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*SOME OBSERVATIONS ON OUR HISTORY*
Andre
*Why a balance sheet ?*
Balance sheets are not very popular in our organisation. In some ways, of dourse [sic] this is a healthy reaction. Incessant discussion of the errors of the past can get in the way of working out the crucial tasks of the present. But it is *unhealthy* for any political current to live in an eternal present, because all the tactical twists and turns, whether successful or failures, will yield up nothing in the way of permanent lessons for the cobstruction [sic] of a revolutionary party.
There is another major problem with never having balance sheets. It disorientates the cadre, and potentially demoralises them. Just look at the turn to industry question. Here we had a major tactical turn, which committed dozens of comrades to moving and changing their jobs; which was made a key question of political divide in the current; which undoubtedly lost us supporters; and which is now rejected by the majority. But why exactly was it wrong ? In its political content, in its application or what ? And what about the unity campaign with the SWP ? Was it right or wrong ? Why did we drop it ?
And what about the more long term probelms of construction of a revolutionary party. Many supporters now have a history of ten years militancy, many more over five years. What is the product of this activity ? Where are we, how far have we got ? A tendency which does not have a grasp of its own history is destined to repeat the errors which it has made.
This document will assert that we have made serious errors, indeed grievous ones, and that we have lost major opportunities for party building. Indeed it will argue that there are major problems in our whole conception of cadre building, recruitment and education.
It is not enough to have a correct programme, or to have defended revolutionary internationalism without substantial default. Many groups have done so and ended up completely defeated. It is necessary to know how to define the correct strategy and tactics, and the correct methods of party building.
The idea that we have basically done OK because we have ended up with politically the best tendency on the British left is hopeless. You also have to answer: why are we not substantially bigger than we were ten years ago ? Was this inevitable ? We will argue that it was not, and that we could easily have had at least double the number of supporters that we now have. Our history has profound lessons for the future -- provided we learn them.
*Foundation to 1970 -- an empirical break with entry*
The foundation of the Group in the mid-1960s took place in reaction to Healyism, the decision of P.Jordan and K.Coates to build a section of the [FI?] in Britain. The political divide they made with Healyism was crucially around two questions: 1) Revolutionary internationalism 2) Against sectarianism. The concretisation of the first was propaganda in defence of the Cuban revolution; and the setting up of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign which was to yield such vital results. The concretisation of the second was the orientation
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to entry work [illegible] Party [illegible] membership.
In the early 1960s the Healy-SLL won control of the YS, which adopted in its majority Marxist positions. Healy's main opponents were the IS and the Militant, both at that time much smaller than the SLL. A number of YS branches started to sponsor *Keep Left*, launched by Wembley North, and it rapidly became the main YS paper.
The problem was that the winning of the control of the YS coincided with Healy's ultra-sectarian turn, which started in the late 1950s and became conclusive by 1963-4. This led Healy to auto-destruct his position of leadership in the YS.
In the late 1950s the Healy group had won to it a not insignificant number of industrial militants, through its participation in a series of building strikes like the Shell-Mex dispute and the 1957 bus strike, together with its long-term base on the docks. It also won, through its intervention in the crisis of the CP after 1956, a number of ex-CP intellectuals like Cliff Slaughter. Healy now concluded that circumstances were right for the formation of an opem [sic] organisation, the SLL which would rapidly challenge the CP.
But the formation of the SLL, and the fact that the SLL newspaper *Newsletter* became the paper of the SLL, inevitably put pressure on the entry tactic. The irony was that just as the entry tactic was winning its most brilliant success -- the winning of the leadership of the YS -- the SLL was jettisoning that tactic. The pressure to do that was increased by the CP militants like Slaughter, who were hostile to work in the LP because of their Stalinist training.
In the early 1960s the YS went through a considerable growth. Many middle class youth were brought into politics by CND, and now turned to the YS. Healyite control of the YS started a Transport House witch hunt. Healy now became convinced that, with the election of a labour government in 1964 which would betray the working class, the way was now open to the formation of a mass revolutionary YS, openly attached to the SLL. The SLL responded to the witch hunt with a series of provocations desinged [sic] to ensure expulsions -- YS leaders like Dave Ashby and Sheila Torrence were thrown out. But the SLL refused to take the campaign for defence of the YS into the LP proper -- indeed its break with entrism now meant that it lacked the means to do so.
The vacuum created by the departure of the SLL enabled the eventual takeover by *Miltiant*.
Such was the criminal foolishness of Healy. Decades of work by Trotskyists was thrown away in the delusion that sections of the masses would break from their traditional organisations at the first whiff of 'betrayal' by the Wilson government. The real development was of course that the working class attempted to deal with the economic problems it faced under Wilson, especially after 1968, by trade union struggle, the mass upsurge which continued into the period of the Heath Tory government. But at no time did any section of the masses attempt to construct a political alternative to the Labour Party. In the 1970 general election Labour won over 12 million votes compared with the 8+ million in 1983. Broken from active participation in the labour movement, Healy's youth organisation degenerated into a decreasing sect, totally consumed with organising football matches and discos.
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[Naturally?], the sectarianism of the SLL and its lack of internationalism were inter-linked. Healy's break with the FI in the early 1960s set the seal on the sectarian degeneration of his group.
The very small forces which supported the International Secretariat against Healy, essentially based in Nottingham, now came forward to build a new section of the FI. In 1964-5 a fusion was effected with the Militant forces, based in London, under the guidance of the USFI. The personal intervention of Germain in Britain convinced a reluctant Group to fuse with Militant. Neither group brought much of the fusion, and it rapidly broke down over Militant connivance at the expulsion of SLLers from the LP.
*Ken Coates, advisor to the left bureaucrats*
Following the decision of the 1965 World Congress, at which Militant left the [FI?], the sections of the [FI?] started to make solidarity with Vietnam the number one priority. In Britain this was done by building the Vietnam Solidarity Camoaign. At first the field was dominated by the CP's British Council for Peace in Vietnam -- the VSC was very much a minority current, having to fight hard to re-educate the left on the question of *solidarity* with colonial struggles. The org. played a major role in the foundation of VSC.
But two other projects indicated the overall conception of entry which the org. held, and in particular the conception of K.Coates -- the *Week* magazine and the Campaign, later Institute, for Workers Control.
The Group strongly criticised Healy for his abandonment of entry. It defended a perspective that a revolutionary party could only be built out of splits and fusions in the mass party of the class. Its guiding thread, spelled out in the 1966 document 'Towards a Decisive Turning Point in Great Britain', was the formation of a mass centrist left inside the Labour Party, with a revolutionary marxist core who would challenge for its leadership. *The Week* was founded on this perspective, and gained sponsorship from a wide range of individuals in the labour movement, from Bill Jones of the TGWU, Jim Mortimer, Labour MPs etc.
Two criticisms can be made of this project. First, the project was conceived in an 'objectivist' manner, with insufficient attention being given to party building as such. Thus *The Week*, billed as 'a new service for the left', could not defend a full revolutionary marxist programme. The very small number of comrades lacked the political literature, for example a theoretical magazine, to recruit to the organisation. Many people who read The Week had no idea whatever that there was a distinct political tendency involved in producing it.
The 'objectivist' conception reduced the role of the marxist nucleus to bringing the mass centrist current into existence, while the problem of building up sufficient marxist forces to actually influence that current was left in abeyance.
Second, Ken Coates, the best known spokesperson of the Group, consciously sought to establish himself as an advisor to the left bureaucrats, winning them to the IWC project and giving them all manner of tactical and political advice. At this time there is no doubt that Coates considered himself a revolutionary marxist, and genuinely thought that this activity would help develop a centrist tendency in the Labour Party. But such activity has its own deadly logic, which came to the fore in the 1967 [dock workers'?] strike. Coates wanted The Week to hold off on any criticism of the sell-out role of Jack Jones, on the grounds that we were working with Jones in the IWC. How could you criticise when you wanted to ma[illegible]
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Coates' activity. [illegible] introduced a tension -- or [illegible] inherent [illegible] between party building and overall political perspectives.
But the tension was also heightened by the actual course of the Group's work and the development of the political radicalisation in Britain. The Group became more and more involved in the VSC work, which Coates eventually opposed. While a mass left did not develop in the LP, the student upsurge began to develop, led by a series of sit-ins at LSE after 1966. The Week began more and more to carry political articles defending an overall marxist perspective.
VSC work itself was not counterposed to entry, indeed wide support could be won for VSC at the base of the Labour Party. But the actual recruits who could be won were not going to come from the LP, in their majority. In 1967-68 the Group entered a period of confusion. It recruited Tariq Ali, who was opposed to entry, and a number of other individuals who neither supported entry nor practiced it. On the other hand it still defended an entry perspective.
A number of Group comrades were central to setting up *Black Dwarf* in 1968. At the time of the appearance of Black Dwarf, a paper brilliantly suited to capitalising on the student radicalisation, The Week was still being produced. The contradiction between the two could not last for long. 'Under the pressure of events' The Week was abandonned.
*The circumstances of the abandonment of entry stored up many long-term probelms.*
While the break from entry was necessary, and absolutely justified by the emeregnce of the mass student radicalisation, it was necessary to warn the youth that the mass organisations of the working class including the Labour Party could not be by-passed. If a very large Trotskyist organisation had existed, it would have been necessary to maintain some cadres in the social democracy for long-term work. In other words, *a turn away from entry did not imply any change of perspective on how a revolutionary party was to be built.* But the circumstances and methods of the Group's entry work encouraged a negative balance sheet of entry. Insufficient attention to the recruitment and training of cadres, of ideological work and the open defence of the Marxist programme, encouraged comrades to write off the entry period as a waste of time.
The break from entry was thoroughly empirical. As the European sections made their turn away from entry, this turn became more and more informed by the notion that the entry period was now definitively finished, an episode from the past of the International which would not be repeated. Building the revolutionary party could now be 'directly posed', outflanking the reformists to the left.
*Enter the Spartacus League*
The May events in France in 1968 had a profound effect on the Group. The role of the JCR in the French events and the student upsurge convinced the Group of the necessity to found a revolutionary youth organisation -- the Spartacus League, which didn't really get off the ground until 1970. This period of the group's history is one of profound confusion. Making a thoroughly emprical [sic] and untheorised break from entrism, the organisation failed to grasp that the real political process was the beginning of a working class upsurge, and not just a student revolt. Still, eventually the Spartacus League played an important role in recruitment. The work around Black Dwarf, and the 1970 split which founded the *Red Mole*, put the organisation in a qualitatively stronger position in terms of [illegible]
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[illegible] a much [illegible] stage late. While we were the [key?] organisers of VSC, much bigger gains were made from the VSC by the International Socialists, armed with a strong theoretical magazine and an 'orientation to the working class'. The Spartacus League was constructed at a time when the best militants from the student milieu were looking for the answers to overall questions of politics -- which centrally posed the question of the labour movement and orientation to workers struggles.
The problem with the orientation of the Group was vividly demonstrated by the 1970 perspectives document 'No, We haven't got all the time in the world'. This document basically argued that the revolutionary party would be constructed out of work directed towards students, black women workers etc. Naturally, much of this was correct but it avoided the central problem of the relationship of the Group to the organised labour movement.
At this stage we were involved in a thoroughly mis-conceived polemic with the International Socialists. Their message was essentially 'go to the factory gate'. Our reply was essentially 'a Leninist organisation can only be built by going to all the oppressed layers of society', which again was correct as far as it went, but missed the central problem. Sharing an ultra-left framework with the IS, and lacking the decisive answers on the united front, the character of the Labour Party, and an overall perspective on how a revolutionary party would be built, we were defenceless on how revolutionaries should actually function in relation to the organised labour movement.
In 1969 Tony Cliff produced a book 'The Employers' Offensive -- Productivity Deals and how to fight them', which enabled the IS to go to many rank and file trade unionists. In 1970 the first factory occupation, at Fisher-Bendix on Merseyside, saw a strong IS intervention. The IS were rapidly growing, which not for the last time, exerted a strong pressure on the Group.
Our essentially ideological polemic of course enabled us to win some of the best, more politicised, militants. But it gave us no answers on the crucial questions of strategy. This situation could not sustain itself for long. In 1970-1 a new leadership emerged in the organisation under the banner of a 'turn to the working class'. The emergence of this leadership was signalled by the production of a document from Oxford 'For Industrial Work'. The political content of the turn proposed was at first unclear, but became clearer at the 1972 conference of the organisation in the famous, now infamous, Jones-Howard perspectives document.
*1972 - Ultra-leftism theorised*
A turn to the organised labour movement was indeed by the early 1970s long overdue. The political form it took however was a form of theorised ultra-leftism and propagandism, the centre-pieces of which were the notion that 'calls to action' were not part of Leninism because the 'working class itself' is extremely active and needs no advice on this score from the revolutionaries. On the contrary, the quintessence of Leninism was 'explaining ideas', coupled with the notion that since the transitional programme 'smashes the state', calls to action against the government were 'a social democratic deviation'.
A long polemic against these positions is hardly necessary. Suffice it to say that such positions could not withstand the test of the anti-Tory struggle which was developing rapidly. When the Tory government imprisoned five dockers under the Industrial Relations Act in August 1972, the Red Mole special made every call to action under the sun, including what amounted to a call for soviets. But the 'social democratic deviation' -- [illegible]
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At this point [illegible] necessary to point out [illegible] had got itself into a spiral of factional warfare which took four years to overcome. Very bad and dangerous precedents were being [set?] in the internal life of the organisation. The way in which the Oxford team seized the leadership of the organisation was utterly factional -- based on unclear politics and demagogy about the working class. The old leadership around P.Jordan hardly fared any better, setting itself firmly against the necessary renewal of political line and leadership cadre. The very bad precedent that political differences were fought out not through clear discussion but in the Conference Nominations Commission, and that the touchstone of political clarity was control of the apparatus was being set.
Not until 1976 was the factional divide overcome, with the permanent loss to the leadership of the organisation of central and valuable cadre like cde Klein. The necessity to build a collective leadership incopprating [sic] comrades from all trends in the leadership was ignored. This terrible factional history is sometimes actually held up as a model of 'internal democracy'. Of course, it's true that the institional [sic] guarantees in democratic centralism, the right of tendency and faction, enabled the organisation to prevent a split. But the real functioning of democratic centralism requires not just the correct institutional rules, but a mature leadership capable of building a collective team. In the early 1970s that did not exist.
In December 1972 the Group held its 'conference on government'. At this conference the question at issue was what attitude to take towards the Tory government of Heath, and whether to call for a general strike to overthrow it. Cde Jones defended the utterly ultra-left position that the question of government was merely a sub-question of the question of the state (which we were against) and that therefore the position of Trotskyists should be 'down with the government' -- irrespective of time, circumstances, the political party in government etc.
By 1973 all this was on the way out, with the consequent splitting up of the 1972 majority, and the formation of a tendency which continued to defend the left propagandism of 1972 -- the Left Opposition Tendency led by cde Marshall. By then the political development of the Group and its strategic perspectives were being informed by something else -- the preparations for the Tenth World Congress and the European Perspectives Document (EPD).
Not for the first time, the political developments in the International leadership set the pace for Britain. The EPD was constructed around the argument that there had emerged a 'new mass vanguard' to the left of the traditional organisations of the working class, and the route to the construction of revolutionary parties was the hegemonising of this vanguard by the Trotskyists.
*THe EPD -- ultra-leftism theorised again*
The huge wave of radicalisation of the working class which swept Europe after 1968 in France and 1969 in Italy created a cluster of organisations, mainly of an ultra-left and centrist character to the left of the traditional workers parties. It created a wider radicalised milieu, especially among the intelligensia, [illegible] it was just one aspect of the radicalisation.
In the first [illegible] of the EPD, the [illegible] the new vanguard being to one [illegible] the mass organisations [illegible], thus
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implicitly to the left of the trade unions as well as the Stalinist and social democratic parties. Gradually this was amended, to incorporate a 'broad workers vanguard'. But the thrust of the argument remained that this vanguard would be outside the mass parties, and would become progressively bigger through successive 'breaks' with the reformist apparatuses.
This was an utterly one-sided analysis. The initial wave of radicalisation after 1968 took the reformist apparatuses off guard and enabled them to be outflanked. But gradually, basing themselves on the radicalisation and moving to the left to accomodate it, the reformist parties and Stalinist parties began to construct a series of political projects to build their parties. The most visible and spectacular was the 'Union of the Left' in France.
Contrary to the expectations of the International, the first wave of radicalisation had actually brought *new* layers into political activity for the first time, and these people did not know the far left organisations. Instead they looked to their traditional mass parties, and to their trade unions. While the far left continued to gow, the reformists also grew, and because they started from a qualitatively stronger base they grew much faster.
The error of the EPD was not necessarily that it advocated open Trotskyist organisations, but that it theorised a false notion of how revolutionary parties would be built. Moreover, the notion which topped off the EPD - that of the 'dialectic of unity and outflanking developed by Segur in France - gave an ultra-left twist to the theory of the united front. In fact, the 'dialectic of unity and outflanking' was a version of the ultra-left 'united front from below', designged [sic] to 'expose' the reformist apparatuses by drawing into action sections of their base in 'initiatives' (generally let it be said of an ultra-left character) controlled by the revolutionaries. This sort of theorising led to French organisation Molotov coacktailing the Paris police force, splitting the Chile committees on the demand that the money got to the MIR etc.
At this stage of the analysis it is necessary to return to events in the British class struggle and their political effects.
*The real first wave of Bennism*
It is fashionable in our current to refer to the events in the Labour Party after 1979 as 'the first wave of Bennism'. In fact the first wave took place under the Heath government of 1970-74. *The major political change in working class politics in this period was the re-emergence of the Labour left.*
The huge struggle against the Industrial Relations Act, two miners strikes, the struggle over the imprisoned Shrewsbury pickets, the freeing of the five dockers and the struggle at UCS caused a sea-change in British politics. Tony Benn set foward his claim to leadership of the left, championing the Upper Clyde struggle. The first versions of the Alternative Economic Strategy began to be put forward, especially in the work by Stuart Holland.
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The Labour [illegible] change in power and wealth towards working people and their families. [illegible] Here were the indications that the spontaneous upsurge of the woking [sic] class after 1968 was finding its political expression within the mass party of the class. *This was an absolutely inevitable political development, given the unitary [illegible] character of the British labour movement.*
*At this stage our current should have made a sharp turn back towards the Labour Party.* Paradoxically, there was no lack of recognition that something was actually going on inside the social democracy. The Group came forward with two related concepts: 'Labour's left turn' and 'the combined upsurge' -- the latter notion indicating that the political crisis was now taking the form of joint trade union, LP fight.
It is important to remember in assessing this question that the *Militant* at this stage was actually smaller than the Group. Their participation in the mass party throughout the various stages of Bennism put them in the crucial strategic position to capitalise after 1979 when the differentiation inside the Labour Party became very sharp. It is wrong to believe that the *Militant* would have acheived the same success if they had been an open group and then turned to the LP after 1979. Their recent success has been a product of *strategic* thinking, always keeping to the fore that the radicalisation would inevitably pass through the LP.
In the mid-1970s there was a contradiction between the concepts which the Group developed to account for the first wave of Bennism -- the combined upsurge and Labour's left turn -- an the overall strategic thinking about the formation of revolutionary parties. Our empirical break with entrism, our generalised ultra-leftism and the political conceptions of the European perspectives document did not arm us to keep in mind what was commonplace in the Group in the 1960s -- that the British crisis would take the form in the working class of the crisis of social democracy.
At the Febuary 1974 general election the Group stood candidates against Labour in a number of constituencies. This was an ultra-left error. Here we had a situation in which a general election was polarised around the basic class question of for or against the Tories' positions on the miners strike. Heath called the election on a specific 'who rules Britain?' platform. A vote for Labour was a basic class vote in that election. Group candidates received miserable votes, including the second lowest vote of any candidate of the 2000+ standing in the election, received by our candidate in Glasgow Queens Park. Instead of standing independent candidtaes [sic], the Group should have called for a class vote for Labour.
In 1975 the Group began fraction work inside the mass party, including the production of Left Action, a bulletin in the LPYS. This turn towards fraction work was a product of the thinking which had gone into analysing the left turn of the LP. *The rapid abandonment of this work was one of the major errors which the Group made in the 1970s.*
The coming to power of the Wilson government in 1974, and the rapid move to bring about the 'social contract' led us to argue that 'Labour's left turn' had been headed off, and that the fraction work was no longer appropriate. But in terms of developments at the base of the LP, the 74-79 Labour government was not a simple repeat of the 64-70 government. During the 1974-[illegible] there was a molecular [illegible] of radicalisation [illegible] via the [illegible] was
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to explode so dramatically after [1979?]. Again, there were not dramatic struggles inside the Labour Party after 1974, and the Labour government steered a right wing course. But there was no contradiction between participating in the anti-racist struggle, ANL, Grunwicks, firefighters struggle etc and maintaining very strong fraction work, if not toal entry in the Labour Party. Indeed, the oft-repeated popular argument in the Group about 'the struggle is outside the LP' misses the point if it is completely detached from strategic questions of the building of a revolutionary party.
Of course, there was one apect of the activity of the Group with which entry (certainly) and strong fraction work (probably) was inconsistent -- the Socialist Unity project, and the fight for revolutionary unity, which became the centre pieces of the organisations work in the seconf half of the 1970s. It is a great failing that no serious critical history of this period has ever been written.
*Into Elections -- the Socialist Unity turn*
The IS transformed themselves into the Socialist Workers Party in 1975. In 1976 they made a turn towards elections, thinking they could establish themselves as a stronger electoral force than the CP -- and this would help them to become the main force to the left of the Labour Party. The response of the Group was to support their campaigns, to try to impose unity on them, to demand open campaign committees in which we could participate etc. In November 1975 they stood a candidate in Walsall North, and we carried the 'impose unity' tactic towards them -- not with a lot of success.
In early 1976 we stood our own candidate in the Stetchford by-election, against both Labour and the SWP, basing ourselves on the Asian population there, and maintaining the propaganda line of a united revolutionary campaing if the SWP would agree. This line was based on a definite strategic line of party building -- that the revolutionary forces would be basically built up outside and against the Labour Party. It was definitely counter-posed to the 'Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory' approach of the Socialist Organiser. The success of our campaign in Stetchford, at least to the extent of beating the SWP, led us towards the whole Socialist Unity project, around which Socialist Challenge was launched in 1977.
Like any political turn it was in part based on empirical experience -- the fact that it appeared to work. And there is no doubt that it enabled us to grow and recruit, making us a pole of attraction for the whole far left. Whether it was a correct turn we come to below. The important point to note here is that this turn became substantially theorised in the *Faction and Party* series written by Alan Jones. This has been re-printed in Bulletin no 6, so comrades can read it for themselves.
The fight for revolutionary unity, and in particular the fight for unity with the SWP, became a centrepiece of the organisations propaganda for at least four years. The present author, let it be said, was enthusiastically in favour of it. But let is also be said that the sum total of its results was not very great. The only regroupment that we actually acheived was with a small dissident group from the SWP -- the International Socialists Al[liance?]
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It made virtually nil impact on the SWP itself.
In the newspaper a series of articles appeared on every far left current, including for example the Lambertists in Britain, explaining that they were all revolutionary, and thus should all be in the same organisation.
The problem with the approach which we derived from *Faction and Party* was that we attempted to draw direct and immediate tactical consequences from the history of Bolshevik-Menshevik relations within the framework of the RSDLP. This confused the question of relations between contending far left groups with the conditions under which a split should, or should not, occur within the framework of an existing mass party of the working class. We will leave out of account here the question of whether *Faction and Party* was correct in its account of Lenin's approach towards the Mensheviks, and whether the Bolsheviks in effect functioned as a *public faction*, with their own publications and internal discipline between 1907 and 1912. This should however be discussed out.
The crucial point is however that even if Faction and Party was correct in its historical generalisations, it was impossible to draw immediate tactical generalisations on this basis. Unity with other organisations, on the sole guarantee of internal democracy, skipped over the crucial questions of defining the correct strategy and tactics for building a revolutionary party, which make all the difference in the world to day-to-day activity of construction of the party. As the present day experience of the SWP shows, a correct united front policy and a correct approach to reformism make all the difference; they are crucial, irreducible components of a revolutionary policy. Here again, these questions cannot be reduced to the famous 'tactical differences'.
This can be clearly seen in the present-day divergence between our current and the SWP. The SWP's general programmatic references to the first four congresses of the Comintern, and the history of the Left Opposition, do not prevent them abstaining on the struggle in the LP; abstaining on the struggle in the unions; chronic sectarianism on CND, YCND and the LPYS; and a non-revolutionary line on Greenham Common. How does a current which advocates entry co-exist with an organisation which opposes it root and branch, and on *principle* ?
*Faction and Party* reduced the questions of dispute among revolutionaries or organisations of the far left, to that of *tactics*, forgetting that between abstract programmatic references and written positions, there are crucial questions of strategy and programme in practice.
Our approach to the SWP was simplistic in the extreme. A coincidence of tactics, and a superficial one at that, does not provide a basis for unity. Moreover, the simple demand for 'unity', without a sustained polemic about the correct policy for party construction must seem ingenuous and dishonest to any serious militant.
In our own ranks there was an ambiguity, to say the least, about whether our unity offensive was a manoeuvre, designed to remove an obstacle, or whether we thought that the aggregation of the existing revolutionary groups was a serious policy for building a revolutionary party.
The argument that democracy inside a fused organisation would have provided the basis for solving the outstanding programmatic abd [sic] strategic differences is again simplistic. 'Events themselves' do not provide a basis for overcoming the [illegible] opposition to a correct revolutionary policy in an organisation like the SWP
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with its [illegible] established left-sectarian tradition and established leadership and cadre. In any case, a viable unity must be subject to the test of a minimum verification in practice. The test of [illegible] has taken the SWP and ourselves in widely different directions, that is hardly an accident.
In my view, the Socialist Unity period was an error, which took us away from the crucial tasks in relation to establishing ourselves in the labour movement. But a wrong policy, if consistently applied and fought for with spectacular campaigns can actually make gains, especially if it corresponds with the 'mood' of a section of the [illegible]. Even if this policy had been correct, the fact that it was carried through in some essentials after 1979-80 was a greivous error, which did us lasting damage.
First off, it was thoroughly leftist and sectarian to stand candidates against Labour in the 1979 general election. The generally miserable performance of our candidates confirmed this. Here was a situation, with the right wing Thatcher Tory party baying in the wings, determined to inflict a major defeat on the working class, when the call for a class vote would have been the correct policy. The speed with which the fight inside the LP broke out after the 1979 election confirmed that we were facing in the wrong direction. But the continuation of the previous leftist policy disorientated us even more fundamentally, as was shown by the outcome of the 1980 conference. Here, the fight for revolutionary unity with the SWP was established as still one of the three main priorities of the organisation (together with the youth organisation and the 'turn'). It was a central priority which was absolutely inapplicable in terms of any practical activity which could actually be worked out in order to try to accomplish it -- other than a few newspaper articles. Everything in the British labour movement was being turned upside down, and we were still fighting for a five-year old policy which had proved utterly unsuccessful. Once again, though, it was a bizarre conretisation [sic] of a definite view of how the revolutionary party would be constructed -- outside and against the existing differentiations inside the labour movement.
*The Turn*
The turn to industry constitutes the biggest single disaster that the Group ever engaged in. It destroyed dozens of Trotskyist cadres. It smashed up our union work. It gave us a left-sectarian faction of 150 comrades, led it should be pointed out, by a section of what was at one time the central cadre of the Group. The failure of the organisation to make a serious balance sheet of 'the turn', and its rapid dumping, is a grave error. Sharp turns are sometimes necessary in the imperialist epoch, of that there can be no doubt. But the sudden transformation of yesterday's philosopher's stone into today's anathema is not a serious fashion in which to train a stable cadre. Comrades should just remember that a near-crisis was provoked inside the majority at the 1980 conference when cde Howard voted for an amendment aimed at protecting our public sector fractions from the wilder ravages of the turn. Extreme pressure was put on comrades thought to be 'soft' on the turn. But yesterday's gold is today's dross, and comrades don't bat an eyelid.
Two fundamental points have to be made about the turn. First, it came out of a crisis of perspective in the International, which has been hardly overcome. Second, it was par excellence an organisational [illegible] solution to a fundamental political problem.
After [illegible] in the advanced capitalist [illegible] struggle [illegible] relative decl[ine?] [illegible]
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effects of the world recession and the [illegible] of one [illegible] the imposition of austerity etc. The new [mass?] vanguard strategy was running into declining returns, as the radicalised milieu outside the mass organisations itself declined. 'The turn' was a knee-jerk reaction to this situation, imagining that the question of the relationship of the revolutionary marxists to the workers vanguard could be solved organisationally, by people changing jobs.
Few comrades will deny that a policy of colonisation, consciously attempting to win positions in unions and factories, can help to build serious trade union fractions and work. But the question of social composition, of 'proletarianisation', is fundamentally a question of overall political influence with the existing workers vanguard, and of political intervention in the real divides in the labour movement. In this regard, it is absolutely no accident that the organisation with the strongest working class acdre [sic] in Britain, the biggest influence in the unions, is the Militant tendency. This influence has not been acheived by 'turns to industry', but fundamentally by building trade union fractions linked with strong work in the Labour Party.
The turn to industry in the International could only gain ground because of the emptyness of the bombast with which we justified our orientation previously, pretending that 'a majority of wage earners' had effectively solved the question.
Irrespective of what was in comrades' heads, the turn had its own deadly logic in smashing up work and creating rampant, apolitical moralism within the Group. Public sector comrades were variously abused, threatened, starved of resources and lectured on their degenerate petty-bourgeois ways. Dozens went outside the organisation. The shambles of much of our public sector work is the consequence -- not least, for example, the absence of a NUPE fraction. Because the turn was conceived as an organisational tactic replacing politics, it inebitably led to organisational excesses like the Cowley fiasco -- as if nearly twenty politically active people could be concealed in a small town like Oxford !
*The logic of the turn ran directly counter to the perspective of entry.* On this point at least, the Faction were absolutely correct. To this extent the turn was a definite obstacle to the adoption of a correct tactic after the growth of post-1979 Bennism.
*The Faction*
The emergence of the Faction is one of the most important events in the history of the Group. It is a formation quite unlike any previous minorities, in that it poses a global alternative at the level of both international orientation and the construction of a revolutionary party in Britain. Its politics are left sectarianism topped off with an opportunist international line. Comrades have to seriously ask themselves however -- why did the faction emerge. What are its roots. How come a whole section of the leading cadre of the organisation rebuked their whole past, and that of the organisation, and adopted such a radically different perspective? Superficial answers in terms of individual quirks and psychology are no use to us here. The answer lies in a crisis of orientation which the International and our current suffered; in the unstable and ultra-left past of our current; and last but not least by the rotten policy of constructing blocs and refusing to fight what is now the politics of the Faction politically.
We have [illegible] mentioned the crisis [illegible] perspective which [illegible] [illegible] were different [illegible]
[page 14]
These differences were never brought out in the interests of constructing a strong majority bloc. Time after time, the wing of the majority around Jones-Roberts capitulated politically to the demands of the Clynes wing, refusing to confront Clynes politically. This was true both on the British and international questions, and was most marked at the time of the December 19[illegible] conference. The factionalism implicit in keeping the majority bloc together was starkly revealed in the attitude of the majority towards Tendency B, often denounced as the 'main enemy' and generally held to be 'liquidationist'.
When cdes Andre and Biggs wrote a pre-conference discussion article attacking the international positions held by cde Clynes, this was widely denounced as 'sectarian' towards the Central American revolution.
In reality the incipient faction's politics got currency in a broad layer of the cadre becuase they were not fought, and indeed becuase they were legitimate within the framework of the majority. Insofar as there was any confrontation with these politics at the 1981 conference, it was simply in the context of the election of delegates to national meetings. The majority tendency slate for these delegates, and the Nominations Commission were substitued for an open political fight. At the conference cde Ellis presented the majority position on Cuba, entirely within the framework of what is now the Faction's politics. The compromise on politics however did not prevent the emergence of the faction, it only encouraged it. The formation and maintainence of the majority bloc sabotaged a serious turn to the Bennite developments inside the Labour Party.
It is of course true that international leaders like Duret sponsored the bloc with Clynes, hoping that manoeuvre and compromise would prevent his supporters 'going over to the Americans'. But the aegis of these international leaders was only operable on the basis of agreement from the leaders of the British majority. But there is a further aspect of the
But there is another aspect of the emergence of the Faction which should not be overlooked. The politics of the Faction, in their own way, are an attempt to come to grips with the history of the Group and make an accounting on crucial questions of party building. It goes without saying that we believe that this accounting is quite wrong, but the absence of any accounting within the majority only lends credence to the Faction's case. It is vital that the majority makes its own balance sheet.
*Sharp turns and revolutionary strategy*
Anyone who is familiar with the writings of Trotsky, and in particular with the *Third International after Lenin*, will tell you that in the imperialist epoch sharp turns are often needed. This is often utilised on the far left to imply that wrenching turns in orientation which completely contradict yesterday's tactics, are thoroughly justified, and indeed the essence of revolutionary leadership.
But the point actually made by Trotsky, especially in his critique of the draft programme of the Comintern, is that programme, strategy and tactics form an interlinked chain, and that although sharp turns in tactics, corresponding with turns in the objective situation are often required, they must correspond with the overall programme and strategy.
The history of our current has indeed been one of sharp changes [of?] tactics, [illegible]
[page 15]
[illegible] overall strategy [illegible] programme. This [illegible] often led to a [deformation?] in the process of [training?] our cadres, with supporters trained in the dogma of the current line, the tasks of the current period, with a neglect of the [programmatic?] and strategic framework. Hence the phenomenon of comrades who are 'left behind' in a previous period of the organisations tactics, something often explained in terms of individual lack of adaptation [illegible] conservatism etc.
Threughout [sic] much of the 1970s the Group lacked a strategic framework of its view on the overall process of the formation of a revolutionary party at all. Insofar as agnosticism on this question didn't triumph then our strategic view was thoroughly ultra-left. A thorough accounting of our ultra-left past is necessary. Its root cause was the abandonment of the view that the revolutionary party would be formed through a process of splits and fusions in the mass party of the class. A failure to have a firm overall grasp of this strategic question inevitably led to instability, violent lurches, and a consequent public inconsistency. These things of course do not go unnoticed by the political vanguard.
It has implications for the formation of our leadership. Comrades have explained that, unlike the British sects like Militant and the SWP, we don't have an historic leadership. On the contrary, new lines are developed and win out, and new people come forward to implement the line. Let us note that this is not exactly an accurate account of what has happened, because there has been a very small group which has constantly been in the leadership over a decade. But it has been true that the leadership has seen an enormous turnover, not to say 'wastage', as successive leadership teams have broken with the latest tactical line and been replaced. Now, it is true that a certain renewal and rotation in any leadership is desirable, otherwise the leadership merely becomes a self-perpetuating clique. But it is also true that *the formation of a stable leadership team, incorporating the most politically cultured and experienced cadres, is one of the crucial stages in the building of a revolutionary party, and in some ways the most important task.* Our failure to do this has been one of our most greivous failures. It cannot be put down to individual failures, the fact that X and Y didn't shape up; it is a function of the wildly gyrating swings in our politics and line. A stable cadre cannot be formed around successive tactical lines, but only around a common programmatic and strategic view. The fetishism of the conjuncture, the dogma of the latest tactical line, doesn't produce cadres it produces hacks, and dogmatic ones at that.
*What kind of a current are we building ?*
There will be no successful transition to socialism without the *prior* building of a revolutionary party. The work of construction of this party has to be conceived of over many years. Spontaneism on this question, the hope that a revolutionary party will 'emerge' out of small groups during dual power is misconceived. The experience of Portugal is eloquent testimony to this. In fact, in most cases were dual power has actually emerged there has already been a revolutionary party in existence, or a strong and consciously revolutionary current in the masses.
The work of party building is not simply a function of intervening in the mass movement with a 'correct line', and through this work becoming recognised as an authoritative and [reliable?] force. Neither is it [illegible] function of [illegible] correct line for the [illegible] [illegible] 'correct line'
[page 16]
theory of building a revolutionary party is a spontaneist [illegible] and one which had bedevilled our work for years.
Our practice in building a revolutionary party has to be firmly based on the relative autonomy of the party, the vanguard and the masses, and the fact that the construction of a party requires *special* tasks, over and above intervening in the mass struggle. These tasks are fundamentally of an ideological, propaganda and educational character, and are vital for the formation of a acdre [sic], and the organisational conquering of 'influence' gained in the mass struggle -- in other words the recruitment and training of new comrades.
*Our current is still fundamentally a propaganda group.* This must be counterposed to the 'small mass party' conception of what we are bing, which ascribes to our current all the tasks of a mass party, with the consequent hyper-activism with diminishing returns, wastage of cadres, plethora of ill-thought out and unfulfilled campaigns and assignments -- all of which lead to an inability to recruit and actually build up any forces.
Comrades will deny that there is in our ranks a spontaneist conception of party building. They will say that what is being argued here is 'propagandism'. We will demonstrate the correctness of what we are saying through two essential facts:-
a) the near collapse of ideological, propaganda and education institutions and practices and
b) the character of the press.
Stable recruitment can only be carried out on the basis of winning militants to our overall programmatic perspectives. But if we lack the methods of explaining these, recruitment just will not take place. A central task, in some ways the bedrock task, of our current should be holding meetings, forums and educational classes explaining our overall programmatic views. In many branches such things are intermittent, or even non-existant. Our overall programmatic views, of course have to be related to the day to day events in the national and international class struggle. But without explaining *our* programme, *our* conception of socialism, *our* theories, nothing will be won. Most often these propaganda tasks are put last in the branches, or are an afterthought to the 101 'practical' tasks which have to be carried out in the class struggle.
To recuit we need not just a cadre who are good and competent revolutionary technicians, able to intervene and lead the mass struggle. That is of course necessary, but will not make recruits. We need cadres thoroughly versed in our programme, capable of demonstrating its living relevance in relation to historical and international events. In order to do that we need internal educational institutions and programmes, capable of training comrades in broader questions than the latest developments in the class struggle and the tasks of the current. Let's put the question practically. How many comrades are there who have little reading time, or whose reading is restricted to the paper and internal, conjunctural material. How many comrades have serious amounts of time to study the history of the workers movement and of revolutions. How many comrades have attended educationals in which overall questions of our programme, rather than the latest tactical line are discussed ?
A spontaneist conception of party building has an inevitable [illegible] a decline in the political culture of the whole current and a [illegible] of the [illegible] cadre, burdened down with repetitive [illegible]
[page 17]
and lacking the means to develop themselves politically, except by individual solutions, which often means withdrawing into a specialised sector of work, or leaving the current and becoming a sympathiser.
Our system of press is totally inadequate for party-building. Let's take the newspaper first. Today it is characterised not fundamentally by its broadness, but by its narrowness -- its narrow concentration on contemporary events in the Labour Party and the debates among sections of the left in the LP. *Overall* propaganda for our programmatic ideas has virtually disappeared. Educational or historical material is virtually non-existant. Even its relation with the mass struggle and mass campaigns is haphazard and inconsistent. Our special tactic requires a paper with a strong party and programmatic profile, not a weak one. The newspaper lacks the means to engage in a serious debate even with Labour Party activists about many aspects of our programme.
The magazine has done a better job in this regard, but its infrequency makes its usefulness limited. Our system of press has now virtaully eliminated pamphlets or other publications, essential for training comrades and winning recruits. The answer on this is always 'resources'. But finance and resources are a product of conscious choices about what is important and what isn't. Propaganda material according to the present scale of priorities is considered non-important, totally secondary.
*The propaganda profile of the group has been reduced to near invisibility.* When our paper is hardly sold on a major CND demonstration, like that of 9 June, it reflects not just bad organisation, but an overall conception of what is important and what is not. Selling the paper on that demonstration was just as importamt for party building as was the fact that our comrades have been instrumental in getting it called.
*The Sword and how to use it*
We started out this text by saying that many caomrades have years of militancy in and loyalty to our current. The justification for this work is the intransigent defence of revolutionary internationalism and the defence of the working class and oppressed without default on any major question. But our current needs a renewal which can only take place on the basis of a critical balance sheet of what has been acheived and what has not. Did we achieve all that we could have? The answer is 'no'. In fact much of our precisously accumulated resources and gains have been thrown away in irresponsible political turns. Our two greatest defaults have been the failure to turn back to the LP when it was objectively posed, and the destruction of cadres and valuable trade union work through the 'turn to indusrty'.
Let us pose it bluntly. Ten years ago we were bigger than Militant. Today they are maybe 4000. Their growth is not just a function of their capitulation to British imperialism on crucial questions but a function of their participation in the LP. *The people that the Militant recruits are potential revolutionaries.* The fact that we allowed this situation to develop is a major blemish and a major indictment of our perspectives and activity. The defence of revolutionary-internationalist politics is not an obstacle to recruitment in precisely the same milieu in which the Militant recruits. [On?] the contrary, our [current?] [illegible] recruit provided
[page 18]
we fight for it.
The special tactic that we have adopted, and the explanation of this special tactic given in the majority political resolution, puts us in a good position to begin the political renewal that we need.
But the experience of the Militant shows that in order to fight with a special tactic, you need a strong party profile, a strong ideological intervention, strong party instituions -- and above all intransigent defence of your own programme vis-a-vis that of left social democracy.
Making a success of the special tactic means a break with much of our history. We have to overhall the press, to produce effective propaganda instruments. We need to rebuild our party propaganda instutitions at all levels. We need to reconstruct the trade unions fractions. We need to stabilise the leadership and put an end to the sharp wrenching turns which have no relation with the objective situation. *We must become an effective propaganda group,* putting an end to spontaneist conceptions of party buidding. Otherwise the present drift and shambles will continue.