in defence of trotskyism no. 4 the methodology of communism

7/30/2019 In Defence of Trotskyism No. 4 The Methodology of Communism

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The Methodology of Communism

In Defence of Trotskyism

Unity is strength, Lunion fait la force, La unin hace la fuerza, , ,. on kt l sc mnh, Jedno jestsia, ykseys on kesto, .,Midnimo iyo waa awood, hundeb ydy chryfder, Einheit ist Strke, , ,vienybs jga, bashkimi ben fuqine, , unit la resistenza,, A unio faz a fora, eining er styrkur, De eenheid isde sterkte, , N neart go chur le cile, pagkakaisa ay kalakasan, jednota is sla,, Workers of the World Unite!

In Defence of Trotskyism is published by the Socialist Fight Group.

Contact: PO Box 59188, London, NW2 9LJ. Email: [email protected]. Blog: http://socialistfight.com/

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Number 4. Spring 2013

The United Front and the

Anti-Imperialist United

Front are tactics that ap-ply at all times except

when the direct uprising

takes place for the seizure

of power and the masses

are flocking to the revolu-

tionary banner; in a sense

it is wrong to characterisethe UF as a tactic at all be-

cause it is the methodol-

ogy of communism, its

very mode of existence, its

orientation to the global

working class as a whole

class, the only method

that can mobilise that

force that alone can over-

throw capitalism.


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In Defence of Trotskyism page 2

Leon Trotsky: I am confident of the victory of the Fourth International; Go Forward!

New Preface by Gerry Downing May 2013

The Socialist Fight Group republishes these selected docu-ments of the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency/ Workers Inter-

national League because we acknowledge their continuing rele-vance to the struggle to build a revolutionary current whichseeks to relate to the whole working class and to win a vanguardto revolutionary politics in preparation for coming struggles.However despite the strength of Revolutionaries and the LabourParty its weakness is that the WIL itself increasingly tended tomake entry work in the Labour party less of a tactic and more ofa strategy as the years wore on until it finally recruited somedeep entrist from the ISG which swamped its revolutionary char-acter by their reformist Labourism.Revolutionaries must neither capitulate to reformism when en-trists by proclaiming that the Labour party can become the vehi-cle to introduce socialism as the original CPGB, Healy, Grant andMatgamna did nor adopt the opposite side of the same coin byproclaiming that the Labour party no longer has any relationship

to the working class and must be denounced as simply bour-geois and the revolution (or at least their own current) can beadvanced by self-proclamation and increasingly manic revolu-tionary verbiage as the CPGB, Healy, Taaffe and Matgamna did/do when in their open party phase.These documents by the LTT are amongst the best on the ques-tion of the United Front we have seen but yet there is a problemwith them all. They do not fully appreciate the centrality of thequestion. This is shown in the final paragraphs of the documentWhat is the Anti-Imperialist United Front (not included here) andshould we fight for it?where they pose the following question, Atactic or a strategy? Would it cause too many problems to call ita long-term tactic or a tactic with strategic implications, ormaybe something else entirely?The United Front is neither a tactic nor a strategy, it is a ques-tion of methodology, it is the way that communist must operatein all their work because it is the way to get closer to and winleadership of the masses via their natural vanguard thrown up instruggle, both domestically and internationally. This approachthen eliminates the handwringing at the end ofWhat is the Anti-Imperialist United Front and should we fight for it?Without wanting to contradict the central argument of this docu-ment, does this struggle for working class leadership in thestruggle against imperialism not share some of the characteris-tics of the united front? Do we not maintain the political inde-

pendence of the working class? Do we not march separately andstrike together? Do we not aim to break the non-proletarian op-

pressed from their own political misleaders? Do we not realisethat the only way, to begin with, to relate to those we want towin is through their organisations? Do we not also realise thataround concrete issues we will be working together with these

misleaders, in order to demonstrate to their base the practicalsuperiority of our programme and method, but also, if possibleto win that base to it?In the same article it correctly tackles the old RIL/ITC because

whereas the WILtended to make theUF a tactic the RIL/ITC tended to makeit a strategy so they

can correctly criticisethem in the followingterms, This is theargument of the In-ternational TrotskyistCommittee (ITC). Itis misconceived inthat it adds to thegeneral confusion onthe AIUF, and isbound up with theITCs false under-standing of unitedfronts as party frontsoperating at a high

level of program-matic agreement, butat least it sees thatthere is a problemhere which needs tobe resolved.And of course if theWIL/LTT collapsedbecause of its failure to penetrate the masses due to a (relative)sectarian approach to the UF because they regarded it too muchas simply a tactic the RIL/ITC collapsed because of they re-garded it (relatively) too much as a strategy and so substitutedfront organisations for the revolutionary party and international.All that remains of their perspective of world revolution is the UKMovement for Justice and the US Coalition to Defend Affirmative

Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights with no public face forrevolutionary Trotskyism, which operates like a secret Masoniclodge within these fronts. What were initially small errors of em-phasis and characterisation grew in time under the pressure ofthe neo-liberal offensive into gross and fatal errors.We regard the interpretation of the Workers Power and FIT onthe Anti-Imperialist United Front as basically historically correct.The LTT attack on the WP position is unconvincing,What the LRCI does is take two separate questions, the strugglewaged by the proletariat for leadership of the other oppressedsectors and the notion of military action alongside the nationalbourgeoisie in the event of a struggle against imperialism, andlump them together as the united front. They thus perpetuatethe previous theoretical confusion. The LRCI is quite unabashedabout this. In a published polemic against the International Trot-skyist Opposition (ITO), it says:On the AIUF, for example, it is ND who is being scholastic. Hebelieves that a bloc with the national bourgeoisie in certain cir-cumstances is permissible, but it is not to be called the AIUF. He

Contents

New Preface........Page 2

Revolutionaries and the Labour

party..........Page 6

The Method of the United Front...Page 16

Reprints of selected documents of the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency

with a new preface for them all by the Socialist Fight Group.The Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency (LTT) was the result of the 1991 fusion of the

Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency of Belgium and Germany, the Workers Interna-

tional League of Britain (which emerged from the collapse of Gerry Healys

WRP) and a group of South African Trotskyists.

Other groups to join the LTT included the Comrades for a Workers Govern-

ment (South Africa), Workers Voice (Sri Lanka), the Leninist-Trotskyist Group

(Canada) and the Swedish Arbetarfrbundet fr Socialismen (AfS Workers

League for Socialism).

The LTT included former members of a number of Trotskyist tendencies, such

as Gerry Healys International Committee, the United Secretariat, the Sparta-

cist tendency, the Revolutionary Workers Party (Sri Lanka) and the Moreno-Lambert Parity Committee.

The LTT fell apart soon after the dissolution of the Workers International

League in 1997.

[The LTT is not to be confused with the tendency of the same name that was

established by the US Socialist Workers Party and its co-thinkers in the United

Secretariat of the Fourth International in 1973].

A large section of the documents can be found on the site of the Encyclopedia

of Trotskyism On Line at. http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/ltt/

Ramsey McDonald, despite the gross class

treachery of the Labour leader Trotsky

never abandoned the Cominterns United

Front method of calling for a class vote for

Labour against the direct representatives of

the ruling class, the Tories.


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is welcome to call it by any name he chooses. For us it involvesunity in action against a common enemy with no mixing ofbanners and with the aim of breaking the masses from theirmisleaders. This is the method of the united front as spelt outby the healthy Comintern.The LRCI appears to have lazily adopted the method of thefourth Comintern Congress, whose participants did not have

the possibility of 70 years hindsight. To take the LRCI to taskover this is not to be scholastic nor to play with words. Its for-mulation is just as ambiguous and confused as the 1922 ver-sion and, as Workers Power never tires of pointing out, am-biguous formulations have the potential to be concretised intowrong positions. In war or insurrection, confusion over com-mon action or a united front with the national bourgeoisie canbe a tragically expensive luxury.If that attack was totally convincing whence the handwringingabove where they admit that there are powerful argumentswhich contradict the central argument of this document butdismiss them so unconvincingly. The quotes from Trotsky onChina are very selective; always those which stress the needfor the class independence of the working class whilst ignoringthose which stress the need to fight Imperialism. Here is Trot-skys polemic against the Eiffelites on China, 1937:In my declaration to the bourgeois press, I said that the dutyof all the workers' organizations of China was to participateactively and in the front lines of the present war against Japan,without abandoning, for a single moment, their own programand independent activity. But that is social patriotism! theEiffelites cry. It is capitulation to Chiang Kai-shek! It is theabandonment of the principle of the class struggle! Bolshevism

preached revolutionary defeatism in the imperialist war.Now, the war in Spain and the Sino-Japanese War are bothimperialist wars. Our position on the war in China is the same.The only salvation of the workers and peasants of China is tostruggle independently against the two armies, against theChinese army in the same manner as against the Japanesearmy.These four lines, taken from an Eiffelite document of Septem-

ber 10, 1937, suffice entirely for us to say: we are concernedhere with either real traitors or complete imbeciles. But imbe-cility, raised to this degree, is equal to treason.This is not simply common action but clearly implies an ele-ment of political solidarity even with the regime itself in orderto open the space to approach the masses loyal to the regime,for sound anti-imperialist reasons, with our own revolutionaryprogramme. And both the RIL/ITC and the WIL/LTT (includingthe CWG in SA) advocated empirically many of the correct tac-tics that flow from the AIUF, like calling for a vote for Sinn Feinin Ireland and the ANC at particular times when they were stillseriously struggling against Imperialism or when black majorityrule was first established in 1994 in SA.The analogy that the Comintern made with the United Frontwas correct, an element of political solidarity with Labour lead-

ers and the Labour party (as a good example of bourgeois-workers parties internationally) is clearly implied against theTories by calling for a class vote for them in order to open upthe space for our political attacks on them. Or else we will beseen as hypocrites; how can we advocate a class vote foropenly pro-imperialist parties who support attacks on Libya,Syria and Iran and not advocate votes for revolutionary move-ments in semi-colonial countries who are in mortal combat withthe forces of Imperialism in Ireland and SA, for instance, de-spite their counter-revolutionary leader, who are fighting impe-rialism? Is that not the content of Trotskys insistence that theduty of, all the workers' organizations of China was to partici-pate actively and in the front lines of the present war againstJapan? Those who charge the old LTT and the ITC of crossingclass lines here are those referred to Trotsky above as either

real traitors or complete imbeciles.In the same article the LTT also acknowledges that there wereweighty political arguments put forward by opponents in SouthAmerica:

One relatively sophisticated argument for the AIUF came fromthe forces which at one time constituted the Fourth Interna-tionalist Tendency (FIT), principally the Politica Obrera of Ar-gentina and Guillermo Loras Partido Obrero Revolucionario ofBolivia. The FIT regarded the Comintern position as healthyand made a clear distinction between the notion of worker-

peasant parties and the Stalinist Anti-Imperialist Front, and

the AIUF which can only start from the proletarian politicalleadership of the national majority (peasants, the majority ofthe urban middle class) . . . it concerns a tactic, which startsfrom the tangible interests of the masses, designed to convertthe working class into the national leader The question[which] concerns us is knowing which socialclass will politicallyhead the national minorityAs regards work in the Labour party revolutionaries must havea strategic orientation to the mass reformist parties of theworking class in all circumstances. Whether ornot revolutionaries conduct entry work in the British Labourparty or in any reformist Social Democratic and Stalinist/Maoistparties where they have a mass base in the working class is atactical question and not a strategic one. But it is a question ofsuch tactical importance that Lenin sought to reorientate theyoung Communist Party towards entry in the Labour party bythe characterising it as a bourgeois-workers party and Trotskysaid that:But it remains a fact that for every revolutionary organi-zation in England its attitude to the masses and to theclass is almost coincident with its attitude toward theLabour Party, which bases itself upon the trade unions.At this time the question whether to function inside theLabour Party or outside it is not a principled question,but a question of actual possibilities. In any case, withouta strong faction in the trade unions, and, consequently, in theLabour Party itself, the ILP is doomed to impotence even to-day. Yet, for a long period, the ILP attached much greater im-

portance to the united front with the insignificant Communistparty than to work in mass organizations. The leaders of theILP consider the policy of the Opposition wing in the Labour

Party incorrect out of considerations which are absolutely unex-pected.

Trotsky, ILP and the Fourth Interna-tional (1935)

Revolutionaries and the Labour partymakes an important con-tribution to the question of the relationship to the Labour party.It contains a very useful short overview of the history of revo-lutionaries from Henry Hyndmans sectarian Social DemocraticFederation of 1881 to Sean Matgamnas Socialist Organiser of1982 who refused to defend Argentina against Thatchers on-slaught during the Malvinas War and who publicly campaignedfor the Kinnochite witch hunter Peter Kilfoyle in 1991 againstMilitants Leslie Mahmood. For a short period they ridiculously

claimed the Labour party is a stinking corpse as if Rosa Lux-emburgs famous denunciation of the German Social Democ-racy was not made in a revolutionary situation where statepower was within the grasp of the German working class. Butnow once more todays AWL are punting their wares within theLabour party. Such obvious confusion mongering is answeredexcellently by Revolutionaries and the Labour party.The leaders of the WIL, which later became Workers Action,have succumbed to the same pressures they correctly claimedMatgamnas group had; Matgamnas groups stands as a par-ticularly virulent example of how a move away from sectarian-ism can end up in opportunism towards the Labour bureauc-racy. The steady advance of the right in the Labour party andtrade union bureaucracy, particularly after the fourth electoraldefeat in 1992 and Blairs elevation to leadership after John

Smiths death in 1994 took its toll on the WIL. It lost member-ship and took an increasingly sectarian attitude to other leftgroups. For instance this they failed to seriously pursue fusiontalks with Workers Power or the Revolutionary Internationalist


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League, both of whom had very similar positions on the Labourparty, and with whom they were to have fusion talks or appealto the membership over the heads of the leadership when thesetalks were scuppered by both WP and the RIL.The WIL did not seriously intervene in the Socialist Labour partyor in the Socialist Alliance at a time when the left in the Labourparty was marginalised and a substantial section of the van-guard, independents as well as left groups, were attracted bythese organisations. They took a similar position on the ScottishSocialist Party; but it was imperative for every serious revolu-tionary to intervene in that party with their revolutionary pro-gramme because it was possible to retain political independence.They correctly pointed out that the main orientation of the ma-

jority of these formations was to counterpose their own minis-cule current to the Labour party in the left sectarian way of thethird period Stalinists by declaring that the Labour party was nolonger a bourgeois-workers party as the Revolutionaries and theLabour partyhad so well exposed. But it would still have beenfar better to fight within these groupings, forming partial alli-ances on tactical questions and appealing to the ranks of groupswho at least had some orientation to Trotskyism and the Transi-tional method, rather than to vegetate in moribund Labour partyCLPs.

It was in these new half-way-house formations, after all, thatmost of the subjectively revolutionaries had, however mistak-enly, congregated and it was really important not simply to de-nounce them for not listening to the sensible WIL but to engagethem where they were. A vanguard can dethatch itself from theclass in a sectarian way and as long as we do not estimate themto be counterrevolutionary-through-and-through we are obligedto follow them at least some of the way, especially at a timewhen the class itself is relatively quiescent. The collapse of allthese efforts and the debacle around the Respect split which hasled to the current crisis in the SWP and Respect Renewal high-lights the necessity to fight for these serious militants trapped inthese groups to explain the history and mistakes of their organi-sations and seek to win recruits and splits to consistent Trotsky-ism.

But the most disastrous error of the WIL was its interventioninto the ISG. Here the future WIL members of the left Faction Ahad made an alliance with the right Faction M by secret con-spiratorial negotiations directly before a conference, overturnedits leadership (GD who produced the theoretical documents onwhich the Tendency was based) and its theoretical basis to seizecontrol of the organisation. They had hypocritically voted to dothe exact opposite in a Tendency meeting a few days previouslywhen the conspiracy must have been well advanced. It was anact of gross political opportunism which disenfranchised manyTendency A members who were not in the loop. Naturally it con-fused and destroyed the left in the ISG, or more correct movedthe whole organisation to the right so its new left was now muchfurther to the right and moreover without any principles. Theexcuse for this opportunist bloc was the supposed common posi-

tions on a labour movement orientation. In reality the centreTendency led by AT was considering placing less emphasis inworking in an increasingly hostile milieu in the Labour party andwas opting for more open work, not an unreasonable positionwhich did however demand revolutionary politics which the ISGcentral leadership had progressively abandoned since 1982.In fact they adapted to the traditional Pabloite movementismand now declare they stand on three equal principles, ecologism,feminism and socialism with a corresponding tri-colour repre-senting this republic Green, Purple and red! And of course theleft and right labour movement orientations were not the same;this hid a range of serious political differences. The political col-lapse of the left soon became apparent and AT and others hadlittle difficulty in exposing it as a rotten bloc. They then de-camped to the WIL and one (a central conspirator) declaring hisexit was on no political basis thereby forcing RP to write hisresignation letter for him. The WIL leadership uncritically wel-comed these new recruits with no political accounting, demon-strating their own increasing opportunism and contributing to a

rightward shift in two organisations.RP however continued to produce good analyses of the ultra-leftist build-your-own-labour-movement currents which repeatedall the old Third Period Stalinist errors; seeAnother Marxism isPossiblewhere RP responds to Mike McNairs critique of GrahamBash and Andrew Fishers 100 Years of Labour(Weekly Worker16 November 2006), Communists and the Labour party 1927-29: a sense of dja vu, RP WA Number 17- Summer 2002 andthe reprint of Class against Class; Extract from the CommunistParty of Great Britain's programme for the 1929 general elec-tion. We might also add J. T. Murphy Growth of Social-Fascismin Britain; The Communist Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 1930.But RP could no longer produce serious attacks on opportunistcurrents, he no led on himself and was part of a reformist anddemoralised group so there was no emphasis on developing theirrevolutionary consciousness and with an increasing contemptu-ous attitude to the rest of the left, becoming almost as bad as inthe old Healyite WRP. It was never going to be possible to de-velop these forces to implement this programme.The combination of this opportunist group with a demoralisedWIL, now locked into entryism in a very hostile milieu, withoutthe spark which ultra-leftist subjective revolutionaries oftenhave in common with more developed Marxist was Trotsky

really wrong to criticise Hicks and Purcell in the way he did overthe betrayal of the 1926 General strike as RP alleges? - causedits demise in 1997. It became soon apparent that Workers Ac-tion, the WILs successor organisation, had become completelyreformists and not just super Pabloites as the ex-ISGers hadbeen.This was most starkly demonstrated in a WA editorial of Nov/Dec. 2004 which explained why they thought socialist could votefor John Kerry in the US election in 2004; Advocating a vote forKerry does not mean that socialists should campaign for him.Neither does it imply any political support for the Kerry-Edwards

platform. It means that socialists should, on this occasion; voteto put Bush out, which means voting for Kerry. It is permissibleto hold the nose while doing so, or to walk through disinfectantafter leaving the voting booth, as did those voters in France who

preferred the crook Chirac to the fascist Le Pen.Logically it was also OK to vote for the right openly bourgeoiscandidate for President of France, Chirac, against Le Pen. Argua-bly this appalling political collapse was also prepared by theresolution to block with the supporters of Yeltsin during the coupled by Gennady Yanayev in August 1991 and thereafter to a neo-liberal softness on and increasing capitulation to imperialismwhich grew progressively worse during events in the Balkans,Rwanda and East Timor, but this is not the place to elaborate onthat argument.The old leaders retired from politics in disgust as much at them-selves as what they had politically spawned. WA struggled onuntil its final issue No. 30 of August 2006 after which it appar-ently died without a whimper. It was a sad end to what wassurely one of the best efforts to apply the Trotskyist Transitional

Programme to entry work. They sought to work in the Labourparty and thereby to forge a link to the mass of the workingclass to build revolutionary leadership but made the tactic un-conditional and thus almost a strategy; entryism in all circum-stances and not when conditions favour this tactic.As the WA they had neglected always to build their own revolu-tionary current, openly and/or by tactical alliances with otherself-proclaimed Trotskyist groups in whatever milieu presenteditself even when conditions are not favourably for entryism inthe Labour party. The WIL in practice and then increasingly intheory became deep entrist to such an extent that revolutionarypolitics was excess baggage too burdensome to bear. Hence itsdemise was prepared by the gradual adaption to neo-liberal re-formism by the WIL and then more openly WA from 1987 to2006. At a time when the growth of John McDonnells LRC pre-sents fresh hope of intervening successfully as revolutionaries inthat milieu it is regrettable it made and pursued these fundamen-tal tactical errors.


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Introduction

THE COLLAPSE of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and the for-mer Soviet Union, and the low level of class struggle in mostof the imperialist countries, has given rise to a new politicalsituation. The discrediting of socialism by Stalinism, and thedecline in working class militancy, is now utilised by thereformist leaders to justify the abandonment of reform pro-grammes and the dropping of even verbal commitments tothe goal of socialism.In Britain, under the impact of three election defeats by theTories, the Kinnock-Hattersley dream ticket tailored their

programme to what they saw as the popular aspects ofThatcherism. They were able to do this by feeding off achain of working class defeats, for which they, together withthe TUC leaders, bore the primary responsibility. Laboursfourth successive general election debacle in 1992, far fromdiscrediting new realism, encouraged the Smith-Beckettleadership to drive the party even further to the right, con-centrating its attacks on the link between Labour and thetrade unions. While the election of Michael Foot in 1981 wasa weak echo of the ferment within the partys ranks afterthe defeat of 1979, each successive leader since then Kin-nock, Smith and now Blair has represented a further shiftto the right. The partys left wing, decimated by expulsions,resignations and desertions, has been entirely marginalised.The collapse in the fortunes of the Labour left, which began

with Benns failure to win the deputy leadership contest in1981 and the non-aggression pact concluded at BishopsStortford in 1982, is the result of its refusal to fight the rightwing in any consistent or principled fashion. The wave oflocal government victories by the left, accompanied byheady talk of counterposing the local state to the centralstate, met its first serious challenge with rate-capping,whereupon the vast majority of the left capitulated igno-miniously and proceeded to implement Tory legislation.After 15 years of Tory rule, the dominance of the right wingwithin the labour movement and the low ebb of the classstruggle presents revolutionaries with specific problems.Neither ultra-left sectarianism (electoral abstentionism, re-fusal to carry out united front policy, empty declarationsthat the Labour Party is finished, etc) nor opportunist adap-

tation (uncritical tail-ending of what remains of the Benniteleft) can possibly forge a revolutionary road forward for theworking class.

On the historical plane, however, these problems have muchdeeper roots, which reflect an almost continuous failure onthe part of would-be revolutionaries in Britain to develop acorrect tactical orientation towards the Labour Party and thebroad layers of workers who follow it.Predictions that the Labour Party would rapidly collapse orthat it was being transformed into a purely capitalist partyhave been made throughout its history. The Social Democ-ratic Federation thought it could compete directly with theLabour Representation Committee when it walked out in1901. But its successor, the British Socialist Party, wasobliged to recognise reality when it affiliated to the Labour

Party in 1916. In the course of 1924, Grigorii Zinoviev, thepresident of the Comintern, claimed both that Labour wouldbe in office for many years to come and that the disinte-gration of the Labour Party is now inevitable! When the firstMacDonald government collapsed in 1925, Communist Partytheoretician R. Palme Dutt, on the basis of the heady rheto-ric of the Cominterns fifth congress, could write of the La-bour Partys decomposition. With the victory of the NewLine, the Communist Party declared in its 1929 electionmanifesto that the first Labour government had exposedthe Labour Party leadership completely. Dismissing the rank

and file, it characterised Labour as a completely disciplinedcapitalist party.Most of the left felt obliged to develop some tactical orienta-tion towards the Labour Party in the post-war period. By1961, however, the Socialist Labour League, the largestBritish Trotskyist organisation at that time, had decided thatthe Labour right wing rested on the carcass of a party, noton a living movement.The student-based radicalisation which followed 1968 re-vived ultra-left moods. Writing in the 1970s, the League forSocialist Action (a split from the International MarxistGroup) criticised those on the left who began to suggestthat the Labour Party was changing its nature, was evolv-ing into a mere electoral machine along the lines of the De-mocratic Party in the USA rapidly being by-passed, in action,by the workers movement. Small wonder that the recentdebate over the Clintonisation of the Labour Party carries astrange sense of dj vu.The response of much of the left to Labours fourth electoraldebacle in a row in 1992 was equally light-minded, consist-

ing in large part of stirring declarations that nowwas thetime to build the independent revolutionary party, withsome reaching the view that Labour was no longer a work-

Written: 1994.First Published: September 1994.Source: Published for the Workers InternationalLeague by Prinkipo Press.Transcription/HTML Markup: Sean Robertson forthe Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).Copyleft: Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line(marxists.org) 2011. Permission is granted tocopy and/or distribute this document under theterms of the Creative Commons licens. Pleasecite any editors, proofreaders and formattersnoted above along with any other publishing in-

formation including the URL of this document.

Publishers Note

This is not in any sense a mini-history of the Labour Party. Itis a condensed overview of the attitude of the main revolu-tionary currents in Britain towards the Labour Party, and anattempt to sketch what we believe to be a correct orienta-tion. It is the outcome of the WILs reappraisal of our ownpositions. In large part it is based on a document discussedby the WILs third congress in July 1993, and passed in anamended form at its fourth congress in February 1994. Al-though frequent reference is made to works by Lenin, Trot-sky and others, we have dispensed with the scholarly appa-ratus on the grounds that it is inappropriate to a publicationof this sort, whose aim, among other things, is to stimulatereaders to make an independent study of the Marxist classics

in the light of current events, rather than to provide all theanswers.

Revolutionaries and the Labour Party

A Workers News pamphlet


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ers party of any sort. Militants evacuation of its remainingmembers in the Labour Party, and its reincarnation as Mili-tant Labour has succeeded only in greatly reducing its sizeand influence.Unfortunately for those who staked their political reputationson such apocalyptic Judgements, the reports of the LabourPartys death have been greatly exaggerated. It has stub-

bornly refused to go away, and has proved a good deal moredurable than the shrill sectarians. Long after many of themhave lapsed into irrelevance or inactivity, or themselves goneover to reformism, social democracy continues to dominatethe workers movement in Britain, and remains the chief ob-stacle to the creation of a mass revolutionary party capableof leading the working class to power.None of the foregoing is intended to underestimate the dan-ger represented by Blair and the modernisers, who threatenmore than any previous leadership to fundamentally under-mine Labours organic link with the trade unions. On the con-trary, the central argument put forward in this pamphlet isthe necessity to fight the right wing, and not to repeat themistakes of all those who believed that they could defeatreformism merely by propaganda, or by ignoring the LabourParty altogether. We are at the same time no less critical ofthose who, having recoiled from ultra-leftism, make up forlost time by adapting to the politics of left reformism.Attempts to duck the Labour Party question on the groundsthat it is merely a tactical issue will inevitably rebound. Likethe dialectic, it has a habit of recognising those who refuse torecognise it. Mistaken tactics based upon wildly incorrectperspectives will have strategic implications and lead to aprofoundly deformed Marxism, which ignores the stagewhich the class has reached and instead substitutes its ownfrustrations and impatience. This in large part is the historyof the left in Britain.A profound ignorance of what Lenin and Trotsky said aboutthe Labour Party exists in many left groups. Many will saythat conditions have changed since their day. This is unde-niably true. But the real question for revolutionaries is

whether the relationship between Labour and the workingclass has qualitatively changed. If Trotsky, at a time whenLabour could muster barely 150 MPs, found that the most

dangerous aspect of C.L.R. Jamess politics was his sectar-ian attitude towards the Labour Party, then it is high timethat his professed followers heeded his advice today.

1. FROM MARXISM TO STALINISMThe early history of British reform-ismThe reformist Independent Labour Party (ILP) was formed in1893. Frederick Engels viewed this event with some hope,and believed that revolutionaries should enter it and fight for

a socialist programme, supporting the position of Marxs son-in-law, Edward Aveling, who took a seat on its national ex-ecutive. At the same time, he, and Marx before him, opposedthe sectarian antics of Hyndmans Social Democratic Federa-tion (SDF), which had turned Marxist theory from a guide toaction into a rigid dogma, and whose sectarian view ofworkers cut it off from the masses. The ILP, although theo-retically weak, represented for the first time since the demiseof the Chartists, a chance to politically organise the labourmovement independent of the bourgeoisie. The method ofMarx and Engels is alien to todays sectarians, who are butpale imitators of the SDF, which in fact did some good workin the trade union field. Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein ofthe Socialist Workers Party (SWP), in The Labour Party AMarxist History, deliberately ignore Engels writings, and

claim that the formation of the ILP was part of a defeat forthe working class.

Unlike the parties of the Second International in continentalEurope, the Labour Party never aimed even in words at theconquest of power by the working class. The direct forerun-ner of the Labour Party, the Labour Representation Commit-tee (LRC), was founded in 1900 in response to mountinglegal attacks on trade union rights. It set itself no greatergoal than the election of trade unionists to parliament and

the pursuit of modest reform legislation. The self-styledMarxists of the SDF walked out of the LRC in 1901 in protestat its refusal to adopt a socialist programme, thereby leavingthe field clear for the right wing and the muddle-heads of theILP. The SDF set a precedent for the recurring illusion thatthe vanguard of the working class could be won by abstractpropaganda for socialism, and without a serious struggleagainst the reformist leadership.Dominated by Lib-Lab MPs and trade union bureaucrats, theLabour Party (as the LRC became in 1906) remained essen-tially an appendage of the Liberal Party, without any coher-ent platform of its own. With the outbreak of the imperialistwar in 1914, the Labour leaders maintained their politicalsubordination to the bourgeoisie, proving incapable of devel-oping an independent class line. Keir Hardie and MacDonaldretreated into personal pacifism, while Henderson joined thewar cabinet. In 1918, under the impact of the Russian Revo-lution, and with the aim of heading off the rising militancy ofthe working class, the Labour Party did adopt a nominally

socialist constitution. But the seriousness of its expressedintention to expropriate the capitalist class may be gaugedby the fact that the famous Clause Four was drafted by thearch-gradualist Sidney Webb.Nevertheless, for the first time the Labour Party had a formalprogramme distinct from that of the bourgeois parties. Tak-ing advantage of divisions among the Liberals, the partymade significant electoral advances in the post-war period.In 1924, Labour was able to form a government, albeit aminority one, for the first time. Its progressive measureswere limited to the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Un-ion, and Wheatleys Housing Bill. No encroachments were

made on capitalist property rights, and far from liberatingthe colonial peoples, the Labour government used militaryforce to crush those who rebelled against British imperialism.

The CPGB and the Labour PartyIn contrast to the major European Communist Parties, whichwere the product of splits in the parties of the Second Inter-national, the Communist Party of Great Britain was formedduring 1920-21 through the fusion of disparate small propa-ganda groups. With no more than 2-3,000 members, theCPGB was immediately faced with the problem of what line toadopt towards a Labour Party which was establishing a massinfluence over the working class.On this issue the CPGBs constituent groupings were com-

pletely divided. The British Socialist Party (successor to theSDF) had been affiliated to the Labour Party since 1916, butin abandoning its earlier sectarianism it had developed adistinctly opportunist trend. The Socialist Labour Party sup-ported parliamentary action, but opposed work in the LabourParty. The Workers Socialist Federation and the South Walessyndicalists were against parliamentary action of any sort.In April 1920, prior to the formation of the CPGB, Leninwrote Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorderin opposi-tion to the anti-parliamentary views of ultra-lefts like SylviaPankhurst and Willie Gallacher. After discussion with Britishcommunists, Lenin came down in favour of communist affilia-tion to the Labour Party, which he defined as a bourgeoisworkers party an organisation based on the working class,but with a pro-capitalist leadership. He believed that the fed-

eral structure of the Labour Party presented an opportunityto build a revolutionary opposition to these right-wing lead-


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ers. This position was adopted as the official policy of theCommunist International (CI) at its Second Congress (1920).Although the founding conference of the CPGB (July-August1920) voted by a small majority to affiliate to the LabourParty, its leaders were in fact far from enthusiastic aboutimplementing this decision. Instead of informing the LabourParty that the British Socialist Party had changed its name to

the Communist Party, and would be maintaining its existingaffiliation which would have placed the Labour bureaucratsin a difficult position the CPGB put in a new application foraffiliation couched in terms which were clearly intended toprovoke rejection. The Labour Partys executive happilyobliged. And although pressure from the CI forced the CPGBto make a more serious approach, which was repeated atsuccessive Labour Party conferences, the right wing used theblock vote to prevent Communist affiliation.As the Labour Party widened its electoral base in the workingclass, opportunist pressures made themselves felt within theCP. The election of a Labour government in 1924 promptedleading party theoretician Palme Dutt to argue that it wasenough that Labour should remain independent of the capi-talist parties, and that it would be a mistake to expect toomuch from a minority administration. The CI intervenedsharply to instruct the CP to mobilise the broadest masses ofthe English proletariat to exert pressure on the Labour Gov-ernment and the Labour Party to engage in a serious strug-gle against the capitalist classes.In addition to demanding that the Labour leaders shouldcarry out their election promises, the CP was to campaign forthe government to implement the following measures:

(a) To deal with unemployment by effective taxation of thecapitalists, and by taking over, under State and workerscontrol, enterprises shut down by the capitalists. (b) To takethe initiative in nationalising the railways and mines; these tobe administered in conjunction with the workers organisa-tions. (c) The Government must take energetic steps to liber-ate the peasants and workers of Ireland, India, and Egyptfrom the yoke of English imperialism. (d) It must be active in

fighting the war danger in Europe and conclude an alliancewith the Union of Soviet Republics . . . The resolution went on to state that the CP should:

. . . preserve its ideological, tactical and organisational in-dependence . . . It must appeal to all groups and organisa-tions of the working class who demand of the Labour Gov-ernment a resolute struggle against the bourgeoisie.Any possibilities which this approach opened up for a correctorientation towards the Labour Party were, however, de-stroyed by the political degeneration of the Communist Inter-national. The leftist rhetoric of the CIs Fifth Congress, hav-ing proved at variance with reality, paved the way for a lurchinto opportunism. It was in the context of this right turn bythe Comintern that the CPGB organised the National LeftWing Movement in the Labour Party.

From the Left Wing Movement to theThird PeriodDespite rejection of the CPGBs repeated applications foraffiliation, and increasing restrictions on their rights, CPershad remained active in the Labour Party, either as individualmembers or as trade union delegates. There was also amuch broader section of the Labour Party rank and file whowere politically sympathetic to the CP. From 1925, attemptswere made to organise these forces into the Left Wing Move-ment (L WM), backed up by the CP-sponsored weekly TheSunday Worker. Although it established considerable influ-ence among rank-and-file militants The Sunday Workerreached a peak circulation of 100,000 the LWM was never

clear as to the character of the left wing it was fighting tobuild. It veered between demands for the overthrow of thecapitalist class and the establishment of international social-

ism and calls for a return to the socialism of Keir Hardie,while boosting the credibility of the various Labour and tradeunion lefts who wrote for the paper. Rather than assistingworkers towards a political understanding of social democ-racy, such methods could only reinforce their existing illu-sions.When opposition to the LWM did emerge in the CPGB, it took

the ultra-left form of arguing that an organised opposition tothe right wing within the Labour Party merely presented anobstacle to the working class, who were allegedly already onthe point of deserting the Labour Party en masse and joiningthe Communist Party. The leaders of this tendency in the CP Palme Dutt and Harry Pollitt were encouraged by theComintern leadership, which was anxious to deflect Trotsky-ist criticisms of its own role in the CPGBs rightward shift bylaying the blame on a section of the national leadership.As Stalin tried to outflank his Bukharinite rivals, theComintern imposed a new line on the CPGB which devel-oped this ultra-leftism into suicidal sectarianism. In the 1929general election, workers were urged to vote Communistwhere the party stood a candidate (25 constituencies in all),and elsewhere to spoil their ballot papers. The CPGB wasinstructed to tell British workers that it was a crime equiva-

lent to blacklegging to belong to the Labour Party and socialdemocracy was now redefined by Stalin as social fascism. Inimplementing this line, the CPGB all but eradicated its hard-won influence within the labour movement and, not surpris-ingly, failed to make any political gains from MacDonaldsbetrayal in 1931.Having evolved into a hardened Stalinist formation, the CPGBabandoned its attempts to develop a revolutionary orienta-tion towards the Labour Party.

2. TROTSKYISM AND THE LABOURPARTYThe struggle for a revolutionary ori-entationTrotsky, while emphasising the need for a rigorous criticismof both left- and right-wing reformists, firmly rejected sec-tarianism towards social democracy. In 1934, for example,he urged his Belgian supporters to call for the election of aLabour government. We could give up this slogan, he wrote,

only if the Social Democracy before its coming to powershould begin greatly to weaken, ceding its influence to arevolutionary party; but, alas, today such a perspective ispurely theoretical. Neither the general political situation northe relation of forces within the proletariat permits the with-drawal of the slogan Power to the Social Democracy! . Healso opposed the ILP decision in the 1935 general election toboycott those Labour candidates who refused to take an anti-war line. If successful, Trotsky argued, this tactic would pre-vent the election of a Labour government and thus deny theopportunity of revolutionaries to expose the Labour leaders.To those in the ILP who argued that the reformist leaderswere already sufficiently exposed as reactionaries, Trotskyreplied: For us yes! But not for the masses, the eight mil-lions who voted Labour. It was necessary to support theworkers in their fight for a Labour government, while warn-ing of the consequences of the Labour Partys pro-capitalistprogramme.Trotsky by no means made a fetish of work in the LabourParty. In its initial phase, the work of the British section ofthe International Left Opposition was directed towards theCommunist Party at first from within the CP and then, fol-lowing expulsion, from outside. This was in line with theTrotskyists international policy of fighting for the reform of

the Comintern. After 1933, when its refusal to learn from theNazi victory in Germany revealed the Third International to


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be dead for the purposes of revolution, Trotsky advised hisBritish supporters to enter the ILP, which had broken fromthe Labour Party the previous year, and to work for its trans-formation from a centrist to a revolutionary organisation.Trotsky was, however, clear that for every revolutionaryorganisation in Britain its attitude to the masses and to theclass is almost coincident with its attitude towards the Labour

Party, which bases itself on the trade unions. The task of theILP, Trotsky argued, was not immediately one of total entryinto the Labour Party, but of building a strong fraction in thetrade unions and, consequently, in the Labour Party. It wasonly through such fraction work that the ILP could knowwhen total entry was necessary. It was true, Trotsky recog-nised, that the policy of the Labour Partys existing left wingwas atrocious. But this only means that it is necessary tocounterpose to it inside the Labour Party another, a correctMarxist policy. As for the argument that it would be impossi-ble to succeed in changing the Labour Party into a Marxistbody, Trotsky replied: With that we are entirely in accord:the bureaucracy will not surrender. But the revolutionists,functioning outside and inside, can and must succeed in win-ning over tens and hundreds of thousands of workers.As the ILP leaderships policies reduced the organisation to

political irrelevance, Trotsky supported a campaign in the ILPfor entry into the Labour Party and, in the event of the lead-erships refusal, that the Trotskyists should enter the LabourParty on their own account. The Geneva pre-conference ofthe Fourth International instructed the British Trotskyists tounify on the basis of Labour Party entry.Trotskys followers broke with the moribund ILP, and theMilitant Group led by Denzil Harber and Starkey Jackson pur-sued the entry tactic in the Labour Party. They seem to havebased themselves on methods of the National Left WingMovement, in which Jackson had participated in the 1920s.Thus the first issue ofThe Militant(July 1937) carried thefront-page slogan Now For a Real Left Wing! . The grouptried artificially to construct its own centrist current in theform of the Militant Labour League, the membership of which

remained almost exclusively Trotskyist.The practice of entry work was common to almost all Trot-skyists, with the exception of sectarians like C.L.R. Jamesand his group, and the Maitland-Tait Revolutionary SocialistParty in Edinburgh. After the Workers International League(WIL) split from the Militant Group in 1937, it carried outwork within the Labour Party for a further four to five years.When a minority tendency emerged in the late 1940s arguingfor an open organisation and a turn to industrial rather thanLabour Party work, the WIL opposed it on the grounds thatmovements in the trade unions necessarily found their ex-pression in the Labour Party, and that therefore it wasobligatory for Trotskyists to concentrate on entry work.By 1941, however, in most areas Labour Party activity haddwindled as a result of conscription and the electoral truce.

Therefore, the WIL empirically adopted the line advocated bythe former opposition, withdrew from the Labour Party, con-centrated on trade union intervention, and maintained asmall fraction within the ILP. In the short term this yieldedreal results. The WIL was able to recruit a significant numberof industrial militants disgusted by the class collaborationistline of the CP after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union inJune 1941. The Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), bycontrast, maintained its Labour Party orientation and suf-fered stagnation and mounting internal factional warfare.The RSL and the WIL fused to form the Revolutionary Com-munist Party (RCP) in March 1944, numerically and politicallydominated by ex-WIL members. The RCP continued the WILpolicy of calling for Labour to break the coalition and takepower on a socialist programme. The logic of this position

should have directed the bulk of the RCPs membership backinto the Labour Party, under the very circumstances of massradicalisation which both the WIL and the RSL had antici-

pated in the pre-1941 period. Instead, the RCP believed thatan organisation of no more than 500 could directly outbid theLabour Party for the allegiance of the mass of the workingclass.

The ambiguities of Labour to powerThe slogan of Labour to power on a socialist programme,

emphasised by the WIL and the RCP in this period, requires acritical examination, particularly in view of the role variationson this demand have played down the years, It has its ori-gins and basis in some of Trotskys writings (e.g., on Bel-gium). A well-known passage in the Transitional Programmestates:

. . . the demand, systematically addressed to the old lead-ership break with the bourgeoisie, take the power! isan extremely important weapon for exposing the treacherouscharacter of the parties and organisations of the Second,Third and Amsterdam Internationals.Trotsky derived this position from the tactic employed by theBolsheviks in the summer of 1917. Indeed, the TransitionalProgramme is posited on the short-term development of pre-revolutionary situations, in which bourgeois democracy would

rapidly become no longer viable. But it is a different matterto raise the slogan in circumstances where dual power doesnot exist even in embryo, where there is no immediate pros-pect of a government coming to power based on workerscouncils, and where the immediate scenario is of a reformistparty taking office on the basis of a majority in parliament.The central ambiguity is the blurring of the fundamental dis-tinction between governmental office in a bourgeois state,and a workers government basing itself on proletarianpower. To the extent that mass illusions in Labour have gen-erally taken the form of a belief that it would carry out sig-nificant reforms through parliament rather than takepower the demand addresses the illusions workers donthave, rather than the ones they do.The other half of the equation the socialist programme on

which Labour is supposed to take power presents similarproblems. A fully socialist programme would incorporate suchdemands as the smashing of the bourgeois state apparatusand the expropriation of the big bourgeoisie. Among differentlayers of the working class this can breed the illusion thatreformism can do the job, and whats more do it throughparliament, or produce scepticism among more advancedworkers who already understand that the right-wing leaderswill not bring about socialism. It evades the real task of driv-ing a wedge between the social democratic leaders and theworkers who have elected them to office.

3. THE EPIGONES OF TROTSKYApocalypse Now: The Healy ten-

dencyThe RCP intervened in the 1945 general election on the slo-gan Labour to power, but the logic of fighting alongside themasses for a Labour government should have required it tocommit substantial forces to work in the Labour Party. Be-cause of the gains that had been made by the WIL during thecourse of the war, the RCP leadership envisaged a furtherperiod of growth in which prospects for a mass party weredirectly on the agenda. Consequently, it only devoted a smallproportion of its resources towards fraction work, and placedits overwhelming emphasis on open work. The rapid radi-calisation that took place in the Labour rank and file, as areflection of wider radicalisation of the class, largely by-passed the RCP.The rationale of the RCP leaderships position was that the

classical conditions for entryism (as outlined by Trotsky dur-ing the discussion around the French turn of 1934-5) didnot exist. The Healy minority argued for entry from 1945


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onwards on the erroneous basis that such conditions did in-deed exist, and projected an ever-deepening economic crisisand the existence of a pre-revolutionary situation.As a result of a split bureaucratically imposed on the RCP bythe International Secretariat, supported by the SWP(US), theHealy group began entry work in 1947. Although formallycommitted to winning Labour Party members to a revolution-

ary programme, the Healyites in practice built a right-centristtendency around the paper Socialist Outlook, which engagedin wholesale adaptation to left reformists and Stalinist fellowtravellers. The fragments of the former RCP majority, led byTed Grant and Tony Cliff (forerunners of the present MilitantLabour and Socialist Workers Party), had collapsed into theLabour Party without any clear political perspective. All threegroupings, however, anticipated long-term work within socialdemocracy as the precondition for the emergence of a revo-lutionary organisation.The main feature of Healys group after 1950 was its politicalliquidation into the Bevanite / Tribune milieu. During his pe-riod of Labour Party entry, Healy held the perspective of a

left centrist movement emerging within the party andbreaking with the right wing. The Healyites role was to burythemselves in the Labour left in anticipation of taking theleadership of the resulting centrist formation.Healys break with this perspective and the withdrawal of hisforces from the Labour Party was an uneven process, takingplace during the years 1959-64. Thereafter, the emphasisshifted to ultra-left rhetoric self-proclamation as the revo-lutionary leadership to which workers would soon gravitateen masse, having broken with reformism under the impact ofan ever-intensifying capitalist crisis. Flowing from this per-spective was the perennial call. to build the mass YS (whichnever materialised) and the fetishing of a daily paper, whichfor all its advantages in intervening in industrial strugglesproved a millstone round the neck of the Socialist LabourLeague (SLL) and the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP).However, this cataclysmic and triumphalist line repeatedlyran up against the problem that reformism was not dead, nor

was there a mass break by workers to the left from the La-bour Party. In 1966, the SLL launched the slogan make theleft MPs fight. But the absence of a significant radicalisationin the Labour Party rank and file, or a polarisation in the Par-liamentary Labour Party comparable to the Bevanite period,allied to the sterile, dogmatic fashion in which the campaignwas implemented, meant that it had a very limited impact.The lack of any clear or systematic tactic towards the LabourParty during its six years in office (1964-70) can best beillustrated by the fact that the SLL issued calls to bring downthe Labour government in 1965 and 1969, yet advocated re-electing Labour in 1966 and 1970.Although the SLL struck an orthodox note in criticising theInternational Marxist Groups (IMG) ultra-leftism in the 1970general election, Its continuing on-off call for a Labour gov-

ernment committed to socialist policies was to prove thepivot around which the Healyites swung from adaptation toreformist illusions Into their most sustained period of sectar-ian ultra-leftism. Although it called for a Labour vote at thetwo 1974 general elections, the recently transformed WRPpresented its own handful of candidates as the answer to thecrisis. Within two years, Healy had decided that reformismhad run its historic course, and once again the working classwas on the verge of a mass defection from Labour. Therefollowed a three-year campaign to bring down the Labourgovernment / Lib-Lab coalition which succeeded only in iso-lating the WRP and substantially reducing its membership.Having thus burnt its fingers, the WRP leadership engaged inanother empirical change of tack in the early 1980s, when itpromoted a line of uncritical support to Ken Livingstone, Ted

Knight and other left-reformists around the WRP-subsidisedLabour Herald. This adaptation was combined with ultra-leftist declarations that reformism was finished and that the

Tory government should be brought down and replaced by aworkers revolutionary government. This schizophrenic linefound its embodiment in Healys community councils, whichcould be presented alternatively either as a platform for left-reformists or as the embryo of soviets.Since the WRP explosion in 1985, all the groups who issuedout of it (apart from the WIL) have adopted methods drawn

from Healyisms later period, often giving them a furtherultra-left twist: proclaiming a permanent revolutionary situa-tion and the necessity of a general strike and a workersrevolutionary government (WRP / News Line); proposing thatthe trade unions should cease funding the Labour Party andbuild a revolutionary party instead (WRP / Workers Press);announcing that Labour is no longer a bourgeois workersparty (International Communist Party); toadying to Living-stone and Knight, combined with crazy predictions of immi-nent military coups and economic catastrophe (Socialist Fu-ture and the Marxist Party). Most of these groups regardrevolutionary fraction work in the Labour Party as tanta-mount to betrayal, whilst retrospectively justifying almosteverything Healy himself did inside the Labour Party.

Building the socialist alternative:the SWP traditionThe state-capitalist tendency led by Tony Cliff, now the SWP,originated as one of the fragments of the old RCP majority.Founded in 1950, and known as the Socialist Review group,the Cliff tendency was at that time committed, as were all ex-RCP groupings, to working inside the Labour Party. Althoughthey did not share Healys inflated expectations concerningthe potential of the Bevanite movement, the Cliffites never-theless agreed that a revolutionary party in Britain wouldemerge as the consequence of a split in the Labour Party.In contrast to the Healy group, which made big gains fromthe crisis in the CPGB in 1956-57, the Cliffites remained asmall and un-influential group buried inside the Labour Party.By the early 1960s, Cliff had arrived at a virtually liquidation-

ist position towards Labour. Marxists, he wrote, should notset themselves up as a party or embryo of a party of theirown. They should remember that the working class looks tothe Labour Party as the political organisation of the class . . . Cliff even wound up the journal Socialist Review, and forseveral years his tendency was without an organ of its own.With the upsurge of student rebellion and the Vietnam pro-test movement in the late 1960s, however, the InternationalSocialism group (IS), as the Cliffites were now known, with-drew its forces from the Labour Party and set up shop as anindependent organisation. It used the substantial forces itwon from the student milieu to implement a turn to indus-try. During the wave of working class struggles against the1970-74 Heath government, the IS was able to recruit hun-dreds of trade union militants, giving it for the first time a

significant industrial base. However, it won these workers bycatering to their syndicalist outlook, and failed totally to pre-pare industrial militants for the political challenge presentedby the re-election of Labour in 1974.By the mid-1970s the IS was probably the largest organisa-tion on the left in Britain, claiming a membership of somethree thousand. Disoriented by these organisational gains,Cliff came to share Healys illusions that the betrayals of theWilson / Callaghan governments would cause the workingclass to reject reformism and rally to the revolutionary party.Accordingly, in 1976 the IS was renamed the Socialist Work-ers Party and stood against Labour in a number of by-elections receiving, however, only the most derisory votes.While the SWP did not fall into the trap of demanding that aworking class still tied to reformism should bring the Labour

government down, it had given no more thought to tactics inrelation to Labour in office than the WRP had. When theworking class failed to break from Labour to the SWP, Cliff


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launched the Anti-Nazi League asa vehicle for recruitment. In thehands of the SWP, the struggleagainst the National Front becamea diversion from the political battleagainst the Labour Party leader-ship. The SWP could identify the

causes of racism and fascism inunemployment and bad housing,but because it rejected any idea ofputting demands on the Labourgovernment, or organising insidethe Labour Party against the rightwing, it could offer only abstractpropaganda for socialism as analternative to capitalism.Although the SWP rapidly aban-doned the attempt to mount anelectoral challenge to Labour, ithas since remained dogmaticallycommitted to organisational inde-pendence, refusing to engage inany fraction work inside the La-bour Party even during the up-surge of a left-reformist movement around Tony Benn in1979-81. Whenever a general election rolls around, the SWPhas usually called on workers to vote Labour without illu-sions which allows it to evade the problem of addressingthe illusions workers do have in the Labour Party and devel-oping tactics and strategy to break them from these illusions.In 1991, the SWP launched its open letter stunt, wherebyLabour left-wingers were persuaded to publicly announcethat they had quit the Labour Party to build a socialist alter-native outside it.The organisational sectarianism of the SWP has not pre-vented it, however, from adopting a thoroughly opportunistapproach to potential converts from the Labour left. Havingrejected the method of transitional demands in favour of the

old social democratic division into a minimum and a maxi-mum programme, the SWP pursues a combination of reform-ist practice and propaganda for a future socialist societywhich dovetails neatly with the outlook of dissident left-reformists. Those who have joined the SWP have been re-cruited on the basis of their despair at prospects in the La-bour Party rather than through a struggle to win them torevolutionary politics.

Militant: from heads down to aban-don shipLike the SWP, Militant has its origins in the break-up of theRCP. During the late 1940s, Ted Grant opposed Healys lineof total entry into the Labour Party and concentrated on

building an independent revolutionary party. By 1949, how-ever, the failure of this strategy, and the isolation of the RCP,resulted in a demoralised leadership collapsing into the La-bour Party on the purely negative basis that nothing else waspossible in the circumstances. Having reunited with the Healygroup in 1949, most of the RCP majority either lapsed intoinactivity or found themselves expelled.In 1950, a few dozen former majority supporters regroupedaround Ted Grant. Lacking any real perspectives, other thanmerely surviving until better times came, the Grant tendencyled a fairly low-level existence inside the Labour Party. Onlyin the north-west, where a group around the paper Rallyworked in the Labour League of Youth, did the Grantitesachieve any growth or influence. Like the Cliffites, they failedto make any significant gains from the CPGB crisis after

1956, despite adopting a higher profile with the launch of theRevolutionary Socialist League (RSL) in 1957. This functionedas little more than the branch office of Pablo and Mandels

International Secretariat, to which theGrantites were now affiliated, andmade little impact either inside or out-side the Labour Party.Even the Grantites base in the LabourParty youth was undercut from the late1950s by the Healy groups turn to

work in this field. The formation of theYoung Socialists in 1960 was followedby a considerable expansion of theHealy tendency. Grants supporters inthe YS were marginalised, and foundthemselves reduced to collaboratingwith the Cliff group in the production ofYoung Guardin opposition to the Hea-lyitesKeep Left. The one point atwhich it seemed the Grant group mightbe getting somewhere was in 1964,when they succeeded in winning a layerof prominent ex-Healyites along withthe Midlands-based InternationalGroup. It was then that the monthlyMilitantnewspaper was launched. Thisdevelopment was cut short in 1965,

when a leading Grantite supported the use of the police toremove Healyite youth from a YS branch meeting, producinga split between those who defended this action (Grant andhis supporters) and those who opposed it (the ex-Healyitesand the International Group).The Grantites stand on this issue was symptomatic of theirattitude to work in the Labour Party. For by this stage theRSL had effectively abandoned its initial combination of openand entry work in favour of its own version of deep entryism.This became more pronounced after Militant split from theUSec in 1965, following which it ceased to produce any dis-tinctively Trotskyist publication. And although Militant tookcontrol of the LPYS after the withdrawal of the Healy ten-dency, it refused to use this position to mount any real politi-

cal challenge to the bureaucracy, arguing that it was neces-sary to avoid expulsion at all costs in order to be there whena future centrist movement arose inside the Labour Party.This passive waiting on events, together with its woodenconception of entry work, left Militant in no position to makegains from the student radicalisation of the late 1960s. In-stead it exclusively concentrated on the Labour Party at atime when the partys local organisation was largely mori-bund.Not until the early 1970s, when the wave of strugglesagainst the Heath government began to breathe life backinto the Labour Party rank and file, did Militant make signifi-cant gains. It was able to do so not so much because of itsown political abilities, but because the removal from the La-bour Party of the much larger forces led by Healy and Cliff

gave Militant a clear field. By 1975 Grant was able to claim1,000 members, and the upsurge of the Labour left in thelate 1970s resulted in Militant becoming the largest groupingon the far left, with a claimed membership of several thou-sand. By contrast, the independent revolutionary partiesfounded by Healy and Cliff were severely reduced in size bythe early 1980s.Organisationally, Militants political practice inside the LabourParty was rigidly sectarian. It refused to operate any mean-ingful united front policy, holding aloof from any serious in-tervention in the Bennite movement and dismissing othergroups collectively as the sects. Rather than providing lead-ership to the leftward-moving sections of the Labour Partyrank and file, Militant concentrated on individual recruitment.This organisational sectarianism went hand in hand with op-

portunist adaptation to the reformist consciousness of theLabour Party membership. Militant never tired of assuringthe working class that the transition from capitalism to so-

in 1925, Communist Party theoretician R. Palme Dutt

(above), on the basis of the heady rhetoric of theCominterns fifth congress, could write of the Labour

Partys decomposition. With the victory of the New

Line, the Communist Party declared in its 1929 election

manifesto that the first Labour government had exposedthe Labour Party leadership completely. Dismissing the

rank and file, it characterised Labour as a completelydisciplined capitalist party.


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cialism could be achieved through parliament. According tothis argument, in Britain the smashing of the bourgeois stateapparatus and the establishment of direct organs of workerspower in the form of soviets and a workers militia would beunnecessary. A majority of socialist MPs in the House ofCommons would simply pass an enabling act nationalisingthe top 200 capitalist companies and thereby secure the

peaceful expropriation of the bourgeoisie.Whereas Militant had previously avoided taking up positionsin the Labour Party, the growth of the tendency convinced itthat it was now strong enough to make a bid to oust theright wing and establish a dominant position on LiverpoolCity Council, although during the period of the 1983-85

socialist council it never made up more than a dozen of the49-strong Labour group. Its real strength in Liverpool camefrom its hegemonic position as the only left-wing organisa-tion of any size operating inside the Labour Party, and itscontrol of the District Labour Party (DLP). With the limitedresources at the councils disposal, the building of thousandsof new homes and the safeguarding of jobs and services atthis time was not unimportant, given the contemporary re-cord of other left Labour councils and the lack of a revolu-tionary situation.However, Militant did not simply act in a reformist mannerbecause of a lack of revolutionary possibilities, but becauseits whole method was reformist and amounted to placing thecontrol of the fight against the Tory government into thehands of the councillors first and the DLP second which leftthe Joint Shop Stewards Committee trailing a poor third. Arevolutionary organisation would in these circumstances haveattempted to reverse this order of importance, and wouldhave placed the leadership of organising the necessarystrikes into the hands of accountable workers bodies.These reformist tactics, and the suspicion with which Militantviewed both workers self-organisation and black self-organisation, led to a loss of confidence by much of thecouncil workforce (which was compounded by the disastroustactic of issuing the entire workforce with fake redundancy

notices), and meant that Militant was unable to underminethe petty-bourgeois misleaders of the Black Caucus. Thisconfusion and lack of confidence among the workforce al-lowed Militant to successfully argue for a compromise withthe Tories over rate-capping that effectively ended the strug-gle although not before this defeat, and the failure to makea united front with the miners, was presented by Militant asa victory.The right-wing backlash in the Labour Party against the left,which grew apace from the mid-1980s, produced a charac-teristic response from the Militant leaders they failed toorganise a serious fight against it. But whereas in the pastthis passivity had been justified by the necessity of remain-ing inside the Labour Party, it now led to an empirical shiftaway from entry work. This development, accelerated by

Militants gains in the anti-poll tax struggle, culminated in thedecision to challenge the official Labour candidate at Waltonin 1991, and the launch of Scottish Militant Labour the fol-lowing year.This turn by Militant flew in the face of the whole strategypursued by the tendency over a period of decades. It repre-sented the junking of Militants main distinguishing position that it was essential to remain inside the Labour Party inorder to take advantage of the radicalisation of the member-ship which would automatically result from developments inthe class struggle. Not surprisingly, this dramatic change ofline provoked a fierce factional struggle inside Militant, re-sulting in the expulsion of Grant and his followers who up-held the traditional entryist position. For their part, the Mili-tant majority around Peter Taaffe have denied that any fun-

damental change in perspective has occurred, and depict thenew turn as a mere tactical detour.

However, the extension of the Scottish turn to England andWales with the launch of Militant Labour in 1993 suggeststhat the detour will be a prolonged one. Having uprooted itsexperienced cadre from its traditional environment, Militanthas now resorted to the instant recruitment methods it hadpreviously derided when carried out by Healy and Cliff. Pre-dictably, this has failed to stop the haemorrhage of members

and, by any standards, the open party turn has been a fail-ure, reducing Militants influence to its lowest level since theearly 1970s.

Left, right: the politics of the IMGThe tendency that formed the IMG originated in a Notting-ham-based group which split from the RSL in 1961. The In-ternational Group, as the organisation was originally known,was committed to working inside the Labour Party. Indeed,at this time one of the central criticisms of the SLL by theUSec of which the IG remained a sympathising group was the Healyites increasing sectarianism towards Labour.After the attempt at rapprochement with the Grantites col-lapsed, the IMG was formed in 1965. It used its base in Not-tingham Labour Party to launch the Vietnam Solidarity Cam-

paign (VSC) in 1966, and achieved further prominence whenleading IMGer Ken Coates was expelled from the LabourParty.But the growth of the VSC, which by 1968 was able to organ-ise large demonstrations against the Labour governmentssupport for US aggression in Vietnam, was based on pre-dominantly middle class forces from outside the LabourParty. With the support of the leadership of USec, whoseofficial section it now was, the IMG made a turn towards theradical student milieu, adapting to its ultra-leftism and itssectarianism towards the labour movement. Consequently, in1969 the IMG withdrew from the Labour Party to concentrateon work among these new revolutionary forces.The IMGs ultra-leftist lurch led its leading figures notablyRobin Blackburn and Pat Jordan to oppose a Labour vote in

the 1970 general election. It would be absolutely incorrectfor us to offer any kind of support to Harold Wilson or theparty he leads . . . , Blackburn wrote in the IMG paper RedMole.

The only principled course of action for revolutionary social-ists during the coming election will be an active campaign todiscredit both of Britains largest capitalist parties [i.e., La-bour and the Tories]. We should disrupt the campaigns of thebourgeois parties and their leading spokesmen using all theimaginative and direct methods which the last few yearshave taught us. In line with this argument, the paper carried a cartoon inwhich a mob of red moles attack both Labour and Tory elec-tion speakers and tear up a Vote Labour placard!The wave of industrial struggles against the Heath govern-ment during the early 1970s largely bypassed the IMG,which maintained its orientation towards the radical milieutogether with the accompanying sectarian ultra-leftism. Atfirst the group refused to take up the demand, increasinglypopular among workers, to bring down the Tory government.The justification given was that this was a reformist demandwhich diverted attention from the fact that the real fight wasnot with the Tories but with capitalism! By 1974, however,when the Heath government was driven from office, an ele-ment of political sanity had returned. In complete contradic-tion to its 1970 position, the IMG advocated a vote for theLabour Party in both the 1974 general elections.The following period was marked by a partial turn back to-wards the traditional labour movement, calling for the forma-tion of a class struggle left wing. In the Labour Party, in thetrade unions, in the trades councils, the IMG argued, it is

necessary to organise an opposition which can fight the right-wing leaders. In line with this perspective, the group began


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to carry out some minimal frac-tion work inside the LabourParty.But in the late 1970s, the IMGsmain emphasis, like the WRPand SWP, was on building a po-litical organisation independent

of, and in direct political compe-tition to, the Labour Party. Tothis end, under the slogan of

socialist unity the group advo-cated a fusion of the whole ofthe revolutionary left. While theHealyites and Grantites werepresumably in practice excludedfrom the proposed fusion, theIMG held high hopes for amerger with the Cliffites, whoselaunching of the Anti-NaziLeague was greeted with the cry

Hats off to the SWP! But thestate caps refused to play ball,and the IMG was reduced tofanning an electoral bloc with afew tiny groups like Big Flame.From 1977 on, Socialist Unitycandidates stood in a variety oflocal elections and parliamentaryby-elections on class strugglepolicies which fell far short of arevolutionary programme. Thesecandidates generally did a bit better than the SWP, but So-cialist Unity failed to establish itself as a serious electoralalternative to the Labour Party.During this period, the IMG had a sharp critique of the leftLabour MPs. Where the Callaghans offer capitalist solutionsto a capitalist problem, it was argued in 1977, Benn andthe other lefts want the leopard to change its spots, so they

try to paint it another colour, but the paint will wash off inthe rain. The group also put forward a variant of the Makethe Lefts Fight line:

Where the many thousands of workers still look to the leftsfor a lead, the lefts must be put to the test. If they say theyare opposed to the cuts they should organise to fight them.They should support every demonstration, strike or picketagainst the cuts and organise their supporters in such action.Such arguments were employed to expose the fact that thelefts would not fight. But what if the left reformists did carryout a struggle against the right wing? This possibility had notbeen seriously considered. Thus the rise of the Bennitemovement, and the victories it scored over the Labour rightat the 1980 party conference, caught the IMG unawares.

Only a year earlier the group had still been concentrating onthe Socialist Unity project, standing a handful of candidatesagainst Labour in the 1979 general election, and the groupsnominal Labour Party fraction had lapsed into complete inac-tivity. Now the prospect of recruiting from among the Ben-nites produced a sudden lurch back towards the reformistmilieu the IMG had abandoned just over a decade earlier.Just as it had once tail-ended petty-bourgeois ultra-leftism,the IMG now adapted to left reformism. The group renameditself the Socialist League (SL) and launched a new paper,Socialist Action, whose politics could best be described as leftBennite. The justification given for this was that the immedi-ate threat to the bourgeoisies interests was not an outbreakof revolutionary struggles, but rather the ousting of the La-bour leadership by the Bennites. The role of the SL, accord-

ing to this reasoning, was to build the Labour left. The subse-quent decline of the Bennite movement in the face of a back-

lash by the Labour right produced tensionsin the SL, which split in 1985.One wing, led by John Ross, has pursuedan increasingly liquidationist path. Socialist

Action, now in magazine form, appearsvery infrequently, and the Rossites mainenergies are directed into the production of

the monthly Socialist Campaign GroupNews, which promotes the political viewsof the Campaign Group of MPs. Ross hasestablished a symbiotic relationship withKen Livingstone, under whose auspicesSocialist Action has advocated a new ver-sion of socialist unity, this time involving amerger between the Labour left, and theremnants of British Stalinism around theMorning Star.The other wing merged with Alan Thor-netts group to form the International So-cialist Group (ISG), which publishes thepaper Socialist Outlook(and has beenadopted as the USecs British section). Atthe heart ofSocialist Outlooks orientationis its project of building a class struggleleft wing in the Labour Party and the tradeunions. This concept has bounced aroundin discussions for nearly two decades sincethe USec Theses for Britain of 1976 andconfusingly has meant different things atdifferent times. But since the Bennite turnof the SL in the early 1980s, it has crystal-

lised into a formula for a propaganda bloc with left reformismon its own terms.The class struggle programme around which Outlookaimsto build the left wing lacks any coherence. Many of the de-mands it puts forward are supportable in themselves. Butunlike the Transitional Programme, its role is not clearly thatof a bridge from the consciousness of workers today to the

socialist revolution, but more a shopping list drawn up to suitthe Benn-Scargill milieu. And although such a programmedoes reflect demands raised by sections of militant workers,it is necessarily the product of the unevenness and spontane-ity of the class struggle, rather than of Marxist analysis. Assuch, it is wholly inadequate as a guide to mobilising theclass in struggle.This approach is presented by Outlooks leadership as anapplication of the united front tactic. In fact, it representsunity in programme, rather than unity in action, with leftreformism, with the inevitable result that criticism ofOut-looks allies is toned down or non-existent.As its chosen vehicles for the class struggle left wing haveeither foundered (Socialist Movement, SMTUC, Women forSocialism) or gone their own ways (Labour Briefing, Un-

shackle the Unions campaign), and with left reformism insharp decline, the ISG is today faced with a crisis of perspec-tive. Under pressure from both right and left oppositions inthe organisation, the leadership has adopted a more openprofile, with the hammer and sickle, and references to

supporters of the Fourth International, making occasionalappearances in Socialist Outlook.

The Workers Socialist League andSocialist Organiser: part of the solu-tion or part of the problem?The tendency led by Sean Matgamna, which now publishesthe paper Socialist Organiser, has a long political history, inthe course of which its politics have undergone a series of

twists and turns no less bewildering than those of the Healy-ite current.

Alan Thornett: Originating in a group of opposi-tionists expelled from the WRP in 1974, the WSLhad made great strides in breaking from the

crazed sectarianism of Healys organisation, andhad polemically demolished the WRPs stupid callto bring down the Labour government. The WSLwas quite clear that reformism still had a hold onthe working class and that it was necessary to

build a bridge from workers existing conscious-

ness to revolutionary politics.


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Matgamna himself broke from HealysSLL in 1963, and was briefly involved inthe failed regroupment around Militant,apparently leaving in 1965 over theMani affair. In 1969, when another at-tempt at regroupment was initiated byTony Cliffs IS, Matgamnas group was

the only one to respond positively tothis appeal for revolutionary unity, join-ing the IS as the Trotskyist Tendency.During the late 1960s and early 70s,the Matgamna group had an orientationtowards the United Secretariat, and theevolution of its attitude to the LabourParty paralleled that of the USecs Brit-ish section, the IMG, shifting from en-tryism to ultra-leftism. In the 1970 gen-eral election, the Trotskyist Tendencyreportedly adopted the same No Voteto Labour line as Robin Blackburn andCo.Having been expelled from the IS in1971, the Matgamnaites established anindependent group, publishing the paperWorkers Fight. In 1976 they brieflyfused with another ex -IS group (whichlater became Workers Power) to form the International-Communist League (I-CL), publishing the paper Workers

Action. By this time the Matgamnaites had made anotherabout-turn on the Labour Party, and now believed that asectarian approach to Labour had been the main reason forthe isolation of revolutionary groups in Britain. They placedincreasing emphasis on fraction work in the Labour Party,particularly in the Militant-dominated LPYS. Resistance by thefuture Workers Power group to this turn was one of thepoints of conflict with Matgamna which led to their expulsionfrom the I-CL within months of its foundation.During the run-up to the 1979 general election the I-CL,

along with the small Chartist group, formed the SocialistCampaign for a Labour Victory (SCLV). This had the supportof several Tribunite MPs and a number of constituency activ-ists, and had as one of its declared aims that of rejuvenatingthe Labour Party. In 1980 the SCLV began publishing Social-ist Organiser, which was conceived as a broad paper ori-ented towards (or, more accurately, liquidated into) the Ben-nite

in defence of trotskyism no. 4 the methodology of communism

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