Reflections on
the History of the CWI
Roger Silverman
In its heyday in the 1980s, the Militant tendency embodied the most formidable Marxist force that
Britain has yet seen. Today it survives in a truncated form under the name the Socialist Party of England & Wales.
This article was written in January 1997, soon after the name change. It deals
with the evolution of Militant and
its international organisation, the Committee for a Workers’ International.
The recent decision to change the name of
the organisation is an appropriate point at which to raise some fundamental
issues regarding the history and development of our tendency.
Prior to our emergence as a mass force, it
was our tendency's general theoretical clarity in the preparatory years which
won us a well-deserved reputation for foresight. Built up painfully over
decades, this authority was originally our sole asset. Without unshakeable
conviction, none of our miracles of organisation would have been possible.
These included, long before the spectacular exploits in Liverpool or the poll
tax campaign, feats of fund-raising and administrative genius – apparatus,
structure, full timers, headquarters, international interventions, influence in
the workers' organisations, mass youth agitation, trade union penetration, etc.
– that were to stun our enemies.
Second only to our political confidence was
our firm orientation to the Labour Movement, our patient strategy and finely
tuned tactics. It was through clear ideas and hard work that our cadres earned
influence.
The tendency's momentum was sufficient to
carry us well into a period when, beneath the surface, our perspectives were
becoming increasingly at odds with reality. There was an imbalance between our
political victories throughout the 1980s and our unexpected theoretical failure
to anticipate events at the end of the decade.
At the end of the Second World War, the
precursors of our tendency had alone had the audacity to challenge the accepted
orthodoxies of contemporary Trotskyism, and to modify the perspectives that
Trotsky himself had advanced in his last months: the prognosis that the
revolutionary wave that was bound to follow the coming war would destroy the
traditional parties of the working class; that just as the Second International
had collapsed in the First World War, the reformist and Stalinist parties would
crumble; and that the Fourth International would become the decisive force on
the planet.
In 1940 these prognoses had been justified.
But as always, reality had overtaken them. For a whole historical period, on
the basis of the economic upswing and of the spread of Stalinism to a number of
new countries, both the reformist and the Stalinist parties became on the
contrary strengthened. Those former Trotskyist groups which were incapable of
drawing up bold fresh perspectives utterly degenerated. The founders of our
tendency generally succeeded where others had failed.
THE POSTWAR BALANCE OF FORCES
Simply summarised, our perspectives were
based on the changed balance of forces, with a proletariat enormously
strengthened by the upswing in contrast with the inter-war period, and with
imperialism drastically weakened by the extension of Stalinism and the colonial
revolution.
In relation to the advanced capitalist
countries, we predicted that the general upswing which began in 1950, with
periodic minor dips, would ultimately give way to a succession of deeper and
deeper recessions in a general process of downswing. This was graphically borne
out in the recessions of 1974-5 and 1979-82. Each successive recession would be
deeper than the last, and this would open up huge class struggles, given the
growth of the working class during the boom years. Our prognosis of "sharp
turns and sudden changes" included the possibility of proletarian
uprisings breaking out almost without warning.
This meant that the tendency was not only
not taken unawares by such events as the French general strike in 1968, the
Portuguese revolution and the overthrow of the Greek dictatorship in 1974, but
had even prepared in advance for the upheavals in Spain in 1975-6. Given the
perspective of intensifying class struggles, we had prepared our forces within
the workers' organisations for impending explosions.
The perspective of radicalisation of the
workers' parties – and especially the Socialist Parties, which were at that
time more volatile than the Communist Parties – was vindicated in the 1970s by
the growth of initially left-reformist and arguably centrist Socialist Parties
in France, Spain, Portugal and especially Greece, the growth of the left in the
British Labour Party, etc.
In most of the former colonial countries,
the tendency argued that there could be no lasting respite, but generally a
succession of wars, civil wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, coups and counter-coups,
famine and genocide. Paralysed by the conservatism of the leadership of the
workers' parties, the permanent revolution was asserting itself in a peculiar
way. In the very weakest links of world capitalism, the tasks of history were
being tackled, with gross distortions, by the most improbable petty-bourgeois
agencies, through guerrilla wars or military coups. Due to the historical decay
of capitalism and the attractive force of Stalinism, capitalism/landlordism was
being overthrown, and replaced by bureaucratic regimes in the crude model of
Stalinist Moscow and Beijing.
No better analysis was made of the new
phenomenon of what we called proletarian bonapartism. Following
events in China, Cuba, and elsewhere, the process of spasmodic leaps towards
proletarian bonapartism in the colonial world was reaffirmed in 1974-5 by a
wave of such events in Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia.
In relation to the Stalinist states, ours
was the only tendency to understand and warn in advance that, at least in the
USSR and Eastern Europe, the bureaucracy had reached the limits of its capacity
to develop society; that it had become not just a relative drag but an absolute
brake on further progress. It predicted convulsions. Now that the productive
forces were no longer being developed, the working class could no longer
tolerate the burden of bureaucratic repression. Few other observers – left or
right – had monitored so closely the hidden data of economic wastage or
tapering productivity; predicted so presciently the uprisings of the working
class which were later to bring down the regimes in East Germany,
Czechoslovakia, Romania, etc.; or anticipated the crumbling of the Soviet
Union.
We have no reason to apologise for our
penetrating analysis of the gathering crisis in the Stalinist states. Our
underlying weakness was that the possibility of capitalist restoration was
categorically ruled out. It was considered that the historical decay of
capitalism had closed off this option for all time. Indeed, the very idea was
derided: to turn the clock back to capitalism in Russia was as unthinkable as
to return to feudalism in Britain.
These ideas wove together to represent a
world view. Radicalisation of the mass workers' parties, successive defeats for
imperialism in the colonial world, the impossibility of capitalist restoration
in the Stalinist world, were all foundation planks of our perspectives. All
were based upon the reality of an instinctive universal appreciation of the
historical decadence and bankruptcy of capitalism. This was founded on the mass
memory of two imperialist world wars, the Great Depression, the victory of
Stalinist Russia in the Second World War, and the colonial revolution which was
sweeping the world. It was reflected in student radicalism and the cult of
Guevara, etc.; in the US government's "domino theory"
justifying its intervention in Vietnam; in de Gaulle's admission to the new US
ambassador in 1968 that "the game's up" and "France
will go communist"; in the announcement by a headline in The Times
at the high point of the Portuguese revolution that "capitalism in Portugal is dead";
in Willy Brandt's resignation statement predicting the end of capitalist
liberal democracy; etc. All these events fortified our perspectives.
THE BOOM OF THE 1980s
It feels almost nostalgic to recall these
confident certainties today. These perspectives, which had stood the test so
well in earlier decades, were becoming hopelessly outdated by the 1980s. It was
not, as it first seemed, merely a question of tempo, nuances, accidental
conjunctures and extraneous factors. There had been as drastic a superseding of
old outlooks as in 1945. Just as Trotsky's perspectives had become inadequate,
so now our perspectives too had become overtaken by the new realities.
Sectarian fragments of the Fourth
International had been thrown into convulsions in the 1940s and 1950s by such
shocks as the organic upswing of the world capitalist economy, the extension of
the frontiers of Stalinism, and – for those who had even noticed – their own
unaccountable failure to become the "decisive force on the planet".
Some refused to concede the slightest modification of Trotsky's schema; others
wrote off the "bourgeoisified" working class and discovered new agencies
of revolution (students, lumpens, peasants) or current Messiahs (Mao, Tito, Ben
Bella, Castro....).
Where their perspectives could hardly be
maintained for three weeks, those of our tendency had stood the test again and
again over the course of three decades. The irony was that, by a process of
ideological inertia not at all unfamiliar in the history of Marxism, these same
perspectives were retained basically intact for an entire fourth decade, during
which they proved all too fallible. They were becoming manifestly inadequate.
To the extent that we clung on to them, our tendency was becoming insulated
from the real world.
The sharp right turns within the
traditional workers' parties in Britain, Western Europe, Japan, Australia,
etc., went far beyond those of the repressive era of Gaitskellism. Many –
notably the British Labour Party – are rapidly metamorphosing into openly
bourgeois parties. There is no comparison even with events at the time of
Ramsay MacDonald (who following his defection left a radicalised Labour Party
still intact) or Gaitskell (who had to retract his attempt to drop Clause Four
in the teeth of bitter rank-and-file resistance).
In many of the more developed ex-colonial
countries, the national bourgeoisie had tried to gain some leverage by playing off
the superpowers and leaning partially on the Stalinist states. Now the
horrifically intensified squeeze on the colonial world has wrought new
convulsions, bringing to a brutal end whatever illusory (or at best marginal)
scope had existed earlier for such populist measures. Nevertheless, not a
single new proletarian-bonapartist regime has been created since the mid-1970s
– not in Grenada, Ghana, nor even Nicaragua, where the process hung in the
balance for ten years.
Most spectacular of all were the definitive
events of 1989, which ushered in a process of capitalist restoration throughout
the former USSR and Eastern Europe.
All these perspectives had foundered on an
inadequate characterisation of the world economy during the 1980s. The general
truism that capitalism has long been historically reactionary and decadent, and
for all its temporary successes can ultimately offer only wars, slumps and
barbarism, is not enough: that is not how it presents itself today in popular
consciousness.
Our tendency rightly explained the
unexpectedly prolonged and substantial boom of the 1980s on the basis of
artificial measures taken by the US government, notably arms expenditure, and
on the intensified exploitation of the colonial world. But only very belatedly
did we come round to an appreciation that what had begun as an artificial boom
had become genuine, with a real organic expansion of the economy, and
spectacularly so in microelectronics, where capitalism was (and is) still
manifestly revolutionising a major sector of the productive forces. In spite of
continuing high levels of unemployment and drastic cuts in the social wage, the
actual expansion of the economy had a profound effect on general perceptions.
By the late 1980s, workers compared
apparently almost uninterrupted growth in the West against the rotting of the
economy and culture in the Stalinist states. It appeared that there had been a
huge and unprecedented economic upswing which had revolutionised the productive
forces in the advanced capitalist countries almost continuously since the end
of the Second World War, throughout the living memory of almost two
generations. The couple of freak interruptions in the 1970s could plausibly be
attributed to unexpected fluctuations in oil prices, due to peculiar extraneous
accidents (the OPEC cartel, the Iranian revolution....)
THE COLLAPSE OF STALINISM
By contrast, the Stalinist states presented
an aspect of monolithic stagnation, corruption, wastage, repression and
bureaucratic decay, sanctified by a tired liturgy of half-hearted cynical
political dogma.
Thus there came a monstrous inversion of
the consciousness that had existed in earlier decades, when the meteoric
successes of the USSR in industrialisation and in raising productivity had
brilliantly offset the capitalist horrors of the Great Depression, Fascism and
World War. It was now socialism which appeared discredited, while illusions in
capitalism soared. Even in the ex-colonial countries, with their hated
parasitic local capitalists, illusions in the capitalist system grew. The mass
of youth dreamed of migration to the West or even the Arabian countries, and
foreign investment was peddled as the panacea which would modernise these
economies.
In the turbulent and paradoxical period
that has opened up, there has been a blurring of the boundaries between the
formerly clearly demarcated sectors of the world; a partial merging of the neat
and convenient trilateral arrangement that existed formerly. Workers in the
"metropolitan" countries face the rapid erosion of the material and
social gains accumulated over previous decades, and loss of their jobs to
former "third-world" countries. The masses in the ex-colonial world,
in a position vis-a-vis imperialism more abject than ever, strain against all
the odds for some respite. And the former Stalinist states are facing
quasi-colonial pauperisation under the encroachments of restorationist
capitalism.
Prior to the 1980s, capitalist restoration
in the Stalinist states was unthinkable. The tendency was right in demonstrating
that the workers, most classically in Hungary in 1956, but also in
Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Poland in 1970-1, were pursuing the programme of
the political revolution for workers' democracy. In the 1960s, there was still
genuine popular pride at the technological progress of the USSR, symbolised
most graphically in its space exploits. Khrushchev could still plausibly boast
of overtaking the USA, and even of "achieving communism", by 1980.
In insisting that there could be no
prospect of capitalist restoration in these countries, we had frankly modified
Trotsky's formula: either the political revolution to cleanse the state of
bureaucratism, or social counter-revolution. Trotsky had argued that without
the political revolution, restoration would ultimately triumph, as the higher
productivity of the advanced capitalist economies prevailed.
In the '50s and '60s, this bold revision of
Trotsky's prognosis was perfectly justified. We exposed the lie that Soviet
tanks were the last defence against restorationist threats, and convincingly
refuted Stalinist justifications for military intervention in Hungary in 1956
and Czechoslovakia in 1968, etc. Clearly, in 1956, all that stood in the way of
the political revolution in Hungary was the absence of the subjective factor.
But we still maintained this position unchanged right up to the end of 1989.
Here again our perspectives had become fossilised.
Our earlier oft-repeated assertions that
"twenty cadres" could have transformed the situation could no longer
be seriously sustained. Twenty cadres in Russia in 1991 might well have been
able to win hundreds or even thousands of adherents – but they could not have
withstood the historical tide and changed the course of events. By now there
was an objective basis for reaction.
It had long been the tendency's position
that the Soviet bureaucracy had become more and more an absolute fetter on any
further progress of these societies. Once its dead hand had brought
productivity growth to a standstill, it had become historically doomed.
But the full implications of this accurate
assessment had not been sufficiently thought through. The analogy was
repeatedly made of a "race" between the social revolution in the West
and the political revolution in the East. But, while world capitalism still
appeared to be developing society, and the social revolution consequently
lagged behind in this "race", what guarantee could there be that the
collapse of the bureaucracy would lead to the political revolution? The
pressure of events would inevitably strain towards restoration.
This was a collective mistake of the
tendency, no matter what tentative challenges were raised behind closed doors.
The author of this article freely admits to insisting as late as 1988 that
there was no question of capitalist restoration in Burma, let alone the USSR.
This admission is made not for purposes of apology but in order to lay bare the
roots of what was after all a major mistake.
The reaction of what was to become the
minority faction was to shut its eyes to reality. It clung to its perspective
of the re-establishment of a Stalinist regime resting on the planned economy
(for instance, following the abortive Yanaev coup). Such an outcome would have
restored, along with Stalinism, their own old reassuringly familiar world
perspectives.
To its honour, the majority recognised past
mistakes. To pose the theoretical possibility of a bourgeois counter-revolution
unfolding in the Stalinist states took political courage and imagination, and
was in itself ample justification for supporting the majority against the
minority in the political struggle that was soon afterwards to break out within
the tendency.
Nevertheless, none of what actually
transpired had been anticipated before the event. Where in the past the tendency
could triumphantly republish its old perspectives documents, it was now reduced
to improvising perfectly plausible arguments...ex-post-facto.
Insufficient
attention was given to the sharp decline that had taken place in the workers'
consciousness during the 1980s. In Poland, much stress was rightly laid on the
fact that Solidarity had emerged as the first independent workers' mobilisation
outside the aegis of the Communist Party. (In 1956 and again in 1971 the
workers' movement had been successfully diverted by the appointment of
alternative factions of the bureaucracy.) But there had also been a
degeneration of the workers' political outlook compared with those movements.
In relation to China, too, the tendency rapidly moved from a position that the
political revolution was not imminent because the bureaucracy had not yet
exhausted its role, to acclamation of the political revolution in 1989. More
regard should have been given to such clear warning signs as the adulation of
the Pope in Poland, and the erection of a replica of the Statue of Liberty in
Tienanmen Square.
This tendency of ours to underestimate the
strength of reaction can also be noted in relation to other features of the
period, nationally and internationally. Events were soon to compel a brutal
reappraisal of perspectives, and provoke a crisis within the tendency. But
meanwhile, great achievements had transformed our role.
THE RISE OF MILITANT
Our tendency enjoyed not only enormous
reserves of political capital accumulated over three decades, but also
confidence, youth, élan, experience, virtuoso presentational and organisational
skills, and strong roots in the Labour Movement. So, paradoxically, by a
curious twist of timing, our greatest practical glories came in the 1980s, a
period when our theoretical heritage was already failing. Our ideological
weaknesses were not to be exposed until the historic shocks of the end of the
decade.
During the '60s and '70s, the tendency's
theoretical confidence had enabled us to train a generation of capable cadres.
By necessity we were largely confined to the role of passive bystanders in
history, making the most acute and penetrating vicarious commentaries on great
events, but usually helpless to intervene. Most of our commentaries were
necessarily written in a grammatical tense which became a hallmark: the past
conditional. ("If we had had members" in France in 1968, in Poland in
1970, in Chile in 1970-3...) We were reduced to writing excellent articles
criticising the mistakes of those who had.
The 1980s marked the point where, in
Britain at least, we were able to cross the barrier between passivity and
intervention, where we became a factor and even a crucial factor in the
objective situation, winning sometimes quite spectacular victories. It is no
exaggeration to say that the tendency entered into the calculations,
strategies, tactics, and the nightmares, not only of the Labour bureaucracy,
but of the ruling class too.
It was during this period that the tendency
achieved its most spectacular successes. Three of our members were elected as
Labour MPs, all known Marxists and proud Militant supporters. The propaganda
slogan "a workers' MP on a workers' wage" – and still more so its
actual practice – brilliantly and irrefutably proved the difference between Militant
and all other currents. We won control of the biggest civil service union, the
CPSA. In the course of our massive intervention in the miners' strike of
1984-5, hundreds of miners were won to our ranks.
In the mid-eighties, we were leading the
population of Liverpool in a five-year struggle against the Thatcher
government. We formed the leadership of the Liverpool labour movement and of
the City Council, establishing a record of unprecedented and model achievements
for a local council, and organising general strikes of thirty thousand workers.
The Government threatened to send in the troops, and eventually had to use the
law courts to throw out of office most of Liverpool's popular and
democratically elected councillors.
This struggle, already perhaps the biggest
movement led by Trotskyism since 1917, was immediately followed by an even
bigger achievement: the struggle against the hated poll tax. We were the sole
left tendency to understand in advance that the tax could be defeated by direct
action. Our comrades had the courage to play the decisive role in launching a
mass civil disobedience campaign.
In the course of this movement, dozens of
our activists were jailed. Eighteen million people were emboldened to refuse
payment. A quarter of a million people were mobilised for one of the biggest
demonstrations in British history. And within two or three years, the campaign
achieved total victory, with the scrapping of the tax and the overthrow of Mrs
Thatcher personally - the world's most enduring symbol of reaction.
Our achievements struck alarm in the
bourgeoisie, and rightly so. For the first time since the Russian revolution,
Trotskyism had been established as a vital force within the Labour Movement. We
had formed an important contingent among the shock troops in the miners'
strike, led Britain's fifth city in a prolonged struggle against the Tory
government, mobilised 18 million people in one of the biggest
civil-disobedience campaigns in history, and overthrown a Prime Minister. For
good measure, within the space of a decade or so we had built an autonomous
revolutionary youth movement under the auspices of the Labour Party, built a
strong base in several trade unions, mobilised 40,000 youth on a Europe-wide
demonstration against racism, established the foundation for a new
International, and much else besides.
We entered into the psyche of society. To
this day, repeated invocations in BBC reports and broadsheet articles remind us
that the memory of that period still haunts the Establishment. Shivers ran down
the capitalists' backs when Pat Wall gave an honest warning of the danger of
civil war, when Tommy Sheridan won an election from a prison cell, when Terry
Fields MP was jailed, along with dozens more activists, by poll-tax courts. Derek
Hatton was cleared of all charges after an operation involving 280 police
officers.
Mrs Thatcher shrilly denounced Militant
in Parliament. Kinnock called our supporters "maggots" and made his
despicable attack on us the centrepiece of his election campaign. Hundreds were
expelled in the first mass purge of the Labour Party in decades. The High Court
intervened to disqualify elected Militant councillors and overturn
the election of Militant trade union leaders. The very name became a household
word, figuring in popular parlance, in crosswords and game shows.
Our record still also attracts the bile of
dilettantes and slanderous gossips; but it is thanks to Militant that hundreds of
working-class families in Liverpool now have decent houses, or in Scotland have
protected their possessions from impoundment by bailiffs.
These achievements represented an
accumulation of decades of patient work within the Labour Movement – which had
itself transformed the environment in which we were working. The situation was
far removed from the days when supporters of the tendency were humbly peddling
a monthly paper in little Labour Party ward meetings up and down the country.
Now the witch-hunt was in full swing, with a wave of expulsions amounting to a
mass purge. The Labour bureaucracy became so terrified at the threat of Marxism
that it consciously decided to wreck the party itself as a living forum of
working-class political life. The necessity of an urgent shift in tactics to
meet the new situation precipitated the first political conflict in the growing
polarisation within the tendency.
THE SPLIT IN THE CWI
What was to become the minority was
patently incapable of adapting to the new situation, theoretically,
strategically, tactically. As is argued below, the main cause of the split that
was about to break was the fact that the tendency's perspectives had become too
brittle. But the most immediate and furious controversy arose over the correct
and courageous decision to stand a Militant candidate in the Walton
by-election. The minority insisted upon an almost obsessive repetition of the
exact methods of Labour Party work of 40 years previously, ignoring all its
intervening successes, and the bureaucracy's subsequent annihilation of first
the youth section and then the Party organisation itself. For them, even
tactics – which require flexibility, ingenuity and improvisation – had been
turned into a fetish.
Trotsky in the 1930s had proposed entrism
as one imaginative initiative among a kaleidoscopic variety of daring devices
to draw new recruits to Marxism. In view of the slower and more drawn-out tempo
of post-war events, our tendency had been correct to extend and prolong its
practise. Despite some mistaken formulations, however, it had never been
elevated from a tactic to a "strategy". For the minority, the
episodic tactics of earlier decades remain to this day a sacrosanct principle.
To resist the temptation of adventuristic
gestures that might result in premature expulsion from the Labour Party was one
thing: but to retreat from a principled battle in the futile hope of clinging
on to a Party card for its own sake would have been disastrous. It would have
been, precisely, a "betrayal of 40 years' work".
Our tendency had always prided itself, and
with justification, that we had never suffered a major split or even a major
difference within our ranks. We used to ridicule the sects, who were
continually splitting because they were incapable of building a durable
foundation or making a consistent analysis. They had a succession of
contradictory positions. Their fragmentation was due to the fact that their
analysis, slogans and orientation were wrong. The first sign of their
petit-bourgeois character was that they were incapable either of coherent ideas
or stable formations.
Before 1991, we had enjoyed a reputation
for almost monolithic consistency. Occasional nuances of difference naturally
arose, but there was no crystallisation of entrenched oppositions as was the
happy norm in the fantasy world of the sects. Our tendency remained stable
while our perspectives, strategy and tactics were at least generally correct.
The storm which suddenly opened up in 1991,
catching the entire tendency unawares, began on apparently trivial issues. But
Marxists do not mistake the accident which sparks off such clashes with the
real underlying cause. Behind these incidental frictions lay major differences,
as was soon to become clear.
The shock struck along certain clearly
identifiable political fault lines. The split represented an assertion of real
and objectively based doubts over what had over the decades hardened into a
reflexive dogma. The majority was counterpoising, not just alternative ideas,
but also a plea for some flexibility – a
"conditionality", in the current jargon. While in periods of
stability, it was necessary to insist firmly and "categorically" upon
well-proven principles, in these times of flux, it was vital to encourage
imagination and experimentation. There was a yearning for fresh air.
At the same time, this was also a
confrontation between two sharply differentiated styles inherited from two
contrasting stages of development. The long habits of painstaking theoretical
preparation and meticulous cadre building in an earlier era had ill conditioned
a more mature generation for the new tasks of mass agitation and audacious
initiatives. The split had a dual nature: slow methods of preparation belonged
together with sure time-tested perspectives in a neatly demarcated world; flair
and daring, in deed and thought, with a world in flux.
To imply that the split had arisen
primarily from personal factors would be to miss the crucial point. After all,
at this level, the minority too was able to make some accurate criticisms. Why
not? In any faction fight, both sides will obviously bring into play the best
available arguments. But that is not the issue. The split cannot be ascribed
primarily to the peccadilloes of individuals. Even Ted Grant’s “dogmatism” and
“stubbornness”, so inappropriate and even dangerous during a period of sudden
flux, had in earlier decades manifested themselves as those very traits of
consistency and resilience that had uniquely carried us through the difficult
decades of the post-war upswing.
The crisis in the tendency arose from the
conservative pressures holding it back from accomplishing the same task in 1989
as had been done so effectively by Grant in 1945. It sprang from the renewed
need to challenge outmoded perspectives, and launch a free and uninhibited
discussion to illuminate the new global balance of forces.
The minority's condition was a classic case
of the well-known affliction of "revolutionary conservatism"
diagnosed so penetratingly by Trotsky, for instance in the history of
Bolshevism. Tragically, a mistake, persisted in long enough, becomes a
tendency. The split became a necessity, the only alternative to theoretical
fossilisation, a sine qua non for regaining the flexibility, openness and energy
needed by a living revolutionary current.
It was the majority in this dispute that
were the first to become sensitive to the anomalies created by the old dogmas.
But precisely at such moments of polemic and split, it is necessary to review
the lessons, and balance what was positive and what negative about the old
traditions. We did not open up a sufficiently comprehensive review of the
theoretical and political foundations of the split.
The many apparently incidental issues where
differences arose between what were to become the opposing wings of the
tendency (the 1987 Wall Street crash, South Africa, the Gulf War, the 1991 coup
in Russia, etc.) were all linked together. What had gone wrong was not that
mistakes of interpretation had suddenly been made over this or that. An entire
world view – unique and irrefutable for an entire epoch – had become redundant.
Old prognoses began to hang, stale and malodorous, in the air. On nearly all
the issues mentioned, the minority were clinging to ossified perspectives.
PROBLEMS OF PERSPECTIVE
The paradox is that, in missing the
opportunity for a thorough discussion of the theoretical foundations of the
split, in part we remained conditioned, implicitly and unwittingly, by these
same inadequate perspectives. Our remarkable successes were interpreted as
harbingers of a new epoch of mass struggles, led in those cases where we were
strong enough by the tendency itself. The reality was that the titanic
struggles of the miners and of Liverpool turned out to be, not the first
skirmishes of the coming "red '90s", but the last battles of the
'70s, undermining the strongest fortresses of proletarian power amassed in the
post-war period. The defeats, first of the miners and the print workers and
then of Liverpool, opened up a long, slow stagnation, a period not unlike that
following the defeat of the 1926 general strike.
This should not have been unexpected. The
tendency had made prophetic warnings of the dire consequences of a defeat for
the miners and print workers, etc. That these warnings were subsequently
underplayed after the defeat of these strikes, and later even derided as
pessimism, falsely depreciates their validity.
That the tendency had inherited a
drastically wrong perspective on these events is clearly demonstrated by the
following passage from a Militant special on the lessons of
the miners' strike:
“This is not 1926 when the miners suffered a
crushing defeat. That was the end of two decades of struggle. Today the miners
and the trade union movement retain enormous strength and the strike marks a
decisive milestone - the beginning of a whole new era of intensified class
struggle." (8th March 1985).
The tendency's slowness to acknowledge the
extent of the defeat represented by the crushing of the NUM clearly arises from
our general failure to assess the new and less favourable balance of forces
that had emerged by the 1980s – a failure that in other manifestations was to
precipitate the split.
We failed to incorporate into our perspectives our own regular token admissions that events would not develop in a straight line, that there would be setbacks, defeats, and even "periods of despair".
We failed to incorporate into our perspectives our own regular token admissions that events would not develop in a straight line, that there would be setbacks, defeats, and even "periods of despair".
The role played by the tendency in the poll
tax campaign was nothing short of heroic. However, the whole phenomenon can be
seen in retrospect as something of an anomaly, attributable to the personal
stubbornness and gross miscalculations of Thatcher, who had overridden the
warnings of her class and her own Cabinet. This battle did not have the
historical inevitability of the conflicts with the miners and with Liverpool.
Once the Conservative Party had summoned up the courage to make the necessary
corrections, for all its growing splits and crises, the mass movement that had
taken such a frightening form was quickly dissipated.
Instead of soberly assimilating the lessons
of our experiences, we have tended to persist in seeking new causes around
which to relive our past glories. We were disappointed in our hope that Militant
Labour
in Britain as a whole would take off as it had in Scotland, despite
some very creditable election results. For all our comrades' magnificent
efforts and partial successes, we were similarly disappointed in our attempts
to build stable mass youth or black movements, or to launch sustained campaigns
against racism, to resist the Criminal Justice Bill, to withhold VAT on fuel
bills, or other issues. Our most successful achievement has been our campaign
against domestic violence.
Faced with the effects of a largely
quiescent labour movement, and an inevitable relative isolation, we have
organised lobbies against false convictions and joined demonstrations for gay
rights, animal rights, road protest campaigns, etc. The tendency's earlier
inflexible "fundamentalist" stance on such issues may have been
pompous and prudish. But our implacable emphasis on the primacy of the
organised labour movement was absolutely right. In those days of class
struggle, the espousal of these issues by trendy radicals was a deliberate
diversion from the real tasks in hand. In default of decisive battles on the
part of the heavy battalions, it is necessary to participate in campaigns over
any generally worthy causes; but today's flourishing of youth activism around
them is a token of the inertia of the organised working class.
Militant Labour was launched in England and
Wales in 1993. In the especially favourable conditions north of the border, Scottish
Militant Labour had achieved outstanding successes. No Marxist could
seriously dispute that there was no alternative but to disengage from Labour
Party work. If anything, this step was already belated. But what were the
strategy and perspectives for this organisation? Was Militant Labour
to be compared to the Revolutionary Communist Party, formed during the
Second World War when the Labour Party was not functioning, and which later
became a powerful influence within Labour Party ranks? Was it conceived as an
alternative leadership? A temporary detour? A new party? The foundation of an
open organisation was long overdue by 1993. But what was earnestly presented as
a "detour" then is now defined in retrospect as a definitive break.
It is true that "New Labour's"
abandonment even of traditional reformist policies, its rejection of Clause
Four, the reduced role of the trade unions, and its open plans to completely
sever the link with the trade unions, have gone a long way towards changing the
party's class character. Just as, at the time of Noske and Scheidemann, it was
necessary to work towards the creation of a new workers' party (the USPD), so
today it is necessary to recognise the qualitative change in the Labour Party
since the accession of Blair, and to call for the creation of a Socialist
Party.
Nevertheless, the question cannot be left
there. Even without trade-union affiliations, let alone a socialist clause in
its constitution, the SPD did later once again become the main workers' party
of Germany. It is significant that, by virtually renaming the Party "New
Labour", Blair has implicitly proclaimed a unilateral split. The giant of
organised labour is still to move back on stage. In their battles with a future
Blair Government, surely the trade unions must either succeed in reclaiming the
Labour Party, or (more probably) they will have to create a new one.
The name Militant Labour
carries echoes of a fine and clean tradition, and connotations of a
united and combative working class. It might be thought an attractive banner in
this kind of future scenario. But now the tendency is to be re-launched once
again under a new name, on the questionable grounds of Militant's allegedly
unfavourable association with terrorism and fundamentalism, and the
unattractiveness of Labour to youth.
Is it not an indication of a certain
weakness of perspective that today, only three or four years since the launch
of Militant
Labour,
yet another change in name and tactics is being undertaken? In the same way, we
appeared at first to hold out exaggerated hopes in the Socialist Labour Party,
before renouncing them. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that, rather than
anticipating events, we are reacting to them, improvising ideas on the wing,
seeking panaceas.
The time-tested Marxist method is to begin
with a scientific analysis; flowing from this, to work out perspectives,
strategy and tactics ... and last of all, to decide such details as a name.
Even though the order appears to have been reversed in the recent debate, then
provided it results in a thoroughgoing review of perspectives, then that is
welcome.
Under conditions of widespread
disorientation, however, even our tendency is not immune from the dangers of
disproportion and self-delusion. It has become almost a rule for sectarian
groups that once their membership drops below a certain point, they proclaim
themselves "parties". What is unique about our tendency is that over
the years it earned the authority to claim leadership. If we were ever to succumb
to the temptation of the easy option so futilely adopted by countless sects of
simply proclaiming our right to lead the working class, that would be a tragic
irony.
If we did not declare itself a party when
we were leading an entire city in defiance of the government, or when Mrs
Thatcher was denouncing us in Parliament for leading millions in a mass
movement which was soon to bring her down, then surely we should be doubly
cautious now – when, sadly, we have largely faded from public recognition – before
arrogating to ourselves the name of that mass workers' party which has still to
be created?
The temporary loss of our previous
influence is the result of objective factors over which we had no control: the
long stagnation of the labour movement, the erosion of industrial
concentrations and proletarian communities, the aftermath of confusion from
events in Russia, etc. But it is precisely at such times that theory becomes
paramount. If the times do not allow for razor-sharp perspectives, then at the
very least what is needed is a ruthlessly honest appraisal of the balance of
forces. To refuse to recognise a setback can turn it into a rout.
The current period has ample precedent in
the history of the working class. Albeit on a much smaller scale, in some respects
it can be compared with the period that followed the defeat of the 1905
revolution in Russia. The Bolsheviks remain the most revolutionary party in
history; and yet they were virtually annihilated in the years 1907 to 1912.
Their ranks were afflicted with despair, adventurism and mysticism. They
entered the decisive year 1917 ill prepared for the supreme test of impending
events. They still had seriously flawed perspectives for the tasks of the
revolution (their formula was still the "democratic dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry"); and in line with these perspectives,
initially disastrous policies and slogans. The overthrow of the Tsar took them
unawares. And yet Trotsky wrote:
"To the question 'Who led the February
revolution?', we can answer definitely enough: conscious and tempered workers,
educated for the most part by the party of Lenin."
Our tendency is in incomparably better
condition today. And clearly, the first breakthroughs towards the future
revolution in Britain will be led largely by workers who were first awakened to
political life by Militant. As with the Bolsheviks in 1917, however, it is only
then that the real test will begin. All our work now is a preparation for those
events.
3rd
January 1997
5 comments:
I remember Roger speaking at LSE Labour Club in the early 70s and his talk influenced me to join Militant. I attended Branch meetings right up to the split but I'm now happily inactive. I can't, however, endorse his analysis. I remember, for example, questioning "Perspectives" on the brink of the 1979 Election. It was obvious Thatcher was going to win and introduce anti-TU laws but the message was, "Don't demoralise the comrades". Sure we had influence in some local LPs but this was often because we were among the few willing to do the donkey work. Because I was living in London at the time, I know we kept apart from developments there simply because we weren't in control(we actually very little influence in London LP). Throughout the 80s, there was no debate about Liverpool (e.g the "Sam Bond affair" or the redundancy notices) or indeed anything else, including Eastern Europe. So, of course, the split came as a surprise, even though the issues it posed had been discussed privately among a few ancient but loyal rank and filers for well over a decade.
I don't see that Bill Sheppard's comments contradict the main theme of the article. I hope he explains where exactly he disagrees.
I’m sorry, Bill, but I can’t agree with your comments here. I think your hind-sight is somewhat jaundiced.
In 1979 Militant didn’t base its perspective on whether or not it would ‘demoralise’ people. I’ve still got the British Perspectives documents from that period and even (believe it or not) some actual notes of meetings and it was freely acknowledged that a Tory victory was a possibility, although, as Labour Party members and Young Socialists we fought hard against it. All perspectives are conditional and I don’t think anyone would have bet on a definitive ‘win’ or ‘lose’ prior to the election. We discussed possibilities. Neither do I agree with you about the lack of discussion on Liverpool in the 1980s. It was, as I recall, a regular theme in all our internal meetings and we (that is, the leadership) were constantly having to justify tactics and strategy to an often critical membership.
What is true is that there were aspects of the Sam Bond affair that were not aired, but our general position I still think to this day, was correct. Neil Kinnock attacked Liverpool at LP conference and that sharpened the discussion on the redundancy notices so there was general circling of the wagons against the attacks of the right-wing and the Tory press, but here again, we openly argued in the movement (and it was understood by the most advanced workers) that the so-called redundancy notices were a tactic to gain time and not a real threat of job losses. It was a very difficult position to be in and it is always clever being wise after the event. Peter Taaffe, in his book on Liverpool (which is still the best book available) in 1987 acknowledged the fact that the tactic may have been the wrong one because instead of giving the Council breathing space, it was a gift to the right wing.
I have many criticisms of the way the CWI developed in the 1980s (self-criticism, too, because I was part of the leadership) but I am against throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is simply not true that we did nothing right and that we discussed nothing properly. I am also against a generalised rush to use the benefit of hind-sight to condemn comrades for having not foreseen all eventualities and getting perspectives wrong. Trotsky got perspectives wrong, even on big issues. It doesn’t invalidate the Marxist method. You analyse what happened, what factors and issues you didn’t see and then you move on.
I cannot comment directly on Militant/CWI from the 1980s on as I left England in 1978. I was a fairly active member in the previous 9 years. I had some criticisms of the perspectives at the time (over optimistic, too much of hedging bets, too much of "0n the one hand, on the other hand", too much of "however, it cannot be ruled out that...").Despite those criticisms, the leadership mostly got it right. From afar, I had nothing but admiration for the role played by Militant comrades in Liverpool, the poll tax struggle etc. No doubt, mistakes were also made. But then, who doesn't make mistakes?
My main disagreement is with Roger's characterisation of Liverpool as structurally determined while the Poll Tax campaign was contingent. I consider both were very strongly influenced by the General Secretary. Even if pressure came from others, things only happened with his approval. That's why Peter Taaffe is the most important figure in the history of British Trotskyism.I just can't see how you can write the history of Militant without carefully documenting Peter's absolutely decisive role at each point, something absent from Roger's account. Otherwise we get an abstract and determinist analysis but devoid of specifying who's influencing who and what.
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