In Reply to Ted Grant and Rob Sewell

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Editor’s note:

The Rise of Militant is the official history of the British Militant, the UK section of the Committee for a Workers’ International (now the Socialist Party.) It is serialised on the Socialist Party website. We recommend this comprehensive history as an introduction to this topic.

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Militant’s Real History is a reply to Rob Sewell’s Postscript to Ted Grant’s History of British Trotskyism. Militant’s Real History is written by Peter Taaffe, General Secretary of the Socialist Party. It has the full support of the Socialist Party Executive Committee.

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Introduction

Ted Grant is a longstanding Trotskyist who was part of the leadership of Militant (forerunner of the Socialist Party) and the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) until he left with Rob Sewell and Alan Woods in 1991. This was after they and a small number of others were decisively defeated in the political discussions within the ranks of Militant and the CWI over the period of a year. They received seven per cent of the vote at a special conference of Militant convened to discuss the outstanding political differences between the two trends, the majority in Britain and the CWI, and the Grant-Woods-Sewell minority. Since then, they have largely disappeared as a significant tendency within the labour movement in Britain and internationally.

Now, however, they have ‘resurfaced’ and have published a book by Ted Grant, which claims to be a “history of British Trotskyism”. It is not, as others like the ex-Trotskyist Harry Ratner have commented (in an article on the What Next? website). It is the memoir of Grant, and a slanted one at that, which seeks to enhance his role at the expense of others. Apart from commenting on one or two points, where Grant has changed his position on his own history since leaving the CWI, we do not deal with his book. We leave that to others like Tony Aitman in his informative and telling piece, which we carry as an appendix.

Most of our comments are directed towards the Postscript of Rob Sewell, which pretends to deal with the ‘history’ of the Trotskyist movement from 1950 to the present day. It does nothing of the kind. It is virtually denuded of political arguments. (It does not even deserve to be described as ‘Trotskyist’ in character, having more in common with the Stalinist school of falsification of other people’s, and particularly our, ideas and actions.)

“Why reply to a tiny grouping and at such length?” will no doubt be the reaction of many, given the character of Sewell’s Postscript. After all, we are used to a campaign of almost continuous distortion of our ideas from every conceivable sectarian organisation. This has had as much effect on us as a drop of water on a hot stove. We have not even deigned to answer what appeared at some times to be an avalanche of personal attacks directed against the leadership of the Socialist Party and the CWI. Moreover, since he left our ranks, Grant has periodically issued an ‘Open Letter’ to our members predicting our imminent demise, which we have not even bothered to reply to.

For some reason the Grant group still consider themselves important. They are a perfect example of the peculiar law which seems to operate with tiny ‘revolutionary’ groups; their awareness of their importance is in inverse proportion to what they actually represent.

Rather than deal with them, we would much prefer to deal more extensively than we have with the tumultuous worldwide events and the role of Marxism in shaping the socialist future. But as the journal of bourgeois finance capital, The Economist, once put it: “Who controls the past greatly influences the present”.

It is necessary, as we have consistently done, to defend from a Marxist standpoint those historically progressive and working class movements in history, in order to pass on the lessons of these events to the new generation. This is even more important when what is involved is the real history of the Marxist and Trotskyist movement. In the 1980s, Militant was the biggest and most influential Trotskyist organisation in Britain, and one of the largest Trotskyist organisations in Europe since the International Left Opposition in the 1930s.

In our book The Rise of Militant, we sought to chart out how this was achieved and the role which individuals played in this. We gave due merit to those who made a contribution to the building of our organisation, including those like Ted Grant and Alan Woods who had parted company with us. No serious challenge was made to this history. Sewell’s account – clearly with the approval of Grant and Woods – now seeks belatedly to undermine our interpretation of this history. He seeks to bolster not just Grant’s but his own role, as well as his brother’s, in the building of Militant to the detriment of others.

We have decided to answer this. Our reply seeks to explain the political roots of our differences with this group but we are also compelled to reply to their organisational ‘criticisms’. This, of necessity, means going into some detail. Even this can serve to illustrate how honest socialists and Marxists should approach history, and the difference between a genuine Marxist organisation capable of attracting the best of the working class, and those condemned to forever remain on the margins of the labour movement.

Peter Taaffe, October 2002

Chapter One

Insults in Place of Politics

Even Harry Ratner, a British ex-Trotskyist, in his article on the website What Next? is scathing about the method employed by Sewell in his truly awful Postscript. Ratner writes: 

“By 1991, Militant was in serious decline, and by January 1992 it had split and Grant and Sewell had been expelled. A majority left the Labour Party and went on to set up the Socialist Party and the Scottish Socialist Party. So what went wrong? Sewell’s explanation is superficial and far from satisfactory. Almost seven whole paragraphs are devoted to casting Taaffe as the main villain who organised a faction against Grant. According to Sewell, Taaffe and his group ‘deliberately sabotaged’, were ‘already pursuing their own agenda’. ‘A very ambitious man with a mortal fear of rivals, actual or potential, Taaffe decided that his talents were not sufficiently appreciated… He surrounded himself with a group of yes-men… Resorted to behind the scenes manoeuvres to isolate Ted, spread rumours about his allegedly impossible character, and worse’… etcetera. Sewell seems to allot the real political context to a minor role.” 

(Ratner’s criticisms are significant in view of the fact that Sewell himself quotes him to justify some of his criticisms of others.)

However, Ratner, if anything, understates the complete avoidance of any attempts to explain the political context of why the split of 1991 took place. He is also wrong to argue that Militant was in “serious decline” at this stage. Yet he at least tries to explain the political and objective basis of the split, something Sewell fails to do. There were objective difficulties which made it harder for us to make the progress that we had made in the previous decade. The post-miners’ strike effects, with the shift towards the right at the top of the Labour Party and the trade unions, the continuation of the 1980s boom, and the collapse of Stalinism, which allowed the capitalists to pursue an ideological campaign against ‘socialism’, complicated the position for us. However, these difficulties were enormously compounded by a failure of the leadership of Militant – above all Grant – to react early enough to the change in the objective situation. Militant had a considerable history behind it and a reputation earned in the successful struggles in Liverpool and against the poll tax.

But the Labour Party had become a barren and futile arena of activity for any serious socialist organisation which sought to actively intervene in the worker’s struggles. The strongholds of Militant within the Labour Party had either been purged or closed down by the right wing. The Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) – the most vibrant and active section of the Labour Party in the 1980s, because of the influence of Militant within it – had been closed down. The Liverpool Labour Party was a shadow of the powerful force for working class action which it had been in the 1980s.

People were being expelled for advocating ‘non-payment’ of the poll tax. Some – a lot earlier than 1991 – were striving to break out of the ideological and organisational prison which the Labour Party meant for us at that stage. In 1987, we had even raised the possibility of launching an independent organisation in Liverpool following the expulsion of the Liverpool Militants just previously. This was vehemently opposed by Ted Grant above all, and even by some of the leading Liverpool comrades themselves. By 1991, however, the situation had become untenable, particularly in key areas of the country where we had led successful mass struggles, such as in Scotland on the poll tax.

For a Marxist, serious divisions within an organisation do not drop from the sky. Personal factors can play a role but where it involves substantial forces these are of a secondary character. Sewell, Grant and Woods elevate the personal and other incidental factors to the main causes of the split of 1991. We on the other hand, from the beginning sought to explain the political roots of the divergent tendencies within Militant.

A widening political gulf developed between an ossified conservative grouping around Grant and those who were prepared to face up to the new political situation which took shape in the run-up to 1991. We have dealt with these differences in our book The Rise of Militant, on issues such as South Africa, Namibia, the Gulf War, the Labour Party and perspectives for the mass organisations, and the perspectives for Stalinism. The reader can acquaint themselves with the in-depth criticisms we make of Grant in this book, which is in contrast to the approach of Sewell. Here, we will give a brief summary.

‘Catastrophist’ perspective of Grant on the world economy

Important political differences occurred over the world financial crisis in 1987. As soon as the 1987 share crash took place, Grant was predicting a world economic slump, “within six months”, along the lines of 1929-32. His thinking was unfortunately, reflected in the pages of Militant. In its initial comments on these developments it stated: “A major slump in production and trade is assured, perhaps even before the summer of 1988”. His co-thinker, Michael Roberts, stated that the October crash “is a barometer predicting the impending storm that will exceed anything experienced by capitalism in the post-war period, possibly matching the great slump of the 1930s”.

This approach was vigorously opposed by me and Lynn Walsh in the British Executive and National Committees, and by me, Tony Saunois and Bob Labi in the International Secretariat of the CWI. As usual, Woods slavishly supported Grant. It was not possible to have a dialogue with Grant on this issue. Instead, there were bitter denunciations of Bob Labi, for instance, for daring to question this analysis, earning Bob the reprimand from Grant that “he did not understand the ABC of Marxism”. We argued that the huge reserves of Japan and West Germany could allow the bourgeois, at the cost of storing up difficulties for later, to temporarily bale out the economy and thereby world capitalism. Grant’s approach would completely disorientate our members in Britain and internationally. If his astronomical, not to say astrological, prediction did not come to pass it would set in a mood of disappointment, if not dejection, amongst our members.

It was necessary to approach this issue in a balanced way, something foreign to Grant, Woods and Sewell. World capitalism still possessed huge layers of fat, which it could eat into, in order to stave off an immediate crisis. We argued that short-term measures could be taken, which would only have the effect of piling up problems and aggravating the crisis at a later stage. Contrary to the analysis of Grant, this is exactly what happened. A revival of world capitalism took place in the aftermath of the October 1987 crisis. Indeed, the huge injection of credit fuelled a growth of world capitalism at a greater rate than the period prior to the crash. This ended with the recession of the early 1990s.

But timing in politics and, it should be added, in the art of political economy, is important. Grant had made a habit of criticising Gerry Healy – which he repeats in his book – for continually predicting a new 1929 over a period of decades, but he made the same ‘catastrophist’ error in 1987. No doubt, if a new 1929-type crisis should occur, he will declare he was right all along! Even a permanently stopped clock is right twice a day. This approach allows the capitalist ideologists a field day in picturing the Marxists as incapable of analysing real processes in a balanced fashion.

These theoretical blunders of Grant have to be taken against the background of his assertion that he was “the only one” who was capable of interpreting Marx’s economic ideas and applying them to the modern era. It is a matter of public record that he completely failed the test on this occasion. Of course, he denounced those who were correct on this issue for having an “eclectic” approach because we did not support his one-dimensional approach. We, on the other hand, contrasted his approach to that of Trotsky who, in the Third Period of the Comintern’s Errors written in December 1929, advanced the prognosis that there were at that time four possibilities in the economic sphere: a slow-down in the rate of growth; a recession with a small drop in production; a severe slump; or a combination of these three!

Trotsky did not come down for any one of these variants. In the eyes of Grant and Woods he was an “empiricist” and “eclectic”! Marxism is a science, but science is based on the analysis of real processes, not a priori predictions made with the false confidence of an astrologer. Yet it was approached in precisely this fashion by Grant and Woods. Not satisfied with a broad analysis of major trends, they attempted to impose a ridiculous timescale of six months for the coming slump. This was even carried over into the written material of Grant, both in Britain and internationally. When the long-predicted slump failed to materialise, this undoubtedly disorientated a whole layer of comrades in Britain and internationally.

Grant made a similar mistake on Namibia, arguing that the South African forces present in the country would not withdraw, and on South Africa itself where, similarly, Grant argued that it was impossible for an agreement to take place between de Klerk’s National Party and Mandela’s ANC, which would lead to the dismantling of the apartheid regime and the introduction of a form of bourgeois democracy.

At sea on Stalinism

An even worse blunder centred on perspectives for Stalinism in the USSR and the possibility of capitalist restoration. Militant and the CWI had underestimated the possibility of capitalist restoration in the USSR and Eastern Europe. This was partly explained by our lack of a base within the Stalinist states and, thereby, the absence of a gauge with which to measure fully the degeneration of the Stalinist regimes. However, it was those -who subsequently became the majority of Militant – who first raised the possibility of capitalist restoration. This was fervently denied by Grant and Woods, who operated, and still do, with an outmoded perception of the real situation which existed.

Following Thatcher’s visit to Poland in 1988 and the tumultuous support that she received in Gdansk, we began to pose the possibility of bourgeois restoration. In fact, pro-capitalist features were strongly represented in the movement of 1980-81 around Solidarity and, going further back, even in the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968. At that stage, however, the possibility of ‘reform’, of Dubcek’s “Socialism with a human face”, was still quite strong. The boom of the 1980s and the further collapse of the Stalinist states contributed, particularly in Poland after the suppression of the movement of 1980-81, to a pronounced pro-capitalist mood, reflected in the support Thatcher and George Bush senior received in visits to Poland. The 1980s boom helped to reinforce this mood in all the Stalinist states.

We therefore posed tentatively, too tentatively as it turned out, at the CWI’s World Congress of 1988, the possibility of capitalist restoration in Poland and the rest of the Stalinist world. This was before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but it was quite evident that there was growing opposition to the Stalinist regimes then. Such a possibility was vehemently denied by Grant. In a lead-off on Stalinism in 1988, I ‘set a hare running’ by posing the issue of bourgeois restoration. This caused a certain amount of controversy at the congress but Grant as the so-called “leading theoretician”, refused to speak. He confided privately that it was because he disagreed with my lead-off but was not prepared to take the floor to answer it.

This was not the case later when an increasing divergence developed between the two trends on the issue of Stalinism. We sent delegations to Eastern Europe – particularly to Poland – who reported back on the mass sentiment for a return to capitalism. Grant refused to recognise this and condemned those who gave the report as “being out of touch”. The same thing happened when comrades spent a period in Russia and reported on a growing pro-capitalist mood.

1991 coup

The differences on this issue came to the fore over the August 1991 coup in the Soviet Union. On 19^th and 20^th August, the old guard ‘conservative’ wing of the bureaucracy organised a coup against Gorbachev. Grant and Co leaned towards “critical support” for the organisers of the coup! They subsequently denied this because of the embarrassment of seeming to side with the pro-Stalinist wing of the bureaucracy. But in a document they put forward as part of the internal discussion within Militant they stated: “If, as was entirely possible, the regime had been compelled to carry out a policy based on recentralisation and the planned economy, accompanied by terror, this would also give a certain impetus to the productive forces for a period of time.” [The Truth about the Coup.]

Woods and Grant clung to their outmoded position until the late 1990s. In Ted Grant’s book, Russia – from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, Alan Woods, in his introduction, writes: “It is worth recalling that twenty-five years ago Ted Grant had correctly analysed the reasons for the crisis of Stalinism, and predicted its collapse. Moreover, he was the only one to do so.”

This is a breathtaking re-writing of history as all Militant supporters, including the leadership, which included ourselves, had this position, based upon our readings of the works of Trotsky. Moreover, Ted Grant was not the only one to analyse the reasons why we expected the collapse of Stalinism to take place. But then Woods writes: “The only correction that has to be introduced concerns the perspective for a return to capitalism in Russia. For a long time, the author considered that such a development was ruled out. That has been shown to be incorrect.”

We in common with Ted Grant also expected that Russia would not return to capitalism, for the reasons that we have explained more fully elsewhere (see The Rise of Militant pp321-414). But when faced with the reality of what was taking place in Poland and elsewhere in the Stalinist world we did alter our perspective, anticipating a return back to capitalism beginning in Poland and, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in Eastern Europe and in Russia itself.

Ted Grant, unfortunately, stubbornly resisted drawing this conclusion, refusing to face up to facts and believing that the attempts to return back to capitalism were of purely a temporary character. He persisted with this method right up to 1997 and beyond, as Woods admits: “It is the contention of the author [Grant] that the movement towards capitalism in Russia has not yet been carried to a definitive conclusion, and may yet be reversed.”

Now, in their current Prospects for the World Revolution, they confess: “We have to admit that things have not turned out as we expected a few years ago. We did not expect that the crisis of world capitalism would be postponed for as long as it has been. This has given Russian capitalism sufficient time to establish itself. The movement towards capitalism has lasted for ten years. The new productive system and its property relations have had time to penetrate the consciousness of the masses. This process has lasted much longer than we expected. The main responsibility lies with the Stalinists who have capitulated on everything…

“Ten years is sufficient time to judge. We have to say that the Rubicon has now been passed. The movement towards capitalism has been contradictory, with many cross-currents, but after every crisis the process has continued with renewed force.”

Compare Grant’s method today as indicated by these lines in relation to the ex-Stalinist states and the position he took in relation to China and Eastern Europe in the 1940s. Along with the rest of the leadership of the Revolutionary Communist Party, he recognised what was taking place, a virtually unstoppable process – given the relationship of world forces -towards the establishment of Stalinist states. Belatedly, the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI – forerunners of the United Secretariat) recognised this in 1953! Grant was not hesitant in using this to show the false method of the ISFI leadership. Yet now he made the same kind of mistake only in an opposite sense, of this time failing to understand the process of capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Given the national and international background against which these processes were developing, there was no possibility of a short-term ‘reversal’ of the process of capitalist restoration, a social counter-revolution, which was taking place in Russia in the 1990s.

Today in Eastern Europe (and tomorrow in Russia as well) the beginning of an opposition to this is under way. But that does not cancel out the fact that in the early 1990s, faced with the reality of capitalist restoration, Woods and Grant buried their heads in the sand, in the same way as the leadership of the ISFI did in the late 1940s. This is illustrated by what Grant wrote in the latter part of his book: “As a matter of fact, even now the class nature of the Russian state has not been decisively determined… It is a question of what property form will ultimately prevail – nationalisation or private property. This struggle is still unfolding, but the result is not yet decided.” [Page 38.] This shows just how out of touch Grant and Woods were, and are, in relation to a serious analysis of processes in the former Stalinist states. At the time that the above was written, 1997, a social counter-revolution was in full swing, a ‘fast track’ route to capitalism.

Re-establishment of Stalinist regime

Their perspective in 1991 was for the re-establishment of a Stalinist regime, resting on the planned economy, if the coup organisers had succeeded. Moreover, they had argued that this was the most likely outcome of the coup. The previous December, Woods had argued in a discussion on Stalinism: “Let us be clear, even if there is a struggle between rival wings of the bureaucracy, one wing openly pro-capitalist and another wing – for their own purposes – trying to defend the basis of the nationalised economy, it would be a fundamental mistake to think that we would be neutral in that situation, even if you had a situation where sections of workers were supporting the other wing.” He continued: “Trotsky said that in principle you couldn’t rule out in advance the possibility of a united front, a temporary and partial united front, between the Trotskyists and the Stalinist bureaucracy, if it came to an open civil war and an attempt to restore capitalism in the USSR” [Woods addressing an international meeting of Militant, quoted in The Collapse of Stalinism, part 2]. And as we have seen, they clung to this false perspective for years afterwards.

We, on the other hand, argued that there was a fundamental difference between the situation in the Soviet Union in 1991 and the period when Trotsky had envisaged a position of “critical support” for a section of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy had completely degenerated, with the great majority abandoning support for central planning and the old system. They had embraced capitalism as the way forward. There was no significant wing of the bureaucracy, in the period leading up to 1991, which still adhered to the planned economy. Grant was so convinced that the coup would succeed that, as the TV reports came through on the collapse of the coup on Wednesday 21 August, he denounced them as “lies” and “bourgeois propaganda”.

He and Woods failed to grasp that even if the coup had succeeded this would not have led to a restoration of the Stalinist regimes. The ‘old guard’ regimes would have been re-established but not the planned economy. Jaruselski had tried this in Poland in 1981 but subsequently admitted: “Our greatest mistake was to keep the party’s monopoly on power, defend nationalised industry and the class struggle”. He accordingly moved towards an openly pro-capitalist position, paving the way for the coming to power of Solidarity and Walesa. And yet, Woods and Grant, in their document The Truth about the Coup, argued: “What would have happened for example if Yanayaev and Co [the main organisers of the coup] had seized power? Is it a foregone conclusion that they would have carried out their stated aim of moving towards a ‘market economy’ albeit at a more gradual pace? For the majority of the International Secretariat, this is a simple question to answer: in today’s situation, ‘objectively… Yes. ‘ But that does not exhaust the question.”

They then advanced the idea that the coup organisers would have been compelled to re-establish the elements of the planned economy, completely ignoring the experience of Jaruselski and the evolution of the Chinese Stalinists in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. They, of course, attempted to cover their tracks by accusing us of tail-ending Yeltsin in the August coup. This was despite the fact that we publicly distanced ourselves from the pro-capitalist Yeltsinites, some of whom flooded towards the defence of their hero at the White House in Moscow.

The mass of the population in the Soviet Union was opposed to the coup. Some had illusions in Yeltsin, the majority were opposed because of a fear that the elementary democratic rights they had gained since 1989 would be snuffed out if the coup succeeded. That is why a series of strikes took place in Moscow, the Ukraine and elsewhere (see pp. 449-451 in The Rise of Militant for a fuller explanation).

Gulf War: “Some of you will be killed”

The position taken by Grant and Woods on the August events in Russia alienated them further from the great majority of our members. Grant’s authority had already been severely undermined – not by the wicked Taaffe and his “clique” – but by his own lamentable performance during the Gulf War. There were serious differences within the Militant leadership over the war which had been simmering behind the scenes, which then broke out into the open, necessitating the calling of a Special Conference to discuss the Gulf War in January 1991 (held at the London School of Economics).

Again, Grant wanted to predict exact time scales, arguing that if a land war was to break out it would last for a minimum of six months and probably for two years. This unqualified statement was repeated in the Spanish organisation of the CWI, clearly due to the influence of Woods. However, in Britain, Militant never once carried such a statement. There was not a single other member of the Executive Committee, including Sewell, who adopted this approach apart from Grant himself.

Yet nothing demonstrated his false approach more clearly than his position on conscription. At a rally at the LSE before the special conference on the Gulf War, he made this statement: “If conscription is introduced, let us be clear, the youth must go into the army. Of course [directly addressing the youth in the audience], some of you will be killed. But for every one killed, ten will take your place.”

This statement was greeted with stunned disbelief and anger. It was made despite the fact that a clear majority of the leadership disagreed with Grant’s proposals and had attempted to dissuade him from these ideas publicly. Prominent in expressing this was none other than Sewell himself, who did not hesitate to make disparaging remarks about Grant’s incapacity, usually behind his back. However, his best efforts were of no avail.

After the meeting, Grant was besieged by young people opposing his views. Despite this, at the conference the next day he made exactly the same points in the course of introducing the discussion on the Gulf War. This produced a near revolt from the floor, with the majority clearly opposed to his statement. I intervened in the discussion, attempting to save him, as had been done on previous occasions, from the ire of Militant’s membership. It was pointed out that, in the event of conscription, which we considered so unlikely that it was effectively ruled out, we would call a special conference to determine our attitude.

It was also pointed out that it was wrong to merely repeat Trotsky’s position at the time of the Second World War, as Grant and Woods did. At that time, the outlook of the mass of the working class was determined by the threat of invasion from a foreign fascist power, with all that implied: the destruction of democratic rights and the workers’ organisations. In 1990-91, the Marxists were faced with a colonial war of intervention by imperialism in the Gulf. If Grant’s position of, in effect, adapting to conscription and going into the army had become the public position of Militant, it would have made it virtually impossible for us to participate in the growing antiwar movements. Such movements were initially bound to have pacifist overtones. Marxists are not pacifists. But at all times Marxists distinguish between the false hypocritical ‘pacifism’ of the capitalists and their reformist shadows within the labour movement, which invariably acts as a cover for war and the genuine antiwar mood of the youth.

We argued that, in the unlikely event of conscription being introduced, this would not mean that young people would passively go into a conscripted army. We could have seen the same kind of revolt that took place at the time of the Vietnam War, with mass opposition and a mass refusal to participate in this war. The short duration of the Gulf War, contrary to all the expectations of Grant and Woods, saved us and them from further embarrassment on this issue. This dispute was a skirmish between the growing diverging tendencies within the ranks of Militant, which was to break out into open divisions just a few months later. It did not however, prevent a serious intervention in the antiwar movement, both in Britain and internationally.

The split of 1991

The month of April 1991 was a decisive one in the evolution of Militant. The national leadership unanimously decided to support the setting up of an independent organisation in Scotland to take account of the favourable situation which had developed for us there. Grant subsequently maintained that this was the issue which destroyed “40 years of work” – now repeated by Sewell – and was the pretext for breaking away from Militant. Yet, it is a matter of record that both Grant and Sewell voted in favour of this decision. We give the details in chapter 44 of The Rise of Militant. Indeed, they both enthusiastically spoke in favour of the proposal and voted for it at a National Committee. They did not then complain that this decision was “rushed through”. If this was the case how were two experienced and allegedly “wily” operators such as Grant and Sewell rushed into taking such an important decision, which represented such a historic departure?

The truth is that they accepted the decision because of the pressure which had been exerted on the leadership of Militant by the complete collapse and emptying out of the Labour Party. For months and years before this decision, the ranks of our party were discussing the taking of such an initiative. Indeed, Tony Mulhearn maintains that in 1983, at the time of the expulsion of the Militant Editorial Board, Grant in a discussion with him, had raised the possibility of us setting up an independent organisation with the name ‘Socialist Labour Party’. He never, at any time, shared these views with the leadership of Militant.

Rejected on the issue of a “clique” he, Woods and subsequently Sewell then moved on to political issues, which involved dogmatically defending past positions which were no longer relevant in the changed situation of the late 1980s, never mind the 1990s. Even before the setting up of an independent organisation in Scotland we had supported local unofficial Labour candidates in Liverpool against the right-wing group that had hijacked the Labour party there. The truth is, rather than in 1991, it would have been more correct in 1987 to have launched an open, independent organisation, in Liverpool first rather than in Scotland. In fact, I did raise this possibility but was vehemently opposed by Grant and found opposition even from some leading Liverpool comrades. If we had launched an independent organisation in 1987 we would have been better poised to intervene in the battle against the expulsion of the Liverpool Militant leadership and also in the huge mass campaign we conducted against the poll tax.

Nevertheless, belatedly, we did recognise the changed situation, the emptying out of the Labour Party, which Grant, Woods and Sewell refused to accept. They summed up their arguments in a lengthy document submitted for discussion within the ranks of Militant. They argued: “Our work in the mass organisations of the British working class was of a long-term character” and should be continued. They failed to consider the changes that had taken place in the outlook of significant sections of the workers to what we always considered in the past to be the ‘traditional organisations’ of the working class.

The Labour Party

These ‘dialecticians’ refused to recognise changes even when they struck them on the nose. Grant argued that the internal position of the Labour Party had not fundamentally changed: “In the 1950s, the internal regime was marked by witch-hunts against the Bevanite left, bans and proscriptions, the repeated closure of the Labour youth organisation”. However, we stressed that the Labour Party of the 1990s was far to the right than that of the 1950s. While attacks had been made on the left in the earlier period, the right had never succeeded in completely destroying the left within the constituencies. Indeed, in the 1950s the Bevanite left dominated the majority of Constituency Labour Party seats on the National Executive Committee.

Through Kinnock, however, then through Smith and now through Blair the Labour Party’s internal democracy, particularly in the local parties, has been well nigh destroyed. That process has been taken much further in the 1990s. Only stick-in-the-mud dogmatists could intone in this period that “nothing had changed”. Not only has the Labour Party changed internally but its position in the consciousness of the working class has undergone dramatic changes, since the early 1990s. Even in the 1997 general election, many workers “held their noses” and voted Labour, not through any enthusiasm but as a means of getting rid of the Tories. Now there is a wide perception amongst workers that this party no longer represents them.

This mood is even more pronounced within the trade unions. Active trade unionists have long disengaged from involvement in the Labour Party at local level. The activists of the local Labour parties consist of councillors and other participants in the Labour machine, seasoned, perhaps, with a few disorientated members of ‘revolutionary’ groups and ex-revolutionaries who have adapted to the ex-social democrats.

Our turn to more independent work in the 1990s did not initially mean a change in our analysis of the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers’ party. However, the further move towards the right: the abandonment of Clause IV, the complete dismantling of internal democracy, the pro-bourgeois position of Blair – he is more at ease in the company of Berlusconi and Aznar, and George Bush junior than with the ex-social democratic leaders of France or Germany – all contributed to the change in our analysis. We drew the conclusion that the Labour Party was a bourgeois party and was no longer a viable field of work for genuine socialists, never mind Marxists or revolutionaries. This allowed us to intervene successfully in the struggles of the working class in Britain and Europe which were taking place outside and in opposition to New Labour. We took initiatives such as Youth against Racism in Europe (YRE), which had a profound effect in the early 1990s and organised the biggest-ever Europe-wide demonstration of youth against fascism. We have also successfully intervened in the anti-capitalist movement and continue to expand our influence within the trade unions.

The Socialist Party and the CWI have been in this period a recognised important part of the left and has been successful in attracting some of the best of the new generation of young people and workers to our banner. We have sought to provide an alternative, socialist pole of attraction by standing in elections and in Britain is the most successful organisation to the left of Labour – with councillors – who have rallied opposition to New Labour-dominated local councils which have carried out cuts in services, sackings, etc. The Grant group have been utterly lifeless and moribund, sitting in empty Labour parties – so far as any parties meet – proposing resolutions but not having the slightest effect on the course of events within the workers’ movement.

Perspectives for the Labour Party now

We have also advanced the idea of a new mass workers’ party and predicted the development of a mood amongst workers, particularly trade unionists, to separate themselves from the capitalist New Labour party. Witness the series of resolutions proposed at British union conferences to weaken or break the link between the trade unions and the Labour Party.

Some trade union leaders in the past period, it is true, have proposed to ‘reclaim the Labour Party’. We have no fetish for organisational forms of struggle for the working class. History knows all kinds of changes, as Lenin pointed out. There have been occasions when bourgeois parties, or parts of them, have evolved towards the left, ending up as new formations of the working class. This was the case in Greece with Andreas Papandreou taking some workers out of the liberal bourgeois Centre Union led by his father George, as well as winning new, fresh layers to found PASOK, which became a powerful socialist party in Greece. PASOK has also shifted dramatically towards the right and is recognised as hardly any different to the other bourgeois parties. We predicted this in a debate with Grant and Woods in Greece in 1992. Now, ten years later, a section of his Greek supporters who opposed us then have belatedly come to the same conclusion.

It can never be theoretically discounted – nor have we ever said this on any occasion – that an ex-workers’ party which has degenerated into a bourgeois formation could, under the impact of mighty economic and political events, begin to shift once more towards the left and transform itself into a vehicle for workers. It is not theoretically excluded that the same thing could happen to the Labour Party in Britain, with Blairism being rejected, a big shift towards the left taking place and a new arena of struggle opening up for socialists and Marxists. This, however, is definitively not possible through the present feeble attempts by some union leaders to ‘reclaim the Labour Party’. At most, they wish for a little bit more influence, “a cup of tea at 10 Downing Street” with Blair, rather than a root and branch counter-movement against Blair – a programme to clear out these capitalist agents and a return of Labour to its socialist aspirations.

The Grantites completely exaggerate developments in the Labour Party. This was indicated by their role in the Labour Party conference in September/October 2002 in Blackpool. Predictably, the ‘Grant Tendency’, on their website, hails this conference as indicating that “the old traditions of the Labour Party are not dead at all”. They accordingly give a false picture of Blair at the conference as close to defeat on the Private Finance Initiative (PFI – privatisation of public services), and on “his plans to wage war on Iraq”. In reality, all that Blair conceded on PFI was that a “review” should take place, which the union leaders acceded to. On Iraq, a resolution was accepted that “war” could be waged through the United Nations if “proof” of Iraq’s guilt was obtained. After the conference, the right wing boasted that they won by “four to one” during it. The most that can be said about this conference was that, even in the highly sanitised New Labour party – with most of the delegates from the constituencies supporting the right wing – the pressures outside were reflected in a distorted fashion. The conference was a very pale echo of the anti-war mood amongst young people and more thinking workers.

The expectations of the ‘Grant Tendency’ amount to “more next year and in the future”. They write: “On this basis, next year’s TUC congress and Labour Party conference will see even greater opposition”. They even go on to prettify what the Labour Party represented in the past by writing: “He [Blair] is paving the way for the struggle between the classes that will see the Labour Party reclaimed, transformed, and restored as a political fighting organisation of the working class” (our emphasis). This is a gross opportunist interpretation of what the Labour Party represented historically. When has the Labour Party ever been a clear “political fighting organisation of the working class”? We always pointed to its dual character, bourgeois at the top but with a working class base and subjected to the pressure and the power of the working class outside. This sometimes compelled the Labour leaders and even Labour governments to undertake radical measures but never was it a “political fighting organisation of the working class” in a clear socialist or Marxist sense.

Reclaim the Labour Party?

This is just one indication of the opportunist adaptation of this organisation. They were shipwrecked by the change in the character of the Labour Party in the late 1980s and 1990s. The effects of the defeat of the miners’ strike were added to in the 1990s by the collapse of Stalinism and, with it, the planned economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This gave the possibility for the bourgeois internationally to conduct a colossal ideological offensive against socialism and in favour of the ‘market’. The CWI was the only Trotskyist organisation that analysed this process in a balanced fashion, pointing to the inevitable effects of this in strengthening the bourgeois and weakening the working class but not in the same sense as happened in the interwar period with the triumph of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain. The potential power of the working class largely remains intact and this will be demonstrated even more clearly under the hammer blows of the economic recession and in a war against Iraq.

Contrast this with the pathetic statements of the ‘Grantites’, which pass as serious analysis. Quite incredibly, in the article on the Labour Party conference, they can write: “The past twenty years or so were years of lull in the movement”. In these last two decades we have witnessed in Britain alone, the miners’ strike, the events in Liverpool, the poll tax struggle and the defeat of Thatcher, as well as the rise of a powerful Trotskyist organisation around Militant. These tumultuous events it is clear, bypassed this conservative and largely office-bound tendency.

The union leaders have been pushed into semi-opposition to Blair because of the mounting hatred amongst workers for New Labour and what it represents. There is an increasing demand that no further trade union finance should go to this anti-working class party. In China the unfortunate families of people executed by the state are compelled to pay for the executioner’s bullets. This ‘tendency’ advocates a similar compliance by British trade unionists: continue paying a levy to a party which seeks to ‘mow them down’ through privatisation, attacks on education, welfare, etc. Such advice is rejected by workers and trade unionists as they increasingly move away from New Labour and demand that the precious resources of the unions should no longer be wasted on this capitalist party.

The trade union leaders want to deflect this movement into one ‘last’ effort to ‘reclaim’ the Labour Party. Yet the preferred ‘left’ candidate of the union leaders to Blair is Gordon Brown, whose economic policies, bourgeois to a fault, have served as the backbone to Blairism since it has been in government. The fact that Brown has partially increased public expenditure – to a level that is not yet up to that of the Tory Major government – has increased his ‘left’ credentials, has conjured up the vision of ‘Old Labour’, amongst the right-wing trade union leaders and even some new left leaders. It will prove to be a chimera. So worried are the Blairites at the pressure from below to separate the unions from the Labour Party that they are even considering repealing one part of the Tories’ anti-trade union legislation – compulsory ballots over political funds. This is because of the fear that there will be a mass rejection of the link to Labour by trade unionists in these ballots (see Socialism Today, September 2002).

Can Labour move to the left?

If there was a serious prospect of shifting Labour towards the left, so that it became once more an instrument of struggle for working people, then no serious Marxist would or could stand aside from this. Unlike Woods and Grant we are not dogmatists. We have to follow the march of events, the inevitable shifts and turns in the situation to determine Marxist policy, including strategy and tactics towards mass organisations of the working class. However, it is not a serious Marxist policy to continue with a tactic which is barren and fruitless, which means that all you do is intone the same mantra that ‘nothing has changed’. This will only isolate the Marxists from any real movement which takes place. Even if, in 1991, it could be conceded that some time in the future the Labour Party might change, this was no justification for adopting the sterile position that, therefore, Marxists should just sit on their hands, ‘wait’, not try to actively prepare forces for the current and future battles.

Timescale is not unimportant in politics as in warfare. Taking opportunities in situations when the time is ripe is an art which is only acquired and honed in a constant discourse within a healthy Marxist organisation and in a dialogue with the working class. In 1991, we took the decision to embark on a different tactic. This has been successful in consolidating the points of support which Marxism built up in the past in Britain and internationally.

On this issue in the past even Grant was not so dogmatic. As he points out in his book, in 1941 the Workers’ International League (WIL), of which he was part, had concluded: “that there was not much going on in the Labour Party; that the activity, in so far as it took place, on the part of the working class, was industrial activity… we convinced ourselves that nothing much could be gained by maintaining the position of entrism at that stage.” In 1941, this was an issue of tactics and not a principle. Why, therefore, had it become a principled question in 1991 and allegedly threatened “40 years of work”?

Later on, in the 1950s, Grant would write about the “problems of tactics as tactics, and not as once and for all fetishes” [Problems of Entrism]. In 1957, he also stated: “The situation demands above all flexible tactics. Entry must not be a fetish, any more than the concept of open work. Our tactic at a given time is dictated by the opportunities open to us and the possibilities of results.” The tactically ‘flexible’ Grant of the 1940s and 1950s had become the ossified dogmatist in the 1990s, along with Woods.

Woods on ‘independent work’ in Spain

The latter, however, prior to 1991, was moving in exactly the same direction as the majority of Militant leaders, particularly in relation to the problems of building a base in Spain. Alan Woods had played an important role in developing the CWI organisation in Spain, which had led some important struggles. However, it was confronting the same problems as in Britain in still being tied to the socialist party PSOE. This had led to discussion on the future orientation of the organisation. In March 1989, he reported in a written form on the discussions of tactics within the leading body of the Spanish organisation. He stated that there was “a widespread mood amongst workers and especially the UGT [socialist trade union federation] activists against voting for PSOE [Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party – now the ex-social democracy].

He went on to say that “PSOE itself is an empty shell [and] support for PSOE is virtually seen as support for the police, torturers and Spanish domination [of the Basques] among wide layers, especially the youth.” He pointed to a leading Spanish comrade, ‘Rati’, arguing for the Spanish organisation to put up its own candidates against PSOE and commented on the difficulty of convincing members of the Spanish organisation to advocate “a vote for PSOE on the grounds that we would be isolated. Not even the rank and file of the organisation would participate.” (In fact, we had this experience in 1987 in Alava, when the Spanish Centre managed to convince the Basque comrades to support PSOE against their wishes.) There was formal acceptance; the rank and file “voted with their feet”.

What then was the answer of Woods to the dilemma which confronted the Spanish organisation? He wrote: “However, given the rottenness of the existing traditional organisations, if ever there was a case for independent (or semi-independent) work, this is it. While it is necessary to stress and repeat the need to orientate towards the mass organisation, there is in my view a danger of overlooking opportunities which exist for winning workers and youth directly to our organisation under the banner of Marxism.”

So Woods was in favour of considering independent work outside of the ‘rotten’ traditional organisations. Yet any later attempt to move in this direction in Britain or in Scotland was condemned as pure heresy. Conditions had not changed but Woods had because it was necessary for him and Grant to move away from the issue of the ‘clique’ – which had been totally discredited in discussions – to seek some political justification for the continued opposition to the majority. For these ‘principled’, would-be leaders, if that meant repudiating previous positions, so be it.

Double standards on ‘independent organisation’

Grant and Sewell voted in favour of the setting up of an independent organisation, both in the Executive Committee and in a National Committee. Sewell dismissed our tentative proposals for such an organisation in Scotland alone, with loud calls for the setting up of a ‘revolutionary party’ on an all-Britain scale. When he moved over into the camp of Grant and his brother, this ‘baggage’ was unceremoniously dropped. Now any departure from an increasingly empty Labour Party towards independent or semi-independent work was viciously attacked. The proposal to stand – not as a ‘Militant’ candidate (as Sewell wrongly asserts) but as a ‘Real Labour’ candidate in the Walton by-election, as Harry Ratner pointed out – was denounced as ‘suicide’. Our candidate, Leslie Mahmoud, received 2,613 votes, a highly commendable achievement in the circumstances. This was despite the vicious campaign of character assassination conducted against her and Militant in general at that stage.

This was denounced by Sewell, Woods and Grant. Their stand was just another example of their double standards. The vote of the RCP in the Neath by-election was 1,781, which Grant commends as a great success. Yet the 2,613 votes for our candidate in Walton was characterised as a “disaster”.

But others more usually prone to criticise Militant praised the campaign. Paul Foot, columnist in The Guardian and then of the Daily Mirror, wrote in the SWP’s journal, Socialist Worker: “I read every word that Leslie Mahmoud was ‘humiliated’ in the Walton by-election, but I can write from long experience of humiliations at by-elections.” He gave examples of five candidates of the SWP who stood for parliament in the 1970s and added: “But I can say that the total vote for all candidates was less than the 2,600 which Leslie Mahmoud won at Walton… I think that’s a good vote in the circumstances. It’s a reasonable base on which to continue the fight for jobs in Liverpool.”

Can’t reclaim RMT flat

What a contrast to the sneering tone of Woods, Sewell and Grant after the by-election! It cut no ice with the vast majority of Militant supporters. Incredibly, this tiny organisation has intoned year after year that nothing has changed in the character of the Labour Party, that the masses will turn to the Labour Party, the right will be defeated and the new mass left wing will arise in the Labour Party.

Woods himself wrote in 1988 apropos Spain: “No one can say how long it will take before there is the development of a mass leftwing in PSOE. It could take a couple of years or it could be next month.” His timescale is out by at least 14 years as no left wing has arisen in PSOE and it is doubtful that it will in the immediate future given the bourgeoisification of this party, as with the other ex-‘traditional organisations’ of the ex-social democracy throughout Western Europe. Like barnacles they cling to the Labour Party – although very few of them are active within it for the very good reason that there is no activity within the Labour Party – while others have never been near the Labour Party since they separated from us. But rather than recognising their errors and engaging in fruitful work outside the Labour Party, they have retreated to the study.

In the early 1990s it was necessary to argue about the class character of the Labour Party. However, since then its degeneration has developed at such a pace and scale that only ossified groupings which cling to outmoded formulae could possibly justify the characterisation of the Labour Party, as we once did, as a ‘bourgeois workers’ party’.

The socialist rank and file has long gone from the Labour Party. The membership is increasingly middle class and the internal democracy and structures of the Labour Party have been all but destroyed by Blair and Mandelson’s ‘project’. The National Executive Committee of the Labour Party has recently taken the decision that no policy issues will be discussed by this body but by special ‘forums’. Well-known left-wing journalist John Pilger estimated that there were no more than five MPs, out of 412 in the Parliamentary Labour Party, who could be described as consistently ‘left wing’.

The Blair leadership is not even considered now to be ‘radical’, let alone socialist. An Italian MP has described Blair correctly, not as the leader of the ‘centre-left’, but as the key leader of the ‘centre-right’ in Europe at the present time. He is in a bloc with Aznar in Spain and Berlusconi in Italy to push forward the ‘Anglo-Saxon/US’ model of neo-liberalism.

The fact that some workers – an increasingly diminishing number – would still vote Labour in a general election is not of decisive significance in measuring the class character of this party. In the US many workers would vote for the Democrats – seen traditionally as a more ‘worker-friendly’ and radical bourgeois party (although this was severely undermined by Clinton) – than the openly bourgeois Republican Party. With no mass alternative in existence, the bulk of the workers who vote may still do so for the ex-social democratic parties as a means of blocking the road to the right-wing bourgeois parties and, in some cases, to block the far right. But this does not mean that the masses still view these parties as they did in the past, as ‘their party’.

Nor is it likely that the trade unions – whose power and influence has been dramatically reduced and will be reduced even further – will move in and transform these parties. The mechanism for doing this has been obliterated over the last ten years. Some unions, like the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) and the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) are presently in a halfway house situation. They have withdrawn some funds from right-wing MPs and transferred some of it to left MPs, and have raised the vague notion of moving in to reclaim the Labour Party. However, Bob Crow, RMT leader, has admitted: “Reclaim the Labour Party? We [the RMT] can’t even reclaim our flat!” (John Prescott, New Labour Deputy Prime Minister, presently lives in an RMT-owned apartment.)

But this mood is largely confined to the tops of the unions. At the base there is a growing and determined mood for the unions to stop paying money and separate themselves from the Labour Party, which attacks them while in government and which is now seen as no different, and in some cases worse, than the previous Tory government.

A similar blunder on Italy

The responsibility of Marxists and socialists is not to repeat the outmoded formulas of the past but to understand the changed situation, particularly the consciousness of the mass of the working class, and the direction in which this is likely to move. Our demand for a new mass workers’ party is one that will be embraced by the mass of the working class in the future. Between now and that situation, all kinds of transitional formations are possible, of alliances between groups of workers, socialists and Marxists who are prepared to offer an electoral challenge as a means of rallying workers against the neo-liberal programme of the Blair government and also its involvement in the looming imperialist plans for further attacks on Iraq.

The only solution to be offered by Grant and Woods is to quiescently sit on their haunches and wait for a future illusory move into the Labour Party. Their activity is largely of a literary character, and a vapid, vacuous kind at that. It is painful to read the same old phrases, the warmed-up ideas and stale language which have not changed for decades.

A similar blunder was made by this group over perspectives for Italy in the early 1990s. In the debate over tactics towards the ‘traditional organisations’ in Italy at the time of the split in 1991-92, which reveals most clearly the political myopia of Woods, their opportunism in switching tactics and the dishonest fashion in which this was done. There was a clear difference between Grant, Woods and their Italian supporters, and the majority of the International Secretariat of the CWI. The IS argued that the split of the Rifondazione Comunista (RC) from the ex-Communist Party Democratic Left (PDS) represented a clear opportunity for our Italian comrades to participate in its ranks. This was initially rejected by Woods and his Italian supporters. They argued that the formation of the RC was a mistake and would melt away. This is clear from the written exchange on the issue.

The IS majority – in a document written by Peter Hadden after a visit to Italy – raised clearly the need for the very small forces, of about 100 members – mostly youth – to concentrate the majority of their forces within the RC. This was completely rejected by the Italian Executive Committee, backed up by Woods and Grant. In a document of theirs, which was a reply to an IS statement, they wrote: “If the RC had attracted thousands of youth, or if it had become an important pole of attraction for a few thousand young workers and shop stewards, which would in itself have created the conditions for debate within it, in other words if the IS majority statements in the RC were not just wishful thinking, then it would have been possible to consider a temporary orientation with all our small forces to recruit the maximum number of comrades. But, comrades, which RC are you talking about? Which country are you talking about? What historical conditions are you talking about?”

Wrong perspectives for Rifondazione

Four years later the leaders of this organisation had seen the futility of remaining within the PDS and were within the RC. When recently confronted by some of their ex-members that they had been wrong and that the IS majority had been correct the lame excuse was that “we were young, and we had dust in our eyes”. But the IS majority did not have ‘dust in their eyes’ but spelt out clearly in a statement in January 1992 – The tactics and orientation of the Italian section – the incorrect methods employed in Italy at the time of the split in the RC from the PDS and the subsequent approach towards this important mass formation. It pointed out: “The RC attracted 150,000 members and, with its communist banner and symbols, appeared to stand on the left of the PDS. This situation demands a similar tactical flexibility as in the past. At the very least, a thorough discussion and review of existing tactics involving the entire membership was called for. No such discussion was held.”

In their perspectives document, the leaders of the Italian organisation wrote: “If the split referred to in the pages of the newspapers takes place, he [Cossuta – one of the original leaders of the RC] will not enjoy great support. Of course he may find a few thousand members, but what then? At the end of the day the majority of the current Cossuta supporters will end up either abandoning political activity or in some small group like DP [Democratica Proletaria].”

The IS commented: “The perspectives held by the comrades were of a small split which would not be long lasting, the majority of Cossuta supporters ending up either out of politics or in a sectarian group like the DP… Events have clearly overtaken and contradicted this analysis. There has not been a period of opportunity in the PDS. Instead, comrades in virtually all areas report that both the PDS and the Left Youth are largely empty and do not provide an arena for fruitful work in the short term. On the other hand, the split has been on a much broader scale than we envisaged… The RC membership not only rose to 150,000 but has remained at this figure. The EC claimed that only 15,000 are active. Even this is a significant figure especially given the lack of activity in the PDS at this stage. In some areas, for example Rome, Turin, the RC has taken on considerable flesh, in others, for example Sicily, the comrades have reported that it is the main force… The 1990 perspectives were clearly wrong on the question of the RC.”

We did not just remain at the level of criticising past positions but advocated a definite turn: “When the split took place our best option would have been to take the bulk of our forces, including the paper, into the RC… To take such a step would not have been a new departure for our tendency internationally.”

We also then examined what the Italian group actually did: “We chose to remain within the PDS, not even seriously considering the possibility of going with the split. With our perspective of a short-lived formation, our starting point was to oppose the split. The ‘special’ [of the Italian paper] we produced on the RC-PDS in April refers to the split as a ‘mistake and damaging’. This and other material explained that ‘this division favours the bureaucrats, the careerists and the bosses’.”

We went on then to comment: “Not surprisingly, we did encounter problems with the [mistaken] approach. Comrades in Bologna reported examples of RC workers who refused to buy the paper because of its unmistakable orientation to the PDS… In Rome [on a demonstration] workers who found out that we intended to stay with the PDS accused us of being opportunist and demanded to know who we would support.”

In fact, the Italian organisation adopted a completely sectarian approach towards the RC. The IS majority advocated that the Italian organisation should immediately seek to be part of the RC. What was the reply of the Italian EC? We will quote here only the most prominent of the many incorrect statements about the RC. They said of the RC: “The split off attracted a part of the old PCI (with an average age of about 50) and various sects, the biggest of which is DP (Proletarian Democracy)… Nine months have gone by and in the last few days the RC has held its congress. We can say that the RC has not been, and is even less today, a pole of attraction for the youth, particularly the young workers who have entered the factories in the last five years.”

Going on to criticise the deficiencies of the political programme of the RC leadership, the Italian EC declared: “With positions like this and with the clash which developed in its congresses, the RC cannot become a credible force for the mass of workers.” It goes on to say that it is “impossible to define the new party as left reformist, never mind centrist. It is a small reformist party, openly opposed to a planned economy, that wishes to preserve, as the PCI did in the past, the communist names and symbols… The RC can recruit old members of the PCI and students already on the left, but is incapable of making headway among the new layers of young workers.”

They also wrote: “It is important to remember that the leader of the ‘Asera Sindicato’, the leftwing of the CGIL, is Bertinotti, a leader of the PDS!” Bertinotti, of course, left the PDS to become now the most well known leader of the RC. So much for ‘foresight’ over astonishment!

Forced to change

A couple of lines later the comrades declare: “The more the objective situation turns in our favour the more the RC will enter into crisis.” The RC was dismissed as “too small” and, in conclusion, the Italian EC declared: “A temporary turn to the RC could be justified if it were capable of giving good short-term results. A long-term orientation to the RC would be justified only if we drew the conclusion that the RC could become a pole of attraction for the masses once they began to move. But we would exclude both these possibilities. We have dedicated a part of our work to the RC because it seemed to us that this could give us better results where the RC had a certain base. Experience has shown that we could attract some individuals but there had been no possibilities of big growth.”

Criticising the IS majority they also declared: “The whole discussion, not just this document [referring to the majority’s proposals for the bulk of our forces to be in the RC], has had a certain aura of unreality, almost as if it were taking place outside the real political world.”

This organisation applied later the ‘unreal’ arguments of the IS majority without recognising this or giving credit to those who proposed it in the first place. In the beginning, however, the Italian EC dug in and compounded their mistakes. But given the pressure of the situation and obviously the effects of our arguments within their ranks, they were forced to do an about turn.

Wrong advice on Sri Lanka

Ted Grant was fond of stating in the past that if you make a mistake you should recognise and correct it openly. Our experience generally was that he never heeded his own advice, but stressed that he had been ‘right all along’, even when it had been patently demonstrated that he was not. Is this not another case of the completely false method of the ‘Grant tendency’?

In judging all political formations, even the tiny ones like this, it is necessary to heed Trotsky’s advice: “It is not so much what is done, but who does it, why they do it, and how they do it.” Having stumbled belatedly into the RC, without a clear explanation of their past mistakes, this guarantees that they will make further mistakes in the future and will act in an unprincipled fashion.

It is not just in the past that the Grant/Woods duo has made fundamental errors. Their false position on the ‘traditional organisations’ has assumed gross proportions in the recent period as, for instance, in Sri Lanka. After a visit to Sri Lanka, Woods wrote a letter to Vasudeva Nanayaka, an important figure on the left in the Sri Lankan workers’ movement who participated in the CWI in the past. This letter advocated that all Marxists should work within the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) which in the past was the main workers’ party in Sri Lanka, but has shrunk to a shell because of the opportunist and nationalist degeneration of the leaders of this organisation over a period of time. He wrote: “We have everything to gain by sticking firmly to the LSSP… It is really incredible how the masses stick to these organisations in spite of everything. Just look at the Labour Party in Britain!”

Comrade Siritunga, the leader of the United Socialist Party, the Sri Lankan section of the CWI, commented on this letter: “I got this letter written by Alan Woods in April 2000 from a member of the LSSP majority faction a long time ago. I did not think it was all that important because it is clear that they are simply living at least a few decades back. The letter bears little relation to the represent Sri Lankan situation at all. After the [October 2000] general election, Vasu’s group, together with the ‘LSSP majority faction’ (all now outside the LSSP!) met to discuss about their political perspectives and future tactics… In that discussion, one of the Woods/Grant followers proposed that everyone who came out of the LSSP in protest at their disastrous coalition politics should rejoin the LSSP. This was ludicrous, especially when considering the fact that Vasu sacrificed his position as an MP and crossed over to the opposition.

“In the election itself the LSSP was wiped out of parliamentary politics and could not win a single seat in the parliament. In that situation anybody campaigning that Vasu should go back into the LSSP politics clearly must be mad…

“In this situation, no one will take Alan Woods’s letter seriously since he is suggesting Vasu and the others should rejoin the LSSP. This is really a ridiculous perspective; anyone who understands simple politics can see this. In reality the LSSP is no more. If anybody is thinking of doing an entry tactic into the LSSP, he should go to the graveyard (cemetery)! The LSSP does not function as a party any more.”

The letter, which was passed around amongst the left in Sri Lanka, made Woods into a laughing stock. The LSSP now has less than 100 members and its only MP is a Buddhist monk. There is more possibility of resurrecting Lazarus than the LSSP.

A change in the situation in Sri Lanka, however, has opened a space for the possibility of developing a new radical formation which could in time lead to a new mass party. All of this is a closed book to Woods and Grant. This is just one further example of how formulas, correct at one stage in history, can turn into their opposite when conditions change and can become a barrier to the Marxist and Trotskyist movement advancing.

A mistake made eleven or twelve years ago in relation to the changed character of the former traditional organisations, or towards perspectives for Stalinism, for instance, may not have been serious if they had been honestly corrected in time. But to stubbornly persist, in the teeth of all the evidence proving the contrary, has condemned this organisation to the sidelines. They have retreated into the study to regurgitate, in a slightly different form, all the old arguments and positions of the past.

Chapter Two

The Party and its Leadership

On the question of organisation, leadership and the method of constructing a viable Marxist organisation they are also completely out of touch. Yet few organisations have adopted such a boastful pose or such a nauseating idolisation of its leading figures as this one. Lenin was always hesitant to write about himself and his ideas in the first person and used the synonym of ‘Bolshevism’ as an expression of what these ideas represented. Similarly, the term ‘Trotskyism’, was invoked first by the Stalinists, Trotsky initially rejected this, stating that those who used this term wished to give a personal name to a body of ideas which represented the continuation of Bolshevism. He also pointed out that his famous 1938 Transitional Programme, The Death of Agony of Capitalism, was “not the product of one man” but the combined and collective thoughts and experiences of a movement, the International Left Opposition.

‘Trotskyism’, through usage over decades, is now synonymous with a distinct trend within the workers’ movement. But any hesitation about personalisation, the cult of personality to give it its right name, is foreign to this group. This is underlined by Sewell when he describes “Ted Grant’s Militant Tendency” (page 211). This term was never used by us before the split of 1992. It has only been used by them since then. They now call themselves officially “The Grant Tendency”. Moreover, they have a special website, “The Ted Grant Website”, the purpose of which is the deification of the leader.

Their approach to the issue of ‘leadership’ goes to the heart of the very profound differences which exist between them and us on the concept of leadership in a revolutionary or would-be revolutionary organisation, which is fighting to become a significant and, ultimately, a mass force. It is axiomatic for Trotskyists that leadership of a party is vital at those turning points in history in which a revolution is possible. Without the presence of Lenin and Trotsky in Russia in October 1917, the Russian Revolution would not have taken place.

In his Diary in Exile – written primarily for his own personal use but which was published after his death – Trotsky, commenting on his own role, wrote: “Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place – on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik party would have prevented it from occurring – of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders. The struggle with ‘Trotskyism’ (that is, with the proletarian revolution) would have commenced in May 1917, and the outcome of the revolution would have been in question. But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin the October Revolution would have been victorious anyway.”

There is nothing “personal” in these remarks, as a study of the successful October Revolution demonstrates. Conversely, the failure of revolutions – where the conditions were much more favourable – on numerous occasions during the 20th century also demonstrates the terrible price the working class pays for the lack of a revolutionary party and a tested and farsighted leadership. Can we therefore deduce from this that, everywhere and on all occasions, it is just one or two outstanding leaders who will make the difference between success and failure in a revolution? It is possible for such a situation to occur but the aim must be to try to ensure that we avoid this situation by trying to widen the numbers and the base of the leadership, by raising the level of all to the tasks of history.

The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 – particularly the latter, who was the theoretical ‘brain’ of the German working class at that stage – shows the terrible price which is paid when the fate of a revolution depends upon one or two individuals and, when they are removed, how the revolution can be defeated. Sometimes, this can be the result but not always under all circumstances is it inevitable. Moreover, it is the responsibility of a farsighted leadership to renew and widen its base by making room and encouraging the development of the next generation. At the same time it is necessary to develop the second, third and other layers of leadership. This is no easy task. There is no easy recipe, but it must be undertaken and be to the forefront of any leadership worthy of the name.

The opposite of Trotsky

Despite lip service to “teamwork”, Grant and Woods epitomised the very opposite of this idea. A continual stress on their own “unique” and “special” role was emphasised. This was done in order to demonstrate that they were indispensable for the future of the organisation, and even of the working class. The leaders of the myriad groups on the ‘revolutionary left’ have used the words of Trotsky quoted above to underline that leadership is vital in a revolution: they are the leadership, ergo they are indispensable.

Although not expressed in as crude a fashion as this, at bottom these are the sentiments of Grant and Woods. And they adduce as evidence the “correctness” of their ideas, particularly of Grant’s, over 70 years! Leave aside, as we have demonstrated, that he has been far from correct in the last historical period. It is ridiculous for Marxists still leading small forces to claim that they are the leadership, that they embody all the experience required to carry through a revolution, when they have never been tested in such a situation.

Moreover, it is one thing to be correct in the period of assembling a force, to even engage in skirmishes – strikes, big campaigns, etc. – which are an absolutely vital task for a real revolutionary leadership. But the real test comes in those periods of abrupt turns in the situation and, above all, in a revolutionary situation. As we have shown, Grant and Woods were found wanting – not in a revolution – but in important preparatory battles which Militant was involved in.

Grant claims justification for his role in the documents he wrote for the WIL and the RCP. We do not want to devalue the contribution that Grant made in the development of these ideas but the final formulations in documents do not tell the whole story of how ideas on perspectives, programme, tactics and strategy evolve within the leadership of a serious revolutionary organisation. In a viable organisation there is a constant process of dialogue and discussion. Who contributes what, where the ideas of one begin, and another end, is sometimes difficult to work out.

Trotsky highlights this when commenting on the role of Plekhanov, ‘the father of Russian Marxism’, Axelrod and Zasulich, in the early Russian Marxist movement. He wrote the following: “Plekhanov and Zasulich lived generally in Geneva, Axelrod in Zurich. Axelrod concentrated on questions of tactics. He has not written a single theoretical or historical book, as is well known. He wrote very little, and what he wrote almost always concerned tactical questions of socialism. In this sphere Axelrod showed independence and acuteness. In numerous conversations with him – I was very friendly with him and Zasulich for some time – I had the clear impression that much of what Plekhanov has written on questions of tactics is a fruit of collective work, and that Axelrod’s part in it is considerably more important than one can prove from the printed document alone. Axelrod said more than once to Plekhanov, the undisputed and beloved leader of the ‘group’ (before the break in 1903): ‘George, you have a long snout, and take from everywhere what you need’.” [On Lenin, by Leon Trotsky.]

Of course, there can be outstanding contributions from outstanding individuals who receive due merit for the contribution that they make. But if this is done at the expense of tapping the galaxy of talent that is assembled in the ranks of a party, of extracting for the benefit of the whole organisation, the contributions of all including at a leadership level, then we will fail. More than at the time of the Russian Revolution, the tasks of building a mass party, never mind the taking of power, will be more difficult and much more complex. It will be a task that will be beyond just one or two people in an ‘International Centre’ or in ‘one centre’ on a national level. This in no way devalues the need to develop a leadership and to make room for the full blossoming of outstanding individuals. But this must be done in the context of continually extending the leadership and renewing it with the most promising and outstanding representatives of the new generation.

Marxism is a science. But scientists, particularly in the modern era, learn from one another and share information in order to advance knowledge. This does not mean that amongst modern scientists there are not outstanding individuals. But the idea of teamwork, of the outstanding scientists building on the work of others, is accepted almost automatically. This kind of approach, however, is foreign to Grant – as evidenced by his book – and by his supporters, Woods and Sewell.

Not an honest history

As others have commented, this is not a ‘history of British Trotskyism’ but a personal memoir – and a slanted and self-serving one at that – which seeks to enhance his own role at the expense of others. His book centres around himself and contrasts his virtuous role to the various ‘devils’, especially Gerry Healy and to a lesser extent James Cannon, Pierre Frank, Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. All of these are now dead and therefore cannot answer the charges levelled against them by Grant or Sewell. Unfortunately for Ted Grant and Sewell, we are able to answer their distortions.

We do not hold any brief for other British and international Trotskyist leaders attacked by Grant – many of whom made errors as well as contributions to the development of the Trotskyist movement – but it is wrong to wait until they are all dead and therefore cannot answer back.

Ted Grant always insisted that he was the ‘only’ individual in the Trotskyist movement who understood what was going on during the Second World War and afterwards. This claim was subjected to searching criticism, from a number of quarters, which has now compelled Grant and his acolytes to slightly modify his line of political infallibility.

Even Sewell in his introduction, now concedes that Grant was “not the only one” to understand what was taking place during the Second World War. The American Trotskyist Felix Morrow and the French Trotskyist Rousset, it now seems, added something (see Tony Aitman’s appendix). Moreover, Grant now concedes, through Sewell, that he made an “opportunist” error in not supporting the ‘Open Party’ faction in the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1949. However, this admission has only been extracted from him by the criticisms in Richardson and Bornstein’s book, War and the International: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1937-49. The ‘Open Party’ faction accused Grant of “betrayal” at this time for his complete capitulation to Healy, who was then a stooge of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International.

We made the same charges against him in the History of the CWI. His opportunist errors derailed what could have been important forces who could have continued the tradition of the Revolutionary Communist Party in the period between 1949 and 1956. This was a period when Healy and, to some extent, those around Tony Cliff, the theoretician of ‘state capitalism’, completely outstripped Grant and the group around him in terms of numbers, influence, regular production of material, etc. Grant also gave the ideas of “state capitalism” to Cliff and then rejected them. He, therefore, bears some responsibility for the modern SWP and their international organisation the International Socialist Tendency.

Grant’s attorney Sewell seeks to argue that when the split in the Communist Party of Great Britain came with the events in Hungary in 1956 none of the prominent ex-CP members moved in Grant’s direction. Grant, through Sewell, mentions that this was allegedly because of their “low level”. In reality, it was because of the complete ineptitude, the disorganisation of Grant and his ‘forces’, which bordered on anarchy. Healy, with an incorrect method and wrong policies, as well as an internally repressive regime, nevertheless made important inroads in winning workers, a number of ex-CP members and young people to his organisation. This was something which Grant was patently incapable of doing, then and subsequently.

Indeed, despite the efforts of young members like Keith Dickinson and Reg Lewis, the state of Grant’s group in 1960 when a trickle of new young recruits came into its orbit was no different to the chaotic state it had been in 1956. Both Healy and Cliff had regular papers – the former with a certain influence amongst trade unionists and workers, and the latter amongst a layer of middle class students and intellectuals in the London area. Grant, on the other hand, produced a newspaper called Socialist Fight, dubbed by its opponents ‘Socialist Flight’, “here today and gone tomorrow”, because it was produced on average every six months.

Why then, did people like me and a layer of youth join the Grant group? Certainly not because of Ted Grant. It was because of the excellent rank and file members on Merseyside, particularly workers like John McDonald, the impressive young Pat Wall, Ted Mooney and Don Hughes, that young people from a working class background joined the organisation. They were approached by Healy’s Socialist Labour League (which later became the Workers Revolutionary Party) through their Merseyside organiser Bill Hunter and had discussions with him. If it was just a question of organisation, where the SLL completely outstripped the Grant group, then like some other young workers they would have joined the SLL. They hesitated because of disagreements with their policies and an innate suspicion of the messianic tone and structure of the SLL. They also leaned towards the method of analysis and the programmatic points which were explained to them by the Merseyside group, more than towards the SLL.

Within a matter of three months of joining the organisation I was made the Merseyside secretary of what was admittedly a very small organisation. Together with other young comrades – it has to be said in opposition to the older generation who wished to pursue a more conservative, cosy existence within the Labour Party – the new layer re-organised the Merseyside branch, rented their own premises, revived old Trotskyists and attracted a whole layer of new, young people. I, together with Ted Mooney, Tony Mulhearn, Terry Harrison (who had not been on Merseyside when I joined the party because of his National Service in Hong Kong), Marie Harrison, Linda Taaffe, Dave Galashan and others, they fought the ‘Healyites’ within the Merseyside Young Socialists Federation.

They received support from the national leadership of the organisation, particularly Jimmy Deane, who as well as being politically capable was also extremely welcoming, gave an impression of a dynamic approach to ideas and organisation, and looked towards the next generation. Ted Grant was not an impressive individual or speaker when you first met him. A better acquaintance with him led to a greater appreciation of his abilities at that stage.

Recognition of Ted Grant’s role – spiteful insults the response

One has to contrast the generosity – some people would say the exaggerated generosity given his vilification of us at the time – with which we treat his role in our book on the history of Militant and the abusive, non-political diatribe which he has sanctioned for use by his acolyte Sewell against his former comrades. When he separated from Militant in 1991, we wrote the following: “We regret that Ted Grant has split in this way. He made a vital contribution in upholding the genuine ideas of Marxism and developing the theoretical legacy of Leon Trotsky in the hostile political climate of the post-war period. He played a key role in formulating the ideas and policies on which Militant was built from 1964. Those especially who worked closely with him for over three decades regret that he has now turned his back on Militant, on our great achievements in struggle and on the powerful following we have built up in Britain and internationally. It is lamentable that he has allowed his political authority to be used by people whose main concern is not to clarify ideas but to cause the maximum damage to Militant. One unfortunate feature of political life is the spiteful urge of former activists to justify their defection by hurling allegations of heinous political crimes at their former comrades. They are wasting their time. This mini-exodus will not deflect us in the slightest from the course we have mapped out.” [Militant, 1072, 24 January 1992.]

In The Rise of Militant we wrote: “Differences in approach towards strategy and tactics are common in the Marxist movement. Everybody puts forward erroneous points at some time, particularly when not all the facts are known. But Ted Grant’s approach was distinguished by a dogmatic and stubborn adherence to a point of view when it was clear that he did not have the necessary feel of how a struggle was developing on the ground. Moreover, he attempted to exercise a political veto over differing views and more accurate assessments of a situation.

Explaining this split we also gave due recognition to the role that he had played in the past: “He had made a big contribution in terms of Marxist theory, particularly in defending the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, both against opportunism and ultra-leftism. But a correct theory in itself is not enough. It is necessary to translate this into programme, strategy and tactics, and relate these to the real movement of the working class. It is this which distinguished Militant from all other “Marxist” groups, during the course of the Liverpool struggle and in the poll tax battle. Despite his past achievements, Ted Grant was sometimes found wanting, particularly in the rapidly changing situation of the 1980s. His lack of tactical awareness and flair was a source of irritation and conflict with some of the main figures in the Liverpool drama.” [The Rise of Militant by Peter Taaffe, p445.]

Contrast this to the comments he and his supporters made about people he collaborated with over a period of 30 years. Sewell writes the following about me: “A very ambitious man with a morbid fear of rivals, actual or potential, Taaffe decided that his talents were not sufficiently appreciated. Actually, despite a certain flair for organisation, Taaffe was never a theoretician and was deeply jealous of people whom he saw as on a higher level than himself… Although Taaffe was a talented speaker and a capable organiser, all his ideas were taken from Ted [Grant].”

Moreover: “In reality, Taaffe felt particularly threatened by Alan Woods who was certainly on a higher theoretical level and was regarded by everyone as an excellent public speaker and writer. Since Taaffe was always looking over his shoulder for rivals, he imagined (wrongly) that here was a threat to his own position.”

By elevating, in this way, the role of Woods it allows Sewell to bask in the reflected glory of the towering talent of his half-brother. What a comment on Woods himself that he could allow these words to be written about himself! He has certainly not lost anything of the haughty, patronising manner, which succeeded in alienating him from so many leaders and rank and file members of Militant in its heyday.

As to any resentment at the superior ‘theoretician’ Woods, such sentiments could never occur to any of the leaders of Militant at the time. I, Lynn Walsh, Keith Dickinson, Clare Doyle and many other leaders of Militant wrote literally dozens, even hundreds, of articles in Militant and the Militant International Review on the theoretical aspects and processes within the trade unions, the General Strike, the Cultural Revolution in China, on Stalinism, the Portuguese Revolution, above all on the strategy and tactics of the mass movements around Liverpool and the poll tax.

These were not just individual contributions but the product of our democratic discussion and debate, and the result of the analysis of the collective leadership and the actions and campaigns that flowed from this. This is how we were able to successfully intervene, for instance, in the poll tax battle and in Liverpool.

‘Correction’ from Grant?

“Ah, but this was when Ted Grant was able to correct Peter Taaffe and others.” Ted Grant was not to the fore in either the analysis of the poll tax or the Liverpool battles, or in the implementation of the ideas which flowed from this analysis. Sewell’s extreme personality cult, as well as his lies and distortions, compel us to tell the truth. Sad to say, Grant never checked a line of many, if not most of these articles; my book on the French Revolution, for instance. Nevertheless, this is a constant theme in Grant’s book and is applied not just to me. His first major collaborator, Ralph Lee, was a good bloke but “the theory” was down to Grant himself. The same applied to Jock Haston and the whole leadership of the RCP, not just Healy but also Jimmy Deane, Pat Wall and everybody else except Ted Grant. The truth is that Grant’s ideas were, originally, often totally unintelligible, incapable of being grasped unless rewritten for publication by his collaborators who invariably added to, not just the presentation, but the formulation of ideas as well.

The denunciations of others accompanied by the assertions of theoretical supremacy of Grant and Woods cut absolutely no ice in 1991 and even less so now given their theoretical incapacity during the difficult and complex period of history since then. They are now embarrassed to deal with the political issues under dispute in 1991. They resort to the pathetic excuse that they lost out in a factional struggle within our ranks because of an alleged “clique” around Peter Taaffe. Sewell admits that the split started with a “violent row”, caused by Woods and Grant with their “clique allegations”. But then, because the evidence is so threadbare, he immediately drops the question instead of attempting to prove it. He also claims that they took “the main theoreticians with them”, without naming a single one of them. We have answered that charge many times and it was rejected by a crushing majority of the ranks of Militant.

However, by a curious coincidence, Grant in his book gives proof of his own tendency towards supporting a ‘clique’. In the discussion in the RCP over entry into the Labour Party or independent work in the late 1940s, he took a ‘neutral’ position, although he really favoured the continuation of open work. The reasons for this, again admitted in his book, were because he wanted to “preserve the leadership. We wanted to maintain the leadership at all costs for the future”. What is this if not a clear definition of clique politics? A correct tactic was not supported by Grant because it was necessary to “preserve the leadership”.

Of course, the leadership of a revolutionary organisation, particularly one that has been built up over a period of time, is priceless capital for the building of a powerful movement. It should not be thrown away or divided lightly. This, incidentally, is one of the reasons why – despite the increasing divergence between ourselves and Grant on a number of issues – we nevertheless strove to preserve the unity of Militant. But if you want to “preserve” the cadres or the leadership at all costs, all you end up with is “preserves”.

The question of entry into the Labour Party or an open party was not an incidental or secondary question but vital for the future of the RCP in Britain. It was the divisions on this issue which helped to completely derail the RCP and led to its disintegration. The interests of the “clique”, in this case the leadership, of the RCP, meant that Grant abandoned a principled position. Compare this to the “evidence” for the charges that he, Sewell and Woods levelled at the majority on the issue of organising a “clique” around me in 1991.

The fairy tales, to the effect that I suppressed Woods’s book on Bolshevism, and personally prevented him from speaking at meetings, are beneath contempt. Suffice to say, no evidence is furnished by Sewell, no minutes of meetings or sub-committees, let alone an Executive Committee meeting, where decisions to “suppress” the literary pearls of Woods would have been made. It is also a lie that I withheld “funds” from the theoretical journal. I was not the National Treasurer; financial decisions were taken through the Executive Committee, of which Sewell himself was a prominent member. He never raised this charge then and it is clearly an attempt ex post facto, to invent the legend that there were manuvres against his brother.

Woods and Grant organised the 1991 split

Another typical fairy tale of Sewell’s is the statement that “Alan’s [Woods] main sin was that he was always close to Ted and consequently would never have countenanced any manoeuvres against him – or anybody else. Taaffe knew that it would be impossible to remove Ted without a battle with Alan Woods – something he feared because of the consequences, above all in the International.”

Every word of Sewell on this and other issues dealing with Militant’s history is a mistake and some are two! There was no “plot” to remove Ted Grant. In reality the real “plotters” – ham-fisted and amateurish though they were – were Woods, Grant and their cohorts. Indeed, the leaders of what became subsequently the majority within Militant were extremely nave about what was going on behind the scenes.

Unbeknown to us, Woods and Grant had been canvassing within the CWI – but not widely in Britain, because their base was so weak here – for a “regime change” in the leadership of the British organisation and internationally. Francois Bliki in Belgium revealed to us after the split of 1991 that he had been canvassed by Woods about such an eventuality. Such approaches were usually made at international conferences.

It was not ourselves but Grant and Woods who themselves tried to organise a “coup” against the leadership. The trigger for this attempt was the objections of Grant – this time accompanied by Woods who had opposed him on some issues such as this in the past – to ‘younger’ comrades, such as the 32-year old Laurence Coates(!), from giving a lead-off at an upcoming international event! Tony Saunois, Bob Labi and I refused to accept this. This was sufficient to trigger charges, for the first time, of a “clique” inside the leadership of Militant and the CWI.

Woods then went outside of the International Secretariat to canvass support. The demand for a change was accompanied with an ultimatum that Tony Saunois, then acting International Secretary, should be removed because of his opposition to Woods and Grant. They generously conceded that he would not be sacked as a full-timer but would be sent to the equivalent of a Siberian power station, to work in Chile! Laurence Coates was to be removed. I would be permitted to remain in my position so long as I “kept my place”, recognised the theoretical superiority of Grant and Woods, and confined myself to organisational tasks.

Weakness of method

This incident highlighted the dilemma which Militant had confronted in the 1980s, particularly in the latter part of the decade. While Grant was respected by the supporters and leaders of Militant, it had been evident for some time that his best days, particularly on a public platform, were behind him. This was not the first time in the history of the Marxist movement that a leader could play a key pioneering role at one stage but prove to be lacking – in fact, become an obstacle – once the situation changes. The tragic example of Plekhanov, “father of Russian Marxism” comes to mind. His role was decisive in the period when the task was to put down roots, to stubbornly defend Marxism against opportunism and ultra-leftism. But the same Plekhanov proved to be utterly helpless in the face of great events, when the rhythm of the class struggle changed.

Entirely fresh layers had been drawn to the banner of Militant particularly to the mass public meetings that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is not possible to take a horse on the Grand National course first time out. It was necessary to present Militant’s ideas in the most popular and accessible form, without watering down or hiding what we stood for. Other younger speakers and leaders of Militant were more able to fulfil this task than someone who was already in his late seventies and is now in his late eighties.

Ted Grant failed to recognise the limitations age places on everyone. Experience and continuity of ideas in an organisation is essential in any Marxist organisation. But it must never become a barrier to a new generation of leaders who are the inheritors of the future and must inevitably carry the main burden of the day-to-day work of building a viable Marxist organisation.

Grant operated with outmoded formulas, which no longer applied to the changed situation. In the post-Second World War period, processes were more drawn out, more ‘predictable’. After 1950, the working out of perspectives, although by no means ever a simple task, was easier than it was at the beginning of the 1990s or today. A certain world equilibrium existed then, with the existence of powerful Stalinist states.

The boom of the 1980s, the emptying out of many of the workers’ parties, for an historical period and above all the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, ushered in an entirely new, unstable period. New tasks theoretically, new problems in the field of strategy, tactics and organisation were posed. It became necessary to be more conditional. This did not mean that we should seek a cowardly position of false neutrality on issues. What was required, and still is, is that we discuss all contingencies and then decide on the most likely variant in any given situation. This sometimes requires the amending of a previous position, when new factors, including previously unknown ones, enter into the political equation.

‘Old Bolshevik’

This has nothing in common with ’empiricism’, ‘eclecticism’, and ‘impressionism’, the sins attributed to us by Grant and Co. The approach of him, Woods and Co. increasingly took the form of astrological predictions. They took an absolutely dogmatic, black and white, undialectical approach towards political phenomena, both in Britain and internationally. Combined with Grant’s attempt to exercise a political veto over the leadership, this would have had disastrous effects for our development unless countered.

Grant’s spear carriers have incredibly sought to argue that we were “saved” from the blunders by timely interventions by Grant. On the contrary, as we have shown, the real history of the 1980s, up to the split of 1991, was characterised by the increasingly dogmatic and intolerant approach of Grant, usually toned down, amended, and sometimes opposed within the Executive Committee of Militant and within the CWI by other comrades. Grant and Woods in the complex new world and national situation, demonstrated an atrophy of thought processes, which relied on old formulae trotted out, which flew blatantly in the face of current developments.

The same is true on organisation and on the history of Militant as well. Sewell makes the ludicrous claims that it was himself and his brother, through their base in Swansea and Brighton, in tandem with Ted Grant, which ensured the rebirth of our organisation, which subsequently became Militant in the early 1960s. This is clearly an attempt to establish Woods’s reputation as an ‘Old Bolshevik’, that he was a pioneer at the beginning of the rebirth of the organisation. He played some role, in Wales for a short time and, more importantly, in Spain later but he was not present as the organisation began to develop again in 1960.

Contrast this with what Sewell writes about me. Sewell suggests that I had just a walk-on part at the time of the “launching of Militant”. He writes: “A new young recruit from Birkenhead, was chosen to come to London on a full-time basis and help produce the paper and assist with the national work”. This “new young recruit” had been active in the organisation for a period of four years before this. I had, moreover, participated in numerous battles with our opponents in the Young Socialists, on a local and a national level, spoken at YS conferences, led an apprentices’ strike in Liverpool and Manchester in 1964 and been involved closely in the discussions around unification with the International Group (IG), which later became the International Marxist Group (IMG), the British section of the USFI.

I had confronted Joe Hansen, who had been Trotsky’s secretary at one stage, and Ernest Mandel, the theoretical leader of the USFI, at a conference we had organised to debate important political differences at Wortley Hall near Sheffield in 1963. At the so-called Unity Conference between ourselves and the IG in 1964, I led a walk-out of the Liverpool delegation, with the majority in Liverpool in support, against the decision to railroad us into a premature unification with the IG. Therefore I was not the “young recruit” in 1964, as Sewell suggests, but somebody who, despite my age, had a certain history behind me.

The same could not be said of Sewell and Woods, who had not even appeared within our movement at that stage. I was elected to become the General Secretary and the official public editor of the paper, as well as the first full-timer, on the motion of Jimmy Deane. The latter’s mistake in relation to support for unification with the IG – in which we opposed him much more forcefully than Grant – was in part motivated by the frustration of working with Grant over a period of time and in reality a complete lack of confidence that anything could be achieved by this man in building a viable Trotskyist organisation.

Where was the Sewell-Woods combo while all this was going on? One of them, Sewell was a youngster and Woods was not yet a member of our organisation but a member of the Labour Party Young Socialists. The same ‘airbrushing’ technique is deployed by Sewell in relation to the 1965 USFI World Congress held in the Taunas Mountains in West Germany. Grant’s presence at the conference is mentioned but not my own. I was a delegate from the British organisation to this conference and spoke, both at the formal sessions and informal discussions.

Re-writing history – the inventions of Sewell

These are not just ‘omissions’ by Sewell. They are a deliberate and farcical attempt to completely falsify the history of our organisation during its rebirth, especially in the early 1960s. What is incredible is that Sewell can speak in the first person plural, “our”; again, by his own admission he was not even a member when these events transpired. Ted Grant was and he has sanctioned this falsification, in order to downplay the role of others who came into collision with him in 1991, and what is even more “unforgivable”, for him, actually convinced a majority of what he considered up to then as ‘his’ organisation. In fact this book, Sewell ‘s Postscript and the continual sniping at the Socialist Party and the CWI since then is a very severe case of quite ‘sour grapes’ on the part of this ‘tendency’. By deciding to oppose, in a most unprincipled fashion, the majority in 1991 and subsequently, they have been sidelined by history.

By his own account, Sewell did not join our organisation until 1966, and did not play a national role for a long time after that. Apart from the false account which has been fed to him by his brother, he is in no position to know the facts. Alan Woods was not party to any decisions taken on a national level in relation to the Young Socialists, in relation to the split with the USFI in 1965, in relation to the formation of Militant, in relation to the apprentices’ strikes of the early 1960s and many other issues.

When I first became a member in 1960, Swansea branch was very small and largely ineffective, with a few individuals around Dave Matthews and Colin Tindley, as well as Muriel Browning. Alan Woods attempted on a few occasions, when we discussed our history, to interpret his membership of the Labour Party Young Socialists as membership of our group in Swansea at that stage. This was not the case and, in fact, the first time we came into contact with him and Roger Silverman was at the 1964 YS conference in Brighton.

If Woods had been a member from 1960, why is it that during the conflicts with the Cliff Group in the YS and the SLL, or the fusion with the USFI, the numerous battles at YS conferences between 1960 and 1964, he was unknown to those who were at the fore of the struggles which were taking place? We only became aware of him when he went to Brighton and managed to have an effect, together with Grant, on a number of students. Before this time, I, together with Ted Mooney, Tony Mulhearn and others, had visited Scotland and Nottingham, built a viable YS branch in Merseyside, won over the majority of the YS branches – totalling 25 in all – split the SLL and won some of their better types to our ranks, led the national apprentices’ strike of 1964, participated in the ‘Unity’ conference with the International Marxist Group in 1963 and many other events both locally and nationally.

Woods did play a role in Brighton in introducing some very able young students to Marxism. It is no accident, however, that most of these became subsequently his sternest critics. He subsequently left the area and travelled to Russia and Bulgaria, and after his return found a changed organisation not entirely to his liking. In his usual manner, he demanded automatic acceptance as the ‘leader’ of the group but suffered a sharp rebuff from those such as Lynn Walsh, who (like others such as Clare Doyle, Roger Silverman, Peter Hadden and Roger Keyse who were won in Brighton) have played an important role in the development of the Trotskyist movement in Britain, and Militant stalwarts such as the worker Ray Apps. None of this, of course, is given a mention in the account of Sewell, which passes as objective ‘history’. Later, Woods did play an important role in Spain, fully recognised in our book on Militant’s history.

Another fairy story is the importance accredited by Sewell to the fact that Woods, in the building of Militant, became our “first regional full-timer”. In fact, Clare Doyle became a full-timer before him, in the North-East, as did Lynn Walsh in the Manchester and Lancashire area, and Terry Harrison in Merseyside.

Historical inaccuracies

If there were any resentments or jealousies it was not from the side of others but from Woods himself. Because of his alleged “theoretical” talents he thought this was sufficient to guarantee his political authority. However, his incapacity to shape up to the new situation that was developing, which was reinforced by his reliance on Grant, meant that he was more and more out of kilter with the approach and the attitude of the majority of Militant members and of the more thinking elements in the CWI.

Ironically, it was this self-proclaimed partisan of ‘dialectics’ who demonstrated the most undialectical approach towards the political phenomena which were unfolding in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Dialectics is essentially the theory of change. However, everything in this world since 1990, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has changed except the views of Woods and Grant! The Labour Party remains the same, Russia, in the first stages, was unchanged as a workers’ state, demands pertaining to another era were trotted out, as with conscription during the Gulf War, irrespective of the objective situation which existed.

During the ten years to 1991, Militant was decisive in the mighty battle in Liverpool as well as in the poll tax struggle. It was in this period that we made a magnificent contribution to the miners’ strike as well. It was also in this 10 to 12 year period that we were able to assemble the youth cadre which in turn managed to have an effect on ever wider layers of young people in the working class in Britain.

This intervention would not have been possible without combating the circle mentality which afflicted many comrades in the period preceding the late 1970s and early 1980s. We had many who were quite comfortable to sit in Labour parties, debating and passing resolutions. They were, in every sense of the term, ‘resolutionaries’ rather than revolutionaries. The prospect of mass work, of ‘dirtying their hands’ in reaching new layers of the working class outside of the ‘traditional organisations’, undoubtedly frightened many of these ‘Marxists’ who gradually distanced themselves from the organisation. Their loss was more than compensated for by the new, combative elements who were drawn into the ranks of our organisation.

Initiatives of ranks

In their heart of hearts Ted Grant and Alan Woods did not like the new political complexion of the organisation. They did not, of course, object to the larger organisation and therefore bigger audiences for their speeches and articles. But the need to present Marxist ideas in a new and quite different fashion from the preceding period in order to attract and hold these layers was a difficult and increasingly irksome task for them.

We have heard much from them about the need for ‘theory’. The present leadership of the Socialist Party and of the CWI have made not a little contribution to the development of the ideas and theoretical explanations of the organisation from 1960 onwards. For instance, in Liverpool I and others independently came to the conclusion that Cuba was a workers’ state, although bureaucratically deformed, in advance of Grant and the national leadership of the tiny organisation that we were at that stage. Grant subsequently came to the same conclusion as us after he visited the Cuban Embassy, got some material, read it and subsequently pronounced on the issue. We based ourselves on a reading of the literature available, and in particular the articles by Ortiz in the journal of the then ISFI, Fourth International, which supplied a wealth of empirical material, to draw a conclusion on this key issue well in advance of the national leadership.

Other important tactical improvisations arose from the ranks in advance of the national leadership and that is the way it should be in a healthy Trotskyist organisation with a thinking combative membership. It was not the national leadership but comrades in Glasgow who led and organised the school students’ strike in 1985 in Britain. This was taken up by our young comrades and developed into a national strike shortly after. Basing themselves upon this experience, our Spanish organisation led a strike in 1986-87, which subsequently led to the formation of the Spanish school students’ union.

The perception of theory and the role of ‘theorists’ of Woods and Grant is one of ‘master and pupil’, of patrician and plebs. Other comrades, even leading comrades, were empty vessels into which these theoreticians could pour their ‘ideas’. This approach, of course, cut no ice with us particularly when set against the increasing incapacity of these ‘theoreticians’ to answer the pressing questions of contemporary politics in Britain and internationally. It was left to others to rearm the organisation in a complex new situation confronting Trotskyism in the late 1980s and in the 1990s, as well as the period we are entering.

We have made mistakes, on tempo, on the estimation of various strike movements and on events internationally. It is not possible for a serious leadership not to make these kinds of mistakes. But in the discussion on all the big events of the 1990s, nine times out of ten right was on the side of what became the leadership of the Socialist Party and the CWI rather than Grant and Woods. The failure – the complete avoidance of political issues – to explain the theoretical and practical differences which led to the Grant group splitting away, is transparent in Sewell’s account.

No serious socialist or Marxist can accept that a split in the largest and most effective Trotskyist organisation which Britain has seen could be put down to the issue of a so-called ‘clique’ around me. This charge was answered in full and rejected by the membership of the British organisation and by the CWI as a whole. The open division which manifested itself in 1991 was preceded, as we have seen, by a series of political clashes of a theoretical and organisational character.

The Liverpool struggle

The few scant words that Sewell mentions in relation to the Liverpool struggle, and as far as the poll tax is concerned, is evidence itself of the shamefaced approach adopted by the ‘holy trinity’. Grant did not play a decisive role in the Liverpool events. In fact, at a famous meeting of the National Committee in 1982, attended by Tony Mulhearn and Derek Hatton, Grant came into collision with me and these two leaders of our organisation in Liverpool, and the majority of the Liverpool membership.

The Liverpool comrades expected that the Labour group would declare in favour of an illegal budget, despite the fact that the left were in a minority amongst the councillors. It was their contention – subsequently proved correct – that as a result of the mass pressure that would be exerted on Labour councillors, even sections of the right would be persuaded to come along with the illegal budget. Grant, in his usual dogmatic fashion, asserted the opposite, and tried to reprimand me afterwards for siding with the Liverpool comrades. I therefore brought Tony Mulhearn and Derek Hatton into the discussion with Grant. These comrades gave him a severe drubbing for his lack of tactical awareness, of his tendency to make grandiose pronouncements about a situation without understanding what was happening on the ground.

Derek Hatton is no longer a Trotskyist but he played a vital role in the Liverpool struggle. Both he and Militant earned a fighting reputation in the eyes of the masses. He was empirical in his behaviour and undoubtedly sinned against the credo of Sewell, Woods and Grant of “activism”. The same could not be said of them, either then or subsequently!

Derek Hatton judged people on the basis of how he saw them performing in action. He was withering in his dismissal of Grant. I had to convince him to write a few complimentary words about Grant’s overall position in the book he wrote at the end of the Liverpool struggle. Mistakes were made in this battle, which we honestly dealt with at the time and in public material since. But the scale of this movement, which was on a higher plane than even the poll tax struggle, terrified the British bourgeois and the right-wing of the labour movement in equal measure. When Sewell’s speaks about this event, he talks about “our” involvement. He played little part in Liverpool, despite his designation as a ‘national’ organiser and was hardly known to the Liverpool membership. The same was true of the poll tax.

The Poll Tax

I visited Scotland to speak at a meeting of members of Militant, which discussed the campaign to defeat this tax. At each stage of the battle in Scotland it was myself, and other members of the British EC – and only rarely Grant – who were in discussions with the Scottish comrades. People like Tommy Sheridan and Alan McCombes – no longer members of the CWI – and Philip Stott and Ronnie Stevenson – who are – as well as many other comrades too numerous to mention, played important roles. But Sewell’s role was virtually non-existent. Most of the participants in this battle would be flabbergasted, if they ever read Sewell’s account, to discover that because he was ‘national organiser’ he played a key role in the poll tax struggle. Moreover, the only time when he took a position different to the overwhelming majority of Militant was at the time of the split, when he proposed that – alongside Grant and Woods – that we adopt a disastrous tactic of allowing the ‘Militant’ MPs – Dave Nellist and Terry Fields – to secretly pay their poll tax in order to maintain their positions. Hundreds had been jailed for refusing to pay the poll tax and 34 of them were members of our organisation. The most prominent were Tommy Sheridan in Scotland and Terry Fields in England. To then allow leaders of the campaign to slide out of the responsibility of doing what they advocated ordinary working class people should do was completely unprincipled, and the height of irresponsibility. Indeed, if the leadership of Militant had advocated this course, it is doubtful if even the MPs would have acceded to this. It would certainly have been an issue that would have tested the unity of our organisation and would probably have provoked, for instance, a revolt in Scotland and other parts of the country.

We defeated this proposal in the Executive Committee and the MPs stuck to their guns. This led to the jailing of Terry Fields, whose role is forever enshrined in the hearts of working class people in Liverpool and elsewhere. Dave Nellist’s stand on an issue of principle was used to carry through his expulsion from the Labour Party. At the same time, it enormously enhanced his standing amongst working class people in general, which will come more fully into its own in the period we are entering. Once it had been revealed that Sewell, Grant and Co were advocating this course in the poll tax struggle, there was widespread disenchantment with Grant, and disgust as far as the brothers Sewell and Woods were concerned.

Chapter Three

A Rehash of Previous Policies

It is possible to visit websites and journals of organisations that would differ with us but to still find something fresh. This cannot be said of the Grant/Woods website which, given its ponderous academic tone, is of no attraction to younger workers in particular, who were looking for a fighting socialist lead. This has not stopped Woods, with that touching modesty for which he is famous, to declare: “Few would dispute that our website is the best in the world”. Leave aside that the “few” happens to be the majority, this indicates what this outfit is all about – it is a ‘virtual group’ without any real forces on the ground. Sewell cannot report on anything since the split (ten years ago) except the launch of their website. Moreover, when they mention the Socialist Party and their own journal Socialist Appeal it is always the former not the latter which is compared to Militant, thereby admitting that we are the real inheritors of this continuous fighting tradition. No amount of boasting or bombast by Woods, Grant or Sewell can cover this up.

What is the balance sheet?

By Sewell’s own admission they were reduced to a rump following their decision to split from us – having beforehand collected resources to finance their own printing facilities, withheld subs, etc. And they have remained a rump of no consequence for the labour movement and are never mentioned by other even small groups in Britain.

Sewell tries to console himself with the fairy tale that they took a majority of the CWI. They are welcome to this delusion if it helps them. As the Russian proverb puts it: “We treasure the deceit which uplifts us more than a thousand burdensome truths.” Just one fact indicates how ridiculous Sewell’s conclusion is. In the list, very small it must be said, of the CWI sections which came out for them, Denmark is put down as coming out in favour of the ‘opposition’ but this group consisted of just three people. As far as we know it remained as three people ever since and now has differences with them. In Belgium we have dramatically overtaken those who went with Grant and Co and are probably at least six times their size, with an even greater proportional difference in Germany and in many other countries. In Ireland, both in the North and in the South, they have nothing. In Southern Ireland the Socialist Party, which is part of the CWI, has a well-known MP, Joe Higgins, and came close to winning another seat in the recent general election, has councillors, a significant and growing youth movement, and is widely seen as an important and dynamic part of the left. In Greece, Sewell – without knowing the real situation – tries to argue that there was an “even divide” but the workers went with them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Their Greek organisation, as stated above, has also split with a section finally moving away from the idea that PASOK is still a viable area of work.

All the most vital forces in Sweden which were involved in the building of a substantial organisation in Sweden, with a weekly paper, went with us in the split of 1991 and are an important component of the CWI. The Grant group there is virtually nonexistent, its main figure being a very rich individual who occasionally turns up on a demonstration to distribute a leaflet. They have managed to maintain a toehold in Spain – through the state-sponsored Spanish school students’ union – but without winning substantial forces from the huge radicalised youth which exists in that country.

Forced to confront reality, even this grouping has been compelled to drop their position on the ex-Stalinist states. But this has not ended their blunders. They for instance characterise the Russian ‘Communist’ Party as a ‘traditional organisation’ within which the largely illusory forces of Woods and Grant and all conscious socialist and Marxist forces should work. Up to recently this party represented that section of the ex-bureaucracy which lost out in the re-division of the spoils following the collapse of the planned economy in the 1990s. (See the recent document of the CWI on World Relations for commentary on this.)

The position of the Grant/Woods group on continued work everywhere in the so-called “traditional organisations” is so absurd, so flies in the face of the real situation which exists, that after Grant has departed the scene, Woods and Sewell will probably drop it like a hot brick. Indeed, in Sewell’s ‘postscript’ this issue is hardly mentioned apart from in retrospect in relation to their 1990/91 split from the CWI.

Woods is more concerned with issues of personal prestige than of principle, correct strategy and tactics. He can perform the most amazing political somersaults and link up with people who, up to now, have been incessantly condemned as ‘sects’. Witness Woods’s recent open letter to a fragment of the Morenoites in Argentina, the Partido Obreros (PO) on the issue of the ‘constituent assembly’. What is most striking is the persuasive tone of Woods rather than the harsh denunciatory words of Sewell and Grant in this book to all those they designate as ‘sects’. (Of course, they are the smallest sect of all.)

Collaborating with right-wing nationalists

These people have also linked up with the Bietz group in Moscow, which claims to be ‘Marxist’, but is lumpen in its social composition and methods. (It has recently had four splits, one individual being expelled for advocating homosexuality.) When I spoke at a public meeting on May Day 1998, called by our party in Russia ‘Socialist Resistance’ – which is the biggest Trotskyist organisation and the only one organised on an all-CIS scale – I was confronted with the Bietz group trying to shout me down. The following are the comments of our comrades in Moscow on Woods’s CIS members: “Once they were unable to come to terms with the new political situation which followed the collapse of Stalinism, the Grant-Woods group were faced with a crisis – no group with any experience in the real movement would possibly accept their sterile and dogmatic approach based as it was in the historic past of the 70s and 80s, so they were left with no option to search around for any group that was prepared to work with them on any conditions.

“One such is the Russian sect, which calls itself the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP), which Rob Sewell conveniently calls “Workers’ democracy”, knowing that the very name of this group will cause unease in his own ranks.

“The leader of this group, Sergei Bietz was once a member of the CWI. His revolutionary rhetoric was proved to be no more than a thin coating when, in August 1991, in the first hours of the coup against Gorbachev he refused to come out on the streets and preferred to watch it on the TV. Following this, ideological differences developed which led him and a few others to break from the CWI.

“As a theoretical justification for breaking with us, he claimed that there were specific Russian conditions that meant that Russian revolutionaries did not need an international. After his departure he maintained a small ultra-sectarian group around him, whose main aim in life appeared to be the disruption of CWI activities. Fuelled by personal pique he found, it seems, a true friend in Alan Woods, They forged a principled agreement not on the basis of political programme but of hatred of the CWI.

“The antics of this group would have been an extreme embarrassment to Ted Grant in the past. They show all the traits of a sectarian group from their stringent demands for violent revolution and lack of understanding of the transitional programme to a complete dishonesty about their size and influence. They are prepared to unite with anyone to attack the CWI.

“Typical were their antics at the public meeting addressed by Peter Taaffe organized by the CWI in Moscow in May 1998. The CWI at the time were heavily involved in an anti-fascist campaign whose main target was the so-called National Bolshevik Party led by Limonov – a right-wing nationalist organization which attracted a lot of youth by using radical, apparently left symbols such as Che Guevara but whose main ideologues were fascist. They use for example the Nazi armbands, the only difference being they have replaced the swastika with the hammer and sickle. When some of this group turned up at the meeting the Chair announced they would not be allowed to speak. Half way through the meeting they started heckling, accusing us of being Jews. Imagine our surprise to see Bietz urging them on and Woods quietly smiling.

“The Bietz group is riddled with all the problems that Rob Sewell falsely says exist in the CWI. Because of its ultra left antics, it is unable to develop any long term work in any area. Under pressure from Woods some of its members have accepted that they should work in the Communist Party. But they do so in a way that Ted Grant once so criticised in the Healey group. They do not put forward a principled programme forward but make huge concessions to the young Stalinists they are trying to win over.

“One recent example occurred when one of their members raised in an internal meeting that they should include some demands on gay rights. This Bietz rejected – after all the young Stalinists would be horrified. Instead this member was accused of propagandizing homosexualism and promptly expelled. To ensure a majority, a number of the Stalinists were quickly signed up – they of course later left.

“And of course the irony is that, even though the CWI does not expect a huge influx of workers into the CP at any time, because of its principled position it is the CWI which has won over a number of young communists, real Trotskyist fighters such as Ionur Kurmanov.

“The Russian ‘WRP’ is similar to its ill-fated British namesake in more than just name. Its lack of political principles, its ultra left demagogy and refusal to take up the reactionary prejudices of the Stalinists leaves the group attractive only to a particular type of “revolutionary” – not to the thinking worker or student but to the lumpenised demagogue who relishes ultra-left adventures but is incapable of the patient painstaking work, including theoretical study necessary to build a real revolutionary organization.

“In recent weeks it appears that the Russian WRP is about to implode in the same way as the British Healyites did. It has suffered a wave of expulsions and splits and there has been a struggle over the control of their web site – about the only thing that shows any sign of life in their group. Anyone who doesn’t agree with Bietz and Woods is pushed out for the most unprincipled reasons. In these circumstances with the lack of any vestige of internal democracy the subsidies paid by the Grant group play a further corrupting role – people who don’t agree lose their subsidy and the less members, the more money there is to share out.

“In contrast the CWI is earning a reputation as principled fighters for the working class and consequently continues to grow and spread its influence.”

The National Question

Woods had intervened earlier at this meeting mentioned in an attempt to try and exploit the differences which had arisen between the CWI and the Socialist Party in Britain on the one side, and our then comrades in Scotland on the other, on the issue of establishing a broad socialist party, the Scottish Socialist Party. These comrades also proposed, at the same time, liquidating the revolutionary tendency within this party, which they have now unfortunately done. Woods accused me and the CWI of kowtowing to Scottish ‘nationalism’ because we were prepared to support the idea of an independent socialist Scotland as a step towards a socialist confederation of England, Wales and Ireland. The meeting was informed that this was not the first time that Alan Woods had made fundamental mistakes on the national question. He is of Welsh origin and denied in the past that Wales was a ‘nation’ until this was corrected by me and Ted Grant.

Notwithstanding this, Woods could still write almost ten years later in relation to the national question in Eastern Europe, specifically Yugoslavia, the following: “National aspirations and the right to self-determination are not, and cannot be, absolute. [Their italics.] Such a demand, in a given historical context, may have a progressive character. But it may be entirely reactionary and retrograde. It is necessary in each case to examine the concrete content, determine which class interests are involved… Although the national question is very complicated, it is usually sufficient to pose the question in concrete terms to arrive at the correct position. In 1991, at the very beginning of the collapse of Yugoslavia, the authors of the present document participated in a debate with some self-styled Marxists, in the course of which one sectarian interrupted Ted Grant, with a shout from the back of the hall: ‘What’s your position on self-determination for Croatia?’ Ted swiftly retorted with an appropriate counter-question: ‘What do you mean? You mean, do we support the Ushtasi or the Chetniks?’ (That is to say the Serb fascists or the Croat fascists.) The heckler didn’t ask any more questions.” [Marxism and the National Question.]

This is an astonishing, not to say scandalous ‘interpretation’ of the Marxist position on the national question. The right of self-determination of oppressed nations – up to and including the right to secede from a particular state – is a bourgeois-democratic demand, but one which is absolutely vital in a genuine Marxist programme. It is axiomatic for Marxists that, as the part is subordinate to the whole, so the right of self-determination is subordinate to the general struggle for socialism and, at certain concrete periods of history, can clash with this aspiration.

Self-determination

Self-determination for the Saarland in 1935 meant the accession of this area to Hitler’s Germany, given the ethnic German background of the population. Marxists, on the advice of Trotsky, opposed this because it meant placing the Saarlanders under the heel of Hitler fascism. In Germany in 1989, the CWI was in favour of German reunification on a democratic and socialist basis. But to begin with we opposed German reunification on a bourgeois basis, because this would have meant the liquidation of the planned economy in East Germany.

The situation was entirely different in relation to Yugoslavia in 1991, which, because of Stalinism, was in the process of disintegration. It is entirely false to say the choice between the Croatian and Serbian people was between different nationalist-fascist forces. It was necessary to put forward a socialist programme for the whole of Yugoslavia that involved the right of self-determination of all the nationalities which made up the ‘federation’, and in particular the nations which felt oppressed by the dominant Serbian nationalism of the disintegrating Stalinist bureaucracy.

It is true that the Croatian wing of the Yugoslav bureaucracy used separation as a lever for capitalist restoration. However, as Militant pointed out at the time: “Militant is no advocate of separatism. But we support the rights of all nationalities to self-determination and even independence if they wish… The overwhelming votes for independence in Slovenia and Croatia, encouraged by the movement of peoples throughout Eastern Europe, reflect the hopes that secession will somehow abolish poverty and end subjugation to a Serbian-dominated state.”

Should Trotskyists therefore have opposed independence at this stage, given the overwhelming mood and vote for this? The answer of Woods and Grant is “Yes!” Instead they counterpose the bare formula of a Balkan federation. Such an approach would have cut the ground from under the feet of a genuine Marxist force with roots in the population. The Marxists in this situation would have countered the nationalism of the burgeoning Croatian and Slovene pro-capitalist forces, not by ignoring the wishes of the overwhelming majority for independence but by giving it a democratic and socialist content. Sometimes this can mean opposing specific referenda on independence – advocating a ‘no’ vote – particularly when it is couched in terms which would violate the rights of minority communities within a proposed independent state. But even then it is necessary to stand for a genuine independence, with safeguards for minorities, at the same time linking this with a socialist confederation in the region. In 1991 Militant suggested that “this would mean the reconstitution of Yugoslavia as a voluntary democratic socialist federation with full rights for all republics and nationalities”.

The subsequent dismemberment of Yugoslavia, accompanied by ethnic civil wars and wars means that it is no longer possible to advocate a return to ‘Yugoslavia’, which is now associated in the minds of the masses with terrible bloodshed and suffering of all the nations it previously encompassed. That is why we now advocate the idea of a democratic socialist confederation of the Balkans. But this in no way means, as Grant and Woods argue, that this precludes – now or in the early 1990s – the need for genuine Marxism to support the struggle for independence or the establishment of democratic, socialist, independent states as a step towards a wider socialist confederation in the region.

Trotsky advocated the right of self-determination for the Ukraine, up to and including separation from Stalinist Russia. This was summed up in his suggested slogan: “For an independent, democratic, socialist Ukraine”. Yet Woods and Grant opposed a similar approach when applied to disintegrating Yugoslav Stalinism. Rather than fighting nationalism, this plays into the hands of the reactionary nationalists in each of the nations of the former Yugoslavia. It leaves the field free for these forces to champion the national rights of people who felt oppressed under Yugoslav Stalinism. It is entirely false to argue that in either Serbia or Croatia the population was following the fascists, the Ushtasi Croatian fascists or their Serbian Chetnik equivalents.

Lenin taught long ago, and this was hammered home subsequently by Trotsky, that the right of self-determination for oppressed nationalities should be inscribed on the banner of Marxism. This would then allow the workers and socialist movement to win over the majority of a nation. At the same time, this demand should be situated in a socialist context. That is why we call for the right of self-determination but usually accompany this – particularly in former multi-ethnic/national states – with the idea of a socialist federation (the CWI now has slightly altered this to a more accurate ‘confederation’). All of this is foreign to this grouping which operates with abstract formulae, which they can happily repeat (wrongly) in the study or small meetings but which would completely evaporate once applied to a real movement involving the struggle for national, democratic and ethnic rights.

This issue is obviously Woods and Grant’s theoretical Achilles heel. Woods spoke at a CWI International summer school in Belgium in 1988 where he stated that: “In 1917, the national question had been resolved by the Bolsheviks.” This is a typical example of Woods’s penchant for hyperbole. The Russian Revolution and the democratic workers’ state which resulted from this achieved wonders in the sphere of the national question. But it did not “resolve” the national question, which would only have been possible over a fairly lengthy period of economic and cultural development, and in conjunction with the triumph of the world revolution. The collapse of Stalinism and, with it, the USSR resulted in an unprecedented explosion of national and ethnic issues, including the creation of numerous other nations who had felt imprisoned within the Stalinist ‘federation’, which was what the USSR was under Stalinism.

CWI – intact and growing

The Postscript of Sewell is completely unworthy of anybody who claims to be a Trotskyist. In the 1930s Trotsky remarked that the Bolsheviks had their disputes but they never conducted themselves in the venomous manner of some of the Trotskyist organisations which he was forced to work with then. This arose from the isolation of these forces and the pressure of Stalinism on the Trotskyist movement itself. But those 1930s disputes were a mere spat compared to the highly personalised, spiteful character assassination, which has become the hallmark of many small groups in Britain and internationally in the last 50 years.

This is a product of the pressure of Stalinism. Sewell’s Postscript is a particularly obnoxious expression of this genre. Assertions are made without facts. Statements are imputed to individuals without any sources given. And gossip in the corridors of the movement become accepted explanations of what took place. For instance, in relation to the Walton by-election, he quotes Dave Nellist as saying that the decision to stand under the banner of Real Labour was “like turkeys voting for Christmas”. In not one meeting which any member of Militant can remember taking place did Dave Nellist make a statement of this kind. Dave Nellist states that “this assertion by Sewell of what I said is not true”.

Dave Nellist is widely respected as a spokesperson for working-class people and is accepted as someone with great integrity. He wouldn’t lie and would be prepared to admit that he made statements off the cuff which he would not subsequently stand over. This is not one of those cases. Rob Sewell has acted in the manner of the British gutter press like The Sun – make it short, make it snappy, and make it up.

There is even an attempt to claim that Pat Wall posthumously supported them. He was a tremendous fighter for Trotskyism over decades, a Marxist MP, a personal friend of me and others in the 1991 majority. No-one can ‘prove’ that if Pat Wall had lived he would have supported the Grant grouping or our own. However, it is significant that his son, Simon, is a firm member of the CWI and our party in Scotland. Moreover, Pat’s widow Pauline was absolutely appalled when it was explained that this grouping was claiming Pat as one of ‘theirs’. She made it clear to Keith Dickinson that she was no longer a member of the Labour Party, did not support the Grant-Woods grouping, was a subscriber to the Socialist Party’s journal The Socialist and in general agreed with our approach towards the Labour Party and building an alternative.

There are numerous errors of fact and interpretation in this alleged ‘history’, which others will correct. The obituary, which has once more been written for the CWI, is no different from what this trend has done periodically. We are ‘collapsing’, we are on our knees, because we have moved from a big headquarters in Hackney! The reality is, like all Trotskyist groups on the planet – apart from this organisation which exists in a bubble of their own making – the objective difficulties weakened us in numbers but not to the extent that they imagine. For reasons of space it is impossible to list here the successes of the CWI which has a presence in 35 countries and on all continents. But the CWI has grown substantially in a number of key areas such as Nigeria with over 600 members, in South Africa, Australia, Greece, etc. In Britain the Socialist Party has 1500 members. We publish a 12-page weekly paper, a monthly theoretical journal, and produce books and pamphlets on our own press. A balance sheet of the Grant group’s ‘influence’ and ours shows that they are totally absent from the trade union movement, from mass demonstrations in significant numbers, from the struggle against the racists and fascists, battles at local level in councils, and so on.

Why have we devoted this space to them now? As we said at the beginning it is because of their attempt to pervert history in the manner of the Stalinists. They are would-be political ‘grave-robbers’. They try to claim credit for the successes of Militant which they were not mainly responsible. For instance, Sewell makes reference to himself being mainly responsible for building the South Wales organisation. He played a part, but the lion’s share of building our influence over the last 20 years – the most successful period for the South Wales organisation – was undertaken by those longstanding National Committee members like Alec Thraves and Dave Reid, alongside a professional team of Welsh full-timers and experienced rank and file members.

Just one fact is sufficient to answer the false claims of Sewell. The biggest Trotskyist meeting ever organised in South Wales was not by the RCP in Neath but by Militant in 1986 in Kinnock’s constituency of Islwyn. Five hundred workers and young people came to that meeting to hear Derek Hatton and I explain Militant’s case in opposition to the witch-hunts being conducted against Marxists at that time. That meeting was organised primarily by the Welsh Regional Committee (Sewell was based in London at this time). The massive battle against the poll tax was also organised in South Wales by the comrades mentioned.

The tasks of the mass movement were increasingly irksome to this increasingly conservative tendency which harkened back to the small meeting room and study. Our leadership of the anti-poll tax struggle was an enormous plus for Marxism in Britain. Alongside of the Liverpool battle it showed how the genuine ideas of Marxism and Trotskyism could be wedded to a mass movement which could at least gain partial victories in one locality or in one arena of work. In the process it laid down criteria for successful struggle and is a constant reference point even today to groups who go into battle; rail privatisation was described as ‘the poll tax on wheels’, the privatisation of air traffic control as ‘the poll tax in the sky’, to name just two examples. Without the poll tax struggle we would not have enhanced our position in Scotland and Tommy Sheridan would not have been elected as an MSP when he was.

Nevertheless, we were not able to exploit the poll tax sufficiently in terms of increased membership for a number of reasons. This was on a single issue and was against the background of a general retreat in the labour movement because of the aftermath of the miners’ strike, the boom which was still underway, and the effects of the collapse of Stalinism.

However, the biggest barrier was the fact that we were still tied to the Labour Party and were not able to campaign for members openly under our own banner. If this had been seriously posed in 1987, this would have been the signal for a split four years before it actually took place because of this conservative tendency.

The picture that this group gives of their renaissance and our ‘collapse’ amounts to whistling in the dark to keep up their spirits. Any role that some of them played in the building of a viable Trotskyist movement was exhausted when they broke away from the CWI. All trends will be tested in the tumultuous events that impend and we are confident that the CWI will attract to its banner the most theoretically serious and combative elements who can rebuild a powerful Trotskyist force and a mass influence which can change the world.

Peter Taaffe, October 2002

Appendix

by Tony Aitman

The history of our movement is an important study for our members. Reading history can be a pleasure in itself; the lessons of history are important to understand the present and as a guide to the future; the history of the Trotskyist movement in particular is often an inspiration to new members just coming into activity, especially in the way that a small grouping can transform itself into a mass movement.

Rob Sewell’s postscript to Ted Grant’s History of British Trotskyism is none of these. Whatever else may be said of the book itself, at least Grant attempts to place each development in the movement – the successes, the reversals, the growth, the splits – in the context of the events against which they took place. In stark contrast, Sewell’s postscript is a vicious stream of bile and venom, in which leading figures disappear and entire historical periods are reduced to the strengths or weaknesses of one or two particular individuals.

It is of course true, as Sewell says, that the history of 50 years cannot be compressed into a few pages, or even one book; Sewell threatens, god help us, several more. But in Sewell’s “history”, whole periods are expunged from history; great events just disappear; individuals and the role they played are airbrushed from the picture in a manner worthy of the worst of Stalin’s “historians”.

It is also true, again as Sewell says, that history is made by individuals. But in the typically crass and mechanical method with which Sewell approaches Marxist theory, the dialectical relationship between the individual and the mass movement, the individual and history, is reduced to the idea that events occur purely because of the whim of particular individuals concerned. Mass movements are, of course, composed of individuals, and the role of each individual in the movement is vital. The point is, however, that individuals can play a crucial role when the general movement of the classes has reached a point when their intervention can be decisive. Lenin played such a role in 1917, but was only able to do so because the masses had moved into revolutionary action. To Sewell, every success was due only to the particular brilliance of Ted Grant (and, of course, himself and his brother), and the reverses of the 1980s and 1990s due to the incompetence of …. Peter Taaffe!! To Sewell, it is as though nothing happened in those years to affect the consciousness of the working class. The defeat of the miners’ strike, the defeat of Liverpool City Council, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the qualitative change in the nature of the Labour Party – you will search Sewell’s postscript in vain to find any real mention or analysis of these. To him, as to the whole of the grouplet around Ted Grant, nothing has changed since the beginning of the 1980s. The tactic of work in the Labour Party has become a mantra, as the slogans of the past are repeated in place of the genuine method of Marxist analysis.

In reality, the defeats of the 1980s and 1990s had a cataclysmic effect on the consciousness of the working class, throwing back decades of understanding. This was particularly so where the consciousness was most advanced and the activity of the class most pronounced, such as Liverpool and Scotland. Inevitably, this also had an effect on the leading layers of the class, within the revolutionary movement itself. We will return later to the truth of Sewell’s assertions about the Party in Liverpool, but what is true is that the events of the closing decades of the twentieth century had a major impact on sections of the leadership of the movement. To blame Peter Taaffe for this is like blaming Noah for the flood. That our Party has come through this period is a testimony to the strength of its leadership and its commitment to the ideas of Marxism.

And that is the point. Any leadership of a revolutionary movement is a collective leadership. Just look at the archives of the Revolutionary Communist Party; the leadership was, it is true, based around Ted Grant, but Jock Haston played no small role in developing its theory. Grant’s ideas themselves at the end of the war were influenced by the theories of Felix Morrow and Albert Goldman. As an aside, it is interesting that Sewell admits this in his introduction to Grant’s book. In all the time Grant spoke in the old Tendency on the history of the movement, this was never mentioned (see the transcript of Grant’s speech on the history held in the Liverpool archives). I myself raised this in the 1980s on first reading Morrow and Goldman’s documents. The exact formulations were different, but the analysis and conclusions were basically the same. When I took this up with Ted, I was dismissed. Morrow and Goldman were petit bourgeois at best; their ideas were only superficially similar, only the British section (i.e. Ted Grant) had the correct ideas. Unfortunately for Sewell, the documents are there and the truth of history cannot be dismissed.

Sober analysis and attention to the realities of history are complete strangers to Sewell. It is often nauseating to have to go through what passes for history in Sewell’s mind. It is important, however, to place things on paper for the historical record. For this reason alone, we shall try to deal with at least some of Sewell’s points.

Firstly, it is important to give some impression of the state of the movement at the time of the final break with Healy. The group was extremely loose, held together solely by the ties of their previous close collaboration and the force of the ideas, for which Ted Grant must take much of the credit. However, it terms of there being a cohesive force with a clear idea of where it was going, this was virtually non-existent. The faction fighting and manoeuvring after the war had taken its toll. Small, isolated groups existed in London, in Liverpool, in South Wales, with odd individuals elsewhere.

The importance of the Liverpool group, however, was its industrial base and its history going back to the 1930s; the first independent Trotskyist candidate had stood for the council in Bootle. The apprentices’ strike, led by the Communist Party in Scotland, in Liverpool was led by our comrades. Terry Harrison, who played an important part in the development of the Liverpool organisation, particularly with younger members, had a leading role in the apprentices’ strike committee. Incidentally, Terry is one of the few people praised by Sewell. It is a pity he did not know Terry’s nickname for him – the bullshitter!! Still, Sewell says that the strike allowed us to recruit a number of young workers, but, amongst all the names that are mentioned, is curiously shy of mentioning any of these apprentices. Perhaps it is because they included Ted Mooney, later to be a Liverpool City Councillor, spokesperson for the Shop Stewards Action Committee in English Electric – and, to use Sewell’s terminology, still a committed member of the Socialist Party to this day.

The organisation that Ted Mooney joined was chaotic to say the least. The secretary of the branch did not attend meetings; work was being ignored in many areas; the base in Walton that Sewell mentions, while important for the group in terms of the intervention into Labour Party conferences, etc., was nevertheless woefully lacking in terms of what was required of a revolutionary party.

“Over the past few weeks there has been no group meetings….there are one or two comrades who have never attended a meeting since I’ve been in the group, namely H Dalton and M Black” (letter from Ted Mooney to Terry Harrison, 26/6/62)

Dalton and Black were later to become leading figures in the Labour Party. Black moved to the right but Hughie Dalton did not significantly change his politics and stood by the heroic 47 Liverpool councillors who defied Thatcher and were fined and removed from office.

“LK is much settled in a new role as a ‘has been’ …. Geo McC is much more friendly … he may soon be back” (letter from Brian Dean to Terry Harrison, 10/6/62).

George may well be a nice old man, friendly with Ted Grant, but to say he is “a supporter of Socialist Appeal to this day” will be met with surprise by many Liverpool Socialist Party members, past and present, who will never have heard of him. He was almost totally out of contact with the group when I went to Liverpool in 1967 and, from Brian’s letter above, even before that. That someone who has had no contact with the Trotskyist movement for 40 years and played no part in any of the internal discussions throughout that period can be paraded as evidence of the continuation of ideas with the Grant group is an indication of that group’s bankruptcy. It is also an indication – and we shall return to this later – that to them, nothing has changed since the 1960s!

For the group nationally, it was vitally necessary to strengthen its organisation and central cohesion. For this reason, Keith Dickenson, a long standing member of the Liverpool group, went to London to work. Strangely, while others receive fulsome praise, Keith is not mentioned. Could this also be because Keith remains a member of the Party’s leading body to this day? For Liverpool, it was necessary to reorganise, rebuild and put some order into chaos.

New members were being recruited, particularly from Birkenhead Young Socialists, where John McDonald was based. Of particular importance was the recruitment of Peter Taaffe, a young Council employee. Sewell has high praise for Dougie Holmes in his acknowledgments; I don’t want to be critical of old Dougie, who made sacrifices for the movement, but let him speak for himself:

“Now we have got two new members …. and Peter Taaffe, a mate of John McDonald’s from Birkenhead, who for only being in the Labour Party for six months knows quite a lot, at least more than I do” (letter from Doug Holmes to Terry Harrison, 19/1/62)

Incidentally, Doug was writing when Terry was in the army in Hong Kong doing his National Service; Doug was still in Liverpool because, against the advice and policy of the group, he had claimed to be a Conscientious Objector and thus evaded doing his service. That Doug finds himself with Socialist Appeal today comes as no surprise; their whole guiding policy seems to be to avoid a fight by any means possible.

Peter had an enormous impact on the group, putting it on a firm footing, making sure meetings took place regularly, developing its theoretical strength. John McDonald is more fulsome in his praise than Dougie:

“We have three members who have shown that they know how to work methodically and more properly…….but P(eter) T(aaffe) is just amazing! Some comrades have been directing sometimes petty and unconstructive criticism at Brian (Deane). Not Peter, he can criticise Brian, but in a way to get something out of him, and he can work himself. He isn’t Trotsky yet, but believe me, Terry, wait and see, he’ll leave Brian and Paddy (Pat Wall) behind in a few years and on the national plane. He might very well be the Maccabee. He has a very powerful and aggressive mind” (letter from John McDonald to Terry Harrison, 5/8/62).

Despite the shortage of space, Sewell devotes an inordinate proportion of his postscript to the very early years of development. Why is this so? Clearly, to do otherwise, he would have to deal with the years of growth in Liverpool, the leadership of the LPYS, the real history of the building of the international. What has happened to all the people involved in those years? To Sewell, they have simply disappeared from history. Why, for example, is so much time spent on the Mani affair, an episode which has disappeared into the mists of pre-history, while the expulsion of the editorial board and the MPs is glossed over in a few lines, and blamed on the Peter Taaffe misleadership? The Mani affair centred around some of our supporters opposing a hooligan element in a clash with the bureaucracy in order to preserve their position in the Labour Party. Is Sewell suggesting that we should have backed down over the expulsions, that the events in a tiny backwater of the labour movement can be compared to a major battle in the full glare of publicity and in front of the whole of the Labour Party? To give the expulsions their true worth in time and explanation would reveal Sewell’s real position. There comes a time when it is necessary to stand up to the bureaucracy and fight, and the position around the expulsions was clearly one of them. Why does Sewell not go into detail about this? Perhaps it is because, of the expelled editorial board members, apart from Grant himself, all the rest are – still committed members of the Party. But waving the brush of Stalinism, Sewell has consigned Lynn Walsh, Keith Dickenson and Clare Doyle to become the non-people of history.

Take the break with Young Guard. As Sewell admits, the closure of Rally and the fusion with Young Guard was clearly a mistake, brought on by Jimmy Deane’s lack of confidence in the ability of the group to develop on its own. The whole blame cannot though be laid at the feet of one man; the desire for unity with others on the left at that time grew out of the isolation of the group in the face of the SLL (Healy, later the WRP) and the IS (Cliff, later the SWP). Sewell, though, does not mention Ted Grant’s position. Jimmy could not have brought the merger about on his own. Was it only Jimmy Deane who was in favour of the merger? In cowardly fashion, Sewell places all the blame for the Rebel/Rally merger on one man unable to answer back.

A hallmark of Ted’s work was to take the easy road. It was precisely the same with his position regarding the Open Party faction and entry into the Labour Party after the war. It is interesting that Sewell now says that it was a mistake for Ted not to have backed the Open Party faction. Despite his claim, Ted never admitted this before – again, see the transcript of his speech on the history of British Trotskyism in the Liverpool archives – and Sewell still says later on that in or out of the Labour Party at that time made no difference, and also talks of “40 years work” in the 1980s. If it made no difference, why was it wrong not to back the Open Party faction? And if the turn by the tendency to open work in the 1980s was a “threat to 40 years work”, the implication must be that it was correct to have joined the Labour Party in the 1940s. Sewell can’t have it both ways.

On Rebel/Rally/Young Guard, Sewell is also silent on the position of the Liverpool group:

“In your last letter, you mention the merger of Rally with Rebel and you express your lack of faith in such a transaction. I am afraid I can only agree with you. I was against the merger from the beginning. I pointed out the inevitable results of such a merger and recent events have proven me to be right” (letter from Ted Mooney to Terry Harrison, 16/12/61).

The split with Young Guard was not accidental. It grew out of the campaign for a youth charter. The charter itself developed on Merseyside out of the apprentices’ charter drawn up by the comrades at the time of the apprentices’ strike. The charter became the sticking point with the IS in Young Guard, and also became a major weapon in our hands in the development of the YS itself. Opposed to the very concept of a transitional programme, the IS/SWP could not tolerate Young Guard being associated with this in any way.

Nevertheless, the split with IS took place and the decision taken to set up Militant. Incidentally, Sewell’s selective memory, while mentioning a number of attempts to set up a paper, curiously forgets Socialist Current, involving Sam Levy and others. Ted was involved in the early issues, yet this gets no mention. Perhaps it is because his “research” involved only received wisdom from others, rather than the more painstaking method of reading through the archives to check and bolster up other people’s memories. Ted was wont to call the Socialist Current the “Currant Bun”; my own attempts to obtain information from him about his involvement proved fruitless, perhaps another example of selective memory.

The production of the paper made an important impact on the growth of the tendency. For the first time in years, a regular paper, whatever its faults, was produced. Despite the early issues being marred by yet another attempted merger with the International Group, forced on us by the International of which we were still (just) a part, the paper made a big impact. It was at this time that I came into contact with the tendency. My father was a building site worker in London’s East End, and came from the proud Jewish East End Communist tradition. He had left the Communist Party in 1956 over the Hungarian events, and I had been brought up with a hatred of Stalinism and a firm belief in the ability and necessity of the working class to change society. My first contact was with the International Group, later to become the IMG. However, they were more concerned with selling me pamphlets by Malcolm X than serious discussion. Similarly, I was repelled by the sectarianism and aura of violence around the Socialist Labour League (later WRP). There was nothing down for the International Socialists (SWP); they seemed overwhelmingly middleclass, with a membership in my YS branch who had open contempt for the “failure of the working class to achieve socialism”. The only group who seemed to have any real sense of where they were going, an understanding of the Labour Party – and, given my background, a sympathetic attitude to the working class militants of the Communist Party – was the group around Militant.

Joining in London, I quickly came into contact with the group mentioned by Sewell from Sussex and Brighton University. But again, Sewell’s selective memory kicks in. Keen to make a sectarian point, he twists and turns reality to his own purpose. To him, the Militant tendency was built by Ted Grant, with assistance from Alan Woods and Rob Sewell. And to make this distorted view of history, people have to disappear. Those who also came from Brighton – Lynn Walsh, Clare Doyle, Roger Silverman, Bob Edwards and a host of others – are simply ignored. If Sewell has a point to be made, everything goes by the board. Thus, Jim Brookshaw’s joining is put years further back in time than it really was, to make it seem as though he was another victory for the great Woods.

But what other events built the tendency? There were some important developments on the industrial front. In Liverpool, the threatened closure of the English Electric factories in 1969/70 by Arnold Weinstock, who was honoured by the Labour government, was met with militant opposition by the workforce, with a threatened workers’ take-over of the factory. The dispute attracted attention from throughout the world, with film and television crews coming from France, Germany and America. Although the shop stewards committee was forced to make a tactical step back from action when other factories failed to come to their assistance, the dispute was instrumental in forcing Tony (at that time Wedgwood) Benn to rethink his policies and place himself on the left of the Labour Party. Again, no mention by Sewell. Could it be because the Shop Stewards Action Committee spokesperson was Ted Mooney and the Chief Clerical Workers’ Shop Steward was Tony Aitman, at that time also a member of the LPYS National Committee? Both of these comrades are, of course, still committed and active members of the Socialist Party.

Where is the analysis of the momentous events in Liverpool around the council campaign? Hardly a mention is made of this, but the struggle in Liverpool had national and international repercussions, raising our stature in the eyes of the working class to an unprecedented level, bringing with it growth everywhere. Why no real mention of this struggle or the people involved in it? And where are the people who built the Liverpool organisation? Sewell mentions three: Doug Holmes played a role years ago, George McCartney flared briefly in the 1950s, Terry Harrison played an important part until he lapsed into inactivity in the mid-1980s. But where are the others? People such as Tony Mulhearn, active in the tendency since the early 1960s, a leader of the council campaign, a print worker militant, blacklisted since the council defeat? Or Tony Aitman, active in the youth work of the tendency since 1964, a full time worker for the tendency, first in Liverpool and then in the national publishing company? Or councillors such as Paul Astbury and Harry Smith, both industrial workers, who made enormous sacrifices in the council campaign? Or Roy Farrar, active in the tendency since the late 1960s, a Post Office engineer until ill health forced his retirement? No mention for them – of course, they all remain firm supporters of the Socialist Party to this day.

This raises the question of the Liverpool split. Let us nail once and for all the lie about the events in Liverpool. The entire leadership was not “booted out”. After years of misleadership by the leading comrades in Liverpool, a section of the membership placed themselves outside the Party. When I returned to Liverpool in the early 1990s, the organisation was a shadow of its former self. Paper sales did not take place; the leading comrades regarded the theoretical journal as unsellable; where there had been three branches in one ward, there was now one branch for Liverpool, where a handful of people met forlornly every week.

With a local leadership that had no grounding in theory – in Dave Cotterill’s words, “we need doers, not thinkers” – the defeat of the dockworkers’ strike had an effect on consciousness. The leading members, bowing to syndicalist trends among the dockworkers, questioned whether activity in the Trade Unions was worthwhile. When pressed, they would deny this, but that was the logic of their position. Rather than the revolutionary party, or even the Trade Unions, the saviour of the working class movement was to be – the internet!! Preparing for a split with the organisation, they proposed a new journal to be produced in Liverpool, a new literary and political magazine. Indeed, with grandiose ideas, they held a conference in which papers were presented and plans laid for the launch of this literary marvel.

The reality was somewhat different. Of course, no magazine was forthcoming. The Liverpool premises, stolen from the organisation by the people in whose names it had been entrusted, has now been sold and is the personal property of … Mike Morris!! For a while, they continued to meet as Merseyside Socialists, but, with no cohesive programme or perspectives, this has crumbled. In Cath Wilson’s words, “Merseyside Socialists is not a party, it is a holding group, we do not aim to recruit or build”. As a result, you can count the number still active on the fingers of one hand. They remain as a social group, held together by ties of friendship, the memories of past greatness and bitterness towards ourselves, wandering sadly from social event to literary gathering while the battles in the labour movement go on without them.

When the split took place, it was like a breath of fresh air in the Liverpool organisation. Let us be clear: Although on paper a majority of members left, in reality a majority of the active membership, particularly those active in the Trade Union movement, stayed. Every comrade who had been removed as a councillor and who was still involved in politics stayed with the Socialist Party – not a single surcharged councillor comrade went with those who left. At the time of the split, we retained comrades on the National Executives of UNISON and the NUT; within a few months of the split, we had another comrade elected as the Black workers’ representative on the UNISON National Executive. The branch secretaries of Liverpool and Knowsley NUT are both members; we have UNISON and MSF shop stewards as members. We have active members in the car plants, the local authority, the voluntary sector, the health service, the building industry. The chair of one the most active of Merseyside’s Trades Councils is a member. We have a number of women comrades, disabled comrades, ethnic minority comrades. For Sewell, no mention is made of this, or of his own tiny grouplet in Merseyside, which has disappeared into the bowels of the Labour Party. To him, Peter Taaffe is responsible for the death of Militant and the Socialist Party on Merseyside; in reality, it is only the programme and perspectives of the Party that has kept the ideas of Trotskyism alive and growing in their historical heartland.

Tony Aitman