifesto, has issued an “urgent call to action” to “all Socialists and class-conscious workers”. They must set up “Councils of Action”, they say, and these Councils of Action “will unite all political tendencies of the working class”, Labour Party, Communist Party, Socialist Labour League, International Socialists, and International Marxist Group to “fight against the Tory Government”.

The funny thing is that on the same page of Workers’ Press (April 30th) we are told that the Communist Party “is incapable of waging an independent fight against the Government”, which is the result of its “reformist peaceful road to Socialism which was drafted by Stalin”. And the S.L.L. “wages a relentless campaign against Stalinism”, although they “will fight to defend the USSR, China and Eastern Europe against imperialist aggressors.”

Seeing that “Comrade” Brezhnev went to Washington last week to conclude an Imperialist agreement, it looks as if the S.L.L. will be out of business on that one.

As for the trade union leaders, they are “a bureaucracy which essentially represent the opportunist degeneration of the workers’ movement”, but they “could not function without the connivance of the Communist Party”.

The S.L.L. “knows that the present leaders of the Labour movement have no intention of implementing Socialist policies”. What the S.L.L. and Workers’ Press call “Socialist policies” will be listed later. For the moment let it be said that they are anything (and almost everything) but Socialism.

Anyway, this motley crew of “bureaucrats” (L.P.), “class collaborationists” (C.P.), “middle class centrists of I.S. and I.M.G.” — Workers’ Press, April 23rd — with the unemployed (who can’t strike anyhow) and tenants, have to “organize a General Strike”, to “force the Government to resign” (Workers’ Press, April 29th). When they have done this, a "Labour Government must be elected . . . pledged by the mass action of the working class to implement Socialist policies”.

Why a Government has to be elected, when a mass movement of Action has already forced one to resign, is not explained. In any case, the programme (for the newly elected Labour Government) is to “force the Labour leaders to carry out Socialist policies”. Now comes the moment of truth: the S.L.L. knows that the Labour leaders will not do this. So: “if the working class is strong enough to force the Tories out, it is strong enough to deal with the traitors in its own midst”.

Poor old Socialist Labour League Trotskyists, this is not even as “r-revolutionary” as the good old 1920 C.P. which at least didn’t monkey about with election nonsense but would replace the Government with Soviets. (What has become of the Soviets?) Anyway, after the treacherous Labour leaders have jibbed at “Socialist policies”, more mass action by the workers will “deal with the traitors” until Gerry Healy is Prime Minister. This is a bit like the French Revolution, which relentlessly destroyed one faction after the other until Napoleon seized power. But they started from the Left, whereas the S.L.L. starts from the Right.

So it looks as if we are in for quite a bit of “mass action”, and the S.L.L. wants £100,000 to build a r-r-r-revolutionary party to do it. It is not quite explicitly stated what the hundred thousand quid is for. If all those workers in the Labour Party, C.P., S.L.L., I.M.G., I.S., tenants, Uncle Tom Cobley and all were really intent on a political general strike, presumably they could do it without £100,000. Even the 1926 lot didn’t wait to collect £100,000 first!

But the cream of the joke is the “Socialist policies” which the “mass-actioned” Labour Government is “to be forced to implement” against its will. Capitalists, tremble! Bankers, beware! Let the bosses face this lot: 

First, repeal the Industrial Relations Act.

Second, “The Right to Work”. (Oh, Christ!)

Third, “The Right to Strike”.

Fourth, "The Right to Defend Rights”.

Fifth: “The Right to a higher standard of living” (Nationalization).

Sixth, “The Right to Health Benefit”.

Seventh, “The Right to Decent Housing”.

(Workers’ Press, April 29th)

They’d have a job to get Enoch Powell to disagree with those. And for these we are to urgently “unite for mass action” like "occupying the factories”. And where is Socialism? Nowhere.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always held a very clear and straightforward idea about political and industrial action. Political action is that which concerns the whole working class, industrial action that of industries or trades. There is no way of getting control of the political machine of Government except by voting. Even if a government resigns as a result of a strike, it is still not known how many want something else, and what they positively want.

Incidentally, nothing could be more absurd than the S.L.L. claims that the capitalists want to “smash the unions”. This is the last thing the capitalists want. They love the trade unions, because they can’t do without them. It is true that Karl Marx urged the trade unions to inscribe on their trade-union banners “Abolition of the Wages System”, which is political; but obviously, having in mind the creation of a revolutionary political party to do it. “Abolition of the Wages System” is political; increases in wages are industrial, and leave capitalism intact.

Political strikes are fatuous nonsense which will only lead the workers into futile disaster. Trade unions resist the encroachments of capital. A political party, pledged to every one of its understanding members, is necessary for Socialism. Neither is it true that because Socialists deplore the stupid folly of marching and rioting for the “Right to Work”, that the work of the S.P.G.B. is dull or tedious. There is no greater task than to dispel Ignorance “which never helped anybody”

Horatio.

Blogger's Note:

See the correction in the July 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard.

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

Sinister Story (2020)

Book Review from the May 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

My Search for Revolution & How We Brought Down An Abusive Leader. By Clare Cowen. Matador. 2019. 350 pages. £19.99

Another book of Trotskyist reminiscences from the 1970s and 80s but with a rather more sinister story to tell, that of the ‘Workers Revolutionary Party’ ending in the exposure in 1985 of its leader, Gerry Healy, as a serial sex abuser. The author was one of his victims but most of her book is about the frenetic activity required of its ‘cadres’, the full-time ‘professional revolutionaries’ of which she was one.

At that time the WRP was arguably the premier Trotskyist organisation in Britain. Funded by Vanessa Redgrave and her sinister brother Corin, and also by the author and later Colonel Gaddafi, the WRP acquired a residential school, a number of bookshops, and a modern printing press on which it printed a daily newspaper. At its height it was able to ‘mobilise’ thousands of ‘youth’ and fill large venues such as Alexandra Palace in London for huge rallies.

Cowen’s account of how it functioned internally is disturbing and suggests it was more like a cult than a political party; its cadres had to devote the whole of their life to the organisation and accept a rigid discipline that included sessions at which they could be accused of being in error and forced to recant.

Fortunately a ‘revolution’ led by such a party never happened, nor was likely to despite the WRP motivating its cadres by proclaiming that it (or, alternatively, fascism) was imminent. When, following the defeat of the miners’ strike, most of them realised that it wasn’t, the whole thing fell apart, though a much smaller WRP still exists on the same basis, putting up 5 candidates at the last general election.

Adam Buick

On the Trot (1994)

Book Review from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gerry Healy: A
 Revolutionary Life, by Corrina Lotz and
 Paul Feldman (Lupus Books. 366 pp. £15.00.)

The title of this book is a misnomer. Gerry Healy was not a revolutionary, Marxist or socialist. Indeed, Ken Livingstone MP. in his sycophantic Foreword, gives the game away when he says that Healy "wanted to find ways of working with the Left in the Labour Party".

Gerry Healy was born in Ireland where, in 1920. he saw his father murdered by the Black and Tans. He came to Britain in 1928. and joined the Merchant Navy. Some time later, he joined the Communist Party and became a courier for the Communist International. But in 1936, he was expelled from the Party, and dubbed a Trotskyist for questioning why the Soviet Union was selling oil to Mussolini's Italy as well as Republican Spain. In fact, Healy knew nothing of Trotskyism or Trotsky at that time, although in 1937, after listening to Jock Haston speaking in Hyde Park, he joined the Militant Group, Britain’s only Trotskyist organisation at the time. But within a few months about a third of its members split from the Group, and formed the Workers International League.

By 1938, Gerry Healy and his little group adopted the now well-known Trotskyist tactic of "entryism", and joined both the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party.

By 1938, there were already four different Trotskyist groups in Britain, all claiming to represent the views of the Old Man himself. Healy joined the WIL some time later; and. in 1941, he volunteered for National Service. He was rejected and, for the rest of the war, worked in a number of engineering factories. During this period. Healy and the various Trotskyist groups supported the increasing number of strikes, and were called "fifth column saboteurs" by the Communists.

In March 1944, the WIL and another Trotskyist group, the misnamed Revolutionary Socialist League, came together to form the equally misnamed Revolutionary Communist Party. But, again, it was all to end in tears for Gerry Healy. The problem was, as before, "entryism" into the Labour Party. Jock Haston and a majority of the RCP opposed entry, whilst Healy and a minority were in favour. Some of them, including Healy, did join the Labour Party, the others remained outside. By 1949, the Revolutionary Communist Party had disintegrated. Healy and his group continued their struggle inside the Labour Party until 1959, when they were expelled. They then formed the Socialist Labour League. Each time. Gerry Healy was a large fish in a very small pond.

In July 1973, the Socialist Labour League transformed itself into the Workers Revolutionary Party under Gerry Healy’s leadership. On 1 May 1976, a daily paper, News Line, was published by the WRP. At the 1979 election, the WRP stood 60 candidates; but by the mid-1980s, the Party was in deep trouble; and, following allegations of Healy's alleged sexual improprieties with female members of his staff, the Party’s recently discovered debts of £250,000, and allegations of infiltration and disruption by MI5, Healy was persuaded to retire from the leadership. By 1988, the WRP was finished. Healy, Vanessa Redgrave and a few others formed yet another party, which they called the Marxist Party; but. shortly after, this also split. On 14 December 1990 Gerry Healy died.

What were Gerry Healy’s political views?

He believed that the Bolshevik coup d'état, in Russia in 1917, was a socialist revolution, despite the fact that the conditions for a socialist revolution did not exist either in Russia or elsewhere. After becoming a Trotskyist, and for the rest of his life, he described the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers state"; and rejected the arguments by socialists that, in fact, the USSR had merely become yet another capitalist state, with all the features of capitalism found elsewhere in the world.

Healy never accepted that the workers must free themselves without the necessity of aspiring leaders such as himself. He believed, just like members of both the Labour Party and Communist Party, that nationalisation had something to do with socialism; and, unlike socialists, he was a nationalist who supported movement such as the Palestine Liberation Organisation and other so-called liberation movements. In all the different groups and parties that he led, he did not accept, or even conceive of. democratic control by the membership. Like many other would-be leaders of the working class, he was, in fact, their political enemy. 

Peter E. Newell

Trotskyist Traumas (1985)

From the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is hostile to those political parties which stand for Trotskyism. Such organisations confuse the nature of the class struggle, mislead workers as to the real meaning of socialism and turn the ideas of Marx on their head in order to make them seem compatible with the elitist ideology of Leninism. Like all parties which aim to imitate the tactics of the Russian Bolsheviks, the Trots (as Trotskyists are known popularly) appoint themselves as vanguards, or leaders of the working class. Working on the arrogant Leninist assumption that workers are too stupid to understand the case for socialism, the Trots offer a programme of what are called "transitional demands", which amount in reality to a list of reforms of capitalism. Once workers have been recruited on the basis of such reformist opportunism. the Trots inform the new members that the reform programme cannot be realised by right-wing governments (including Labour governments, which the Trots unfailingly urge workers to vote into power) and therefore it is necessary to plan for workers to seize power in a violent coup d'état. to be led by the self-appointed "revolutionary party", which will establish state capitalism, as did the Bolsheviks in 1917. In short, the Trots offer an anti-socialist political position, both in their tactics and their objectives, and socialists have no option but to expose and oppose them.

Like the Leninist Left in general, the Trots have never been numerically significant in Britain. In the late 1940s there was a brief period when the Revolutionary Communist Party (not the same as the RCP of today) had more than ten thousand members and hopes of ousting the Communist Party of Great Britain as the main Leninist party in Britain. But. as is predictable in organisations so obsessed by leadership, the top men in the RCP could not agree to share power and so spurious ideological differences emerged in order to allow each leader to lead his own splinter party. Unlike the CP, which claims to stand in the tradition of the Kremlin-led Third International, the Trots all claim to be the true descendants of the tradition of the Fourth International, formed by Trotsky in opposition to his one-time fellow leaders of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin and Stalin. The Trots accuse the CP of being "Stalinists" and the CP accuses the Trots of "ultra-leftism". In fact, all are united in their Leninist contempt for the ability of workers to organise consciously and democratically and in their belief that state capitalism is socialism. Since the days of the RCP the Trots have tended to split three ways (although. in talking about Trotskyist splits, nothing is that simple). One section, led by Tony Cliff, became the International Socialists in the early 1960s and the Socialist Workers' Party in the mid-1970s. After a brief spell of growth they are now in decline and doing their utmost to fuse with the second Trot organisation, the Revolutionary Socialist League, known publicly as the Militant Tendency. The RSL is led by Ted Grant, another survivor from the heady days of the RCP, and has practised a dishonest tactic known as "deep infiltration", that is. joining the Labour Party and attempting to take it over. Such an approach has caused RSL members to be disliked by most sections of the Labour Party, although it has been the most successful Trotskyist organisation in recent times. For example, it gained control of the Labour group on Liverpool City council, appointing RSL member Derek Hatton as Deputy Leader of the council. The SWP is impressed by the success of the Militant Tendency (although trade unionists in Liverpool who are losing their jobs as a result of Hatton's tactics are most certainly not) and SWP leaders are doing their utmost to persuade the RSL to leave the Labour Party and enlarge the SWP. At present there seems no chance of this happening. although the latest news is that a split has emerged between the Grant-led London leadership of the Militant Tendency and the Liverpool crowd.

The third section of the Trotskyist movement in Britain has been led since 1959 by Gerry Healy, a man few people would have heard of before late October of this year. Those of us who had heard of Healy know him as by far the craziest of the would-be Lenins: a man who uses violence as an answer to his opponents (the present writer was once the recipient of some of it) and is known throughout the Left for his fanatical passion for demagogic. leadership. Healy started as leader of the Socialist Labour League, formed not long after leaving the RCP, and this became the Workers' Revolutionary Party. It is difficult to trust any membership figures for the WRP: at most the party might have had 10,000 and until its recent split claimed 6-7.000 members, but it probably had far fewer and even less who were active. Despite its small size the WRP published a daily newspaper called Newsline (with racing tips and all) and was able to stage large-scale rallies. It has been alleged that the party received financial assistance from the Libyan dictatorship; certainly. it has received huge donations from its most famous member, the actress Vanessa Redgrave, as well as her brother, Corin, both WRP leaders. The WRP tended to recruit quite a few of its members from the actors' trade union. Equity, and it is no coincidence that some of the daftest working-class policies were devised by leaders who more often than not had no experience of working-class life. The top man in the WRP was always Gerry Healy: it was he who was seated on a large, throne-like chair on a podium at WRP rallies at Alexandra Palace.

In mid-October 1985 those of us who bothered to look at Newsline were stunned by the front-page headline: HEALY EXPELLED. This was equivalent to the Roman Catholic Church expelling the Pope. Did our eyes deceive us? But no, the front page of Newsline continued to run the story for days: the leader had been ousted. This is the first time in British Trotskyist history that one of the triumvirate (Cliff, Grant and Healy) had been thrown out of one of their own parties.

It is difficult to get to the bottom of the recent WRP split and, from the point of view of establishing socialism, it is not of much importance. But there are lessons to be learnt from what has happened. According to Newsline, Healy was expelled for using WRP-owned flats as a base for taking advantage of twenty-six female members. If this is true, then Healy and they are the victims of all that goes with the vanguardist approach to life. If a man is given power over other people it is not surprising when he takes advantage of them. If women workers are taken in by Healy's nonsense in the political arena, who is surprised if they are taken in by him sexually? It is quite likely, however, that the grounds for the Healy expulsion are utterly fraudulent and the story has been concocted in order to discredit a leader the WRP has spent over a quarter of a century urging workers to admire.

Mike Banda, general secretary of the WRP. has been in the forefront of the Healy expulsion and it is not improbable that the action was a smear, used to cover up the real reasons for the split. It is not uncommon for those lacking the courage of a political argument to use smear tactics as a means of alienating a leader from the followers. If this is what has happened, then Healy and his supporters (including the Redgraves) will rightly accuse Banda and his clique of using despicable Stalinist techniques. That will be true but, as socialists have often told the Trots, Stalinism follows Leninism as surely as night follows day. If they want to run an organisation of leaders and led, in which the led must be conned into obeying their leaders, there is no avoiding the dirty struggles which leader- politics thrives on. Healy has left the WRP with its membership records. Banda says that the WRP leadership still wants to question Healy regarding Healy's possession of a £16.000 BMW car. And these are the people who are proposing to show the uneducated proletariat the way to socialism!

The crisis in the WRP can be seen as one episode in the recent decline of the Leninist Left in Britain. The CP is split, with most of its members disowning the Morning Star which the CP rule book instructs them to sell. The Militant Tendency is despised by most Labourites and has been seen to fail in its efforts at running capitalism in Liverpool. The SWP seeks unity with the Militant Tendency. although the former (quite correctly) regards Russia as state capitalist and the latter regards it as a workers' state. The Left within the Labour Party is lying low in order to make vote-winning easier for Kinnock. Indeed, one-time hard-Leftists like Ken Livingstone are preparing for the eventuality of a coalition with the Alliance after the next general election. The Left is in a mess.

The Socialist Party, as a principled revolutionary party, founded in 1904, long before the Bolshevik revolution, will not cease to show the Trots for what they are. They are wrong and we will expose their political ignorance; they are dishonest and we will expose their trickery; they are clownish and we will laugh at their amusing misfortunes. We can do that because, not only have we made a principled analysis of Leninism since its inception, but we stand for the interest of the working class. The same cannot be said for the creatures of the gutter who write newspaper articles on the WRP to discredit the concept of "socialism" or "Marxism'. Journalists made great use of the WRP story: RED IN THE BED proclaimed the Mirror (31 October) and SEX STORM ROCKS VANESSA'S PARTY stated the Star on the same day. In London, LBC ran a five-minute feature on the Healy expulsion and the Channel Four News on 30 October had Michael Crick (a name to remember) searching the gutters for material with which to smear the Trots. When was the last time any of these "democratic" media allowed the WRP time or space to tell workers what they stand for? The fact is that these bogus democrats of the media. like their counterparts in Moscow and Pretoria, are in the propaganda business and they will quite willingly broadcast unsubstantiated smears if they will weaken the ideas of those seen to be dissidents. We have made it clear that the WRP are enemies of the working class - but so are those who have been capitalising on their embarrassment. The WRP are not democrats and would not come to the aid of socialists being smeared by the media. The demise of the WRP is to the benefit of workers as there is one less party of confusion-mongers on the scene. Perhaps some of those who invested their energies in Trotskyism will now wish to find out about the real Socialist Party.

Steve Coleman

"Young Socialists" in Conference (1968)

From the April 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the trotskyist “Young Socialists" gather in Morecambe for their annual conference this month they will be voting on a proposal from their national committee that they should put forward their own parliamentary candidates in future elections. This would be a clear break from their previous stand of critical support for the Labour party and it is worth taking a look at these new contenders for the workers’ votes.

The "Young Socialists" were originally organised by the Labour party as its youth section in 1960, to replace the defunct Labour League of Youth. As always, tension rapidly built up between the idealist young people who formed its rank and file and the Labour party bureaucracy which wanted to keep them firmly in hand. The spineless policies of the Labour leaders grated on the “Young Socialists” and they were also incensed by the arbitrary control of their organisation by Transport House. This, then, was a classical situation for the trotskyists to move in on and the “Socialist" Labour League played the same role as the “Communist” party had done in the previous takeover in the thirties. The break from the Labour party came in 1964 when a wave of expulsions ended in a complete split in the movement. Those who left retained the name “Young Socialists” and formed a nominally independent organisation, while the rump which remained in the Labour party now operates under the clumsy title of “Labour Party Young Socialists".

If the plans of the national committee ever get off the ground and the “Young Socialists” do run candidates for political office, they will present themselves to the working class on a platform of transitional demands. These can be anything from “Victory to the Vietcong" to the call for “Nationalisation of the basic industries, banks and insurance”. They are intended as a minimum programme (socialism being relegated to some indefinite, doomsday status) but are supposed to have a long-term effect as well. As the original Transitional Programme of the Fourth International put it: 

the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime.

Obviously this process of progressively phased revolution has not advanced very far since the Transitional Programme was first adopted in 1938, as the demands at present being touted clearly show. Just what benefits the victory of the Vietnamese ruling class over the American capitalists would bring for workers anywhere remains obscure, to say the least, while nationalisation of industry — even if total, as in Russia — merely enables the ruling class to tighten its grip on the means of production. If all the supposedly revolutionary, transitional demands of the “Young Socialists” were enforced, the working class would remain in exactly the same position as it started out — propertyless and exploited. The slogans of the “Young Socialists” are a far cry from Marx’s — and the Socialists Party’s — revolutionary demand of abolition of the wages system.

The need for the so-called transitional demands arises in the theoretical framework of the “Young Socialists" parent body (the “Socialist” Labour League) because they take it as axiomatic that the working class cannot possibly grasp the case for socialism if it is presented to them in simple, uncompromising terms — without some form of bait. In fact, the pivot of all their arguments is the conviction that the workers can never arrive at an understanding of socialism by their own efforts and that they must therefore be controlled from above by a leadership. The only useful purpose the working class serves is that it provides the mass basis which the trotskyists hope to make use of in their attempt to gain political power.

This line of thinking is in direct conflict with Marxism. While Marxists have always argued that the socialist revolution must be the result of a united effort by the workers of the world, the followers of Lenin and Trotsky maintain that action by a determined minority, with passive or blindly following masses at the back of them, is all that is necessary. In the case of the Russian Bolsheviks there was perhaps some justification for this attitude, operating as they were in a backward, peasant country. But, however sincere their intentions to build socialism might have been, the historical obstacles were insurmountable and they found themselves leading a bourgeois revolution which conformed in all essentials to the characteristics which, as Engels pointed out, typify the rise to power of capital. They were the “small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses” who lead every revolution which merely replaces one ruling class by another.

A socialist revolution is something entirely different, however.

If the conditions have changed in the case of war between nations, this is no less true in the case of the class struggle. The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long persistent work is required, and it is just this work which we are now pursuing, and with a success which drives the enemy to despair.

(Engels' introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France)

It is this “long persistent work” which socialists take on in their efforts to convince other workers like themselves of the urgent need for establishing a socialist society based on the principle of “to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability”. Trotskyists, on the other hand, shirk this job. Falling back on idealism or, to use their own language, “petty bourgeois impressionism”, they try to sidestep the task of spreading socialist ideas among the working class as a whole and retain the archaic notion that only a conscious minority is needed. Thus, in the “Socialist” Labour League’s pamphlet — The death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the 4th International:

The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership (our emphasis).

This is nothing but the view which Engels was attacking as already outdated in 1895. It belongs to a different era; to the era of capitalist revolutions.

We might add that there are, of course, no prizes for guessing who the “revolutionary leaders” will be. With customary modesty, Gerry Healy et al. announce themselves as God’s latest gift to the working class.

Apart from the leadership issue, once the slogans and pamphlets of the “Socialist” Labour League are stripped of their mock-revolutionary verbiage, what remains is a thoroughly reactionary programme. Socialists maintain that a class-conscious working class has the ability right now to build a society of abundance, based on free access to wealth—what Marx called the “higher phase of communist society" in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. Any need for possible preliminary stages is a thing of the past. What Marx saw as necessary in 1875 — an initial period during which the productive forces would be rapidly increased — is obviously an outdated concept, when we consider the gigantic strides that have been made in all branches of industry in the last hundred years. Like other socialists, Marx’s suggestions were based on an over-optimistic prediction of the imminent overthrow of capitalism in the closing years of the nineteenth century. The “Socialist” Labour League, however, is still committed to maintaining the wages system in the second half of the twentieth century and its members talk in terms of “generations” before it could possibly be done away with. Supporters of the trotskyists in the trade unions should bear this in mind when they back organisations like the SLL — and it wouldn’t do them any harm either to remember just what happened to the unions in Russia when the Bolsheviks, under Lenin and Trotsky, gained power. It would be interesting to learn how many of the trade unionists and “young socialists” who look to the SLL. for political guidance would be prepared to submit to Lenin's maxim “of unquestioningly obeying the will of the Soviet leader, of the dictator, during the work.”

Another completely reactionary role which the “Socialist" Labour League has taken on itself is that of calling on the workers to vote Labour in past elections. Their national secretary, Healy, advances a sophisticated argument to justify this;

  During the general elections of October 1964 and March 1966 we urged trade unionists to vote Labour and at the same time fight within the labour movement for a socialist policy to be adopted by the government.
  The Socialist Labour League advocated this policy knowing that the vast majority would vote labour as part of their experiences.
   It was our responsibility to go through this experience with the working class. Likewise it is our responsibility today to outline ways and means to fight Wilson within the labour movement, not to desert this fight through abstention at the polls.
   Hence we call on the 'left' MPs to fight him in the Parliamentary Labour Party at the forthcoming conference at Scarborough in order to take the working class through the experience of political struggle in relation to the Labour Party.
  Our job is to expose these 'left’ MPs, just as Wilson is being exposed, and at the same time demonstrate to the working class the need for alternative revolutionary leadership within the labour movement.

The weak points in this would be obvious to any thoughtful worker. If, as Healy admits, the workers were going to vote Labour anyway what was the point of the SLL adding to the confusion! Wouldn’t it have been far better to have taken a stand on socialist principles, as the Socialist Party did, and to have called on the working class to oppose capitalism and all the capitalist parties (including the Labour and “Communist” parties)? Despite Healy’s grandiose plans to “take the workers through the experience of political struggle in relation to the Labour party”, objectively all he has achieved is to help to keep the workers on the Labour-Tory pendulum. Many of those who voted in a Labour government at the last general election will, on present evidence, be voting in a Conservative administration at the next. One sign of hope, to be sure, is the sizeable proportion who seem to have abstained in recent by-elections and, if their present mood of disillusionment and apathy could be replaced by socialist understanding, this indeed would be a breakthrough. But, if for a moment we go along with Healy’s rather paranoiac dreams and assume that they were ready to support the “Socialist” Labour League, where would it get them? Healy’s message is simple:

We say that the labour movement has had enough from such traitors, on the left and the right — a new, alternative leadership has to be built.

Far better for the working class to realise that all leaders, whatever their pretensions, are the political enemies of the workers. There is no substitute for socialist working men and women. What is needed above all are self-reliant workers equipped with a thorough understanding of Socialism, not abject followers cringing and praying that this time they will not be betrayed and compromised.

In any case, the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain does not subscribe to the narrow interpretation of “experience" which is common to all varieties of trotskyist theory. We do not think that the only way to learn is by burning one’s fingers. Applying this to the young workers in the “Young Socialists", we say — why wait until bitter experience forces you to see through “Socialist" Labour League? Why not examine its programme from the standpoint of Marxian Socialism now? Why not come over to the side of the revolution?

John Crump

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