Trotskyism, the Labour party and lessons for today

[Red Monroy]

In this three-part series Mike Macnair examines the historical development of Trotskyism internationally and in the UK, it relationship towards the Labour party and what lessons could be learnedfrom this history for todays communists (and especially Trotskyists).

I'll post the articles in three posts. The first article (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004149) is dealing with the historical development of the Trotskyist movement from its inception up to 1969:


In, out, shake it all about

How did the far-left policy of Labour Party entry develop? Mike Macnair looks at the changing attitudes of British Trotskyism

http://cpgb.org.uk/images/1004149.jpg

This article is the first of a three-part series about the Trotskyists and the Labour Party. Specifically, the Trotskyists and the Labour Party, not Trotskyism and the Labour Party.

Trotskyism as a historical political tendency has shared with ‘official communism’ the belief that the Labour Party is part of the workers’ movement in Britain - and, in fact, represents the large majority of those workers who see that the working class needs political organisation and action independent of the capitalists, in spite of its pro-capitalist and imperialist character.

Also in the political DNA of every tendency which descends from the early Communist International is the idea of the ‘united front’ among workers’ organisations. For ‘official communists’, Maoists and the majority of British Trotskyists since the late 1940s, this idea is modified by Georgi Dimitrov’s arguments (for the 1935 7th Congress of the Comintern) that the united front involves a suspension of public criticism, or diplomatic approaches to disagreement, in order to achieve unity.

For ‘official communists’ and Maoists, the idea of the workers’ united front is also superseded by the idea (from the same Comintern congress) of the people’s front, including ‘left bourgeois’ forces. Trotskyists reject this idea (at least formally). But the people’s front idea does not in itself exclude unity tactics towards the majority workers’ party.

These two ideas in combination require that Trotskyists, like ‘official communists’, should have some tactic towards the Labour Party. In this sense they differentiate ‘official communists’ and Trotskyists, on the one hand, from ‘left’ and ‘council’ communists, from the ‘impossibilists’ of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, and from a variety of other far-left tendencies, on the other.

However, the fact that Labour is a ‘bourgeois workers’ party’ and the policy of the united front do not, in themselves, dictate what tactics are appropriate, either generally or at any particular period. Trotskyism as such therefore does not dictate any particular approach to the Labour Party.

In their multiform 80-year history in Britain, the Trotskyists have attempted a variety of tactics towards Labour: entry or ‘fraction work’; ‘deep entry’ or ‘shallow entry’; ‘strategic entry’ or ‘raiding entry’; entry attempting to build an independent Trotskyist current or group in the Labour Party or entry to try to build and win over a broader Labour left current or group; and ‘open party’ work with or without (unsuccessful) electoral challenges to Labour, either in the name of the group itself, or as part of a ‘broader’ left anti-Labour coalition.

This history therefore provides a certain amount of, as it were, ‘experimental evidence’ about the tactics adopted by small groups attempting to construct a revolutionary Marxist party in Britain by linking their minority ideas and small cadre to the broader mass movement. There should be something to be learned from it.

The history of Trotskyism in Britain is also to a very considerable extent a history of (almost senseless) splits about the choice of tactics towards the Labour Party. Prima facie this is a historical lesson of a different sort: to be avoided.

There are, of course, defensible arguments that all this evidence is worthless. Maybe any Trotskyist tactics towards the Labour Party were doomed from the outset to fail. Perhaps the objective relation of forces was too bad. Or perhaps profound political errors unconnected to the Labour Party tactics doomed the Trotskyists to remain marginal.

Either of these suggestions may be true. For neither, however, is the evidence so strong as to force the conclusion that the record of the tactics, debates and splits themselves has nothing at all to teach the present-day left.

What follows is a certain amount of necessary background on the international evolution of the Trotskyist movement; a brief, superficial and probably imperfectly accurate run-through of the history;[1] (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004149#1) and an attempt to see what if anything can be drawn out as lessons. Some ‘alphabet soup’ is regrettably unavoidable. This first article will carry the history down to 1969, the second will bring it up to the present date and the third will attempt to draw out the repeating features and possible lessons.

Trotskyist origins

The international Trotskyist movement emerged after Trotsky’s deportation from the USSR in 1929, out of a combination of two distinct and episodically conflicting elements. On the one hand, local and national oppositional groups inside and outside the communist parties began to identify with Trotsky as a revolutionary opponent of the official line of the CPs. On the other, Trotsky and his immediate associates endeavoured to organise an international movement on the political basis of the decisions of the first four congresses of the Comintern (1919-22).

The two elements were distinct and episodically conflicting, because the cadres of the communist parties had a relatively low level of knowledge of the discussions and decisions of the early Comintern, and an even lower level of knowledge of the views of the Russian Left Opposition, which were both suppressed and falsified by the Moscow bureaucracy.

Moreover, the course of events produced a series of violent turns both in the policy of the Comintern and conversely in the policy and orientation of Trotsky and his immediate associates. Down to 1928 Trotsky was a left critic of the Comintern, mainly round the China question. Between 1929 and 1935 he was a right critic of the Comintern, counterposing the policy of the united front to ‘third period’ sectarianism. From 1936 to 1940 he was again a left critic of the ‘people’s front’ policy.

Superimposed on this was the ‘party question’. Down to 1933 Trotsky was an advocate of a factional struggle within the communist parties and Comintern and a vigorous opponent of the idea that a new, Fourth, International was needed. Then in response to the Nazi coup in Germany and the failure of the German Communist Party (KPD) to mount any resistance, he denounced first the KPD and then the Comintern as politically dead. The Trotskyists issued a joint call for the fight for a new international with some left socialist and right communist groups.

This orientation was short-lived: the left socialist/right communist groups wanted diplomatic unity, where differences were papered over, not unity involving rigorous polemics. When the Comintern began its unity turn, this took them into the camp of the people’s front. They won over several of the stronger early Trotskyist groups to this perspective.

The Comintern’s ‘united front’ turn began in 1934 in France, and Trotsky urged the French Trotskyists to join the SFIO, the French Socialist Party, in order to link up with the SFIO left and thereby avoid being marginalised. The relative success of this tactic in France led Trotsky to argue for its application elsewhere. But by 1936 (when US Trotskyists were beginning their ‘French turn’) Trotsky was arguing for the French Trotskyists to come out of the SFIO and work as an open party.

The outbreak of war in 1939 brought new sharp political turns from Trotsky. The Hitler-Stalin pact and Russo-Finnish war led him to emphasise defence of the Soviet Union against the wave of Anglo-American liberal outrage and urge a tactical orientation towards the ranks of the communist parties. The fall of France in 1940, on the other hand, led him to shift ground sharply from the dual defeatism espoused in the 1938 Transitional programme to the ‘proletarian military policy’ of urging working class control of defence against the threat of fascist conquest. The first of these turns produced a major international split in the Trotskyist movement, the second - transmitted after his death by the US Socialist Workers Party - produced national splits or exacerbated existing splits in (at least) France, China, Vietnam and Britain.

Trotsky’s shifting orientations and willingness to accept damaging splits can only be really understood on the basis of two points. The first is that from 1929 it was clear that capitalism had not resolved the contradictions which had produced World War I, and by the early 30s everyone knew that a new world war was on the way. The idea that these developments represented the “death agony of capitalism”, though strikingly stated in the Transitional programme, was actually the common coin of the international communist movement.

The second is that Trotsky made a negative judgment on his own views and activities between 1903 and 1917 on the party question and his conciliationism. He concluded that the ‘hard’, ‘sectarian,’ or ‘factionalist’ Lenin had been proved right on these questions by the course of the Russian Revolution and he himself had been proved wrong on them. He was perfectly explicit about this, and in places where it cannot possibly be explained by ‘protective coloration’ against the Stalinists’ cult of Lenin.[2] (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004149#2)

The combination meant in the first place that he was very quick to identify Hitler’s 1933 coup as the ‘August 1914’ of the KPD and Comintern - following Lenin’s decisive response to August 1914 rather than his own ambiguities in 1914-15. Second, he was absolutely determined to build an organisation, however small, on a clear political programme - meaning the first four congresses of the Comintern, read as the last time that the communists had really had a party. He was not minded to conciliate ultra-leftists, right communists or social democrats or construct a centrist ‘August bloc’.[3] (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004149#3)

Third, he was a man in a tearing hurry: the object was to have the core of an international, even if skeletal, in place before the world war broke out. In theory, the 1933 resolution, ‘The International Left Opposition, its tasks and methods’, said: “The frequent practical objections, based on the ‘loss of time’ in abiding by democratic methods, amount to short-sighted opportunism. The education and consolidation of the organisation is a most important task. Neither time nor effort should be spared for its fulfilment. Moreover, party democracy, as the only conceivable guarantee against unprincipled conflicts and unmotivated splits, in the last analysis does not increase the overhead costs of development, but reduces them.”[4] (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004149#4)

In practice, however, the rapidity and violence of the turns urged by Trotsky on the international movement in the 1930s had the opposite effect. Debates were truncated; tactics were so short-term in character that debates had to be truncated; the result was “unprincipled conflicts and unmotivated splits”.

1930-49

The initial ‘Trotskyists’ in Britain - the Ridley-Aggarwalla Marxian League; and the ‘Balham Group’ in the CP, led by Purkis and Groves - were left critics of the CPGB’s ultra-left ‘third period’: thus the Balham group, in its one opportunity to intervene in the CP in an organised way before expulsion, used it to argue against work in the trade unions. After expulsion, its Communist League combined class-war victim defence activities with propaganda aimed at the CP.

The 1933 international turn led to the Trotskyist international leadership urging the group to enter the Independent Labour Party, which had split from Labour in 1932. The result was a brief faction struggle, which ended in a split in December 1933. The minority entered the ILP as the Marxist Group, where they fought against CP fellow-travellers and for the perspective of the Fourth International. After the CP fellow-travellers walked out, the MG was banned by the ILP in 1936.

In the process, some of the MG’s members drifted out into the Labour League of Youth and in 1935 set up the Youth Militant paper. This group became the Bolshevik-Leninist Group (BLG). By spring 1936 Trotsky was arguing for a turn from the ILP to the Labour Party, and an international conference in July called on the British Trotskyists to unite within the framework of entry. MG members drifted over to the BLG in the Labour Party; there was a sharp debate over perspectives in autumn 1936; and in December the remaining MGers divided between an open party perspective (led by CLR James) and a few who remained in the ILP without organisation.

The CL, meanwhile, had drifted de facto into the Labour Party. It had been perfectly normal in the 1920s for local communists to “pass under the radar” in local Labour Parties, and the Balham Group at the end of the day consisted of local communist activists rather than theorists. To evade the proscription of communist organisations the CL changed its name to Marxist League (ML). It also became involved in Stafford Cripps’s Labour-left Socialist League, fighting against the influence of the CP fellow-travellers in this organisation until the Socialist League was banned and dissolved in 1937. An attempt to set up a new left front, the Socialist Left Federation, was rendered stillborn by the ML’s determination to exclude theBLG, leading to obscure procedural fighting, and the ML had collapsed by the end of 1937.

The remainder of the ML’s members and the MG fused in February 1938 to form the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL mark one) on the basis of a perspective of combining an open party with fraction work in the Labour Party - in reality, given the background, an agreement that the two components would carry on with their existing tactics.

The BLG in November 1937 set up a ‘broad front’ organisation under the name of the Militant Labour League (MLL) on the basis of a partial (centrist) programme. This proved to be a mere front, and the Labour League of Youth, where the BLG had been most successful, became increasingly dominated by CP fellow-travellers. The group split in November 1937 over the circulation of (alleged) slanders against Ralph Lee, who had recently joined from the South African Trotskyist movement, and the split group round Lee formed the Workers International League (WIL). The WIL’s policy, while still formally entryist, shifted towards ‘shallow entry’ with a stronger focus on the trade unions and some willingness to work outside the Labour Party.

In August 1938 Cannon and Shachtman visited Britain on behalf of the international leadership and attempted to force a unification of the groups on the basis of the (draft) Transitional programme. The BLG and RSL fused, together with the Revolutionary Socialist Party, a Scots semi-Trotskyist splinter off the De Leonist Socialist Labour Party, to form a new Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL mark two). There was again an agreement to disagree on the Labour Party question, since the RSP was opposed to entry in the Labour Party on principle.

In May 1940 Labour joined the wartime coalition government. The effect of the coalition and the suspension of elections was that the internal life of the Labour Party was effectively shut down; the RSL’s MLL front was banned in April 1940; and the group’s work was heavily disrupted by conscription. Those remaining became sharply divided into three factions: the Harber group, which controlled the CC; the ‘Left Faction’; and the ‘Trotskyist Opposition’. The differences concerned the ‘proletarian military policy,’ and the relation of Labour Party work to open work. The problem was exacerbated by the Harber leadership’s rather free hand with expulsions.

The WIL, meanwhile, had unequivocally adopted the ‘proletarian military policy’ and had shifted more and more heavily towards open and trade union work. When the 1941 invasion of the USSR led the CPGB to oppose strikes, the WIL began to grow strongly by providing strike support and winning trade union militants opposed to the ‘class peace’. By 1944, with several hundred members, it was bigger, more deeply implanted in industry and more influential than any Trotskyist organisation had ever been before.

In 1943-44 the US SWP in the form of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (the FI, which it controlled) embarked on a campaign for fusion of the RSL factions with the WIL, with the support of a minority round Gerry Healy in the WIL and of the RSL ‘Trotskyist Opposition’, particularly John Lawrence. Fusion was achieved in March 1944 with the creation of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The WIL had the overwhelming majority at the fusion conference, and adopted a Labour Party policy of fraction work, which would allow the RSLers to continue working in the Labour Party, while emphasising the tactical opportunities outside Labour.

The RCP was almost immediately given publicity by several of its leaders being arrested and prosecuted under retrospective legislation, which provoked a division within parliament and a wide defence campaign, ending in the reversal of the convictions on a technical error. They now embarked on electoral work, with little success.

The Healy-Lawrence minority argued from autumn 1945 for full entry in the Labour Party, and obtained from 1946 the support of the international leadership. After the debate had been carried on for about a year, the FI leadership in September 1947 authorised the minority to go ahead with entry as an independent group. They moved into the Labour Party as the secret ‘Club’ without disclosing their political affiliation, engaged in local activism to get their bearings and in December 1948 launched a ‘broad’ paper, Socialist Outlook, featuring articles from various official lefts in the party and unions. In 1949 this led to a broad-front organisation, the Socialist Fellowship; but the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 led the official lefts to break with this project, leaving the Club in control of a front.

In December 1948 the RCP majority leadership decided that the open party perspective was no longer working and to argue for entry - albeit without any clear perspective as to what would be done in the Labour Party. The international leadership insisted that if they were to do this, they must join the Club under its existing leadership; so the RCP was wound up in June 1949. The capitulation of the RCP majority to the FI-backed minority marks the end of a definite period in this history: entry was now ‘normalised’.

1950-69

Since a conference of the fused group would not have given Healy a majority, he proceeded over 1949-50 to a campaign of expulsions and provocations to get rid of supporters of the ex-RCP majority. Among the expellees, two groups formed organisations: the Socialist Review group of about 30-40 round Tony Cliff (later the International Socialists, today’s Socialist Workers Party) and the group round Ted Grant of about 20-30, initially unnamed, then for a period identified with an irregular journal called International Socialism, then (with others) organised in 1957 as the RSL mark three: the forerunner of the later Militant Tendency and hence of today’s Socialist Party in England and Wales and the Socialist Appeal group.

Meanwhile in France a faction struggle had developed between advocates of open party work and those of ‘entry sui generis’ in the Communist Party (PCF) (which at the time had weight in the French workers’ movement comparable to the Labour Party, the SFIO having been marginalised by the war). Entry sui generis was, in substance, a form of ‘deep fraction work’: there was to be a minority public face, while the majority entry fraction was to keep a low profile until the emergence of left-right debates in the PCF. The FI leadership decided in 1951 to impose a leadership in France to implement entry sui generis; the result was a split. The orientation to entry in the CPs was generalised across continental Europe by the FI 3rd World Congress in 1951, though the documents were clear that it did not apply everywhere: in Britain Labour Party entry, in the US open party work was preferred.

In the US, however, a faction developed round Bert Cochran and George Clarke, which argued not for entry into the CPUSA, but for an orientation to the milieux led by the CPUSA and its fellow-travellers. This development led to the US SWP leadership to move into opposition to the international leadership round Michael Raptis (Pablo); and when Healy, as Cannon’s man, followed this turn, John Lawrence went with Pablo. The result was splits in the US and Britain and an international split in the FI between the ‘Pabloite’ ‘International Secretariat of the Fourth International’ (ISFI) and the ‘anti-Pabloite’ ‘International Committee of the Fourth International’ (ICFI).

A further split followed in 1954, when the ISFI 4th World Congress agreed to attempt reconciliation with the SWP, and Mestre in France, Cochran-Clarke in the US, and Lawrence walked out. The Lawrence group (unlike its international co-thinkers) failed to organise in a systematic way and developed into a loose circle of CP fellow-travellers in the Labour Party.[5] (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004149#5) The official lefts withdrew their protection from the Healy-controlled Socialist Outlook, which was proscribed by the Labour Party in 1954.

The Hungarian revolution of 1956 led not to an organised split in the CPGB, but to extensive defections from it and the formation of the ‘new left’ both inside and outside the Labour Party. The major winner was the Healy Club, which now won an important layer of cadre - reaching around 400 members - and in 1959 launched a semi-open organisation, the Socialist Labour League (SLL), which was promptly proscribed by the Labour Party.

The result was not, however, an immediate, complete break. Labour in 1960 launched a youth organisation, the Young Socialists. The SLL ‘turned’ to work in this organisation through a newspaper Keep Left, and achieved considerable success, growing to around 1,000 members by 1964. The adult group had been orienting towards open work since around 1961-62, and in 1965 the Keep Left group pulled out of the YS, provoking expulsions where possible, leaving voluntarily where the bureaucracy would not oblige.

The Cliffite Socialist Review was replaced by International Socialism in 1960 and the group, still around 30-40, became the IS. It worked in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, attempted to build itself in industry using a specialist paper Labour Worker, and worked in the YS in a left-front paper called Young Guard. This was produced jointly with the RSL (mark three), but was dominated by the more dynamic IS. The IS reached 200 members by the time of the 1964 general election. In July 1965, its conference adopted a policy of downgrading day-to-day Labour Party work in favour of industrial work; in 1966-67 it moved into Vietnam Solidarity and activity on the campuses, and by 1968 had reached 400 members. In that year it issued a call for revolutionary unity, in effect terminating the entry orientation.

The Grant group, after a low ebb in the early 1950s, in 1956 was contacted by the ISFI as a possible means of intervening in the crisis in the CPGB, and in 1957 launched the RSL mark three in collaboration with some other forces, notably some ex-CPers, including Ken Coates and Pat Jordan from Nottingham. The RSL was initially (like the SLL) a semi-open organisation, which meant that the launch led to a split with a ‘deep entryist’ faction, Socialist Current. This was followed in 1961-62 by first the formation of a semi-external faction of the RSL, then of the Internationalist Group (IG) of Jordan, Coates and others - less than 10 members - which later became the IMG.

The RSL mark three and IG briefly re-fused after the 1963 ‘reunification’ of the FI between the US SWP on the one hand and the ISFI on the other to form the USFI, but proved unable to work together. The USFI world congress in 1965 recognised both RSL and IG as sympathising groups, which the RSL regarded as an expulsion. The congress also decided on a turn to Vietnam solidarity work, which the Grantites rejected as third-worldist. The implementation of this turn allowed the IG to grow substantially in the student and youth milieu, and it renamed itself the International Marxist Group.

Meanwhile, the IG had been carrying entry work through a ‘broad-front’ publication, The Week, and a sort of quasi-trade union work - a broad-front agitation for workers’ control - through the Institute for Workers Control led by Ken Coates. The dominance of the youth and Vietnam Solidarity work in its practice led to splits successively with Coates and the IWC in 1967, and with those most committed to Labour Party work in 1969, the latter forming the Revolutionary Communist League. The IMG now for most purposes, though not completely, abandoned Labour Party work.

The effect was that the organised Trotskyists, having in 1950 been almost entirely in entry, had by 1969 almost entirely abandoned it in favour of ‘open party’ perspectives. Those who hung on were the RSL, which had been left in undisputed possession of the Labour Party Young Socialists, and the considerably smaller RCL.

Notes


This is an outline account and particular points will therefore not generally be referenced. For the period down to 1949, I have used primarily S Bornstein, A Richardson Against the stream and War and the International (both London 1986); I am aware of the authors’ strong bias in favour of the WIL, since I read a long time ago John Archer’s 1978 PhD thesis on the same period, which displays a symmetrical bias in favour of the entry groups, but I do not have present access to Archer. Martin Upham’s 1979 PhD thesis, available on the Revolutionary History website (www.revolutionaryhistory.co.uk (http://www.revolutionaryhistory.co.uk/)), adds little to Bornstein and Richardson. For the period 1950-69 I have used: Bob Pitt’s Rise and fall of Gerry Healy; Ian Birchall’s Building the smallest mass party in the world; and Ken Tarbuck’s unfinished autobiography, all on the Revolutionary History website; Rob Sewell’s postscript to Ted Grant’s History of British Trotskyism (www.marxist.com/history-british-trotskyism-ted-grant.htm (http://www.marxist.com/history-british-trotskyism-ted-grant.htm) - the Socialist Party’s critiques of this are pretty much exclusively addressed to issues internal to the factional struggle in Militant); and Pat Jordan’s duplicated history of the IMG (1972) as well as other resources available on the web. For 1970-date I have used these sources so far as applicable; on the IMG I am also writing partly from my own unpublished work on its history, finished in 1986; other web sources; and from 1972 I am to some extent writing from memory.
Notably at various points in the Writings of Leon Trotsky 1929-1940 (New York: 1972-) addressed to internal debates among the Trotskyists.
August bloc: Trotsky’s 1912 attempt to unify all the factions in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, opposed to the Prague conference of Bolsheviks and ‘Party Mensheviks’, which excluded the Mensheviks.
Documents of the Fourth International (New York 1973) p29.
J McIlroy in What Next? Nos 26 and 27 (2003) provides the clearest account of the split and Lawrence’s evolution.

[Red Monroy]

The second part (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004157) deals with the history from 1970 to today:


Entries and exits

Mike Macnair continues his historical summary of British Trotskyism’s attitude to Labour Party work

http://cpgb.org.uk/images/1004157.jpg

At the end of the first part of this series we left the Trotskyists in 1969, having mostly pulled out of Labour Party work (‘In, out, shake it all about’, October 28). Left behind were the Revolutionary Socialist League (mark three) or Grant group, which was ensconced in effective control of the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) and had launched the Militant newspaper in 1964, and the small Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), formed in 1969 from a fusion between a group which had split from the International Marxist Group over entry and a splinter from the RSL.

In the next period, some of the prodigals were to return ... and at the end of it the Militant, almost the longest-standing and certainly the most successful Trotskyist ‘entryists’ in Labour, were to leave, and in doing so to split over the issue.

1970s broad left

Before looking at the evolution of the Trotskyists’ tactics towards Labour in the period from 1970, it is necessary to turn aside from the question of the evolution of the general political situation in the 1970s and the role of the Communist Party.

The International Socialists and International Marxist Group had abandoned Labour Party entry just at the moment when the downswing in Labour’s internal life, caused by the prospect of electoral victory in 1963-64 and the fact of Labour government in 1964-70, was coming to an end. A rising wave of strikes in the 1960s led the capitalist class to demand, through the judiciary and the media, new controls on the trade unions. Prime minister Harold Wilson and minister of employment Barbara Castle - both former ‘Bevanite’ Labour lefts in the 1950s - obliged in 1969 with the white paper In place of strife, which foreshadowed the modern anti-union laws. The unions, through the Communist Party-led Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions (LCDTU), and the Labour left, fought back and In place of strife was abandoned.

The capitalists therefore dumped Wilson in 1970 for Heath’s Conservatives, who immediately brought in anti-union laws. Coming after the defeat of In place of strife and at the tail end of the long boom and period of full employment, the effect was not to control industrial action, but to politicise it. The 1972 miners’ strike ended in a defeat for the government. In the same year the new industrial relations court was neutered when widespread solidarity action and the threat of a general strike over the jailing of five dockers produced their release. Labour - as is usual - moved left in opposition, and its internal life grew.

Finally, Heath in early 1974 embarked on another confrontation with the miners which was plainly going to lead to defeat, and called for an election on ‘who rules the country’. The election left Labour as the largest minority party, the ‘men in grey suits’ told Heath he must go and Labour was put back in.

The result of this form of the defeat of the Heath government, and the international context (which included the Portuguese revolution and in 1975 the US scuttle out of Vietnam) was that - unusually - left-right inner-party struggle continued at a considerable level under a Labour government, and the first years of the Thatcher government saw a continuation of this struggle rather than - as in the past - a revival of Labour leftism in a new form when the party lost office.

The broad Labour left was intertwined with the CP-led broad left fronts in the trade unions and the analogous CP-led Broad Left in the National Union of Students, which had succeeded in winning control of the NUS with the election of Jack Straw as president in 1968. There was no organised Labour broad left, but British road to socialism ideas of a left British nationalism and an industrial revival, and the ‘Alternative Economic Strategy’ approach of a bloc of labour with industrial capital against the City, were widely current on the Labour left in the wake of the ‘Barber boom’ and subsequent bust under the Heath government.

The CP, in fact, was doing rather well in the early to mid-1970s: from its wartime peak of 56,000 members (compare the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party’s 500 at the same period), it had declined to a little above 30,000 in the early 1950s, and after Hungary 1956 fell to 26,000. By 1975 it was back up to 30,000. But the CP itself was moving right with the development of Eurocommunism: a development which went along with falling membership in the later 1970s, but whose full implications were only to become clear in the 1980s.

Over 1974-79, the CP’s industrial base was weakened and its trade union fractions became more than ever dependent on the union bureaucracy. The reason was that that the Wilson government was able to deliver the conditions for the employers’ counter-offensive. The Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1974 ‘repealed’ Heath’s anti-union legislation, but left many of the restrictions in place, providing an instrument to discipline unofficial strikes. The government promoted centralised wage bargaining as part of its ‘incomes policy’, undermining the shop stewards and local bodies. The Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act 1974 took negotiations over sackings out of the hands of the stewards and local organisations and gave them to tribunals and centrally employed union lawyers. The check-off system of collecting union dues, increasingly widespread, weakened the branches’ connection with their membership. At the macroeconomic level, ‘stagflation’ - the combination of rising unemployment and rising inflation - made strike action on any issue except pay less attractive, while the employers were by and large willing to negotiate on pay and simply raise prices.

In spite of its splintering, Trotskyism in the 1970s was a much larger tendency than it had been at any time before. How the Trotskyists related to the Labour Party in this shifting situation, and in the 1980s in the face of Thatcherism, is therefore a larger and more complex question than the experiences of 1930-59 and 1950-69.

1970-91

It is convenient to look at the long-term entry groups first, because their history is simpler, and then the Labour Party question, as it affected the ‘open party’ groups.

The initial difference between the RCL and the RSL/Militant was the difference between the ‘broad front’ conception, which the RCL inherited from the IMG (and other Trotskyist groups), and the conception of linear recruitment through open defence of a party programme, which characterised the RSL.

As a result, the RCL entered and took over Socialist Charter, originally a Labour left broad-front project. But the majority of the RCL/Chartist rapidly evolved towards Eurocommunism and the RCL as such dissolved. Chartist became a broadly Eurocommunist project in the Labour Party (which still exists), while the informally organised ‘Chartist minority tendency’ (Chris Knight, Graham Bash and others) continued to operate on a semi-Trotskyist basis in various broad fronts, re-emerging in the 1980s as another broad-front project, Labour Briefing.

The Militant, left alone in the LPYS, was able to build itself by recruiting among the youth. At some point between 1965 and the early 1970s (its own histories are unhelpful on when) it developed its distinctive strategic/programmatic conception of a legal revolution, in which ‘Labour’s Marxist Tendency’ would first win control of the Labour Party, then win a general election, then pass an ‘Enabling Act’ through parliament to implement a programme of nationalisation of the top 200 monopolies and so on. The result was a strategic conception much closer to the British road and the ideas of the Labour left than the ideas of any other Trotskyist group were.

On this basis, after Young Communist League entryists and their fellow-travellers’ ‘Operation Icepick’ had protected the CP’s student territory by carving Militant out of the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS), the Labour broad left protected Militant from being purged from the LPYS, and its growth there could work through into gradual growth in the adult party. Attempts at a witch-hunt from 1975 only gave Militant additional publicity and credibility. By the 1980s it had above 5,000 members and three Labour MPs, with an exceptionally strong base in Liverpool.

The sharp rightwards development of the Eurocommunists, the 1981 Social Democratic Party split from Labour and the accompanying media offensive against the left, the defeat of the miners in 1984-85, and the ignominious collapse of the pretensions of the ‘local government left’ at the same period over rate-capping and illegal budgets, removed the shelter of the broad left from Militant and more serious witch-hunting measures were taken from 1985. Meanwhile, from 1988 Militant was drawn into the anti-poll tax struggle. This was precisely because as part of the Labour Party it had an electoral network reaching into the working class districts, which the other Trotskyist groups, based on the campuses and in the unions, lacked.

A rightward-moving Labour Party, the fact that Militant’s main party bases were under serious siege from the witch-hunt and success in the poll tax struggle, led the majority under Peter Taaffe to decide in 1991 to leave Labour. The result was a split with the minority, led by the historic leader of the group, Ted Grant. The majority, initially Militant Labour, gave birth after further splits to today’s Socialist Party in England and Wales and to the Scottish Socialist Party. The minority formed Socialist Appeal to continue the long-term struggle in Labour.

SLL-WRP

The Socialist Labour League entered the 1970s as by a long way the largest Trotskyist organisation and the best implanted in industry. It foresaw an impending 1929-style crash and a short-term settlement of accounts between the classes, and in 1969 launched a daily, Workers Press. It also launched an ostensibly broad-front competitor to the LCDTU, the All Trade Union Alliance (ATUA) - in fact it was a pure front for the SLL. Through the period of the Heath government, its line of a general strike to bring down the Tory government had a certain real agitational purchase, and the SLL continued to grow, reaching over 3,000 in 1973, when it renamed itself the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Along the way, in 1971 Healy broke the group’s loose relations, which had continued since 1953, with the French anti-Pabloite organisation led by Pierre Lambert. As a result it shed a small number of Lambertistes, who went into the Labour Party and organised themselves as the Bulletin group, which was later renamed (under the new management of John Archer) as the Socialist Labour Group.

After the fall of Heath, Healy, who had less and less relationship with reality, continued the line that a crash was imminent: the WRP must promote the line of a general strike to kick out the ... Labour government. Peculiarly, in industry this implied a line that the workers should ‘hold their fire’ until the big day came. In 1975 Alan Thornett and others in Oxford created an opposition to this line, influenced by the Bulletin group. They were promptly expelled from the WRP and formed the Workers Socialist League, a group almost wholly based in Oxford, but with some outliers elsewhere. The WSL adopted what is best described as a policy of ‘shallow entry’. It joined the Labour Party, but its political work and paper Socialist Press remained focussed on the trade unions and on the critique of other Trotskyist groups.

As WRP numbers declined from their 1973-74 peak, Healy in the late 1970s shifted to an ‘anti-imperialist’ orientation, which allowed him to obtain (limited) funds from the Libyan regime. He also attempted to get closer to elements of the trade union and Labour ‘official left’. One result was that in 1981 the WRP provided staff and material backing to Labour Herald, the Labour left paper launched by Ken Livingstone after he won the leadership of the Greater London Council, and ex-SLLer Ted Knight (who had rejoined the Labour Party in 1970, and in 1978 became leader of Lambeth Council).

The 1984-85 miners’ strike and the collapse of the ‘local government left’ brought down Healy, the WRP and Labour Herald. At the initial split between pro- and anti-Healy wings, the two sides mustered a bit under 800 active members between them: a substantial group for the Trotskyist left, but a far cry from the SLL at its height, let alone from Healy’s fantasies. The process of splintering was to continue until all that was left was micro-groups.

IS-SWP and offshoots

The International Socialists’ unity offensive in 1968, and the decision of the IMG not to join in, allowed the IS to sweep up most of the elements radicalised in the Vietnam campaign - it grew from 450 members to just short of 1,000 during 1968. It also offered a serious perspective in industry - that of ‘rank and file groups’, as opposed to the involvement of the CP broad lefts in the bureaucracy. From 1969, therefore, IS aimed to ‘turn’ its new forces to work in industry - with factory leaflets, trade union contacts and so on.

From 1970 it embarked on the practice of ‘open recruitment’ - inviting almost anyone it met to join, with the intention of rapid growth and integrating the new members afterwards. Like the SLL, it grew in the early 1970s, and around 1975-76 developed the conception that it had become a ‘small mass party’. This was reflected in the beginning of an electoral intervention in 1976 and the change of name to Socialist Workers Party in 1977. At the same period, the ‘rank and file’ industrial perspective failed (like the CP’s industrial base) as a result of Wilson’s union laws and the other shifts of the period.

From the beginning of the open recruitment policy, it has been difficult to assess how big the IS-SWP actually is (even its own leaders have often deceived themselves). In the early 70s it certainly had major influence in the shop stewards’ movement, playing an important practical role (for example) in some of the solidarity initiatives round the 1973 miners’ strike, especially the ‘battle of Saltley Gate’. In this phase it had some similarity with the broader and less tightly organised formations of the Italian far left like Lotta Continua, which some IS members admired. In this form, the loosely organised membership probably reflected a real political affiliation, and the IS may well have overtaken the SLL as the largest Trotskyist group by some way.

But ‘Bolshevisation’, the various early 1970s splits and the decline of the shop stewards’ movement led the IS-SWP to stabilise at a lower real membership level in the later 1970s. Its deployed forces in its public initiatives, and its financial resources, suggest that it arrived at a fully organised and dues-paying membership of around 1,500-2,000 at the time of the launch of the SWP, and has remained at that level ever since, though the paper membership figures have at various points been up around 10,000 and remain now - after recent ‘corrections’ - around 5,000.

The ‘party turn’ led the SWP to shed a large chunk of its former leadership and of its industrial base in 1975 in the Protz-Palmer-Higgins group, but this did not survive long as an organised group. The electoral turn was markedly unsuccessful, and its results worsened when the IMG entered the electoral field through the left front, ‘Socialist Unity’ - and did as well as or better than the SWP. Electoral intervention was showing up the SWP as merely another left group, not “the revolutionary party”, and was therefore abandoned in 1978.

Though it did consider entry in response to the shifting politics of 1975-76, the SWP has remained since then and to date on the ‘open party’ perspective. Its Labour Party orientation is an imitation of the old CP’s: to deploy ‘united front’ (actually popular front) work, on the basis of diplomatic agreements with the official lefts, for which the SWP provides (as it were) contract labour. The labour supplied is mainly recruited on the campuses. This orientation began with the Right to Work Campaign in 1976-77 and the Anti-Nazi League shortly after, and has continued through various forms down to the present.

The 1968 IS unity offensive picked up not only a lot of recruits, but also a parasite: the micro-group, Workers’ Fight, round Sean Matgamna, which had recently constituted itself after passage through the SLL and RSL (mark three), decided on entry in the IS. The Matgamna group worked as an organised ‘orthodox Trotskyist’ faction in the IS - the Trotskyist Tendency - with considerable success. It multiplied its own numbers by about 10, and also created a climate in which, for a period of time, there was significant discussion of theoretical issues in the IS. Expelled from the IS in December 1971, the Matgamna group returned to the name Workers’ Fight, and initially maintained an ‘open party’ orientation.

There were to be two further aftershocks of this discussion. The ‘Right Opposition’ or ‘Discussion Group’ faction in IS, like the Matgamna group, criticised the theoretical basis of Cliff’s state capitalism, but was influenced by old-time RCPer Roy Tearse, who was not a member of IS. Expelled from IS in April 1973, the faction promptly split between the followers of David Yaffe (who had done most of the theoretical heavy lifting), who formed the Revolutionary Communist Group (now Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!) and the followers of Tearse, who entered the Labour Party as the secretive and weakly organised ‘Discussion Group’. They engaged in low-level Labour work, combined with internal discussion without a public face; emerged to participate in the Labour Herald project; and after the failure of that project collapsed, winding up in 1988.

The Birmingham-based ‘Left Faction’ had supported the expulsion of Workers’ Fight but - after moving into and out of formal existence as a tendency over the next three years - was expelled in 1975 and formed Workers Power. It moved more or less immediately into fusion with Workers’ Fight (the new organisation was called the International Communist League); but, as has since become a recurring pattern, Matgamna was unable to sustain unity when differences emerged - in this case on the Labour Party. Workers Power emerged, still as an open organisation, in 1976. Later it was to shift to a ‘shallow entry’ perspective, producing elaborate Theses on reformism in 1985 to bless this turn, which lasted till the 1990s.

The Matgamnaites launched into entry and in the run-up to the 1979 general election a broad-front project, the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, involving Chartist (both wings) and Ken Livingstone. This in turn gave rise to a broad-front paper, Socialist Organiser, albeit resourced and organisationally controlled by the Matgamnaites. But again the Matgamnaites were unable to sustain unity, even in a broad front, and the coalition broke up over the local government question in 1980-81, leaving Socialist Organiser as the ICL party paper.

In July 1981 the ICL fused with Thornett’s Workers Socialist League, under that name, but liquidating Socialist Press in favour of Socialist Organiser. The fusion was already in crisis by 1982 over the Falklands/Malvinas war, and after part of the old WSL departed in April 1983, the remainder were expelled in April 1984, and formed the Socialist Group. Some old WF-ICLers had now had enough of Sean’s recurrent behaviour pattern of courtship, rapidly followed by violent split, and went with them.

The politics of this split was that the Matgamnaites were in process of reorienting to the campuses, albeit within the framework of NOLS. Finding the SWP dominant and the IMG departed, they elected to differentiate themselves from the SWP by a bloc with the Union of Jewish Students against SWP students’ support for ‘no platform for Zionists’. However, this implied a larger rejection of ‘third-worldist’ anti-imperialism and led to a general reorientation of the Matgamnaites’ politics from the ‘orthodox Trotskyism’ which had been the formal basis of their fight in the IS, and the fusions with Workers Power and the WSL, towards the semi-Zionist Shachtmanism which has deepened since.

Socialist Organiser continued - the group had a supporter selected to fight Wallasey and was able to run a general election campaign in 1987. This attracted a press witch-hunt, and in 1990 the paper was banned. To remain in the Labour Party the group ‘wound up’ and started a new journal under the name Workers’ Liberty, becoming the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. In 1995 it made an abortive attempt to unify with Briefing, which lasted no more than a few months.

IMG-SL and splinters

The history of the IMG after 1969 is a history of kaleidoscopically shifting factional alignments, with two repeating undertones. The first was the international faction struggle between New York and Paris which began that year, initially over Paris’s adaptation to the Guevarist ‘prolonged people’s war’ line in Latin America, and spread to pretty much everything. New York’s supporters in the IMG argued - until 1980 - for a return to entry; and some Mandelites argued episodically for Labour Party fraction work. The second was about the choice between a broad-front policy, which saw the involvement of the official lefts as key to effective action, and a far-left regroupment policy.

The decision to reject Cliff’s unity offer in 1968 was almost certainly wrong, but in the immediate term was blessed by a degree of success. The IMG grew from under 100 in 1968 to around 200 in 1972 and 600 by 1975, remaining at this approximate level up to 1980. Efforts from 1970-71 to replicate the IS’s industrial turn had only very limited success, but the IMG did begin to develop bases in the white-collar and public sector unions, and had a strong presence in student politics.

Between 1973 and 1975 the formal line of the group was to pursue broad-front initiatives involving the official lefts, described as the ‘punctual united front’. Meanwhile, minority supporters were pushing a far-left regroupment line, and took some open initiatives towards (a) far-left cooperation in single-issue campaigns and (b) ‘far-left unity’ projects in the unions: notably the Socialist Teachers Alliance in the NUT and Socialist Caucus in the civil service union, CPSA.

Part of the supporters of the US SWP split in 1975 and formed a small entry organisation, the League for Socialist Action (LSA). In 1975-76 the majority, urged on by Ernest Mandel, made an attempt to develop Labour Party fraction work on the project of building a movement to defend Labour’s (leftist) 1974 manifesto against the Labour government: this fizzled out and the IMGers sent into Labour either drifted out of Labour or out of the IMG.

After this failure, the majority temporarily adopted the minority’s ‘far-left unity’ line, with some success - as indicated above, the Socialist Unity electoral front derailed the SWP’s electoral project. But the Ford’s strike in autumn 1978 exposed the continuing marginality of the IMG in industry, and the visible approach of a general election tended to marginalise far-left electoral tactics. Moreover, in 1978-79 the faction fight between Paris and New York was (apparently) liquidated by the formation of a large majority including both sides, on the platform of a global ‘wrenching turn’ to industry (sending the ex-students and white-collar workers to colonise factories). The IMG ‘took the turn’ and in doing so cut its membership by a third over 1979-81.

Under these conditions a group led by Peter Gowan and Bob Pennington argued for a turn to full entry, which was accomplished in 1982 together with refusion with the LSA and the adoption of the names, Socialist League for the group and Socialist Action for its paper.

Meanwhile, the Paris-New York fight had reopened, with New York breaking with Trotskyism in favour of a left-Stalinist or Castroist line; and the supporters of New York now argued against the entry policy and for maintaining the ‘turn to industry’, and won a large minority.

Inside the Labour Party, the old issue of broad-front politics versus revolutionary regroupment reasserted itself in the form of attitudes to the ‘local government left’ and in particular how far it was appropriate to make public criticism of Ken Livingstone; and, conversely, how far the SL should be involved in far-left projects like Labour Briefing.

The miners’ strike greatly exacerbated these issues, since the pro-New York faction claimed it confirmed their ‘turn to industry’ line, while it added the issue of how far the press should make public criticism of Scargill. In 1985-88 a complicated process of manoeuvres between five factions - (1) pro-New York, (2) the central leadership round John Ross, (3) pro-Paris, (4) ‘entry and regroupmentist’, and (5) a localised group in outer west London - ended with a three way split. The ‘entry and regroupmentist’ faction led by Hearse and Packer split and formed the International Group. The pro-Paris and outer west London factions successively split to join the IG. Though the pro-New York faction was now left as the clear majority of the SL membership, the Ross faction had control of the leadership and expelled it shortly before the conference due in early 1988. The New Yorkers formed the Communist League as an open project.

The Rossites now organised themselves round the broad-front Campaign Group News (launched 1985-86) with Socialist Action mutating into an erratically appearing, occasional theoretical review.

The IG in 1987 fused with the Socialist Group to form the International Socialist Group. Initially, this looked like a serious project of Trotskyist regroupment within the Labour Party, and was joined by the ‘Chartist Minority’ and by the Lambertiste SLG, producing a group of over 200, which was the largest of the ex-SL fragments.

It did not take long, however, for problems to emerge. In particular, a section of the ex-IG leadership was tempted towards the idea of open work by the development of the Chesterfield socialist conferences into the ‘Socialist Movement’ from 1987. As a result, the sections of the ISG most closely committed to strategic entry in the Labour Party and the Briefing project dropped out, though the ISG remained in - increasingly shallow - entry until 2000.

By the end of 1991, therefore, the large majority of Trotskyist and semi-Trotskyist groups - the SWP and ex-Militant *- were again outside the Labour Party. This tendency was to continue down to the present.

1992-2010

The last 18 years can be treated much more briefly. The period has been characterised by a series of attempts by groups outside the Labour Party to create a ‘Labour Party mark two’, which have been repeatedly discussed in this paper. For present purposes their relevance is only the impact on the entry groups.

Conditions inside the Labour Party have been characterised by a high degree of centralised control by the right, and even where - as in the run-up to the 1997 election - Labour membership rose, this has been accomplished by media advertising and bank direct debit payment rather than by local organisation. The Eurocommunist and ex-left element of the old ‘soft left’ has by and large become an element of the hard right, with elements of the old Labour right (Kaufman, Hattersley) criticising Blairism from the left. Under these conditions the left within Labour has been declining and hanging on by its fingernails, rather than taking significant initiatives or growing, and a large part of those Trotskyists who still remained in Labour have been attracted by open work.

Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, though only actually launched in 1996, had been in gestation since 1992 - with the old pro-Paris faction of the SL of Brian Heron, Pat Sikorski and others, which had joined the ISG, involved in the negotiations. This faction pulled out of the ISG and Labour to join the SLP as the Fourth International Supporters Caucus; Workers Power also partially shifted ground from Labour to a degree of support for the SLP. But the SLP rapidly ran into the ground through Scargill’s bureaucratic control.

The attempt which got furthest was the Scottish Socialist Alliance/Scottish Socialist Party. Originally a part of Militant Labour-SP’s counter to Scargill, the SSA was able to ride on the back of Tommy Sheridan’s role in the poll tax campaign; achieved a fair degree of electoral success and a wide regroupment; mutated into a left nationalist party; and finally crashed on the cult of the personality of Sheridan which had given it its success. The SSA-SSP drew the Scots ISGers and AWLers out of the Labour Party.

The next attempt was the Socialist Alliance. Ken Livingstone’s decision to run as an independent for mayor of London, and the London Socialist Alliance trying to run on his coat-tails, involved an SWP turn to electoral work, but also shifted the ISG pretty much wholly into open electoral work and led the AWL to turn in this direction, while retaining a Labour Party fraction. A significant part of Briefing also went over to the SA project.

Respect grouped another layer of anti-war ex-Labour types, especially from localities with large populations of south Asian origin in east London and Birmingham. It did not, however, bring more Trotskyists out of Labour.

Socialist Appeal, while remaining formally committed to strategic entry on Ted Grant’s conception, has in practice shifted to a complete focus on Venezuela solidarity and cheerleading for Hugo Chávez.

A slight counter-tendency is provided by two relatively recent developments. The first is that Permanent Revolution, which split from Workers Power in 2006, showed some indications of supporting some sort of Labour Party work. The second is that the AWL seemed in 2008-09 to be on the verge of joining the Socialist Party in characterising Labour as a purely bourgeois party. However, Matgamna has made a vigorous counter-offensive and the group may be in process of returning to, at least, organised fraction work in Labour.

This narrative has been bald and simplified; the reader may also have found it long and tedious. But putting the whole narrative together makes certain recurring patterns stand out. In the third and final article in this series I will look at these patterns and how they can be explained by theory and historical context.

[Red Monroy]

The third part (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004162) deals with the conclusions and is for that reason probably the most interesting of the three. While it makes too many points to simply sum it up here, I believe that the theoretical underpinnings have important implications that all comrades can learn from, so do read on:


Dances with scabs

In this final article, Mike Macnair draws some conclusions from the history of Trotskyist entry into the Labour Party

http://cpgb.org.uk/images/1004162.jpg

The narrative given in the first two articles in this series has been bald and simplified, and has abstracted almost completely both from the political disputes on international issues within and between the groups; and from the theoretical and empirical arguments offered for and against Labour Party entry.[1] (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004162#1) The point of doing this is that putting the whole narrative together, and abstracting from the disputes and arguments, makes certain recurring patterns stand out.

The first is that there is one and only one example of a successful Trotskyist entry tactic in the Labour Party: the Grant group/Militant Tendency between the late 1960s and the late 1980s. Almost every other Trotskyist group that went into the Labour Party declined or at best gained nothing or very little from doing so, in spite of ephemeral successes.

The Workers International League, which made the first real growth beyond very small and localised groups, was effectively an open organisation. The capitulation of the Revolutionary Communist Party majority was due to pressure from the Fourth International and the failure of the open party perspective, not due to the success of the Healy-Lawrence entry project: hence Healy-Lawrence’s need to purge the Club in 1950 to create an artificial majority.

The Healyites were at a low ebb in 1954-55 and ‘broke through’ by recruiting ex-CPers after 1956, followed by semi-open work in the youth. The Cliffites stagnated in entry through the 1950s and grew from semi-open Young Socialists, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and industrial work in the early 60s, the International Marxist Group from Vietnam solidarity work in the later 60s and the turn to open youth work. The small long-term strategic entry groups, like the old Revolutionary Socialist League (mark two) Left Faction, Socialist Current, the Discussion Group and the Bulletin group-Socialist Labour Group (there were and are others!) began as micro-groups, remained micro-groups and faded away, as their adherents died or lost heart.

If we ask why the Grant group succeeded, the answer is that it built a sect by recruiting newly radicalising youth and indoctrinating them in Grant-think before exposing them to larger politics. It was able to do this because it was left alone in the Labour Party Young Socialists. The Healy Workers Revolutionary Party after it became a cult in the early 70s did the same thing in the WRP-controlled YS. In both cases it was possible to pretend that no other Marxist/communist/Trotskyist groups really existed. The Socialist Workers Party since its party turn has always wanted to do the same thing - but never quite succeeded in walling off its members from the rest of the left.

If we ask why Militant was left alone, the answer is in the first place that its immediate competitors had turned to open work (which was at first almost equally successful). Why was this? The history makes it very clear that it is extremely difficult to carry on with active entry work when Labour is in government. The RSL (mark two) failed and broke up in 1940-43. Healy’s entry was, as I have said above, actually unsuccessful, because it was ‘after the fair’: the real moment of life and discussion in the Labour organisations was 1944-45, not 1945-51. The 1964-70 Labour government saw an extensive exodus of Trotskyists to open work. The 1997-2010 government saw almost all the few remaining Trotskyists leave.

Secondly, until a late stage Militant as Militant carried out merely propaganda work (in the form of resolutions, as well as of publications) and did not actually interfere with the projects of the old CP Broad Left. Indeed, in the unions it participated in the Broad Lefts, and the ‘Enabling Act’ line was only very marginally to the left of the CPGB programme, The British road to socialism. Hence it was protected by the Broad Left, until its collapse, from being purged from Labour.

Once the Broad Left collapsed, the now much larger Militant Tendency was forced to face real political choices in the 1980s ... and was driven towards exit from Labour.

Broad fronts

The second pattern is the ephemeral quality of Trotskyistbroad-front approaches in the Labour Party. The Militant Labour League was a mere front for the Bolshevik-Leninist Group and RSL (mark two). The official lefts’ use of Healy’s Socialist Outlook was brief. Lawrence and his group became merely fellow-travellers. The Week lost its broad front character with the International Group-IMG’s Vietnam turn, and Ken Coates integrated himself into the official left. The RCL took over Chartist ... but the majority became Eurocommunists. Socialist Organiser became a party paper for Sean Matgamna. Labour Herald collapsed with the WRP. Campaign Group News expressed the turgid line of the official lefts and the evolution of John Ross and co towards ‘official communism’. Briefing became, for a short time, a party paper of the ISG; in its subsequent reincarnation it is closer to what Campaign Group News was: a platform for (less eminent) official lefts, which does not animate an organised movement.

The converse of this point is the relative success of ‘official communist’ influence in the Labour left. The Trotskyists were already fighting against the odds against CP fellow-travellers in the 1930s Socialist League. The decision of John Lawrence and his group to become CP fellow-travellers reflected the real relation of forces in the 1950s Labour left. The case is still more transparent in the era of the late 60s-70s Broad Left.

The phenomenon is even present now. In spite of the liquidation of the party and the character of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain as a mere fragment of the old party, today’s official lefts are far more like CP fellow-travellers than Trotskyists, and better understood as trying to revive the old Broad Left than as trying to build something new.

If we go a step ‘higher’ in the level of the analysis, we can see that the Trotskyists succeeded when they could grow directly at the expense of the old CP: in 1941-45, in the wake of 1956, in the wake of 1968. In the first case the CP also grew, even more dramatically, but lost enough support to its left to allow the WIL to be the first viable Trotskyist group. In the second the CP declined. In the last case the CP also grew, but merely slightly: to have grown at the same rate as the Trotskyists would have taken it up towards 100,000.

Fantasy parties

The third visible pattern is the recurring tendency for the left to announce the death of Labour and the need for a new Labour Party ... only for this view to be falsified, as left-right fights begin in the Labour Party or ejection from office causes the party as a whole to move its rhetoric left and begin to support grassroots activities.

This pattern began with the Communist Party’s ready acceptance, almost without resistance, of the ‘third period’ line during the 1929-31 Labour government, and the Independent Labour Party’s walk-out from Labour in 1931-32. It was repeated with the 1940s RCP’s insistence - until the wave of leftism in Labour in 1944-45 had actually passed its peak - on the greater opportunities of open work. It was repeated again in the turns of the International Socialists and IMG in the late 1960s, which was accompanied with the production of real evidence about the hollowed-out character of the constituency parties and ward branches, and with extravagant rhetoric about Labour’s ‘new’ role as managing capitalism.

It is obviously not possible to categorically assert that the similar claims made by the Socialist Party in England and Wales at present have a similar character. It is possible that the coalition will break up within a year of its formation and Labour get back into office; or that more acute economic crisis or other events will produce a ‘grand coalition’; and so on. But, assuming Labour remains in opposition, it is, I think, fairly predictable that (1) Labour’s rhetoric will move left; (2) its membership and political life in the constituencies and branches will increase; and (3) Labour activists and MPs will be found participating in grassroots campaigns against the Con-Dem cuts, and so on. If Labour remains in opposition and none of these happens by 2015 then - assuming I have not become unemployed - I will pay £50 or the equivalent in 2015 money to the SPEW fund drive. I think it is a pretty safe bet.

A distinct phenomenon, but one which is related to the history of Trotskyist relations with the Labour Party, is the tendency of Trotskyist groups to declare themselves to be ‘the revolutionary party’ which is in immediate contention with Labour for the leadership of the masses. The RCP in 1944-45 is again a classic example; the 1973 transformation of the Socialist Labour League into the WRP and the 1976 transformation of the IS into the SWP provide two more. The 1996 turn from Militant Labour to the Socialist Party has the same character. The 1981 transformation of Frank Furedi’s Revolutionary Communist Tendency into the Revolutionary Communist Party rendered what was already absurd merely absurdist.[2] (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004162#2)

Theory

Why, in theory, should these patterns be found? There are two distinct groups of issues. The first concerns the relation of communism to the Labour Party and the theoretical underpinning of the united front policy. The second is distinctive to the Trotskyists, their relationship with Stalinism/‘official communism’ and their early history.

Labour is a ‘bourgeois workers’ party’. I have argued in a pair of articles in this paper in 2009 that the traditional argument for this view is unsound, but that there are good reasons for still using the formula.[3] (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004162#3) The point is that the Labour Party is a workers’ political party which is tied to and ultimately controlled by the capitalist nation-state: not that such parties are, as Lenin mistakenly argued, a phenomenon peculiar to imperialism.

Among my conclusions were: (1) that the essential tie of Labourism to the bourgeoisie is through nationalism, legalism and class-collaboration; and (2) that the bourgeois/workers contradiction in Labour is not necessarily expressed in the form of left/right division, but is also or instead expressed in the form of leftwards and rightwards movement of the party as a whole, depending on whether it is in opposition or government.

This understanding allows us to explain the problems of entry projects in periods when Labour is in government (the party as a whole moves right, not merely the right wing) and hence the sterility of strategic entry (Militant being the exception which proves the rule, caused by the unusual circumstances of the 1970s).

It also lets us see why Trotskyist ‘broad front’ projects fail. The Labour left, to the extent that it remains within the circle of nationalism, legalism and class-collaboration, is umbilically tied to the right. For the Labour left merely to organise and campaign for its own purposes is therefore in the medium term merely to prepare the next generation of the Labour right (Ramsay MacDonald; Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle; Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock) and to reinforce Labourism as an instrument of capitalist rule. For communists (and therefore for Trotskyists) there is an irreducible choice between organising and campaigning for our purposes - independent class politics, proletarian internationalism and workers’ rule through radical democracy - and organising and campaigning for Labour left politics - constitutionalism, left versions of nationalism, and class-collaboration. It is this choice which means that broad fronts in the Labour Party either break down and turn into party fronts or end with the Trotskyists becoming bag-carriers for the official lefts, merely adopting their politics.

In a sense, the same is true of Eurocommunism. The very success of the Broad Left in the late 60s-early 70s sucked the old CP into the frame of reference of Labour’s internal struggles and thereby neutered the partial support for independent workers’ organisation that the CP could provide before 1975.

Broad fronts of the militants who want a serious fight and union democracy are a perfectly reasonable tactic in the trade unions. But transplanting this tactic into a bourgeois workers’ party like Labour, is much more problematic. (I should say that, though the reasoning and evidence is very different, this conclusion is merely that of Trotsky’s 1930s critique of those of his co-thinkers who proposed broad-front left projects: especially of Raymond Molinier and Pierre Frank.)

United front

Among bourgeois workers’ parties Labour is peculiar (as the Comintern leaders pointed out in 1919-20) because it claims to be a united front of all the British workers’ organisations, a claim reflected in its affiliate structure.

The 1919-20 discussion in the Comintern is, in fact, slightly misleading, because it largely assumed the character of the pre-1918 Labour Party. Since 1918 Labour has claimed not only to be a united front, but also, and contradictorily, to be an individual membership party founded on an ideological programme (clause four and its replacement, and so on). This second claim is reflected not only in clause four, etc, but also in the system of bans and proscriptions: initially in the form of bans on ‘communist’ organisations.

Nonetheless, the original ‘French turn’ was argued to be an application of the united front ‘from the inside’. And the policy of the united front has since the 1930s been offered as the principled basis of Trotskyist entry projects and a reason for rejecting open work.

There is a problem with this argument, in relation to the basis of the united front policy itself. I argued the essentials of the point in my book, Revolutionary strategy (London 2008), chapters 5 and 6. The policy of the united front is necessary because a higher form of unity, in a single democratic party, is not available.

It is not available because the rightwing leaders of the former united parties insist on a dictatorship over the party backed by the capitalist state, and split if they do not get their way (or sometimes merely if the left challenges them). Thus the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1916 expelled the left, which formed the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). The minority opposed to the left at the Tours congress of the French SFIO in 1920 walked out. The Labour Party leadership rejected the nascent Communist Party of Great Britain’s application for affiliation, and went on to put in place bans and proscriptions of ‘communist and communist-affiliated’ organisations.

In more recent times, the founders of the British Social Democratic Party walked out of the Labour Party in 1981 because in their view the left had got too strong - even though it had not obtained actual control. In response to this walk-out, the accompanying media campaign and the resulting severe defeat of Labour in 1983, the so-called ‘soft left’ round Neil Kinnock went on to a large-scale systematic purge of Militant.

Full party unity, with the social democrats, in other words, is available if and only if you are willing to accept that the right wing, the direct agents of the capitalist class, remain in control and above the rules: or if, like most of the small-scale, long-term entry groups, you are so trivial that you fall below the radar of the right wing and the capitalist press.

It is for this reason that it is not sectarian to insist, as the early Comintern theses did, that the only acceptable united front proposals are ones which preserve the liberty of the communists to organise, to call themselves communists, and to call the right wing scabs and capitalist agents. Unity has always been and remains available on the right’s terms - that is, that the capitalists shall control the workers’ party. Such unity is wholly worthless from the point of view of the interests of the working class.

The consequence is that entry is only an application of the united front tactic if - as was the case in the original ‘French turn’ to the SFIO - the party you enter is prepared to give you rights to organise as an open faction.

Entry under conditions where you are entering illegally, banned by the bureaucracy, may be a useful tactic to try to get ideas into circulation among the members of the party entered - just as an organisation which is banned by law and fully clandestine must use all sorts of trickery to get its ideas into circulation.

But it is not an application of the united front policy. The united front means unity in diversity. To fight for the united front by entering a party is to claim the right to exist as an organised faction which is prepared to call the leadership scabs when it is necessary.

Full entry under ban is, therefore, an abandonment of the united front tactic. The reason is because it is an abandonment of the claim to the right to organise and to criticise.

Suppose, for a moment, that we achieved a fighting and democratic unity of the existing self-identified Marxist left in Britain on the basis of Marxist principles. Such a party, starting with a few thousand, would rapidly grow to say, 10-20,000. It would still, however, be faced by the problem of the Labour Party’s 150,000-odd individual members and above a million affiliated members.

Would it be right for the 20,000 to enter the Labour Party? The answer is, if and only if it was possible to obtain the abolition of the bans and proscriptions and the right to affiliate. Otherwise, to enter is to concede from the outset the right wing’s right to make the rules and limit the scope of organisation of the left.

Of course, the organisation of an illegal fraction in the Labour Party is not open to this objection. The open party continues to demand affiliation; the fraction seeks to spread communist ideas within the Labour Party. The moral justification of this clandestine conduct, when discussing with Labour Party members, is that the Labour Party is and has been since 1920 engaged in double standards. The affiliate structure is a big lie as long as the bans and proscriptions remain in place.

This argument may seem in itself pretty abstract. But the practical consequence is that through full Labour Party entry under illegality the communists (Trotskyists) cannot appear under their own name unless they are so trivial as to be ineffective. They have to be clandestine ... or paint themselves as left Labourites, as in the various ‘broad front’ projects. The result of the camouflage is that, over time, they become left Labourites and not communists (Trotskyists).

In reality, Militant Tendency members, while pursuing a ‘party’ project in the Labour Party rather than a ‘broad front’ one, also had to paint themselves as left Labourites through the ‘Labour to power on a socialist programme’ and ‘Enabling Act’ schema. This schema involved - and, to the extent that it is maintained, still involves - lying to the working class about the actual and current behaviour of the English judiciary, the senior civil servants, the media and so on. It also involves self-deception about the probable behaviour, in the event that Militant got as far as winning control of the Labour Party and a majority in the House of Commons, of capital (disinvestment), landowners (a new and more ferocious Countryside Alliance) and the security service and armed forces (coup plots more serious than those which were actually projected against Wilson in 1974).

The schema was based on what Clement Attlee’s Labour government did (and what it could have done). But the reality is that what Attlee’s government did and could have done was possible because the British working class was overwhelmingly under arms, and in the ‘soldiers’ parliaments’ of 1944 the soldiers were beginning to think politically. And it was possible because the Red Army had reached the Elbe and ‘containment’ of the Soviet regime was the only serious option for global capital, and this meant massive concessions to the western European working class.

Again in reality, Militant’s vision of a legal* take-over of the Labour Party and, thence, of the constitution, was proved false by the limits of Militant’s own actions in the leadership of Liverpool city council and the actions of the media, the judiciary and the labour bureaucracy in the 1980s. But no real balance-sheet of the error has been drawn. Socialist Appeal remains within the Labour Party without a serious project; SPEW projects the creation of a new Labour Party based - again - on the trade union bureaucracy and on Labourite ideology.

Trotskyists are communists

Trotskyists think of themselves as a completely different party from ‘Stalinists’. In Britain, since the 1944-49 RCP, it has been relatively unusual for them to use the word ‘communist’ in their names - far more common are variant recombinations of ‘socialist’, ‘Marxist’, ‘workers’ and ‘international’.

To social democrats, anarchists and the broader world, Trotskyists are communists. A different faction of communists from the Stalinists, from the ‘post-Stalinist’ ‘official communists’, from Maoists (or, for the few who know of that tradition, from ‘left’ and ‘council’ communists). But still communists. The key is the attitudes to August 1914, to October 1917 and to colonial wars and ‘other’ overseas interventions. ‘Communists’ are people who think it was and is wrong to support your own country in imperialist wars, and who support the forcible seizure of power in October 1917 rather than opposing it in the name of ‘peaceful’ constitutional change, and - for anarchists - people who support the dictatorship of the proletariat. Before 1991 ‘Go back to Moscow’ was as commonly thrown at someone selling Socialist Worker as at someone selling a more ‘orthodox Trotskyist’ paper or, for that matter, the Morning Star.

It is for this reason that Trotskyist groups grew when they were able to grow at the expense of the old Communist Party. Until rather recently[4] (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004162#4) it has always been many times easier for a Stalinist to become a Trotskyist than for a social democrat to do so. The political distance is smaller: to become a Trotskyist, the social democrat has to decide not only to fight capitalism, but also that Marxist political economy and insistence on the determinant role of class is a valid and relevant guide to action; that August 1914 was a betrayal; and that the October revolution showed a genuine possibility of the working class taking power, rather than being a mere putsch. By comparison, for a Stalinist to reject national roads, class-collaborationism and the dictatorship of the bureaucracy, and the body of smears against Trotsky, is a very much smaller gap to cross. After all, if you actually read Lenin, you may well not become a Trotskyist, but you will certainly find it hard to defend ‘official communism’.

Equally, this circumstance underlies the fact that Trotskyists have never been able to go round the ‘official communists’ by entering the Labour Party. On the contrary, they have always found themselves confronted by larger forces fellow-travelling with ‘official communism’. (Again, Militant being left alone in the LPYS is the exception that proves the rule.) For social democrats to become a Stalinist is a lot easier than becoming a Trotskyist: they do not have to abandon their nationalism or faith in the bureaucracy and bureaucratic methods, while the people’s front accommodates their instinctual belief that socialism is about the unity of classes, not the subordination of other classes to the proletariat.

Trotskyism grew when it could grow at the expense of ‘official communism’. This happened because in the eyes of most advanced workers Trotskyism was a faction of communism, not a fully independent party. This must raise a question mark over Trotsky’s decision in 1933 to denounce the Comintern as dead and call for a new International together with a short-lived group of centrist collaborating organisations - and then in 1934 to urge his supporters to take refuge in entry in social democracy.

Some ‘official communists’ claim that the sectarian policy the Comintern urged on the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1929-33 was merely a mistake, not a conscious betrayal. I reject this view. It is quite impossible, given the prior history, that Stalin and his associates actually believed that this line would lead to victory in Germany; or that the KPD would have insisted on sectarianism against the will of the Comintern leadership. Rather, after the SPD denounced the Rapallo treaty, it consciously decided to sacrifice the German workers’ movement to the perceived geopolitical interests of the USSR in an alliance with the German nationalist right wing. This was a larger-scale version of the earlier (1921) decision to play down the repression of Turkish communists in the interests of Soviet relations with Kemal Atatürk.[5] (http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004162#5) That this decision in the case of Germany was profoundly stupid (considered as cynical geopolitics) does not make it any less a betrayal.

However, that a split has a real principled basis does not prevent it from being premature. For a split in a political party to be timely, it has to be clear not only to the participants, but also to the party’s audience, that the issues in dispute involve fundamentally different aims. From this point of view, Trotsky’s 1933 successive denunciations of the KPD and Comintern had a principled basis - but were premature. It was not clear to broader layers of advanced workers that Trotskyism and Stalinism stood for fundamentally different political projects.

The effect of Trotsky’s and his immediate co-thinkers’ line and conduct after 1933 was paradoxical. In the first place, it did largely succeed in creating a (very small) international movement and cadre which defended the fundamentals of the politics of the first four congresses of the Comintern.

Miseducation

There is one major exception to this: the question of the united front. The groups which broke with Trotsky and the central Trotskyist leadership over the necessity of creating ‘broad fronts’ and diplomacy towards the left included Pierre Frank and Michael Raptis (Pablo). In the curious process by which the Trotskyist Fourth International was recreated in 1946-48, these individuals succeeded in stamping the broad-front conception on the reconstructed movement. With it came Dimitrov’s diplomatic conception of the united front.

There are problems with the ‘first four congresses’ line. I have addressed these in Revolutionary strategy and will not repeat the points here. It remains true that the line was and is massively closer to the fundamentals of Marxism than the line of the people’s front and national roads developed by the late Comintern and post-war ‘official communist’ movement.

On the other hand, the 1933 denunciation, and the following period of frantic efforts to construct the skeleton of an international, trained up a generation of cadre in false conceptions of the workers’ party and of splits. This generation included, in Britain, Healy, Cliff and Grant, who passed on this training to pretty much everyone who has followed them in the Trotskyist tradition.

I pointed out the main problem in the first article in this series. Trotsky was too much in thrall to an image that he had to follow ‘Lenin, the splitter’, and in too much of a hurry, in 1933-1940. As a result, the Trotskyist cadre were trained in practice that it was acceptable to split on tactical issues, and that it was acceptable to split prematurely when the issues were not fully clarified.

In addition, the abandonment of the project of the International Left Opposition in 1933 - taken together with the absence of a clear criticism of the 1921 ban on factions in the Russian CP and Comintern - expelled from the consciousness of the Trotskyists the idea of a public debate and a public faction within a common party. The only options were restriction to internal discussion - or a full split.

As far as British Trotskyists are concerned, the experience of the WIL-RCP confirmed these lessons. The WIL split was unambiguously premature. Yet the failure of the RSL entry project rewarded the WIL with an absolute predominance in the Trotskyist movement, which allowed it in 1944 to prematurely declare itself a party. Pretty much every Trotskyist organisation since has hoped to repeat the WIL’s success. Turn ‘outwards’ with the right tactic, ignoring your Trotskyist factional opponents, and you will be rewarded with sufficient preponderance to marginalise them.

Never again has it worked. Even when the SLL, IS or Militant were at their height of their influence, they still had Trotskyist competitors snapping at their heels ... to be encountered whenever the group went beyond its private ‘turf’.

The resulting dispersal of forces has precisely made all tactics towards the Labour Party - or, for that matter, the Communist Party - in the end ineffective. The Communist Party which did not disperse its forces could influence Labour from the outside. For the dispersed forces of the Trotskyists, there was no real political influence on Labour to be gained even from within.

Notes


‘In, out, shake it all about’ (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004149) Weekly Worker October 28; ‘Entries and exits’ (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004157) Weekly Worker November 4.
The Scottish Socialist Party was briefly entitled to the name of ‘party’, because it did regroup the large majority of the far left - though in practice it was a ‘broad front’ left-nationalist party. The CPGB uses the name of a party, but we write in our ‘What we fight for’ column: “The Provisional Central Committee organises members of the Communist Party, but there exists no real Communist Party today.” We use the name to deny the right of the Eurocommunists to liquidate the CPGB and any claim of the Morning Star faction that it is the party.
‘Labour Party blues’ (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1003752) July 23 2009; ‘Making and unmaking Labour’ (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1003690) July 30 2009.
The evolution of Eurocommunism since the 1970s has created post-communist trends which are more profoundly and consciously opposed to Marxism than classical post-1918 social democracy or even right Labourism.
Loren Goldner (home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/turkey.html (http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/turkey.html)) defends the Soviet choice. My point here is not to endorse Goldner’s arguments, but to give a reason for supposing that interpretation of the 1929-34 policy in terms of Realpolitik is more plausible than honest belief in the policy.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Funny I posted Part II in the History forum already, comrade. :blushing:

Was the titled inspired by Dancing with the Stars or something like that?

[Crux]

A pretty interesting red, I'll be back in a bit for a longer response. Thanks in advance for the 50 quid, mike. ;)