Jim Higgins
This article is very loosely based on a talk I gave to the AGM of Revolutionary History
in 1997 although the overwhelming majority of this text is new I believe that it
reasonably accurately reflects the spirit of what I said two years ago. Because I had just
published a book about the IS/SWP, Ted Crawford who convened the meeting advertised the
subject as "A History of IS". At the time, having sated myself on the fractured
rhythms of Cliff’s turgid prose, I could think of nothing more tedious than going
through all that again so soon after I had said my last word on the subject. In
consequence, I chose to speak about the movement in general, emphasising that regardless
of differences on Russia, the Labour Party and much else, there was a common thread
running through all the groups, adhering to our tradition, one that we had to come to
terms with if we were not to spend even more of our lives in grinding irrelevance. Having
apologised, for gathering the comrades under a false prospectus and, as a practised
revolutionary infighter, having laid the blame squarely, if unfairly, on Ted Crawford this
is roughly what I had to say.
Although I have been asked to speak on it, the IS/SWP is not the problem, it is just an integral part of the overall problems of the revolutionary left. That problem is of a movement that is almost totally irrelevant, one that is immured in a tradition that was once vibrant and alive but has become ossified as a result of slavish adherence to form without reference to content or context. The SWP fondly imagines that it is building the British Bolshevik party. Others basing themselves just as rigidly in what they too see as the Bolshevik frame are rebuilding, reconstructing, organising for, or just plain proclaiming: the Fourth International. The political justification for all this has not advanced one whit from the time when Lenin and Trotsky first enunciated it. Indeed the argument now takes on a course much like that of the oozelum bird, with a better than even chance of ending up like that unfortunate bird in a wisp of blue smoke. The working class, in so far as they see or hear us at all, find the theoretical underpinnings incomprehensible or just plain risible. Strangely there are those among us who glory in their obscurantism, who boast of their utter fidelity to the thought of LD Trotsky, who assiduously work through Lenin’s Works looking for some apposite quotation that will set up today’s problem with the day before yesterday’s solutions. For some demented souls merely to have found the quote is to have successfully concluded the discussion.
It is difficult to understand how anyone can believe that Lenin, who died 74 years ago, or
Trotsky who died 57 years ago could have possibly produced answers to today’s
difficulties. One would have thought that anyone with that kind of posthumous
infallibility should have made a rather better job of things while they were alive. Surely
it is unlikely that the chap who wrote What is to be Done, promulgated the
Democratic Dictatorship of the Workers and Peasants, insisted on the 21 Conditions for
affiliation to the Third International and banned factions in the Russian party is an
infallible guide about how to get close to the working class in the post-Stalinist,
post-Social Democratic age of Tony Blair. This a tall order, even to anyone as good at
reading the chicken bones as a Cumaean Sybil or Tony Cliff.
As part of the homage to the Russian Revolution there is this romantic attachment to
recreating the events of Petrograd in October 1917. Will the British Revolution start
until the leader has arrived at the Finland station in his sealed train? If the Bolsheviks
took over the Smolny as their headquarters will the only begetters of British bolshevism
have to take over Cheltenham College for Young Ladies? What is the British equivalent of
storming the Winter Palace? Balmoral I suppose, although how we are going to get the
battleship Aurora up there, God alone knows.
As one of those who came to the Trotskyist movement from the CP in 1956, in my case after
some some nine years of CP membership I can recall the various meetings where the
contending Trotskyists set out their wares. Ted Grant’s pitch as you might suppose
was delivered at enormous and infinitely tedious length. Unity it seemed was possible on
the basis of the first four congresses of the CI, The Transitional Programme of 1938,
Preparing for Power, Nationalisation of the 100 biggest companies and the banning of under
21s from employment in Billiard saloons. These high points were expounded like a
recitation of the Stations of the Cross, a Via Dolorosa of the saddest kind, calculated to
confer a certain charm on imminent crucifixion. Suffice it to say that I had no sense of a
Damascene revelation nor any need to even consider joining the RSL. More to the point
neither did anyone else in a similar position to myself. Healy who was at that time
adopting a smiling non-sectarian image was much smarter. He addressed the actual concerns
of the political minority among the 7,000 people leaving the CP. What had gone wrong? What
was the cult of the individual? Was Marxism valid in the light of the experience of
Stalin? These and much else were questions that were patiently and persuasively discussed.
The solid foundation to all this was a small arsenal of the works of Trotsky and especially, for that sort of audience, The Revolution Betrayed. The net result was that The Club took the overwhelming majority of ex-CPers who moved to Trotskyism. People of the calibre of Brian Behan, Peter Fryer, John Daniels, Ken Coates, Cliff Slaughter and Tom Kemp to name but a few and a small but not unimpressive sprinkling of experienced industrial militants. I yield to no one in my distaste for that truly dreadful man Gerry Healy but for a brief year or so in the late 1950s he was the most serious exponent of revolutionary politics in Britain. In a few months in The Club I learned more about Marxism than I had done in the all the years in the CP. For that I am grateful. But then having built it he proceeded to destroy it. Like the child who takes his ball home when he cannot have his own way, Healy felt the need always to be in control: politically, personally and, it transpired, sexually. He was a small plump obnoxious embodiment of a power mania, of a similar character to domestic tyranny written just a little bit bigger. As Brian Behan said, if the organisation gets so big that he cannot get into his Rififi type Citroen (it was actually Tony Banda’s Rififi type Citroen) and drive frantically round the country quelling any dissent, then he has to have a smash up. And in 1959 the smash up came and Healy went from being the least sectarian of the 57 varieties to become the most exclusive and offensively sectarian of the lot, a finely tuned machine for burning out the cadre.
The Socialist Review Group started off in 1950 as an orthodox Trotskyist group,
with what it fondly hoped was a better theory on Russia. Its early correspondence files
contain urgent appeals to Pablo and Co for SR to be installed as the British section in
place of Healy’s Club. There were dreams of forming a rival FI with Mangano in Italy,
Chaulieu in France and maybe Shachtman in the US. In this scheme the new International was
to be headed by Natalia Trotsky, an example, perhaps, of that hereditary principle which
was so fatal for the Romanovs but more likely an early manifestation of Cliff’s
inspirational opportunism. Like Healy, Cliff also believed briefly that Tito might take on
a revolutionary orientation. The area of activity was the Socialist Fellowship (a left
Labour organisation that represented the Pabloite deep entrism of Healy and Lawrence) and
the recruitment area the ex-members of the RCP. In the circumstances the SR
magazine was not at all like an LP entrist paper but a far more a Trotskyist journal
replete with its cover picture of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. After a brief time it
became clear that the ex-members of the RCP were very few and far between. Discussions
took place with Ted Grantıs group, slightly later expellees from Healy’s Club. These
foundered on Ted’s view that state property was the most significant prerequisite for
a workers’ state. Indeed, at the time he was debating whether the Labour Government
already had sufficient state property brownie points to qualify as a workers state.
Trotskyism was clearly approaching its post war nadir. The movement was declining by the
week, a condition that, far from inducing conservation, led to an acceleration of splits,
the break in the FI (USFI and ICFI) and the consequent splits in the sections.
Cliff who learned the phrase from Trotsky, adopted primitive socialist accumulation as his guiding principle to build his minuscule group. The LP was not a particularly fruitful area but it was the place where a group of 30 could become 40 or at least replace lost members. SR magazine became an entrist paper and the Labour Party a subject of investigation. It seemed that the workers were less enthused by the reforming abilities of Labour and more keen on the `do it yourself’ reform at the workplace, spearheaded in engineering with its tradition of shop stewards and local negotiation by lay union militants. This was indeed a profound insight and became dignified by the title the Changing Locus of Reformism. But like much else in SR/IS theory, having elucidated a few insights that could be spatchcocked into the overall group politics it no longer became necessary to elaborate or confirm that which was handy enough as it stood. On to all this was added the Luxemburgist phase of the group in which Rosa’s organisational prescriptions were infinitely preferred to Ilyich’s. This approach was a great deal more attractive to the Labour left, CND and later Young Socialist audience that the group’s magazine was addressing.
It has to be said that SR and IS were most pleasant organisations in which
to work in those halcyon days from 1959 to 1968. There was a great deal of inefficiency,
but no more than I have personally experienced in far more bolshevik organisations, there
was a turnover but an astonishingly large number of comrades stuck and the group grew
slowly but at a gently accelerating pace. By foresight or good luck, the growth of trade
union militancy developed at the same time as the growth within the Young Socialists
slowed down and, with the aid of IS theory on the rank and file. it became possible to
recruit modestly among militant workers. The attrition here was greater as the local
struggles that secured recruits died down or were defeated. But recruit we did, sometimes
spectacularly, as at ENV where we recruited a majority of the shop stewards’
committee. It was this event that made us think of the way that transitional programmes
could be worked out for industries and unions that would promulgate comprehensible demands
that would inevitably lead on to considerations of power and the need for political
organisation to win the workers ultimate demands. The overall strategy would itself be the
transitional bridge to the revolutionary party. It seemed to me at the time that this was
a genuinely creative way to apply the inspired essence of Trotsky’s Transitional
Programme of 1938. Once again this was an insight that, once it was discovered that it
required little hammering to fit it into the Groupıs overall political jigsaw, nothing
much was done to elaborate the ideas.
Within IS and certainly among the leadership this was accepted as the line of march.. Rank
and file papers were produced and loose organisations grew up around them and at their
height were distributed in tens of thousands. Here was a tenuous but hopeful base. Cliff
produced two pamphlets that were successful in popularising the IS among industrial
workers. One on Incomes Policy and the Rank and File and the other, on Productivity
bargaining. Both sold in thousands of copies and were an earnest in themselves that
non-sectarian activity addressed to advanced workers’ specific concerns brings its
own rewards.
In 18 years the Cliff group had grown from 30 to about 800 members, practically all of
that growth taking place in the course of the 1960s. It seemed to indicate that patient
work that eschewed stunts and sudden changes of line might start to build a tenuous but
real presence in the workers’ movement. During those years, most of them lonely and
not rewarded with success, the recruiting focus changed from ex-RCP members, to Labour
Youth, to CND and the Young Socialists, all of this to build a group that, it was hoped,
would be able to recruit workers into a significant socialist organisation. The focus
might change but the objective was unchanged. For a time it seemed that the IS Group might
transcend the constrictions of Trotskyist orthodoxy. If that was less the result of taking
organisational thought than happenstance then that was how things actually happen in even
the most Leninist organisations, including Lenin’s. It is at moments like this, where
an organisation sits on the brink of modest successes, that the members should be most
vigilant. It is just at such times that organic growth can be forsaken for some get rich
in a hurry scheme.
The catalyst was Enoch Powell’s racist speech about "The Tiber flowing with much
blood" which caused a furore and gave an opportunity to some Mosleyite dockers at
Tooley Street to set up a dockers’ demonstration in support of Powell. On the left
there was a panicky discussion on the urgent menace of fascism, predicated on Powell
acquiring a mass base among disaffected workers. In fact, there was no urgent menace and
Powell was almost as surprised as the rest of us at London dockers rallying to his
support, such fellows were hardly in accord with his romantic notions of empire. This did,
however, provide Cliff with the opportunity to produce a plan of Baldrickesque cunning
that, he fondly imagined, might make him member-rich at an accelerated rate. He embarked
on a unity campaign, with approaches made to organisations ranging from the CP to the
Militant and taking in Healy’s SLL and the IMG. Naturally enough, such a dive back in
to the past required the 1903 Lenin mode rather than the 1905 Luxemburgist style. In the
event, nobody answered the call, with the exception of Sean Matgamna and his minuscule
James P Cannon fan club. This particular "historic" fusion was arranged at a
meeting between Cliff and Matgamna in the former’s back room. The IS Group acquired a
fully fledged "Trotskyist Tendency" without its members or its elected
committees having any say in the matter. This was hardly the result that had been planned
and the dubious benefits of a handful of extra members was made entirely nugatory by the
time expended in rehashing old disputes, a pastime that Sean enjoyed immensely and
indulged in at tedious length. If today he rejects the Cannon fan club for The Max
Shachtman Appreciation Society he is still as prolix as he ever was. It is a measure of
the liberal regime in the IS group that it took three years of faction fighting to lose
the Matgamna group, whereas Healy and Grant had previously dispensed with his membership
far more expeditiously.
The failure of the unity campaign was of considerably less significance than the fact that
the group came out of it a markedly different organisation. It was not noticeably more
efficient for all its democratic centralism but it was markedly less tolerant of dissent
than previously. Cliff, having invited Matgamna in on his own say so, felt that he should
be able to banish him with equally arbitrary facility. The fact that an entire conference
had devoted itself to framing a new "democratic centralist" constitution which
enshrined the rights of factions seemed beside the point to Cliff. His Lenin bore an
uncanny resemblance to Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. After the unravelling of the
fusion with the Trotskyist Tendency in 1971 tolerance of any form of dissent was
increasingly harshly treated and all too often a desire to carry on a discussion beyond
Cliff’s patience was seen as a particular case of dissension. If the growing
harshness of the regime could in part be attributed to the faction fight with Matgamna,
this was merely the accelerant rather than the primary force. The theoretical
underpinnings were provided by Cliff’s four volumes on Lenin. It was the story of the
sort of man Lenin might have been if he had only had the advantage of reading Cliff’s
biography of him. But the group did grow although whether there was any connection between
growth and the adoption of democratic centralism is doubtful. Rather more significant was
the growing industrial militancy and the development of the print shop into an asset
capable of generating significant surpluses. This was effected by an extremely large
donation from one comrade. It is possible to run a substantial apparat by exacting
extortionate subscriptions and quotas from the members, but this will always be
problematical because the largest costs are incurred in producing agitational and
theoretical material. Not only that, if the membership falls it is just not possible to
double up on already high subscriptions to maintain the same infrastructure. All of which
can mean that an organisational hiccough can become a downward spiralling crisis. Nothing
beats a print shop for ironing out the bumps and troughs in the building of a small group.
Print and paper for your own journals is at cost, printers come at full time revolutionary
wage rates and jobbing work supplies the surpluses for full timers’ wages, posters,
leaflets and travel expenses. The great technological breakthrough of web offset printing
has been the making of many a revolutionary socialist group. The forerunner in this was
Gerry Healy, of whose faction fight with John Lawrence it was said that he won because,
although he had fewer votes, he had more shares in the Socialist Outlook publishing
company. The Militant Group had their print shop and a vast complement of full time
workers. Nowadays any group who can raise a few grand can, even if they cannot run to a
web press, purchase a very serviceable sheet fed machine. Thus, unfortunately, has
photo-setting and offset technology conspired to give life to that which would, otherwise,
have been happily still born. Otherwise poverty stricken organisations can now operate as
a capitalist entrepreneur, able to maintain a subsidised full time apparatus far beyond
anything they could afford on the basis of working class members’ subscriptions.
Local organisers are responsible to the centre and their tasks and instructions emanate
from that location. In the early 1970s a number of IS membership campaigns were launched
in which Cliff, with his charts and league tables, encouraged a spirit of competition
among the organisers that had more than a passing resemblance to Stakhanovism. Last
month’s inflated figures were surpassed by this month’s even more optimistic
results, while both would be easily outstripped by next month’s daringly imaginative
claims. The new members were never seen or heard of again and I was reminded of a report,
sent in by Will Fancy some years before, which detailed the work of the Eltham Socialist
Review branch: "Comrade X," he wrote, "does not attend branch meetings,
does not sell the paper and does not pay subs, but he can otherwise be considered a keen
and enthusiastic member of the group.
The group quite quickly became, whether as IS or the Socialist Workers Party, a place
where opposition was rapidly extirpated and very soon a culture developed where there was
no facility for disagreement and no culture of discussion or constructive debate. In its
dash for the Leninist party it had created something very similar to the pre-1956
Communist Party, without anything like that partyıs industrial cadre.
The sort of complaints that IS and SWP expellees make are not new and can be replicated in
other organisations. I remember talking to Harry Wicks in the 1960s, when he bitterly
complained about Reg Groves maintaining a correspondence with Trotsky on Prinkipo, which
Harry only found out about when the American SWP published Trotsky’s replies from the
archives. At the time, the early 1930s, Harry and Reg were living in the same house. And
Reg Groves was one of the nicest and attractive personalities from the history of the
movement.
The RSL of Harber and Starkey Jackson before the fusion in 1944 maintained a regime of
which Yezhov and Yagoda would have been proud. One particularly choice piece of
Machiavellian sadism occurred during the war, when Harber’s faction, who happened to
have a majority, put the right faction, known as the Trotskyist Opposition, led by John
Lawrence and Hilda Lane under the direct and individual discipline of the Left Faction.
The RSL had perhaps 30 members at the time although it was the British section of the
Fourth International.
At the time of formation of the RCP in 1944, James P Cannon, doing his cut price Zinoviev
act, set up a minority faction led by Healy and Lawrence even before the fusion
conference. After that it was Pablo and Mandel, described by Cannon as, "our young
men in Europe," who carried on the worst traditions of the CI, nurturing and
sustaining Healy and making and breaking national leaderships while generally playing the
fool both with the cadre and the politics of the international.
After the war the RCP, which was in many ways the best of the bunch although a massively
flawed organisation, found that all the brave promises of the Founding Congress of 1938
were empty and drizzled their remaining time away in endless faction fights. As Jock
Haston said, "We produced so many internal bulletins that we did not have time to do
anything else even if there had been anything to do."
The stories about Healy are beyond counting and his name has become a byword for
everything that is obnoxious and repellent about our movement. There are those who say in
his mitigation that he had a sense of humour, which is true. Whether you find gallows
humour attractive or not is probably dependent on how close you are to dangling from the
end of the gibbet. The story is repeated again and again for different organisations. The
Militant Group, now the Socialist Party, has over its long lifetime produced a few little
gems that will sound familiar to practised malcontents. In a paper published on the
Internet, David Tourish of the University of Ulster and a specialist in Celtic Studies,
produces this quotation from a disgruntled ex-member of the Socialist Party: "To
cross the General Secretary would result in a tantrum or some kind of outburst. Comrades
became fearful of initiative without the sanction of the General Secretary. Incredibly,
even the opening of a window during an EC meeting could not go ahead without a nod from
him. Under these conditions the idea of a collective leadership is a nonsense... The EC as
whole - which is supposed to be a sub-committee of the CC - is out of control. In 99 per
cent of cases the CC is simply a rubber stamp for the EC." And so say all of us,
because we have been saying something similar whatever organisation we happened to be
talking about.
The AWL has developed from a couple of fusions with the Matgamanite core that was defused
from IS. First the Left Faction who were expelled from IS in 1974 and later Alan
Thornettıs group. Strange to relate, for a man who was a serial expellee from the SLL,
the RSL and IS and complained bitterly at this cavalier treatment, Sean had a fairly short
way with his own dissenters and, within not too long a time, the Left Faction took on an
independent role as Workers Power and Alan Thornett was working on a less taxing
project. The AWL’s journal, Workers’ Liberty, has a spurious air of
openness that is in fact a stratagem to solicit contrary opinions and then subject them to
such a remorseless weight of Matgamna’s polemic as to make the `peine forte et
dur’ seem like blessed release. For many group gurus the organisation is an extension
of their personality and, like some corner shopkeeper they retain it to themselves,
defending with a fervour that can spill over into savagery. It fulfils their everyday
needs and nourishes their fantasies in a milieu in which they are definitely more equal
than others. Matgamna is just such a case in point, as editor of Workers’ Liberty,
hardly an issue passes without an article of wearisome length and dubious relevance from
his hand. In addition, and this has got to come close to abuse of privilege, he frequently
puts in one of his own poems but, at least, Ireland now has its own champion to compete on
equal terms with William McGonagall.
One of the other dubious characteristics that we have inherited from the Russian Social
Democratic Labour Party is the studied air of absolute certainty that suffuses their work.
Lenin and Trotsky continually give the impression that Marxism is an exact science, and it
is because they say so, and because they are Marxists then what they say is, by
definition, correct. Prior to 1917 their claims lacked a certain credibility because they
argued violently with one another and they could not both be right. This feature of their
work, which is as much a matter of style as anything else, has been adopted with
particular enthusiasm by devotees of the Church of Latter Day Trotskyism. Those whose
record of achievement should be accompanied by an attitude of modest stillness and
humility are given to statements of such mind blowing arrogance as to make one’s
colitis become general. I cite a statement from a 1977 internal bulletin of the Militant
Tendency, that is a paradigm of this particular foible: "What guarantees the
superiority of our tendency ... from all others inside and outside the labour movement is
our understanding of all the myriad factors which determine the attitudes and moods of the
workers at each stage. Not only the objective but the subjective ones too." If you
believe this one, then you will readily accept that, despite my advancing years, nubile
young women frequently mistake me for Leonardo Di Caprio. It’s hell I tell you
comrades.
This is the movement we inherited and, with all its faults, it has maintained the thin
revolutionary thread that would allow us to pass it on to the next generation. Without
seriously taking thought and making extensive amendments I do not think we should. Its
organisational forms have been the endlessly repeated vehicle for the petty careers of
small time power maniacs whose pathetic compulsion to be cock of their own small
malodorous midden would be an object of sympathy if they had not wrecked far too many
useful and irreplaceable comrades. We have all been here before, some of us several times
and as Denis Healey said: "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."
Contrawise, our tendency has been able to call on the comrades to make special sacrifice
to buy a bigger shovel and then with passionate exhortation call for prolonged and
frenzied digging on a three shift system.
The Leninism of 1917 was addressing problems that have not existed for three quarters of a
century and are of little help to revolutionary socialists in 1999. The Leninism of the
1930s, which we call Trotskyism offers us the same thing only written very, very small.
The yearning for an international leadership that would bestride the world workers
movement turned out to be the plaything of Cannon, Pablo, Healy and Lambert. The brave
hopes of 1938 have ended in the petty squabbles and squalid manoeuvrings that have
characterised the years since Trotskyıs death. The organisational principles that were
intended to sharply differentiate the revolutionaries from social democrats and Stalinism
need to be re-examined in the light of the political demise of these false doctrines. The
FI which was to stand as a rallying point against the upper and lower millstones of
Stalinism and Reformism went into a flat spin when both of these abominations shuffled off
the stage. Trotskyism seemed unable to define itself without the twin evils it never quite
came to grips with. The workers deserve much better than the spectacle of endless splits
over trifles and unquestioning adherence to outdated formulas. I am in general against
quotations from the pen of the masters but there is one from Trotsky that I like consider
in moments of high emotion or depression: "Learn to Think". If we apply this
maxim seriously then there are no eternal verities, everything is open to re-examination
and argument. Recently I have been cheered by the work that Cyril Smith has done and Mike
Jones is doing us all a service by shedding light on the early years of German Communism
and the founding of the CI. Al Richardson too has a splendid habit of blowing raspberries
at radical chic has challenged the myths that have for too long been our smelly comfort
blanket. Whether they are right or wrong I don’t know nor do I care - they are doing
what Marxists should be doing and have not done nearly enough. Putting things up for
scrutiny and deciding if they are needed on the voyage. Because this has been a long
voyage and we have made much less progress than I imagined we would when I was a 12 year
old who thought he was a Marxist. So there is still a long way to go and the journey will
be that much easier if we clear out some self constructed obstacles that bestrew our path.
The broad socialist movement remains the place where we can transcend our own limitations
and limited vision. Most of us have been at our best in that movement, it is where have
experienced those fleeting certainties about how we can transform ourselves in the
co-operative process of transforming society.
I would like to finish with a verse from a poem by Erich Fried, a German socialist :
Speak One More Time
About the joy of hoping for Joy
So that at least some will ask: What was that?