train
dict |
|---|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsBristol fashion(June 1976)From the Spectator, 19 June 1976, p.13.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.In March of this year the Sunderland ship repair yard, Greenwells, closed down and 400 skilled workers lost their jobs. Viewed from some Whitehall bureaucratic fastness, this fact may not cause much loss of sleep after all, the figure represents only 0.04 per cent of the total unemployed in Britain. Viewed from the harsher vantage-point of Sunderland, where a 12 per cent unemployment rate is twice the national average, it is a significant addition to the local dole queue.In normal circumstances one might have expected a work-in or demands for the nationalisation of the yard. But the circumstances were not normal. Greenwells Dry Dock was already nationalised – acquired by the government as a by-product of the Court Line rescue operation two years ago.The main assets of the dock, buildings and plant, are owned by Sunderland Shipbuilders, who are themselves an associated company of North East Coast Ship Repairers, with the whole lot nationalised under the control of the Department of Industry. There is some dispute about the profitability of Greenwells in the past. The government employed a firm of accountants, Touche Ross, who estimated losses over the last ten years at £796,000. Much of this was a capital write-off, however, and when the trading loss of £300,000 was probably a function of the complicated group financing of Court Line rather than an accurate indication of the Greenwells situation. Nevertheless, it was, like so many ageing shipyards, in need of capital. An estimated requirement of £750,000 seems to have been the prime cause for the DOI’s decision to close.It was at this point that Mr Christopher Bailey, the highly successful owner of Bristol Channel Ship Repairers, became interested in the yard. Bailey has a proven record of success in resurrecting failed ship-repair yards. A few years ago he took over Swansea Dry Dock, which had made a loss for thirty years, from the government receiver. That dock now makes a profit and last year turnover was about £2 million. Just the man, one might have thought, to invest his own money in Greenwells and, in the process, to save quite a few jobs.In January the DOI were told that Bailey was interested in the yard, but did not respond. In April the Labour MP for Sunderland, Mr Fred Willey, accompanied Christopher Bailey to meet officials of the DOI. At this meeting they were informed that, despite the fact that the DOI had closed the yard, its reopening would have to be negotiated with Sunderland Shipbuilders, North East Coast Ship Repairers and Sunderland Council (who own the land). Somewhat puzzled by the logic of all this to-ing and fro-ing, but wishing to get things moving, Bailey contacted the various parties. In the event Bristol Channel were more annoyed than puzzled when they received a demand, from Sunderland Shipbuilders, for a rental of £25,000 per annum for five years, at which point the rent would be increased to £100,000. This is really quite extortionate. Sunderland ship repairers have been paying a rent to the council of only £3,000 and the yard and its assets, being now completely unproductive, are a net drain on resources in maintenance costs.The rigour of the rental demand gives rise to a strong suspicion that the DOI are more concerned to prevent another Bailey success, where they and others have failed, than to secure employment in the area. This suspicion is not confined to Bristol Channel. The Sunderland District Committee of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, with 10,000 members in the area, have come to the conclusion that “Bristol Channel is being presented with a set of grossly prohibitive terms to prevent the takeover of the dock”. Such is their anger that they are recommending their members to disaffiliate from the Labour Party.All of this is quite absurd. Bristol Channel consider that at least £1 million will be needed to put Greenwells into successful operation. This is entirely within their means and their intention, if they acquire the yard. Mr Bailey, of course, is a comparatively rich man, the ex-Greenwell workers are not, despite the £300,000 redundancy pay and their continuing receipt of wage-related unemployment benefit. The government that has been prepared to dispense with all precedent in forcing through the ship repair nationalisation Bill, on the pretext of saving jobs, is simultaneously denying jobs to several hundred workers from that industry. It is all very depressing. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Robert James [1*]Natalia Trotsky and the Fourth International(December 1972)From International Socialism (1st series), No.53, December 1972, p.42.Transcribed by Mike Pearn.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Natalia Trotsky and the Fourth International, Pluto Press 7.5pThe Russian question was a problem for Trotsky throughout his life in opposition and exile.His own eloquent but widely varying characterisation of Russia as a workers’ state are ample testimony of the analytical problems involved for serious Marxists.It is probably true to say that the unfortunate, if perhaps understandable, tenacity with which Trotsky clung to his definition has succeeded in disorienting the Fourth Internationalist movement he founded. It requires some fairly large assumptions to suggest with absolute confidence that had he lived he would have changed his mind. One thing is clear, however, he would not have allowed his thought to remain fixed in the categories of 1940. The varying adaptations to Stalinism of his fissiparous followers would be unthinkable for Trotsky.What Trotsky would have said or done in the light of the unthought of post-1945 reality is unknowable. We do however know what his life-long comrade and companion Natalia thought and what she, inevitably, was forced to do. She rejected the theory of the “degenerated workers’ state” and in time she broke with the organisation that had itself so grievously degenerated from its birth in 1938.Her reward for her dedication to the principles of revolutionary socialism as against the compromised these of the Fourth International was to be abused (abuse in no way mitigated by its sorrowful tone) for desertion.In the few pages of this pamphlet a whole period of revolutionary experience is brought into sharp focus and the organisation found wanting.The future is with Natalia whose genuine faith in communism, the working class and the logical steps she took flowing from that faith made her the genuine representative of the political heritage of Leon Trotsky. Note1*. Robert James is a pseudonym used by Jim Higgins. Top of the pageLast updated on 19.10.2006"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsTrade unionsDemocracy at the Top(October 1975)From the Spectator, 18 October 1975, p.496.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Last week postal balloting commenced for several key posts in the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. It is the hope of some commentators with an interest in these things, and not a few engineering employers, that the result will signal a distinct lurch to the right on the Executive Committee, the union’s leading body. If Jimmy Reid, the telegenic Communist, and Bob Wright, the present incumbent of the North-West England seat, are defeated there will undoubtedly be a spurt of enthusiasm in the press for postal ballots. Democracy, it will be said, has triumphed. The innate good sense and moderation of the working man confirmed.Already there is a growing lobby which calls for the compulsory introduction of postal balloting. An even larger school of thought, moderates to a man, suggest that the government should cover the costs of such ballots for any union adopting the system. It all seems a bit excessive just to ditch Messrs Reid and Wright, or their peers.I have argued before in these pages that the failure of left-wing candidates in recent AUEW elections is less to do with the postal voting system, more the manifest failure of the current left regime to satisfy the members on wages and conditions. That, however, may not be the point; perhaps the issue is democracy. The old AUEW procedure was for ballot papers to be issued, for those with fully paid up cards, at branch meetings. Voting took place at the meeting and counting at the union headquarters. Nowadays the union head office posts the ballot papers direct to individual members, who, if they feel like it, send them back to the union for counting. Under the branch system returns seldom exceeded 5 per cent of those eligible to vote, while postal ballots have notched up scores of 30 per cent and more.Now that dramatic broadening of the electoral base is a powerful argument in favour of postal voting. However, for those who advocate this system (to flush the reds from under our union beds) there must be one or two reservations. In a recent postal vote one Laurie Smith, a currently unaffiliated, independent Trotskyist, won a post as National Organiser, beating his right-wing and communist opponents. This result has so encouraged the International Socialists that they are running their man, Willie Lee, for another organiser job with an impressive list of sponsoring convenors and shop stewards.The arguments for a reversion to branch voting are not just advanced by Communists and their fellow travellers. Districts firmly under right-wing control have lived happily with the system for years. It is argued, that all those members with passionately held moderate views should be prepared to test their convictions against the minor inconvenience of attending a branch meeting. More convincing perhaps is the point that those who do attend meetings are more likely to know the trade union record of the candidates, than those who take their advice from the Sun or Woodrow Wyatt.On both sides of the argument, of course, there is an element of special pleading. For my own part I would be more impressed by those partisans of democracy in the AUEW if they would broaden their concern to other unions with less democratic procedures. Even if the leadership of these other unions is impeccably, even ‘multi-chromatically,’ moderate.Until recently the General and Municipal Workers Union operated an informal but effective type of dynastic succession. Election to high office required ties of blood with existing office holders. The Transport Workers Union elects only one official, the General Secretary, and once in office only death, age sixty-five or spectacular malfeasance can remove him. In the Electrical Trade Union, Mr Frank Chapple managed to combine the posts of General Secretary and President at the same time, a ploy that his Communist predecessor, Frank Haxell, no mean hand at stuffing a ballot box, would have thought coming it a bit strong.Some years ago Mr V.L. Allen carried out a survey of almost all TUC affiliates to discover their method of electing general secretaries. Some seventy-three were elected and the surprisingly high total of fifty-five were appointed. Only thirty-six of them were subject to periodic election, while eighty-four, barring accidents, were there for life. Since Mr Allen’s survey there have been a number of mergers and amalgamations, most of which have sunk elective unions into ones where appointments the order of the day.In a sense all of this is beside the point, further inquiry shows that the tenure of office of periodically elected officials is the same as for their appointed, and once-only-elected, colleagues. History records only three general secretaries who failed to be re-elected when they were eligible and wanted to stand. One, in the Carpenters and Joiners Society, in 1862 another in the Engineering Union in 1913, and the aforementioned Mr Frank Haxell. Incidentally, the ETU seems to have had some sorry experiences with their leading officials; of the first four general secretaries, three were sacked for pinching the funds.In the light of these simple facts, the attack on Hugh Scanlon for his alleged undemocratic behaviour in exercising his casting vote in favour of a return to his union’s traditional methods, do seem a bit harsh. Interestingly enough, one of the problems facing the AUEW is the difficulty of achieving a joint rule book with the recently acquired draughtsmen’s union, TASS. Prior to the amalgamation, and still today, TASS appointed all their officials. The stumbling block to their full integration is the Engineers’ insistence on popular, periodic election. It is a matter of some irony that if Mr. Scanlon and his left-wing colleagues were to agree to appointment, then a reasonable calculation would indicate a permanent left-wing majority for the united leadership."
}
|
{
"content": "Those with a concern for the development of trade union democracy might well turn they attention from the red herring of postal balloting and concentrate on the question of recall. The truth is that whatever system is used to acquire officials the result is something of a lottery. Bearing in mind the vagaries of the elective and appointive process, it is not surprising that occasionally the venal, the corrupt, the overly ambitious and plain stupid attain high office. This unfortunate effect is of course not confined to trade unions, as anyone with half an eye to politics or business can testify. It is, though, doubly unfortunate if, once in office the offender stays there until the grim reaper cuts him down.It is surely not unreasonable that members signing a requisition in sufficient numbers (say a fifth or a quarter of the appropriate constituency) be able to submit the official to a re-election process, whatever the method by which he originally got the job. It will be said in reply to this scheme that trade unionists should not wish to impose on their officials a security of tenure worse than their own. The answer this is that no members have security of tenure to match their full-time officers, as many of the rank and file are discovering on our vastly expanded dole queues. Even if it were true the answer would still be: ‘Yes they should’.If, as is so often claimed on May Day platforms, the trade union movement is not a business but a crusade, then it is only right that the mounted and caparisoned leaders should be more exposed than the poor bloody infantry. In any case as Doctor Johnson said, in the context of imminent execution: “It concentrates the mind wonderfully well.” Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsRevolutionary Trade Unionism(Part Two)Dual Unionism in Britain(April 1971)From International Socialism (1st series), No.47, April-May 1971, pp.14 & 19-23.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The first part of this article, which appeared in our last issue (IS 46), dealt with the early development of trade unionism in Britain, and with the experiences of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) in the US.In 1903 the British SLP was formed from members of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). The immediate cause of the split was the support given by the SDF leadership (Hyndman, Quelch, etc.) for Kautsky’s compromise resolution on Millerand’s entry into a French government with Gallifet, the murderer of the French communards. The dispute was, however, much more far-reaching than this. Tom Bell indicates this in his book Pioneering Days [7]:‘The main line of the opposition was against all reformism: exposure of the Labour Party and trade union officials as fakers; for socialist trade unionism; against the monarchy and exposure of the futility of Labour parliamentarism’.This line the official SDF nicknamed ‘Impossibilism’. In short, it was more or less complete De Leonism. The social composition of the small British SLP was mainly industrial workers, with a few clerical workers. [8] The criteria for membership was absolute adherence to the programme and a refusal to be influenced by reformism, reformists or booze. The leading figures in the organisation were Connolly, Yates and Mathieson, all dedicated teetotalers. No official of a trade union was eligible for membership of the party. [9] Presumably there was not too much danger of this for the party had only 80 members at its founding conference (the majority of these in Scotland). [10] The members were excluded from dual membership in any other organisation which precluded any work in the Labour Party, where they might have had some chance of proselytising.The main influence in the early period of the party was James Connolly. Connolly had returned from a trip to America in 1902 where he had come under the influence of De Leon. He became the first organiser of the SLP at a wage of 30s a week, when the money was available. According to Bell, Connolly toured all over Scotland recruiting for the organisation and it is, perhaps, as a result of his efforts that in 1904 the SLP reported a membership of 200 to the International. Connolly, besides being a brilliant organiser and speaker, was also an unusually accomplished writer. He wrote, handset, printed and dispatched copies of the party paper The Socialist. But despite the undoubted talent of Connolly, the singleness of purpose and dedication of the members, their exclusivenessand insistence on complete agreement on all points would have made them as ineffective and irrelevant to the course of British socialist development as the SPGB had it not been for their adherence to industrial unionism and their efforts to spread these ideas to the Clyde.With the founding of the IWW the British SLP decided to convene a conference in Glasgow to set up a propaganda organisation to popularise the idea of revolutionary industrial unionism. At this conference the Advocates of Industrial Unionism was founded. The programme indicated not only that De Leon’s advocacy of industrial unionism had been learned but also, and with much less reason, his attachment to dual unionism had been transported across the Atlantic. In the preamble to the programme this is made clear:‘... the trade unions foster a state of things which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping to defeat one another in wage wars. The trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These sad conditions can be changed and the interests of the working class upheld only by an organisation formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry or in all industries if necessary cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.’ [11]Mitigation of the full rigour of the SLP programme was a measure of compromise that even De Leon had to accept at the IWW founding convention. The propaganda of the Advocates around the Clyde resulted in some support in a few Glasgow factories (Argyle Motor Works and Albion Motor Works are two mentioned by Bell [12], and particularly the Singer Sewing Machine Company on Clydebank). Factory gate meetings were held and study classes begun. In time most of the Singer departments had a group of supporters of industrial unionism. The SLP, on the basis of this limited success, decided to turn from propaganda to organisation. The Advocates of Industrial Unionism was transformed into the Industrial Workers of Great Britain (IWGB). A vigorous campaign at Singer’s resulted in a large increase in membership (over 4,000 members). [13] The slogan ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ caught on. The difficulty arose precisely on the basis of the slogan. The IWGB had proved that they could organise a union of sorts; they had to prove the efficacy of the slogan when someone was actually injured. One day a woman was dismissed. Strike meetings were held in all the shops and the management declared a lockout. Ten thousand workers were on the street and in the initial burst of enthusiasm many more joined the IWGB. But there were problems. The IWGB had little or no funds. The revolutionary phraseology of their leadership gave considerable offence to the large Catholic section of workers and gave a handle for the employers to drive a wedge into the workers’ ranks."
}
|
{
"content": "The company hit on the stratagem of sending a postcard to the workers on the firm’s books, whether they had worked there recently or not, asking them if they would like to return to work. The strike committee asked the workers to send in their cards to them and in all they received 4,000 cards. (This postcard ‘ballot’ shows an interesting similarity to events in the recent Pilkington’s strike.) Despite their opposition a return to work move began to gain steam. In a few days the strike was broken. Shortly after this the leading members of the IWGB and the SLP were sacked. The IWGB claim that these sackings merely served to disseminate the industrial union message to newer fields could not obscure the fact that the union had been defeated not least of all by the inadequacy of its programme for any struggle falling short of the socialist revolution.The IWGB, after the Singer debacle of 1911, did not have another chance. Dual unionism, then as now, could only get a toehold in firms, like Singer’s, where the open shop principle applied. Even at Singer’s, the ASE (Amalgamated Society of Engineers – predecessor of the AEU) skilled tool makers did not join and worked throughout the strike. The degree of consciousness necessary among the members to make the slogan ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ stick across an industry, assuming that that degree of organisation can be attained, in reality presupposes an organisation that transcends unionism of any sort.The SLP militants were not only active on the Clyde. They provided much of the theory behind the Labour College/Plebs League split from Ruskin in 1909. Connolly influenced Tom Mann in the direction of industrial unionism, although Mann was more influenced by French syndicalism. Mann, despite a thoroughgoing contempt for craft unionism and the trade union bureaucracy and an attachment to industrial unionism, firmly set his face against dual unions. In 1910 he was a moving spirit in the formation of the Syndicalist Education League. The resolution passed at the founding conference shows the line of the league: ‘Whereas the sectionalism that characterises the trade union movement of today is utterly incapable of effectively fighting the capitalist class and securing the economic freedom of the workers, this conference declares that the time is now ripe for the industrial organisation of all the workers on the basis of class, and not trade or craft, and that we hereby agree to form a Syndicalist Education League to propagate the principles of syndicalism throughout the British Isles, with a view to merging all existing unions into one compact organisation for each industry, including all labourers of every industry in the same organisation with skilled workers’.At first sight the syndicalist approach seems much the same as the SLP. In fact there were differences, differences that sent the SLP into paroxysms of polemical rage. Not, only were they opposed to dual unionism, but the principle of the syndicalists, claimed the SLP, was the mines for the miners, the railways for the railwaymen, which denied the all-inclusive, working-class basis of industrial unionism. The syndicalists’ crimes did not end there. They also completely denied any validity in parliamentary politics. With the later IWW they believed in ‘direct action’, ‘sabotage’, ‘physical force’ and the ‘General Strike’. The SLP, following De Leon, believed in the ballot box to bring the SLP to a parliamentary majority, at which unlikely event the power would be handed over to the revolutionary industrial unions to organise society. (De Leon had said, in the American context: ‘Where the General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World will sit there will be the nation’s capital.’)In British terms Mann’s emphasis on ‘boring from within’ ensured a more lasting influence than the SLP. The movement for amalgamation began to gather momentum. The general propaganda on industrial unionism gave rise to developments in the trade unions probably unsuspected by the early militants. The post-1918 amalgamations gave rise to the AEU, the NUR and other federations. The discussion on the nature of the state and the form of socialist power induced a number of middle-class intellectuals to introduce the alternative blueprint of guild socialism. Hilaire Belloc climbed on the bandwagon, to hark back to the medieval simplicities in which the Roman Church had found its cosiest ideological niche, in The Servile State.The period from 1910 until the war was one of unprecedented rank and file initiative. Each succeeding year saw an increase in the millions of days lost in strikes. An unwilling trade union leadership was forced into supporting and, if they could run fast enough, leading strikes. Max Beer, by no means a revolutionary socialist, describes the pre-1914 industrial unrest as follows:‘The years 1911 to 1914 will ever be memorable in the annals of British Labour. The United Kingdom witnessed for the first time a class war in which all its component parts were involved. English, Welsh and Scottish miners, English railwaymen and Irish transport workers were joining hands across the borders and seas. Robert Smillie, Tom Mann, James Larkin and James Connolly, all born fighters, led the new forces in battle array. Nothing like it had ever happened before; neither in comprehensiveness nor in numbers had that Labour upheaval any parallel in British social history’. [14]The growth of a movement of the working class for itself was in process. The imposition of French syndicalist theory, and IWW non-theory admixed with guild socialist vapourings gave the movement a specific flavour but did not fundamentally alter its course, merely changed its direction and assisted, up to a point, in clarification. The organisation of revolutionaries that could have given firm leadership and direction to the militants was missing. The movement had to wait some years and go through the carnage of 1914-17 before the possibility of such an organisation could arise from the example of the Russian Revolution."
}
|
{
"content": "The objective and subjective reasons for the failure of the post-war CPGB have been discussed in previous issues of IS. [15] The lost opportunities of the Minority Movement and the subsequent subordination of the Communist Party to Moscow in the 1920s betrayed a whole generation of socialist militants to futility and despair. Third PeriodThe expensively bought and paid for experience with dual unionism in America and Britain were once more tried, at Russian insistence, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The idiocy of the ‘third period’ (so called after the arbitrary division of post 1917 periods of the revolution: 1917-1924 Period of Revolutionary Offensive; 1924-1928 Period of Revolutionary Ebb; 1928-1933 Period of Renewed Revolutionary Offensive – after the collapse of the third period we were not treated to any nomenclature for the succeeding periodic pains) may have been a logical extension of Stalin’s campaign to destroy the Bolshevik party, and with it the old Bolsheviks, but it had no connection with the realities faced by any of the non-Russian parties.By 1928 Stalin, with the assistance of the right, had effectively broken the Left opposition led by Trotsky. ‘United front’ tactics internationally had resulted in the subordination of the foreign parties to nationalist and non-socialist allies. In China the Communists, at Stalin’s direction, played second string to the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai Shek until Chiang had no further use for the Communists and massacred them in Shanghai. The Anglo-Russian Committee in Britain was dead. The right phase of the Russian Party and the Comintern was ending its usefulness, together with Bukharin, the theoretician of the right wing. The development of state capitalism in Russia called for an altogether more ruthless exploitation of the workers and peasants. Stalin’s struggle against the Bukharin wing of the party began. In the process the whole line of the Communist International (CI) had to be recast. The united front was jettisoned in favour of the ‘class against class’ policy. The Russian struggle against the kulaks was mirrored in the foreign parties’ struggles against social democracy. Social democracy became overnight the ‘left cover of fascism’, more deadly because more insidious; social democracy equalled social fascism.In trade union terms this meant the end of the period of work in the reformist unions, to build meaningful industrial factions. The French and British parties were bludgeoned into line; in the German party it was necessary to expel the opposition of Brandler and Thalheimer.The effect of the new line on the Minority Movement was catastrophic. Yesterday’s denials of splitting and dual unionism were contradicted by today’s insistence on independent activity. The instructions from Moscow demanded that the MM should always attempt to wrest the leadership of strikes from the union machinery. Alternative strike committees were to be formed to become the basis of continuing factory committees that would eventually be amalgamated to form new trade unions. In a pamphlet, published in May 1929, Harry Pollitt indicated the ultra-left dual unionist position of the MM.‘The Minority Movement is now the alternative national centre for the industrial movement of the British workers. Those who want Mondism, class collaboration, company unionism, can get it from the General Council of the TUC. Those who want a policy based solely on the interests of the working class, a policy of militant trade unionism, look to the MM for their leadership.’The Worker in July 1929 went even further.‘The issue therefore of fighting independently the daily struggle of the working class ... means a complete break with all the old conceptions of continuing our activities within the constitutional framework of trade union branches, District Committees, etc. New forces have to be won, new forms of organisation found.’ [16]The reference to new forces was a denial, again at Russian insistence, of the previous line that only bona fide trade unionists could join the MM. The Comintern, for some unaccountable reason, believed that in a country, with the tradition and history of the working class like Britain, the non-unionist could be drawn directly into revolutionary unionism without even a passing acquaintance with the reformist model.The actual practice of the MM in the application of the new line was somewhat mitigated by the fact that its influence had declined from the point where it had some sway over a few national unions. (One MM report on the Austin strike of March 1929, indicated that although the Austin Birmingham strike committee was against the union leadership, they were equally opposed to the outside leadership of the MM. [17])But, mitigated or not, the new line managed to throw away any of the gains that remained from the past. The main areas of strength of the MM had been the mines, engineering and railways. The Scottish miners’ union was in the hands of the right wing. This leadership was supporting an unrepresentative and undemocratic clique in both the Fife and Lanark unions. In the circumstances the MM needed little encouragement to make a foray into dual unionism. In mid-1929 they set up a new union, The United Mineworkers of Scotland (The official union was the National Union of Scottish Mineworkers, NUSM). The UMS was completely under CP control and although they claimed 14,000 members – mainly in Fife and Lanark – there were, in the words of one delegate to the MFGB (Miners Federation of Great Britain) conference in 1930, ‘loud speakers and very few listeners in’. The UMS fought two strikes against wage cuts, both unsuccessfully, and by 1933 were attempting to merge with the NUSMW. Their overtures were rejected and in 193S the UMS went into voluntary liquidation."
}
|
{
"content": "The drive toward dual unionism in the Scottish mineworkers alienated much of the MM support in the MFGB, the most prominent – if not the most important – being A.J. Cook, the secretary of the federation. Cook denounced the UMS and broke with the MM in 1929. Arthur Horner, although opposed to the new line, did not break with the CP, but when the MM turned its attention to the South Wales coalfield, as an area where their independent influence could be displayed in a way that would impress the Comintern with the dedication the British Section, Horner spoke out against the indiscriminate advocacy of dual unionism. He soon, however, confessed his errors and was, for his sins, excluded from the Central Committee of the party. In 1931 he accepted the chairmanship of the South Wales Central Strike Committee during the strike of that year. But he opposed an independent strike committee and resigned from the Central Strike Committee (on which no officials were allowed to sit). The strike was called off after 15 days and when the MM tried to prolong the struggle they were completely isolated from the miners who went back to work en bloc. Horner was arraigned, for his lack of faith in the masses, before the British Party and the Comintern. By some strange quirk of fate he was not expelled, perhaps because he was one of the few remaining experienced and capable miners left to the party. Stalin, with a few jokes about the crime of Hornerism, allowed him to remain.In engineering and the railways the story was the same. The MM did not have the strength to organise any breakaway unions, but they were able to cause a fuss over the very real difficulties that workers experienced in a period of mass unemployment. The application of the line on the unorganised led to a development of the thesis of ‘never mind about union membership’. [18] The insistence that the union machine was rotten and that workers could really operate only outside its ambit was unconvincing at the congress of the CI and the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU); to workers who were recoiling from five years of defeats and mass unemployment, it was sheer lunacy. The emphasis on non-unionists and breaking with the unions was also deeply repugnant to most dedicated unionists who had fought hard to keep their organisation intact and to exclude the nons.The purest expression, however, of the third period tactic was in a field where the party and the MM had always been strong, although it was a field well off-centre from the main arena of working class struggle – the Tailors and Garment Workers Union (NUTGW).There was trouble in the tailoring trade long before the MM change of line. The introduction of the conveyor belt and machine cutting reduced the craft content of the job and increased the number of women employed. The NUTGW was based in Leeds and dominated by catholics. The largely Jewish and non-catholic membership in London were, with some justification, afraid that their problems were not being properly dealt with by the Leeds leadership. The London Organiser, Sam Elsbury was a founder member of the CP and the MM. When in October 1928, a dispute broke out over a non-unionist at the Rego factory in London, it was endorsed by the London District Committee. The unions national leadership would not sanction the strike because, they said, it was prejudicial to a new national agreement they were attempting to organise with the employers federation. The strike was well run with the strikers, mainly young women, holding marches, manning pickets and making street collections. Public sympathy was gained and considerable trade union aid forthcoming. After nearly three months the strike was settled with Rego’s recognising the union, but not the union shop, and the reinstatement of most of the strikers. At this stage the Leeds cabal took action against Elsbury, expelling him from the union and forcibly taking over the London office. In other times the CP and the MM would have mounted a full scale campaign for Elsbury’s reinstatement in the union, with some possibility of success. In 1929 such a course would have been to lose a glorious opportunity to strike a blow for independent revolutionary action against the rotten labour fakers. On the 7th March 1929 the United Clothing Workers Union (UCWU) came into existence. The new union recruited a majority of the London membership rapidly and a substantial minority of the Leeds membership. Elsbury was well satisfied with his work for the party line. What the new union needed more than anything else was a little time to consolidate the organisation and to build up the funds. Unfortunately it is a feature of all dual unions that they are never afforded the time to consolidate their position."
}
|
{
"content": "In the North London factory of Polikoff the overwhelming majority of members joined the UCWU and the management recognised the union. When NUTGW members applied for jobs in the factory they were informed they would have to transfer to the United Clothing Workers. The NUTGW complained to the Wholesale Clothiers Federation who successfully brought pressure to bear to withdraw recognition from the UCWU. Elsbury attempted to stave off the inevitable trouble, for his union was in poor shape to win, by insisting that his members were prepared to work alongside any trade unionist. Polikoff nevertheless refused to permit the collection of UCWU dues in the factory. Elsbury took his problems to the party. The Industrial Committee promised Elsbury that a sum of £500 would be available to meet strike pay, through collections and a subvention from the RILU in Moscow. Elsbury called a strike for union recognition. Arrayed against the UCWU were not only Polikoff (who according to most testimony was quite prepared to recognise both unions) but also the NUTGW, the TUC – in particular the T&GWU who threatened to black deliveries to Polikoff if the UCWU were recognised – the London Trades Council and the Employers Federation. The NUTGW were sending down their members to break the strike. A prominent member of the Executive Board of the UCWU, in fact the chairman, Dave Cohen suddenly acquired an affection for the NUTGW that had so recently expelled him from its ranks. At the same time he acquired the necessary finance to emigrate to Canada. The strike started on May 4th. By May 9th Polikoff s had applied to a magistrate for sixty seven summonses against UCWU strikers for breach of contract. Polikoff also indicated that they might find it necessary to apply for 500 or 600 summonses in all. Polikoff’s manager explained to the bench the reason for his actions:‘It is very difficult for me to say but we want to teach these people a lesson. At the present time they are members of what is known as a breakaway union – a Communist organisation – and they are not members of the orthodox union which is recognised by the TUC. We want to recover from them the money they have lost us ... the damages must be at least a week’s wages ... they have practically shut our works.’20 On May 10th Elsbury arrived at CP headquarters for his first instalment of £500. Nobody could tell him anything about the money. He was urged to come back tomorrow. Each succeeding day brought the same response. Elsbury demanded a meeting of the Central Committee to enquire into the failure to provide the promised cash. The general isolation of the CP at this time is indicated by the fact that although they called for collections in their press and J.T. Murphy, who had been seconded to the UCWU for the duration of the strike, spent most of his time raising money, the total collected nowhere met the £500 minimum. The strike dragged on. Polikoff secured a conviction on May 23rd against one of the strikers, who was fined £4 15s 0d, and asked for a further eighty eight summonses. The remaining sixty six cases were adjourned for a fortnight, although there was little doubt as to their outcome. The same day Elsbury called a meeting of the strikers and confessed his inability to provide funds for the strike or to pay the fines. Amid tears and recrimination the strike was called off. Each returning worker was presented with a document to sign in which he or she promised not to join or pay subscriptions to any organisation not recognised by the TUC. Membership of an unofficial union would be punished by instant dismissal.Shirley Lerner comments on this in a way that cannot be bettered:‘In trade union history, the “document” was an instrument which the employer used to prevent a worker from joining a union or to compel to join only a company union. As such it has been traditionally despised by the labour movement as a most obnoxious anti-union instrument. But in this case the “document” was used to compel the workers to abide by an agreement made by an established trade union and the employer; and therefore, there was no outcry against it by the official trade union movement.’ [19]A few members rejoined the NUTGW, but most joined nothing. The whole brave venture had resulted in no profit to either union and a massive increase in apathy. A situation that kept Polikoff’s an open shop for over seven years.The Communist Party had got the United Clothing Workers involved in a strike that Elsbury would have preferred to avoid, on the promise of funds. Elsbury expected a party enquiry to exonerate him; in fact the reverse was the case. Elsbury was ordered by the party to relinquish his post as secretary and to hand over to Pountney, a distributive worker, drafted in during the Polikoff dispute to assist as an organiser. Elsbury refused and resigned from the party, a resignation that was subsequently made official by his formal expulsion. The CP controlled Executive Board dismissed Elsbury from his post and forcibly expelled him from the UCWU office."
}
|
{
"content": "The election of Pountney was achieved at the inaugural National Conference, and the union affiliated to the MM, an unnecessary diversion considering that the union had until then, at least, been dealing direct with King Street. But the failure of the Polikoff strike, the brutal expulsion of Elsbury and the hostility of NUTGW in particular and the trade unions in general coupled to a chronic shortage of funds to pay provincial organisers denied the union any effective future. Pountney and the Executive attempted to lay the blame on the ‘renegade’ and ‘social fascist’ Elsbury, but the impetus was spent. The UCWU declined into a small East London Union of a few hundred dedicated adherents until, in 1935, it closed up shop completely. By the time of its demise the third period policy that brought it into existence had completely changed. The ‘Peoples Front’ was on the order of the day. With little or no explanation the ‘social fascists’ became important figures to be courted and made much of in the anti-fascist front. The MM that had started off with such high hopes in 1924, and such real possibilities, was quietly and unceremoniously interred. The very notion of a militant, class-war oriented, opposition within the unions was a thing of the past, best forgotten in the crusade to win friends and influence people in high places with the new soft, and soft headed, Russian line. This was the last time that the CP attempted to form a coordinated trade union opposition dedicated to a revolutionary purpose. Its decline into dual unionism was dictated not by considerations of British conditions or a genuine spontaneous movement of British workers, but solely at the behest of the Kremlin oligarchy. Since that time, despite an accession of new industrial cadres, the CP has been unable and unwilling to direct its industrial work in a coherent revolutionary direction.In the post-1945 situation the CP earnestly pursued the industrial peace decreed by the continuation of the wartime alliance with Stalin. With the outbreak of the cold war the industrial factions moved neatly into line behind the ‘peace campaign’, and outbid the most extreme racialism of the Beaverbrook press in their anti-German and anti-American chauvinism. The partial cutting of the Russian leading-rein in 1956 rejuvenated nothing. The party was settled into a stagnant centrist rut, outflanked politically on the left by the growing left groups, not trusted – except in terms of vote organising – by the left trade union leaders. It has no role to fulfil except to stand in the way of the formation of a genuine revolutionary party. The CPGB is the only proof I know of, and that questionable, of the religious contention that there is some sort of life after death. ConclusionsWhere does this leave us? In general the attitude of revolutionaries should be against dual unionism. Does a re-examination of the past give us any reason to modify any of this traditional position? There can be little doubt that the lessons of Singer’s in 1911, through the MM’s third period to the adventures in the NASD [1*] and the most recent Pilkington’s dispute, show clearly that a dual union is not too difficult to form as there are, in all conscience, far too many good reasons why workers should be dissatisfied with their union; the problem is to nurse the union through its first difficult days without meeting disaster. None has succeeded so far.The IWW was an inevitable development, not just because it is an historical fact, but also because the AFL was craft dominated, had high initiation and membership dues, and. was uninterested in the semi-skilled and unskilled, at a time when the massive consolidation of American capitalism was putting tremendous strains on the unorganised workers. The IWW was unable to fulfil its intentions because it failed to organise the industrial workers of the East. Not only did the IWW face massive repression but much of its effort was made nugatory by the basic theory it presented. The struggle was seen more in terms of the final combat with capitalism than in the economic terms of the workers. All this is understandable, if regrettable; the founding convention, in 1905, was held with the first Russian revolution as a background. The American militants, with some justice, thought that they were in a more favourable position to make the revolution than the backward Russian workers. They were wrong. The revolution is taking a much longer time to take place than they ever considered, and the vehicle for its consummation is not to be found in a militant industrial union isolated from contact with a revolutionary party. The CIO, that derived specifically from the experience of the IWW, had to employ many of the industrial tactics of the Wobblies without their revolutionary programme. John L. Lewis’s quarrel with the AFL and Roosevelt’s problems with the corporations meant that the money and the political climate was ripe for the CIO industrial union drive. Even at that the massive upsurge in mass, production industry nearly got out of the hands of the ‘responsible’ elements. A revolutionary party operating within and upon such a movement could have made all the difference to the eventual outcome. It is part of the unforgivable sins of Stalinism that a party did not exist.There is no reason in principle why revolutionaries should be opposed, in all circumstances, to independent revolutionary unions, but it is difficult to conceive of the situation, while capitalism lasts, for them to exist. A trade union is, by definition, an all inclusive organisation. It must take its members, whether by trade or industry, as they are, not as some idealised image of the class conscious militant. Indeed if all workers had the same high level of consciousness we would not have a trade union but a revolutionary party. A revolutionary union today would be an organisation of friends, cosy perhaps, but without influence or purpose."
}
|
{
"content": "There is another, and more important, objection to the existence of a dual union, organised and directed by revolutionaries. The need for the maintenance of the independent existence of the union can spill over into an opportunist mitigation of the revolutionary politics.In the 1930s the Dutch Trotskyists (organised in the RSAP – Revolutionary Socialist Worker’s Party – led by Henricus Sneevliet, a founder member of the Dutch CP) were in control of a small militant trade union federation, the NAS (National Labour Organisation) organising building workers, dockers and Amsterdam municipal workers, in opposition to the large reformist union federation. In Holland unemployment dole was paid by the government through the trade unions, including the NAS. For the Dutch trade unionist this was an important reason for maintaining union membership. In 1934 the government banned all municipal workers from maintaining membership of the red NAS. At a stroke the NAS membership was reduced from 25,000 to 12,000. The continued existence of the NAS depended on the tolerance of the bourgeois government. Sneevliet, a deputy in parliament, began to temper his criticism of the government. Trotsky wrote to him suggesting that whether the perspective was one of rising militancy or of increased repression the NAS should join the reformist trade union.‘When the great strike wave will begin in Holland, which should be regarded as highly probable if not certain, the reformist trade unions will grow mightily, absorb fresh elements into their ranks and in such a period the NAS will appear to the masses as aji incomprehensible splinter organisation. In consequence the masses will become unresponsive to the correct slogans of the RSAP ... I must say quite openly: systematic, solicitously arranged agitation inside the reformist unions seems to me the only means not only of preserving the RSAP as a genuine revolutionary party (for by itself this hasn’t any historical value) but also of carrying it to victory ... If. ... the development in Holland without passing through a revolutionary upsurge, goes directly ... into the reactionary ... we nevertheless come to the same conclusion: The NAS policy must became an obstacle to the party. The first assault of reaction has already ... cost it half its membership. The second assault will cost it its life. The excellent workers ... will then have to seek the road to the reformist unions in a dispersed manner ... The trade union cannot lead an illegal existence that the party can. But by means of this blow the party will be terribly hit, for an illegal revolutionary party must have a legal and semi-legal mass cover ... and at the same time an arena.’ [20]Sneevliet and the RSAP refused to listen, and Trotsky broke with them:‘A party that doesn’t participate in the real trade unions is not a revolutionary party. The NAS exists only thanks to the toleration and financial support of the bourgeois government. This financial support is dependent upon your political attitude. That is the reason why the party didn’t, in spite of all our insistence, elaborate a political programme. That is also the reason why you, as a deputy, never gave a genuine revolutionary speech ... Your activity has a diplomatic and not a very revolutionary character ... The NAS itself is not a bridge to the masses but a wall separating you from the masses.’The NAS was dissolved in 1940 at the beginning of the occupation; the RSAP split in 1942. Nothing remains of the NAS and not much more of the RSAP members. (Sneevliet was shot by the Nazis in 1942.)The argument is often that opposition to dual unionism is alright in general, but in particular circumstances the union is so corrupt, so bureaucratised and the internal regime so draconian as to make work impossible. The argument is not new and begs the question – what about the members? The trade unions organise millions of workers, the majority of whom are at the lowest level of working class consciousness – a feeble and unenthusiastic grip on a trade union card. The task of revolutionaries is by patient, hard, painstaking work to influence and develop the consciousness of these workers. The nature of the bureaucracy and the extent of the harshness of the internal regime will determine the tactics but not the strategy of working in the mass trade unions. Lenin, in Left Wing Communism makes the revolutionary position clear, in his criticism of the German left communists and their predilection for revolutionary pure unions.‘... These gentlemen (the reactionary leaders of the reformist unions – JH) will no doubt resort to every device of bourgeois diplomacy and to the aid of bourgeois governments, the clergy, the police and the courts to keep Communists out of the trade unions, oust them by every means, make their work in trade unions as unpleasant as possible, and insult and bait and persecute them. We must be able to stand up to all this, agree to make any sacrifice, and even – if need be – to resort to various stratagems, artifices and illegal methods ... as long as we get into the trade unions, remain in them, and carry on communist work within them ... When Zubatov, agent of the secret police, organised Black Hundred workers assemblies and working-men’s societies (in 1905 – JH) for the purpose of trapping revolutionaries and combating them, we sent members of our party to these assemblies ... They established contacts with the masses, were able to carry on then agitation, and succeeded in wresting workers from the influence of Zubatov’s agents.’ [21]"
}
|
{
"content": "Whatever may be said about the EPTU or the GMWU they cannot hold a candle to the Zubatov societies. The call for breakaway unions is most often a measure of impatience, shocked horror at the bureaucracy’s affront to the norms of decent behaviour, and desire for a short-cut. To win the unions from the bureaucracy is not the main question, except that an honest administration is better in pure trade union terms and gives greater access to greater numbers of workers. The task is to explain and agitate, to patiently set in a political context the day to day struggles of workers. In a word, to build a revolutionary fraction of the party. To see the struggle in any other terms is to condemn trade union work to revolutionary phrase-mongering without working class response or to be forced into the same compromises with capitalism that finished Sneevliet and the RSAP. So long as the masses remain in the reformist unions no amount of sophistry will be able to deny that the place of revolutionaries is in those unions. Trotsky, as usual, sums up the problem with admirable clarity.‘Impatient leftists sometimes say that it is absolutely impossible to win over the trade unions because the bureaucracy uses the organisation’s internal regime for preserving its own interests, resorting to the basest machinations, repressions and plain crookedness ... This argument reduces itself in reality to giving up the actual struggle to win the masses, using the corrupt character of the bureaucracy as a pretext ... Why not abandon revolutionary work altogether, considering the repressions and provocations of the government bureaucracy. There exists no principled difference here, since the trade union bureaucracy had definitely become a part of the capitalist apparatus, economic and governmental. It is absurd to think that it would be possible to work against the trade union bureaucracy with its own help ... Insofar as it defends itself by persecutions, violence, expulsion, frequently resorting to the assistance of government authorities, we must learn to work discreetly, finding a common language with the masses but not revealing ourselves prematurely to the bureaucracy.’ [22]It is, probably, unlikely that many revolutionaries today will be foolhardy enough to see in dual unionism any viable alternative to hard patient work in the mass reformist unions. The danger at present lies in the field of recently radicalised workes with little or no political experience seeing a breakaway as the only way to beat the bureaucracy and the bosses at the same time. It is the clear responsibility of revolutionaries to point out all the difficulties, all the problems to any workers who see this as the road to salvation.In the final analysis salvation is to be found, not in one factory, not in one union, not in one union federation but in the mass movement of the whole class led and directed by a mass revolutionary party. Top of the page Footnote1*. The general opposition to dual unionism did not prevent the particular activity of certain ‘orthodox’ Trotskyists in involving themselves heavily in the NASD breakaway from the T&GWU in the Northern ports in the mid-1950s. Like other efforts in this direction there was little profit for the Trotskyists and none for the workers. See IS 2, R. Pennington Notes7. P. Renshaw, The Wobblies, p.37.8. Bell, Pioneering Days, p.42.9. Kendall, op. cit., p.68.10. Ibid., p.63.11. Bell, op. cit., p.72.12. Ibid., p.72.13. Ibid., p.73.14. Beer, History of British Socialism, p.362.15. On Strike, quoted in Roderick Martin, Communism and the British Trade Unions.16. The Worker, 19 July 1929. Quoted in ibid.17. Quoted in ibid., pp.155-6.18. Railwaymen’s MM Broadsheet, quoted in ibid., p.132.19. Quoted in Shirley Lerner, Breakaway Unions and the Small Trade Union, from which much of this narrative is taken.20. Trotsky, Letters on the Dutch situation.21. Lenin, Collected Works, vol.31, pp.54-55.22. Leon Trotsky, On the Trade Unions, p.55. Top of the pageLast updated on 30.12.2007"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsAmalgamating the engineers(May 1976)From the Spectator, 29 May 1976, p.15.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Contrary to myth, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers is rather democratic. That bold statement, as is usual with such statements, requires immediate qualification. Within the amalgamated union there are four sections: Engineering with 1,200,000 members; the Constructional Engineers with 30,000; the Foundry workers with 50,000; and the Technical and Supervisory Staff (TASS) section with 130,000. The first three sections all elect their officials by periodic membership ballot; TASS appoints its officials. It was this last deviation from the AUEW norm that gave rise to much heart-searching and ill-concealed anger at the Engineering section’s annual policy-making National Committee in Scarborough last week.The National Committee is composed of fifty-two delegates and is a committee rather than a conference, because – under the strange code of the AUEW – a committee can instruct, while a conference may only direct. It is the highest formal expression of the founding members’ insistence that the rank and file must have the last word. This admirable desire also gives rise to a very large rule book and the feeling that procedures are such as to prevent anyone from doing anything.Practically all the members of the committee are men who have gown middle-aged in the union and its industrial activity, They are very experienced, convenors of large factories and district presidents. They also have a predeliction for addressing their fifty-one colleagues as if they were a mass meeting of thousands, a practice in no way abated by the fact that no one ever applauds. The atmosphere of ritual is further enhanced by the convention that, although everyone knows everyone else quite well, delegates refer to one another by their numbers. It does give the air of a rather liberal prison regime to hear someone say: “Number 33 is talking nonsense, but I agree absolutely with number 50”.To complicate matters further, the committee is fairly evenly divided between left and right, with the right having the edge of late. That edge was expressed fairly clearly in the twenty-nine to twenty-two (one abstention) decision to support the TUC Government pay deal. Although again that is not exactly a left-right division, at least one delegate told me, in anguished tones, that he voted for the pay deal because he had always supported Hugh Scanlon and could not stop now. Of such touching loyalties are policies made and broken.On the other hand, the National Committee was evenly split, twenty-six to twenty-six, on the question of full amalgamation of all the sections. Superficially, the argument centred around the question of the periodic election of the assimilated TASS officials. In practice it is fairly clear that the right’s objection is that TASS is firmly under the control of Communist Party members. To add the weight of TASS officials and delegates to the Executive committee and National Committee would seriously alter the balance in favour of the left. Because of their existing contracts of employment, the TASS officials could demand seats on the Executive that would be theirs for life. They would be sitting with members subject to quinquennial election and, at the same time, eligible for election to such powerful and prestigious posts as president and general secretary, without the danger of losing their sinecure it they fail to be elected.This injustice, as real as it is apparent, gave the right wing a powerful peg on which to hang their objections to TASS. It also gave rise to the strange spectacle of the left, who in most other unions demand the periodic election of appointed officials, cautioning patience and undemanding of the TASS officials’ dilemma. It is indeed a dilemma for the TASS officials, since recent AEUW elections have shown a well defined tendency to oust sitting left-wingers and install those thought to be “moderate”. The TASS General Secretary, Mr Ken Gill, would undoubtedly find it extremely galling, having achieved the highest office of his union, to be out of a job in three years’ time.The left, of course, argue that if the postal ballot were dropped in favour of branch balloting then TASS would be far more willing to accept the electoral principle in the future. This, however, is not a point that Mr Gill was prepared to confirm. His point, expressed with some force, is that the AUEW wishes to become the sole union in the engineering, industry. If the union makes it impossible for appointed officials to maintain their existing rights and conditions then any prospect of further amalgamation with other unions will be much circumscribed.Now that is a point of some power. A few years ago the Engineering union made amalgamation proposals to the National Union of Vehicle Builders, a quite significant union in the car industry. Talks broke down on the engineers’ insistence that NUVB officials should be subject to election. Almost immediately Mr Jack Jones, a man with his eye to the main chance, nipped in and offered the security that the engineers refused. The NUVB is now an integral part of the Transport union and as a result the AUEW is in a minority position in a number of important car plants. It may be unlikely, but is not beyond the bounds of possibility, that if TASS are eventually rejected Mr Jones might make them an offer they could not refuse. Which would take his already massive union over the magic two million mark.The very real fear of the right, and left, in the AUEW that Jack Jones will deprive them of their leading role in engineering was the factor that made the National Committee stop short of completely wrecking the amalgamation. By a narrow majority they passed a resolution that calls for election of all officials, a joint rule book, common subscriptions and benefits; but this is clearly a delaying or bargaining position, not an absolute condition. Amalgamation, in the full sense, will be delayed for another twelve months and perhaps put in jeopardy."
}
|
{
"content": "Why, you might ask, should we care about all these divisions in the AUEW? The answer is simple. The real problem of national wages determination is the possibility of foundering on differentials, particularly in engineering. Broadly speaking, large numbers of semi-skilled production workers are in the Transport union, with the overwhelming majority of skilled men in the AUEW. Inter-union rivalry will vastly exacerbate an existing problem. Trade union patriotism is as resistant to rationality as any other kind of chauvinism. Unions wish to maximise their membership and bargaining strength, while employers with any sense want to avoid demarcation and differential disputes. One union for engineering workers would seem to be a good way to satisfy everybody, but it will not happen this year. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsSetting the Record Straight(May 1972)From the International Socialism, Internal Bulletin, May 1972.Transcribed by Ted Crawford, September 2012.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.In the Red Mole, No. 40 (17 April 1972), a letter from a number of NUM members appeared, together with a highly tendentious commentary from the IMG. The letter from the NUM members (a copy of which was sent to SW) is the result of some intensive lobbying by IMG members.On the face of it the condemnation in the letter seems fairly damning. Three members of the Editorial Board and others complain (1) that the conference was not advertised to all organisation, (2) that an IS Conference had no right to add members to the Editorial Board of a rank and file miners paper.The IMG complain further that they were excluded while Tony Cliff and Chris Davison were admitted. They complain that the Chairman (Peter O’Neill, NUM) refused to accept amendments to the draft programme in the Collier. He refused to accept a vote on the constitution of the paper. Why, they ask, was workers’ control (an item agreed at a previous meeting) not included in the agenda. They repeat the accusation that an IS miners’ conference added a member to The Collier EB.Let us now examine the facts. The original decision to launch The Collier was taken at an informal ad hoc meeting in Barnsley on 27 February. This was intended to be an exploratory meeting with a few miners and 10 members. The IMG got wind of the meeting and decided to gatecrash. Because it would have been incomprehensible to the 40 odd miners who turned up at the meeting we made no attempt to exclude the IMG members (none of whom were miners).This first Barnsley meeting resulted in an EB of six (four IS members and two nominated by the IMG). As the result of their ill-mannered intervention the IMG were somewhat cookahoop. In an IMG internal bulletin they wrote the following“We are now in an excellent situation to extend our influence among the more militant miners and we can cash in on IS’s spadework. Two articles have been written for The Collier by IMG members and will be submitted to the editorial board by our contacts on it. It is now of prime importance that we are able to make an intervention in the conference in Leeds on the 19th. The IS are insisting that the conference is for miners only but it is almost certain that Cliff, Charlton, etc. will be there. This is something that we can use to insist that we be allowed in but (underlined) it is important that we have a base of support amongst the miners themselves. It should therefore become a major priority of all units of the organisation with contacts in the mining industry to mobilise support for the conference. There are already a few miners in the Yorkshire area who would be prepared to fight in the conference to let us in and if we could take even 20-30 miners with us to the conference it would prove practically impossible for the IS to stop us getting in. The fact that IS could not attempt to throw us out of the Barnsley meeting indicates that the political ties of these miners must be extremely tenuous and one or two good members from the IMG could have a big impact at the IMG (sic) conference This is the best opportunity we have had for some time to get our ideas across to industrial militants and at the same time hit IS where it politically hurts. It is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss.”In the event, as was to be expected, they had only one or two miners at the conference.Between the first Barnsley meeting and the conference an EB meeting was held at 6 Cottons Gardens. All the EB members were present, including the two IMG contact/nominees for the EB (these two comrades Cotter and Thornton subsequently signed the Red Mole protest letter). At this meeting the contents of the first issue were agreed and a lengthy discussion took place on the programme for the paper. All points in the final programme were unanimously agreed by all members of the EB. The final decision taken at that meeting, again unanimously, was the organisation of an IS miners conference. The EB, including comrades Cotter and Thornton, agreed that members of the IS National Committee (effectively, comrades Cliff and Charlton) and any NUM member of whatever political persuasion should be entitled to attend. Unless political tendencies had actual members in the NUM, who could put their point of view, the EB saw no point in allowing them to take up the time of the conference. In the event, a sizeable contingent of non-NUM members of the IMG turned up and were not admitted.The IMG-inspired letter from the NUM members would seem incomprehensible. It is less so when we discover that signatures to the letter were obtained by the IMG without the text being available to all the signatories. According to comrades Cotter and Thornton they thought that IMG miners had been excluded from the conference and that the letter was calling for an open rank and file miners paper.On the accusation that we added to The Collier EB at an IS conference, there is just a germ of truth, but only in the sense that the Chairman did not stop the conference electing another EB member. There is, however, a certain comedy in the IMG’s shocked reaction to this. The addition, comrade Ian Taylor (another signatory to the letter) is in fact one of the few (perhaps the only) IMG members in the NUM. If they deplore this procedure so much they should have instructed him to resign."
}
|
{
"content": "As to Peter O’Neil’s refusal to agree to programme amendments and a constitution. This again was a decision of the EB, taken on the ground that the programme was available to NUM members for a few days before the conference and that amendments would not be available at all. It was agreed that a further conference would be held in the Autumn at which, with adequate preparation, the programme, the style and the constitution of the paper could be discussed and amended in the light of several issues of the paper.The final accusation, that workers’ control was not on the agenda, is nonsense. Workers’ control is in fact one of the points in the programme and anyone (assuming he was a miner) could have discussed the question.What is clear from all this, including their own mouths, is that the IMG are attempting parasitically to take advantage of our consistent work in the coalfields. Last week, for example, they attempted, without consultation with any IS miners, to set up a ‘Barnsley Collier Group’. Again, due to their inexperience and inefficiency, only one miner turned up to the inaugural meeting.In all conscience, we ourselves are weak enough but a group that feeds on the meagre crumbs dropping from our sparse table displays a weakness and lack of knowledge and principle that is truly alarming. Jim Higgins Top of the pageLast updated on 15.9.2012"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsThe unionsOut of Molehills(January 1976)From the Spectator, 17 January 1976, p.10.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.It is an interesting fact that most people of my acquaintance do not know the name of the new head of British Leyland; they do, however, know both the name and the nickname of the shop steward for the internal transport drivers at Leyland’s Cowley assembly plant. I speak, of course, of Mr Alan Thornett, known to millions as, “the mole,” a reference to his talent for boring from within. This is not to say that Mr Thornett is a Fabian thinker of a new and original kind. Not at all, he is a revolutionary of a particularly intransigent type. Even so it is, at first blush, a little difficult to understand why, of over two hundred Transport and General shop stewards at Cowley, Mr Thornett should be singled out for so much attention in the national press and television.To set the background to recent events it is necessary to know something of the general problems of Leyland’s labour relations. British Leyland is a vast sprawling industrial empire, its work force are organised within some 250 bargaining units (in contrast to the one unit at Ford). Even with a vastly superior management to the one they have, Leyland would have a difficult personnel problem. In addition to the complex arrangement for bargaining the corporation were very late in changing from piece work systems to measured day work. Over three years from 1971 to 1974 they managed, just, to get acceptance of the new work method. It is calculated by some Leyland managers that this changeover has decreased the number of disputes and halved the rate of wage increases. Although this must be good news to BLMC it did throw into stark relief the inadequacies of management planning. Under the piece work system the worker had some incentive to ensure the adequate supply of parts – his take-home pay depends on it. With a day wage system, no matter how many time and motion study men are used, if the management do not plan an even supply of parts the worker will have no personal reason for making up for this deficiency. Nowhere is this problem more acute than in an assembly plant, which brings us neatly back to Cowley.Among the many Leyland factories Cowley has traditionally been one of the more militant, unlike the Longbridge plant – where the Communist, Dick Etheridge, earned company plaudits for statesmanship and accusations of “class collaboration” from the extreme left. Among the leading far left elements at Cowley were Mr Alan Thornett and Mr Reg. Parsons, both of them were members of the Workers Revolutionary Party, which had several adherents in the plant.The WRP is a highly disciplined organisation requiring of its members activity throughout their waking hours and a lot of those hours generally reserved for sleep. In addition it demands absolute adherence to the current political line as expressed through the thought of the General Secretary, Gerry Healy. In a few words it is a sect of true believers, a political equivalent of the Exclusive Brethren. It was to the development and greater glory of this organisation that Messrs Parsons and Thornett devoted their not inconsiderable talents.The cost to Mr Parsons, in personal terms was high. His marriage and family broke up and he came more and more to think that any sort of society arising from the efforts of the WRP would be considerably worse than anything that was currently on offer. He broke with them and joined the Labour Party and is now a fully paid up moderate. Mr Thornett also had his difficulties, he found that some of the wildest excesses of WRP policy were very difficult to even attempt to implement and he fought for a change of line. After a brief and very unequal struggle, Mr Thornett and some 200 supporters were expelled from the WRP. Nothing daunted the expellees set up their own organisation, the Workers’ Socialist League (known rather unkindly as the “Weasel” to others on the left, and began publishing a paper, Socialist Press, an uncomfortably close echo of the WRP’s Workers’ Press. The similarity does not end there for both journals are heavily biased in favour of long complicated attacks other groups who fail to accept their version of the revealed truth.Coincidentally with his political trouble, Mr Thornett also experienced some difficult with the Cowley management. In late 1974 they withdrew their recognition from him as a deputy senior shop steward for, they claimed, his disruptive activities. An attempt to mount a full-scale strike of the Cowley workforce fizzled out with only Mr Thornett’s own section coming out. The Transport and General officials then negotiated an agreement with management, under the terms of which he would maintain his job as internal transport shop steward but could not take on a senior post.There the matter rested until just before Christmas 1975, when the mole surfaced in a successful bid for the chairmanship of the TGWU 4,000-member branch serving the Cowley factory. This was achieved at a no more than usually ill-attended meeting and in face of a challenge from WRP member, Mr Tom White.It was at this point that it emerged that Mr Thornett was also a candidate for two other union posts. The first was for the TGWU Regional Committee and the other for one of the seven Deputy Senior Shop Steward posts. British Leyland let it be known that that it would not recognise him if elected. Mr Parsons gave a press conference at which he pointed out the danger of Mr Thornett’s possible election and let it be known that the factory was full of disruption with not only the WRP and WSL operating within its walls but also the International Marxist Group and the International Socialists. He further threatened to resign as Senior Steward unless the election gave rise to a moderate majority."
}
|
{
"content": "A graphic illustration of the dread with which management viewed the prospect of a Thornett election is given by the following anecdote. Negotiations had been going on for some time about speeding up the Princess production line from sixteen to twenty cars per hour. The trade unions rejected the scheme and the management intended to introduce it, unilaterally, this Monday. They have now postponed the speed-up for a week on the grounds that a strike might help Mr Thornett’s chances and in any case a lot of workers might not be able to vote against him if they were home-bound strikers. Whether this ploy had much effect is open to doubt. What is clear, however, is that Mr Thornett’s defeat in his last two election bids, by overwhelming majorities, was primarily due to Mr Parsons’s carefully orchestrated press campaign. Leaving aside the lack of fairation in such a conflict – after all Mr Thornett with Socialist Press’s circulation of a few thousands is at a severe disadvantage against the several millions of the national press – is it not possible that the commentators are missing the point?Someone, whose name, like the head of British Leyland I forget, once said there are no bad trade unions, only bad managements. Mr Thornett, whatever his talents as an agitator, cannot cause anything like the damage that a set of incompetent and inept managers can wreak. If revolutionary agitators had anything like the power that is so often ascribed to them then the socialist millennium would have been ushered in fifty years ago. Mr Thornett may well be a disaster as a Deputy Senior Steward but the increasing tendency of the press to intervene, in a highly sensitive and complex area, with their portrayal of simon pure moderates and black-hearted militants can prove even more disastrous. If the suspicion got abroad that the press, the employers and the trade union leaders were in a conspiracy to deny the members their right to choose, then Mr Thornett will have won a far greater victory than his little newspaper could ever give him. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsLenin(April 1970)From Socialist Worker, 23 April 1970.Later issued as a pamphlet.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Lenin – Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk on 22 April 1870. His father was a teacher and inspector of schools in reasonably comfortable circumstances. Lenin was able to attend the classical Gymnasium and later the Kazan university, although he was subsequently expelled after his arrest for taking part in a student revolutionary discussion circle.The 1880s were a period of extreme reaction, following the reforms of the early 1860s and an increase in populist terrorism. In 1887 Lenin’s brother Alexander was arrested for his part in the attempt to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. In May of that year Alexander and his comrades were executed. Lenin was deeply attached to his brother and there can be no doubt that the execution had a considerable effect on the seventeen year old boy.To suppose, as does the official Russian biography, that this traumatic event set him immediately on the road to a marxist view and against individual terrorism is dubious. What is clear, however, is that from 1888, when he read Marx’s Capital and joined a marxist group in Kazan, he was an uncompromising opponent of acts of terror (intended to galvanise the masses but which in fact led to apathy and despair) and the idealist notions of the Russian populists, the Narodniks (named after their group Narodnya Volya – People’s Will).In a series of closely reasoned pamphlets he argued for the marxist method against populism. Between 1889 and 1891 he managed to translate the Communist Manifesto into Russian, write several major works (amounting to some 500 pages in all) on Social Democracy and Populism, to organise discussion circles and to pass his law examinations.In 1895 Lenin went abroad to make contact with members of the emigré marxist group, The Emancipation of Labour. In Switzerland he met the leading Russian marxist theorist Plekhanov and made arrangements for the publication of a collection of articles.On his return to Russia he set up the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in Petersburg and made contact with a number of groups in other Russian towns. The attempt was made to break out of the closed circles of theoretical discussion groups and to make contact with industrial workers. Leaflets were distributed at factories and preparation made for an illegal newspaper. In December 1895, Lenin and most members of the League were arrested and the material for the paper seized.Throughout 1896 and until his exile to Siberia in 1897 Lenin was under interrogation in the St Petersburg jail. In between interrogations he found time to write a draft programme for a Social Democratic Party (prior to 1917 all socialist parties, revolutionary or not, were called Social Democratic), an obituary of Engels, a leaflet and prepare material for his major work The Development of Capitalism in Russia.In his draft programme and the explanatory notes it is interesting to see how early Lenin’s thought developed. In a sense, Lenin’s subsequent work was in developing his 1896 programme and fighting for the necessary tactical changes, in a changing situation. The programme puts at the centre of the analysis the working class. Agitation and propaganda are set by the actual condition of the workers.In Russia, capitalism came very late on the scene and in consequence it was grafted on to Tsarist absolutism. Alongside the most modern large-scale industrial enterprises, the administrative machinery was autocratic, graft-ridden, feudal and inefficient. In this situation the employers were able to hide behind the autocracy. Instead of controlling the state directly they operated through corrupt officials. The working class were subjected to all the concentrated barbarism of capitalism without even the crumbs of political democracy.The struggle for better conditions in these circumstances became, willy-nilly, a political struggle.The task of socialists, in Lenin’s conception, was to encourage the day to day struggles against the employers, to advise on the relation of forces, assist in the preparation of demands and to cast all this within the framework of a political and democratic programme.The employers were to be forced into taking the form as well as the content of state power. The workers needed “open struggle against the capitalist class ... in order that the intrigues and aspirations of the bourgeoisie may not be hidden in the anterooms of Grand Dukes, in the salons of senators and ministers ... And so down with everything that hides the present influence of the capitalist class ... the workers need the abolition of the government’s absolute rule only in order to wage an open and extensive struggle against the capitalist class.” (Collected Works, vol.2, pp.119-120). The programme, therefore, demanded the norms of capitalist democracy (universal suffrage, religious freedom, the eight hour day, equality before the law, right to strike, factory legislation, liberalisation of the land laws).All this was to give the working class the possibility of independent activity In the process of this struggle the working class base of social democracy was to be assured. With variations, in his estimation of the capacities and strength of the different classes, Lenin maintained to the end the idea of a programme that set out to develop class consciousness and to set the scene for the next stage of struggle. The limits of any struggle were the limits of existing working-class consciousness.In 1898 a few revolutionary social democrats met in Minsk at the First Congress of the Russian Social Democracy. Almost immediately a document called the Credo appeared. In it the democratic demands of social democracy were seen not as a stage in the development of the struggle but as sufficient ends in themselves. It said that socialists should restrict themselves to the economic interests of the workers and subordinate their politics to the liberal constitutional demands of the capitalists. “Economism” as a theory and tactics for socialist agitation entered the Russian movement at much the same time as the controversy over the German socialist Bernstein’s revisionism was exercising the minds of social democrats in the West."
}
|
{
"content": "Lenin in Siberian exile sprang to the defence of the independence of the working class and socialism against economism, while in Europe Rosa Luxemburg and Plekhanov attacked revisionism. The development of Lenin’s ideas in this controversy were to find fuller expression in his book What Is To Be Done?.In late July 1900 Lenin left Russia for his first long exile. The immediate political task was, through the medium of a paper, to unite the growing circles of marxist intellectuals in Russia with the spontaneous wave of working class struggles and build a united socialist party. After some initial difficulties with Plekhanov, the paper, The Spark (Iskra), was produced. The earlier years of clarification began to pay dividends. A coherent body of ideas related to the Russian movement had been developed.The need now was for an organisation capable of popularising and acting on those ideas and to make the vital connection with the working class. It is in this light that the much misused What Is To Be Done? and the controversy of 1902-3 on organisation must be viewed. A party of a new kindFrom 1901 to 1903 Lenin and his wife Krupskaya carried the main burden of work on Iskra. Some 13 issues appeared in 1901. Many British socialists will know the hard, grinding work involved in financing and producing a readable newspaper that combines socialist agitation with working class appeal.The production of Iskra and its distribution in Russia multiplied these problems a thousand-fold. Some of the Russian distributors sold the paper and sent the cash but did not follow up their contacts and set up workers’ groups. Another unscrupulous rascal sold the copies and then used the money to publish a paper supporting economism.The leading emigré Russian marxists were an exceptionally talented group: Axelrod, Plekhanov, Potresov, Martov were all capable of brilliant work but they were also undisciplined and argumentative. In the circumstances it is little short of miraculous that Lenin and his wife were able to produce a paper at all.In Russia, alongside the development of an embryonic socialist party, the chaotic situation gave rise to a number of other political organisations. In 1901 the Social Revolutionary Party, claiming, with some justice, to be the inheritors of the People’s Will, was formed. At much the same time “liberal” sections of the professions and the middle class formed the Constitutional Democrat Party (Cadets).What Is To Be Done? is superficially an attack on economism but it is essentially the demand for a disciplined party, a party of a new kind. Lenin’s insistence on the inability of the working class to advance, unaided, beyond trade union consciousness was riot new, indeed it was a commonplace in international socialist circles.What was new was his insistence that intellectuals, who were to bear the socialist massage to the workers, must be dedicated, full-time revolutionaries. The capriciousness and instability that characterised so many Russian intellectuals had to be subordinated to the living workers’ movement.The party intelligentsia were to operate under the discipline of the workers in the party branches. It is this vital point that differentiates Lenin’s ideas from the rest. In the party controversy over who should be entitled to become a member, the argument turned not on a word or two ‘that only he is a member who puts himself under the discipline of the local organisation’ but over a whole conception of revolutionary struggle.At the party congress in 1903 Lenin was defeated on the membership question. Later in the conference, however, he was successful in the elections to the editorial board of Iskra. It is from this victory that the terms Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik (minority) derive. The split in the Russian movement was never really to be healed and in 1912 the two sections became separate organisations.The divergence of 1903 and the emnity and bad blood that flowed from that event are often cited as an example of the cold calculation of Lenin and his inhuman attitude to his political opponents. The truth is, as usual, rather different.Martov, his opponent in the party controversy, was a very close personal friend (even after the revolution Lenin maintained warm feelings towards him). The break with old comrades and the heat engendered in the debate made Lenin physically ill.What is characteristic of Lenin is that despite the pain it caused him he was prepared, in the interests of the revolution, to break with anybody. The fact of a disciplined, effective party organically related to the working class was worth more than old acquaintance. 1905: the first SovietIn the wake of the Russian defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1905, the situation for the working class became more and more oppressive. A peaceful crowd went to petition the Tsar for the alleviation of their conditions. The crowd carried holy images and portraits of the “little father” – the Tsar.The Tsar’s response was to fire on the crowd. From humble petitions the Petrograd workers moved rapidly to strikes, demonstrations and armed struggle. Their slogan “The eight hour day and arms” was given weight and real revolutionary content by the spontaneous development of Soviets – workers’ councils. The movement spread like wildfire. Thousands of estates were burned, hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike.The real fight against Populism and Economism was won in the streets and the Soviets. Lenin’s description of the working class as capable of only trade union consciousness was transformed into: “The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic ... The special conditions of the proletariat in capitalist society leads to a striving for socialism: a union of them with the Socialist Party bursts forth with spontaneous force ...”After five years of exile Lenin returned to Russia. At first he was suspicious of the Soviet, seeing in this novelty not an organ of working class power but a transitory combat organisation.The Bolshevik organisation was small and with little influence. Lenin called for the recruitment of workers by the thousand. In a time of revolutionary ferment the restrictions of 1903 were unnecessary and redundant."
}
|
{
"content": "But the relation of forces in the revolution were against the working class. The autocracy maintained its army, the liberal middle class vacillated and the socialist forces were not strong enough. After several months the leaders of the St Petersburg Soviet were arrested and the subsequent strike in Moscow was bloodily suppressed.The revolution ended with the Cadets in tortured doubt as to whether they should join Witte’s ministry, with some of the choicer examples of Tsarist reaction and a series of government inspired anti-semitic pogroms. The desert yearsThe years that followed the defeat of the 1905 revolution have been called the “years of the desert”. The workers’ movement in Russia was in steady retreat. Revolutionaries, active until then, became tired and disillusioned. The most dedicated held on and survived – just.In the absence of a living movement the emigre quarrels became bitter and inward looking. Immature, ultra-left tendencies developed in the party. Attempts were made by some to import Kantian idealism into marxist philosophy.Lenin fought all these struggles, if not with enthusiasm, with vigour. The need to hold on and maintain the organisation was amply justified in 1917.The struggles against the ultra left and the “God-seekers” are not, of themselves, of any great significance. But, as part of the process by which Lenin developed his ideas of organisation and the application of Marxism, the period of 1905 to 1917 is the period in which a party capable of taking power was built and that is certainly of more than passing importance. Against the war1914 was the real testing time for socialism and socialists. In country after country, yesterday’s revolutionary internationalists became today’s grovelling social patriots. Plekhanov in Russia, Hyndman in Britain, Guesde in France, almost the entire German Social Democracy, became enthusiastic participants in national defence.Those who maintained a consistent position were pathetically few in number. The Russian Social Democracy, the Bulgarians, the Italians and a few isolated groups, such as Luxemburg’s in Germany, were all that kept the revolutionary tradition alive.It is difficult today, with the experience of 50 years of social democratic betrayal to draw upon, to conceive of the shock that the treachery of the Second International in 1914 imposed on the internationalists. For years the hopes for the revolution had been placed, rather misplaced, in the International, particularly its German section.To reject the moribund Second, with its passive millions, for a new international with a few adherents was a prospect that daunted all but the most uncompromising. Of these the most uncompromising was Lenin. At the anti-war conferences of Berne, Kienthal and Zimmerwald, the slogan “Turn the imperialist war into civil war” was advanced by the Bolsheviks against the pacifist slogans of “Peace without annexations and international reconciliation.”In 1916 Lenin wrote his major contribution to internationalism in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In this work, Lenin develops marxist theory on the connections between the metropolitan countries and the colonial world. He sees in this the root cause of war and reformism in the metropolitan centres. In its descriptions of the interdependence of the developed and underdeveloped countries, the book brings on to the stage of history for the first time the revolutionary role of the colonial peoples in the scheme of world revolution.From 1914 to 1917 Lenin lived mainly in Switzerland. The war made contact with the Russian movement difficult and his time was spent in correspondence with those socialists abroad who were against the war. He joined and was active in the left of the Swiss Socialist Party.He wrote not only his book on Imperialism but a host of articles and pamphlets on the war and the attitude of socialists. In this period he deepened his understanding of the fatal conjuncture of practical opportunism with verbal revolutionism, best exemplified by Kautsky (the erstwhile “Pope of Marxism”). 1917 – then Stalin’s growing menaceIn Russia the ruling autocracy was finding the task of fighting a full-scale modern war impossible. The already unstable regime was literally falling apart under the pressure of events. Beaten in battle, unable to meet the minimal requirements of the working population and incapable of relinquishing even a shadow of power to anyone else, the Tsar and Tsarism were doomed.In February 1917 a peaceful women’s demonstration demanding bread was fired on. The result, a general strike, the reinstitution of the Soviets – but this time Soviets that could take and could hold the power.For a short time it was possible for the politicians to maintain the fiction that only they had the necessary intelligence and ability to govern, but not for long. In the beginning the predominant influence in the Soviets was Social Revolutionary and to a lesser extent Menshevik. For them, the Soviets did not represent working-class power but a means to a provisional government. Years of mechanical adherence to the marxist formula, that Russian socialism would have to wait until capitalism had fully developed and assumed complete political power, blinded them to the actual situation. The attempt to bend the revolution, despite the tangible evidence of workers’ power in the Soviets, to conform to their preconceptions led the Mensheviks into coalitions with capitalist government. Finally many of them found themselves on the side of open counter-revolution in the camp of Admiral Kolchak and Baron Wrangel.In April 1917 Lenin returned to Russia. His last and longest exile was at an end. His programme (the April Theses) shocked not only the Mensheviks but also large sections of the Bolshevik Party.In calling for all power to the Soviets, an end to the war, social production under the control of the Soviets, nationalisation of the banks, abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy, lie was breaking with a whole tradition of Russian Social Democracy and, in the eyes of many, capitulating to “Trotskyism”. The Bolshevik leadership in Petrograd, in the persons of Stalin and Kamenev, had pursued a policy little different from that of the Mensheviks."
}
|
{
"content": "Stalin in particular had indicated support for the provisional government and the war. In the brief but heated controversy that followed, Lenin threatened to take the take the fight out of the party and into the working class. In the end the Bolsheviks were convinced. From the recognition of the Soviets as the centre for socialist advance, it was but a short step to the actual seizure of power. The Bolshevik agitators were sent into the factories and the barracks. By June, a demonstration organised to show the workers’ support for the provisional government and its war aims brought half a million workers onto the streets almost all of them behind Bolshevik slogans: “All power to the Soviets, Down with the capitalist ministers.”In May Trotsky returned to Russia. As Lenin’s views on the perspectives for the revolution converged with his, his own views on such previously disputed questions as the nature of the party converged with Lenin’s. In a short time he was accepted into a leading position in the Bolshevik Party and was to play a vital role in the struggle for power.After an abortive street demonstration in July the government took the opportunity to arrest leading members of the Bolshevik Party (including Trotsky) and Lenin went into hiding. From July to October, Lenin was effectively cut off from the day to day affairs of the party. Besides writing a mass of detailed letters and articles on the changing situation, he also found time to write his book on the marxist theory of the state, State and Revolution.The provisional government, now led by a “socialist”, Kerensky, was in a difficult situation. The war was becoming increasingly unpopular, while the allies were pressing for an offensive on the Eastern front. The army General Staff were restless, particularly General Kornilov, at the spread of democratic notions into the army and Kerensky’s inability to control the Soviet.At the same time the Bolshevik slogans were taking deeper and deeper root among the working class. Something had to give. Kornilov marched on Petrograd to restore order, overthrow Kerensky, and set up a dictatorship. Kerensky, bereft of all but the trappings of power, had to turn to the workers and soldiers organised in the Soviets and. inevitably, to the imprisoned Bolsheviks. Trotsky and the rest were released and brilliantly organised the defence of the city. Kornilov was defeated and the direct road to the overthrow of the provisional government laid. On 25 October the Military Revolutionary Council led the insurrection.The situation that shortly faced the Bolsheviks after the assumption of power was exceptionally grim: the complete breakdown of administration, the break up of the war front and a hostile army of Germans in the Ukraine together with an even more hostile internal opposition. The power had been taken and must be maintained until the revolution in the West could come to the rescue.Peace with the Germans had to he achieved to allow a breathing space. At Brest Litovsk peace talks were begun. The result was a “robber’s peace”. With the end of the imperialist war and the defeat of the Germans the “robber’s peace” was annulled but some 22 foreign armies descended onto Russian soil to bring aid and comfort to the various White armies, to snuff out the Soviet Republic and to share the resultant spoils.The creation of the Red Army by Trotsky and the eventual defeat of the interventionist and counter-revolutionary armies is not only a tribute to Trotsky’s genius as an organiser but is also confirmation of the very real support that the Bolshevik government had among the Russian masses.Four years of imperialist war followed by four years of civil war left Russia prostrate. Transport was at a standstill, as was industrial production. Even more disastrous, the working class base of the Bolshevik Party had virtually disappeared from the factories. They had fought and died in the Red Army and had been taken into the government and party administration.In the absence of the class, democracy disappears and power is exercised behind closed doors to satisfy the interests of the few. Stalin displayed special talents of an exceptionally high order for this type of skullduggery.The last years of Lenin’s life and his failing health mirror the decline of the revolution. The monumental problems of reconstruction involved the Soviet state and the party in a number of situations where principle was, necessarily, subordinated to expediency. The New Economic Policy was adopted not as a development of socialism but as an attempt to put a little dynamism into a devastated economy. It is not without significance that Lenin uses the term “state capitalism” for this feature of Soviet life. The need to make these compromises was, however, seen as a temporary expedient.Every day that the Soviets extended their life brought them that much closer to the revolution in the West, particularly in Germany. The internal situation, while Lenin was at the helm, was conditioned by the hopes for international revolution.It was only under Stalin that the interests of the Third International (set up to aid the revolution abroad) were subordinated to the interests of Russian diplomacy and the internal situation in the Russian party.The demobilisation of the Red Army made a massive contribution to the ranks of the party. Army officers were able to achieve high rank in the party and the government machine on the basis of some administrative skill and organising ability.Unfortunately the skills acquired in an army, even the Red Army, are not entirely conducive to working-class democracy. It is on these formations and the lower rank leftovers from Tsarism that the Stalinist bureaucracy was based.Lenin, due to his illness (in May 1922 he suffered a stroke that paralysed his right side and affected his speech) was at first slow to recognise the full import of the developments in the party and the administration.As the full extent of the situation began to dawn on him, Lenin saw the need to reform the Party institutions, to cut out the plethora of bureaucratic committees and to increase the numbers on and the influence of the leading committees of the party."
}
|
{
"content": "In his view, the seven-man political bureau held too much power and its actions should be subjected to the discipline of a broader party committee. The essence of the change was to bring into the administration more workers: a return to the fundamentals of 1903On the question of Georgian independence, Lenin fought an incomplete and ultimately unsuccessful fight against Stalin and his henchmen.In the course of Lenin’s illness, Stalin utilised his own position as general secretary to keep news of developments in the Soviet Union from him. The doctors were given instructions not to permit Lenin to work.It was only by laying down an ultimatum that he would ignore their advice completely, that he was able to gain a few minutes each day to read reports and dictate a few notes and letters. At one stage Stalin felt so confident that be threatened Krupskaya with a party court for permitting Lenin to dictate a short note.Lenin did not discover this last episode until after he had completed his Testament. When he did he broke off all personal relations with Stalin. The Testament reveals the difficulty that Lenin faced. With the working class weak and small in number the only salvation for the regime lay within the party structure itself.The danger of a split was analysed and the character of leading Bolsheviks discussed, not always to their advantage. But it is in an appendix, written some days later, that Lenin suggests that Stalin should be removed from the post of general secretary.In the first months of 1923 Lenin feverishly began to prepare a case against Stalin. Directing his attention to the Georgian affair, Lenin let it be known that he was preparing a “bomb for Stalin”.But on 7 March, Lenin suffered another attack. He was paralysed and never spoke again.It is interesting to speculate as to the possible outcome of the struggle if Lenin had lived and regained his health. It is possible to argue, and often is argued, that the internal Russian and the external world situation would have imposed on a Leninist party the same development, with perhaps less barbaric methods that Stalin imposed.It seems to me that such a view leaves out of account a whole series of considerations that are linked to the active participation of Lenin in the Russian party and the International. The grotesque theory of “socialism in one country”, the consequent subordination of the international communist movement to the needs of the Russian bureaucracy are, in my view, unthinkable in terms of a party or a government led by Lenin.But such speculation, no matter how interesting, is not particularly fruitful. Lenin’s life was dedicated not to what might have been but in defining the goal, estimating the resources available, and then setting out the road to reach that goal.Today we are too often presented with the spectacle on the one hand of those who have forgotten the goal, ignore the resources and wander round in ever decreasing circles. On the other hand we have those who only recognise the goal, have little or no resources and proceed to march smartly backward into the past.For revolutionary marxists the goal is socialism, the available resources are the working class as it is, not as we would like it to be, and the road to that goal is the construction, with the active participation of advanced workers, of a revolutionary party. Top of the pageLast updated on 1.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsHarry Wasn’t(1965)From International Socialism (1st series), No.23, Winter 1965/6, p.31.Transcribed by Mike Pearn.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.George Thayer, The British Political Fringe, Anthony Blond, 30sThere is an American academic fringe, plentifully supplied with cash, whose task is to present in popular style detailed studies of some obscure facet of British political life. The popular style is for sales and the obscurity to ensure that slipshod research passes unnoticed. The final product is usually rewarded with a PhD for the author, and a pain in the fundament for the half-way knowledgeable reader. Mr Thayer was not after a PhD – he has probably got one already – but his book is set firmly within this school of writing.The field covered ranges with splendid impartiality from the Neo-Nazis to the Socialist Labour League, taking in on the way the Cornish nationalists, the Liverpudlian Protestant party and many others. For socialists, if not for others, it is this impartiality which invalidates the book as a serious contribution to politics. Whatever Gerry Healy’s enemies may say about him there is no basis for comparing him to Colin Jordan. The closest they have ever been to one another is in the pages of this book, a distance measured in chapters and nothing else. The thesis that all are slightly mad or exhibit a pleasant national eccentricity ignores the fact that the “outside Left” is part of an international tradition. To discover similar groups and parties Thayer need not have left America at all. It may well be that Colin Jordan’s existence as a rather specky nazi is the result of incomplete potty training as a child, but the British far Left, whether Thayer and Transport House like it or not, is an integral part of working-class politics in this country.Mr Thayer owns to being “within the mainstream of American political thought.” This may explain some of his errors and patent lack of knowledge of the terms and controversies he attempts to describe: for example the early Trotskyists did not spend the years 1932 to 1938 arguing the question “was the USSR a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ or a ‘bureaucratic collectivist state’.” This particular controversy did not arise until 1940, and only in the most passing way did it impinge on the British Trotskyists – the whole thing was in fact an American deviation.Mistakes of this sort abound, together with a number of simple factual errors. To instance a few of these; Harry MacShane has never been the editor of Labour Worker; Red Flag is not the most expensively produced paper on the left; Martin Grainger and Peter Cadogan were not members of the Socialist Review group; Socialist Current does not claim “that they alone hold the classical Trotskyist position,” and finally, the term for work in the Labour Party is entrism not “enterism” or “entryism.” The mistakes would be supportable were it not that they are well mixed with half facts and half truths, which it would be playing into the hands of Transport House to correct in this review.I have no way of knowing if these errors are repeated in the sections on the fascists and the lunatic nationalists but it seems likely. Some of the anecdotes are amusing and it certainly gives one pleasure to imagine that Colin Jordan celebrating the Sun festival of Lammas – named after the Celtic Sun-God Lugh – around the camp fire. Who can be dangerous who is that daft? But leaving aside the stories which may or may not be true this is a bad book. Indeed, I would go so far to borrow a word from President Johnson, another strong swimmer in the “American political mainstream” – this is a “chickenshit” book. Top of the pageLast updated on 8.10.2007"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsSectarianism, Centrism and the I.S. Group(October 1971)From IS Internal Bulletin, October 1971. [1]Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.All sections of the organisation, including the “Trotskyist Faction”, should welcome the National Committee decision to hold a Special Conference on the proposal to dissolve the fusion with Matgamna’s group. This opportunity will clarify a number of questions, not only about revolutionary unity (that is, the unification of organisations with similar programmes and objectives, and the willingness to put in perspective those things on which they disagree in the interests of shared common struggle), but also about the norms of behaviour within a revolutionary party in a full, free, frank and democratic discussion.The Matgamna group entered I.S. in late 1968. Let me say right at the outset that I believe the fusion to have been botched, whatever the good will on both sides. On the basis of some joint work in Manchester, discussion in Cliff’s front room, and the publication of a few patchy but hopeful issues of Workers Fight, the unity was consummated. One of the first lessons that can be drawn from the balance sheet of the last three years is that unity cannot be achieved in any meaningful sense in this way. Time, care, and serious analysis cannot be replaced by general feelings of good will. A lasting unity has to look further than the immediate situation. Organisational concessions may well be made – indeed would have to be made – to effect unity. But subordination of principled differences to achieve a fusion can only lead to difficulty and recrimination in the future.Matgamna will argue, and indeed has argued, that his and his adherents’ entry was based on a wish on the part of the I.S. leadership to enlist their support in the turn to the class epitomised in the debate on democratic centralism. This assertion, like so many of Cde. Matgamna’s, is unproved and unprovable. In any case, whatever anyone on the I.S. EC may have thought about the usefulness of Cde. Matgamna in this debate, any hopes they had were to be dashed.As was to happen so often in the future, the credit balance of Matgamna’s infrequent support was counter-balanced by the debit of his sectarian approach and his predilection for combination with anyone who was aggrieved or disagreed with the Group’s political line. The authors of the Platform 4 document, a document originating in Manchester and critical of a number of points in Group policy, were the first to receive the dubious attention of the Matgamnaites. In short order, the Platform 4 comrades had quit Matgamna’s sectarian waiting-room, vowing never to patronise that particular line again.Since this first essay into oppositional combination, Matgamna has been industrious in his search for disaffected partners, making overtures to libertarians at one time, and the erstwhile DC’s at another, without a blush or any apparent damage to principle, even though credibility took one or two hard knocks. Let any member of the NC or EC indicate some disagreement with a facet of current Group policy, and he or she will find himself encumbered with the embarassingly heavy-footed aid of Matgamna and his followers.In all these attempts to combine with others to cause the maximum discomfort in the Group and to attract to their faction, the Matgamnaites have never attempted to form a faction that would transcend the closed sect of the “Trotskyist Faction”. They argue that all the disagreements that have arisen since their entry, where they have always supported the opposition to the leadership, though these disagreements may come up episodically, they are organically linked in the sense of the basically non-Marxist method of analysis employed by the current group leadership. In this sense, they presumably think that only their defined position is capable of countering our anti-Marxist for formulation. This may be so, but what is true is that at no stage have they attempted, either alone or in concert with others, to mount a debate on these questions that for serious people must be of paramount importance. Never mind their disagreement with Group methodology, they have never attempted to seriously discuss their own platform. Only when discussion has been forced on them, on their alleged basic position, have they been willing to discuss at all. The history of their existence within I.S has been to wait for an issue that causes controversy, and then to climb on the bandwagon, causing the maximum discord possible.Why is this the case? It cannot be and should not be argued that the “Trotskyist Faction” contains a parcel of malevolent malcontents. To be sure, the faction includes some excellent people, whose dedication to the revolution is beyond question. But then, so does the RSL, the SLL and the IMG, to name but a few – and they, of course, have the decency to maintain their own organisations. The reason, then, is to be found in their estimation of I.S. Since joining, they have made no secret that they consider I.S. to be “Centrist”. It should also be said that the amount of work that they have done in arcing their position in a non-Factional way in the Group journal has been comparatively nil. For a faction that claims to represent the tradition of Trotskyism, one would have thought that they would welcome the opportunity to publish in the group’s theoretical magazine. Instead they preferred the internal publication of duplicated trivia. This of course is consistent with their objective of building the internal sect; it is, however, inconsistent with loyal work in I.S. and a desire for genuine fusion."
}
|
{
"content": "Let us be absolutely clear: For a Trotskyist with any claims at all to orthodoxy and a passing knowledge of the small change of the history of the movement, a larger organisation characterised as “Centrist” is ripe for entry, with any one of three perspectives a possibility: (1) To fight for the leadership and transform the subject organisation (as the Trotskyists tried in the ILP in the 30’s); (2) To split the organisation into separate healthy and unhealthy components, removing an impediment to the growth of a genuine revolutionary party (as with the SWP in the American SP in the mid-30’s); or (3) To increase the strength of the sectlet to be regurgitated as a sect by the offended organisation (as in the SFIO in the early 30’s). Parenthetically, it is worthwhile adding that the comparative mildness of the I.S. internal regime and the Matgamnaites’ lack of success in building an independent sectlet into a full-blown sect, recognised by one of the Fourth Internationals, gave added impetus and urgency to their decision to join I.S.With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to see that Point (3) was the course chosen. Cde. Matgamna’s cadre was young, inexperienced, and dependent on his and one or two others’ frequently faulty knowledge of Trotskyist history and tactics. To make a bold stroke for the leadership was clearly out of the question, and would require hard work along the line of the I.S. Group’s orientation, so that a proved record of building the organisation could qualify them for leadership. In this context it needs to be pointed out that, with one or two exceptions, the Workers Fight comrades have not attempted to build the Group, but to recruit to their faction from those already in I.S. membership.To seriously split I.S. would also require a far more disciplined and theoretically able cadre than the Matgamnaites possessed. Even Matgamna, in 1968, professed to be agnostic on the Russian question and the permanent arms economy. It may be, of course, that this agnosticism was of a diplomatic character, to enable him to influence those discontented I.S. members still adhering to traditional Group positions. If this is so, then it casts doubt on his loyalty both to the Group and to his factional comrades.It is clear, then, if (1) and (2) are excluded, that (3) is the indicated course. A “Trotskyist Tendency” is built, battening on genuine disagreement, turning activist branches orientated on the working class, into talking-shops dedicated to discussion of orthodox sectariana and the sins of the leadership in general and T. Cliff in particular. Is it any wonder, that workers who joined the Group on our analysis of the industrial struggle (incomes policy, productivity bargaining, the rank and file trade union movement, etc.), and the political scene (the decline of social democracy and Stalinism, the Tory offensive, and the need for a revolutionary party, etc.), are repelled by a flood of carping sectarian criticism. It should surprise nobody that on occasion we have been forced to split branches into those who wish to build their own sect and those who wish to build a revolutionary workers’ party. This regrettab1e but necessary procedure has been described by the Matgamnaites as “ghettoisation”. If so, it is a ghetto they themselves have built by their refusal to see the main orientation of the Group on the working class and the building of the organisation as a priority by their refusal to conform to the norms of reasonable branch behaviour.Since the discussion on the Common Market which they, as usual, opportunistically joined (not in concert with others, but as a separate, closed sect), they have been busily exporting their comrades to spread disaffection. The Common Market debate is for them not the opportunity to clarify politics, but the chance to attack the I.S. Group.The Bolshevik Party of Lenin would not have permitted such conduct; No section of the Fourth International (ICFI, USFI, or Posadist) would permit such conduct; The I.S. Group has permitted it too long.One of the real problems that confronts many loyal members of the organisation who find themselves at some time or another in disagreement with some part of Group policy or activity, is that they have continually to be looking over their shoulders to discover whether the Matgamnaites are attempting to make sect propaganda out of the issue. This was a feature especially of the Irish and Common Market disagreements. In a very real sense, the elucidation of politics for discussion and disagreement are stultified by the existence of this permanent sectarian opposition.The “Trotskyist Faction” claim to be a tendency with a clear and distinct programme that sets them apart from mere transitory factions that find their raison d’être in arguments on specific points of disagreement. Leaving aside the question as to whether a finished programme exists in a religious-type devotion to the first four congresses of the CI, the Transitional Programme of Trotsky, and a call For the formation of a new Minority Movement or a new Militant Workers’ Federation (this last displaying a lamentable ignorance of the factors that made a Minority Movement and a Militant Workers’ Federation possible), coupled to a sneaking regard for the moribund USFI – leave all this aside. In the ghetto of their own minds, the Matgamnaites fondly imagine this rag-bag to be a programme. That being so, they are merely proving the case for dissolution of the fusion. In reality, at every point in both their contributions and published material, they are to all intents and purposes a separate organisation, with privileged recruiting rights within I.S."
}
|
{
"content": "In an attempt to deny the logic of their description of I.S. as “Centrist”, Cde. Matgamna at the October NC chose to see a difference between different sorts of Centrist: Centrists of the Martov/Andreas Nin variety, which he equates with I.S., being acceptable, while the Kautsky/Maxton brand were definitely persona non grata. This distinction indicates either a lamentable lack of knowledge of Marxist history, or an attempt to extend the miseducation of the “Trotskyist Faction” comrades to the Group at large. Martov, as with Kautsky, was ineligible politically to join the Communist International. Indeed, the statutes of the CI were specifically designed by Lenin to exclude Centrists of the Kautsky stripe, and with splendid impartiality, those of the Martov stripe as well. Andreas Nin, and the POUM (not the P.O.E.U., as one member of the “Trotskyist Faction” has it) were castigated by Trotsky with more vigour than Maxton and the ILP. For good reason: their Centrist crimes were greater, because their revolutionary possibilities and failures were so much greater. Indeed, those within the Fourth International at that time who solidarised themselves with the POUM (Vereecken and Sneevliet) were expelled from the international, and rightly so. Lenin and Trotsky preached at all times unremitting war against Centrism. It is clearly the duty or genuine revolutionaries to oppose and to attack Centrism wherever they can.If I.S. is Centrist, then Matgamna and his co-thinkers are absolutely correct to oppose it, to fight it, to impede its progress, if necessary to smash it. (In this connection, the “Trotskyist Faction” has gone so far as to append to their latest platform document at least two signatures of comrades who do not subscribe to the document nor to the Trotskyist Faction. Two conclusions can be drawn from this: They care so little for their reputation within I.S. that they stoop to forgery; or, they are so careless as to suggest that their attitude to politics is light-minded. Either of these conclusions casts no credit on the authors of the document.) That they do think I.S. is Centrist is proved by their own publications, from their entry document through Cde. Hornung’s “Centrist Current” (Comrades will recall how he claimed with little modesty but some accuracy to be “driven on by the steam hammer of his own polemic”), to the latest effusion posing as their platform.The accusation of Centrism is of course nonsense, whether the shade of Martov or Nin is conjured up to give the argument a shadowy substance or not.Are we for a revolutionary, democratic centralist workers’ party? – Yes, we are.Do we stand for the primacy of the working class in revolutionary struggle? – Yes, we do.Do we deny the possibility of a peaceful transition to Socialism? – Yes, we do.Do we stand against Stalinism and the political and trade union wings of social democracy? – Yes, we do.Do we unconditionally support workers in struggle and attempt to give them Marxist leadership? – Yes, we do.Do we stand on the first four congresses of the Communist International? – Yes, we do.Do we stand for a transitional programme, if not Trotsky’s? – Yes, we do.Are we for a new revolutionary International? – Yes, we are.The I.S. Group now contains within itself the foundations of a revolutionary party. It would de criminal, in the current comparatively favourable climate, to waste more time in counter-productive bickering that cannot be, and will not be resolved. As the Group and its opportunities expand, we can afford even less the luxury of this time-wasting irrelevance.The “Trotskyist Faction”, if the Conference passes the National Committee’s resolution, will have the opportunity of putting their ideas on organisation and politics to the test of the real world. The hard facts of that experience will turn them into either a tight little group of friends, parasitic for their discussion and documents on the “crimes” of I.S. and any other group that differs from them by a comma, or they will begin to understand the real ABC of Marxism in the working class movement. If the latter alternative (and we hope that it does) should take place, then a real and lasting unity can be forged; if the former, then of course we are not interested.The history of our movement has been marred by the in-bred factionalism that derives from isolation and repression. The opportunities that revolutionaries lose are not regained easily. For perhaps a brief period we have the chance to make contact with larger numbers of workers than ever before. If precious time and resources are to be wasted in arguing with Matgamna and his circle, when we should be taking these chances to engage in real class struggle, then we deserve the irrelevance that has condemned, and condemns, too many revolutionary groups. Jim HigginsOctober 1971 Transcriber’s Note1. Higgins, a leading member of the EC of IS, here states why the fusion between the Matgamna group and IS must now come to an end. This was voted on by the membership and the transcriber, Ted Crawford, was among those voting for the ending of this fusion. Top of the pageLast updated on 15.9.2012"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsThe Fall of the Mekon(9 November 1985)From the Spectator, 9 November 1985, p.22.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Jim Higgins reviews the career of Gerry Healy, Trotskyite and alleged womaniser“God,” so they say, “does not pay his debts in money”. I was reminded of this wise old maxim when the news broke that Gerry Healy had been expelled from his creation the Workers Revolutionary Party for allegedly using his exalted position to extract sexual favours from young female comrades. For some 50 years, Healy has graced, or rather disgraced, the British Trotskyist movement. In that time, by a combination of low cunning, skullduggery and verbal and physical abuse, he has created almost as many ex-Trotskyists as Joe Stalin. It would not have surprised me at any time in the last 30 years it he had been expelled for grievous bodily harm, but that it should be for grievous bodily charm is extraordinary.Physically, Gerry Healy is probably the least prepossessing man I have ever seen. Short, very stout and with an extremely large head that grows directly out of his torso, he is for all the world closest in appearance to the Mekon, that fearsome tyrant from the planet Venus, whose plans for universal domination were foiled by Dan Dare in the pages of the Eagle. The similarity does not end there: like the Mekon Healy is given to wild, splenetic rages when crossed.On one famous occasion, a dissident member of the organisation was speaking at a meeting of the central committee, justifying his position. His speech was continually interrupted by Healy, who, becoming exasperated by the comrade’s (shortly to become an ex-comrade) persistence, gave tongue to the immortal phrase: “Stop speaking when I am interrupting.”Reports that Healy has notched up a string of amorous successes are perhaps a significant plus for that dialectical proposition about the interpenetration of opposites. They are even more astonishing in the light of the fact that in the past Healy, has used the romantic indiscretions of his comrades to line them up in support of whatever factional dispute he happened to be conducting at the time. At his party’s summer camps and schools, the sexes were rigidly segregated and “purity patrols” were appointed to seek out and separate young internationalists whose political discussions were becoming too intimate.That he found time for his dalliances is something that has surprised seasoned Healy-watchers. One thing however, that Healy has in abundance is energy. His schedule is formidable; hardly a day passes when he is not speaking at some meeting or another. In addition, he fits in political writing (in a style likened by one critic to a sandbag dragged through a puddle of glue), plotting and conspiring with a dedication to heresy hunting that would have put Titus Oates to shame.Over the decades, it is this heresy hunting, that Healy has developed to a fine art. Let there be one dissident in John O’Groats and he will spring into his car and drive for hours to bring the traitor to book. Another ploy, which he has refined, is the midnight knock on the door for those thought to be wavering from strict orthodoxy, to engage in long and acrimonious theoretical discussions. Even the most stalwart has been known to wilt by five a.m. the next morning. Again, one of his smoother innovations – in the development of democratic centralism – has been what might be called “guilt by vote”. In this stratagem, a prominent oppositionist is expelled on whatever charge seems handiest. A resolution pledging support for the expulsion is then moved in all branches of the organisation and those who vote against it automatically expel themselves. Thus are anti-party elements kept to a minimum and their tenure made breathtakingly brief.How, you might ask, did anyone as personally and politically repulsive as Healy maintain himself in a leading role in an organisation claiming direct links with anything as world-shattering as the Russian revolution and the civilised and fastidious personality of Leon Trotsky, let alone, as is claimed, notch up it tally of seductions that would make a man a third of his age seriously look to his laurels. Why did they put up with it? There are those who would point to a textbook on morbid psychology to find the answer to this mystery, but they are probably wrong. Because, despite all of the shifts and turns of Healy’s policies – as an open revolutionary in the 1940s, as an entryist in the Labour Party and a close supporter of the Bevanites in the 1950s, taking in during that decade Liverpool dockers and London building workers, through the campaign in the Young Socialists in the 1960s, then back to the open party in the 1970s and loving up to the “petit bourgeois nationalist”, Gaddafi – he has always been surrounded by a cadre of young, middle-class acolytes. It is to them that he has represented himself as the continuity of the movement made flesh, the heir to Lenin and Trotsky. Before this living embodiment of the Bolshevik vanguard, nothing less than total submission will do.Dedication above and beyond the rigorous life of a Trappist monk is demanded. Meetings seven days a week, financial contributions of swingeing severity, large paper sale quotas and total loyalty to a wildly shifting political line, are a small price to pay for the emancipation of the world’s workers, particularly if you feel guilty about a comparatively privileged past and present. So great has this remorse been for some of the young and impressionable lady comrades that they seem, according to accusations, to have made the ultimate sacrifice."
}
|
{
"content": "Now he has been exposed, angry parents of young females lobby the central committee for redress and even his chosen successor, Michael Banda, has turned on him, leaving him bereft of support from all but the wilder reaches of the actors’ trade union. In a sense it is ironic that a man who spent 50 years attempting the revolutionary overthrow of international capitalism should be brought low by a series of sordid peccadilloes in a succession of Clapham apartments, with the ultimate indignity of having to dispatch Corin Redgrave to collect his old age pension book and wages from the party headquarters in which he can no longer set foot, a humiliation he had visited on many other full-time workers in the past.With luck this will be the last we shall hear of him. If so, then I cannot improve on the concluding passage of a letter of resignation from his organisation by a tough-spirited lady comrade: “Goodbye, it has been very unpleasant knowing you.” [1] Note1. Supposed to have been said by Jan Pallis, wife of Chris Pallis. – Note by TC Top of the pageLast updated on 6.4.2004"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsNow Let Us Praise Leon Trotsky(July 1975)From International Socialism (1st series), No.80, July/August 1975, pp.27-30.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.LEON TROTSKY suffered a great deal during his life. The years of triumph were few and short-lived. For the rest it was a struggle against great odds with, in his later years, great, almost unbearable, personal tragedy. Since his death a romantic appreciation of his life, his style as a man, has for all but a few obscured the essence of his politics. Many of those who claim to be closest to every word of his work have, by sterile orthodoxy or opportunist adaptation, squeezed out the living revolutionary content of his thought. Isaac Deutscher’s biography is, deservedly, a much praised work, but in the end – particularly the third volume – it says more about Deutscher’s political distance from Trotsky than about the book’s subject.Of course biography, good biography at least, is often written by people with strongly held views. In that sense the biography of one person contains elements of the author’s own autobiography. Historical objectivity, like absolute truth, is a bit of a lie. Even those historians dedicated to detailed exegesis on 18th century laundry lists can tell us little more than the irredeemable dullness of their own thought and the frequency of change of some dim Hanoverian’s small clothes – I assume it was infrequently and, if it is proved he changed three times a day, I shall further assume incontinence.Recognition of this simple fact should not absolve historians from striving towards the ideal. This injunction applies with greatest force to those who wish to change the world by an examination of its history. The past can make fools of the most erudite scholars, even erudite, marxist scholars, unless they recognise their own subjectivity and the subjectivity in all written history.Naturally we cannot demand the same rigorous conditions from those ‘historians’ writing from academic ambition or an ideological commitment to the status quo, and most of the time we do not get it. Given these reservations we should deal lightly and with understanding of Joel Carmichael’s Trotsky [1*], subtitled ‘an appreciation of his life’. The book is an absurdity, a quite unnecessary and redundant absurdity. It leans oppressively on Deutscher and Trotsky’s own My Life (reprinted by Penguin at £1.50) and gets both of them wrong. It contains two central themes, first that Trotsky was overly troubled by being Jewish and second that the Russian Revolution of October 1917 was the result of Kaiser gold. The first point is bolstered by the assertion that: ‘he wrote about [the Jewish question – JH] more than any other revolutionary’, which is not true – Martov wrote more. Trotsky, like Martov and like a number of other Jewish revolutionaries, wrote about the Jewish question because they were internationalists. They disliked Jewish separation and detested Zionism for perfectly sound socialist reasons, which are equally valid today for Jews and non-Jews. Any half way intelligent reader of Trotsky on this question will be forced to the conclusion that he had an eminently sane approach to the question untrammelled by psychological trauma.The Kaisergeld accusation rests, as it has for years, on the testimony of Eduard Bernstein. We are enjoined to trust Bernstein because: his ‘probity and acumen were never challenged’. Now the fact is that at the time Bernstein made his accusation the German Communist paper Rote Fahne called him a liar, which deals with the challenge to his probity, and his acumen had been challenged for years by Lenin, Luxemburg and countless other revolutionaries. The accusation was that the German government made a modest subvention of six hundred and sixty-six million dollars (equivalent) to the Bolsheviks. No need to read that again, it is not a misprint, 666 million dollars. The negative proof offered to prove this assertion is that the Bolsheviks had forty one papers in 1917. At 15 million dollars a throw you could have 41 papers in Britain today; whether, as a result, you would also have a revolution is another question. You can just imagine – or can you? – Ludendorff and Hindenburg discussing whether to equip another hundred divisions for the Western Front or give the cash to that bald headed little Russian: Lenin.According to Carmichael, Trotsky knew all about the Kaisergeld and proved his guilty knowledge by never referring to it. No wonder he kept quiet when we learn, from the intrepid Joel Carmichael, that Trotsky had been in receipt of German cash since 1915. Here the money came, it is alleged – as did the much larger sum to the Bolsheviks – from Helphand for the purpose of carrying on anti-Allied propaganda. Now the real situation was that Trotsky had publicly and loudly broken with Helphand by 1915, a fact that Carmichael acknowledges and then has the unmitigated gall to say:‘Yet his real relations with Helphand must have been more complex, perhaps just because they could not be disclosed.’By the same fractured logic we might say that Edward Heath is a Trotskyist. He has undoubtedly read Marx, always speaks against Marxism and is never seen in the company of Marxists: all pretty sinister I think you will agree. JOEL CARMICHAEL, according to his publisher’s blurb ‘... has written extensively on Marxism and the USSR for magazines such as Encounter ...’ There really is not much you can add to that. If you want to know more about Trotsky and his life save your £5.95 and with the money buy the paper back Deutscher trilogy and My Life; they are actually worth the money. But enough of this persiflage, let us now talk about Trotsky."
}
|
{
"content": "It is clear, from whatever source – adulatory or condemnatory – that he was a great man and a great revolutionary. He was bountifully endowed with all those attributes of the popular revolutionary hero. Of striking appearance, reputedly the finest orator of his day, the equal of Jean Jaurès. A prolific writer, his published work is about twice the volume of Lenin’s, with a brilliant style that at its best enters the realm of art. As a Marxist theoretician he stands easily in the company of Lenin and Luxemburg. Like Lenin he was meticulously careful of the details as well as the broad sweep. In the Russian movement noted for unpunctuality, mess and inefficiency he was a shining example of the opposite virtues. Always tidy and well groomed he stood out among the more bohemian comrades. A frequent criticism was of a haughty aloofness, a certain arrogance. Those who knew him best deny this, his impatience was with anything that might detract from important business in hand. With comrades who could teach him something or who could themselves be taught he was patience incarnate. With errant but valuable comrades the degree of his patience and attention were only matched by the decisiveness of the break when all persuasion failed. At Coyoacan, in his last exile, he would apparently spend hours talking to an illiterate Mexican comrade. Joseph Hansen, in his introduction to My Life, recounts a story that confirms Trotsky’s continual search to learn something new. Apparently, a young American farm worker came to visit Trotsky, more as a tourist attraction than from political sympathy. The boy, it transpired, was a pacifist. Trotsky was keen that he should be approached to become a guard. It was explained that a Mid-West, pacifist, farm boy was not the most promising guard material. ‘But he is a real American peasant,’ Trotsky replied. This particular social class was one that Trotsky was anxious to study at first hand.If in saying all this, the impression is given of an omnipotent genius whose life was unsullied by error, then that itself is an error. Trotsky was wrong on a number of occasions but to say that is merely to acknowledge his humanity. It does no honour to our old revolutionary heroes to describe infallibility as their main characteristic. Infallibility is for popes and those who want to build a church, not for revolutionaries who want to build a party of real people. Too often we find that, in order to enhance the eminence of a cherished historical figure, it is thought necessary to diminish the stature of any others who stand in the same plain. Just recently the market has been very bearish in Trotsky and very bullish in Lenin stock. In matters of this sort it is possible to enhance our own understanding through a fuller appreciation of all the leading Marxists of the past; polygamy, in these things if no other, is much to be preferred to monogamy. IT IS generally acknowledged that the three outstanding revolutionary socialist figures of the 20th century are Luxemburg, Trotsky and Lenin. If pressed hard I would put them in that order of ascending merit, but really it is not very helpful. All have to be considered in their own specific circumstances and time. In comparing Lenin and Luxemburg it is necessary to understand the quite different working-class situation they faced in their separate countries. Luxemburg had to break through the ossified structures of German Social Democracy, to let the class breathe. Lenin had to provide the hard framework in which the spontaneous action of the Russian workers could be guided to state power.Even more in the case of a comparison of Trotsky and Lenin it is important to see the complementary nature of the relationship. The pre-1917 disputes where Trotsky called Lenin a cheap lawyer and Lenin called Trotsky a swine have a certain antique charm; the important thing, however, is that the last six years of Lenin’s life were spent in fruitful joint activity with Trotsky. Quite the reverse conclusion can be found in the Lenin relationship with Stalin. At one time Lenin called Stalin, ‘this marvellous Georgian’; years later, after the revolution, he called for Stalin’s removal and broke off all relations with him. Now that is significant, not because Stalin had not been a ‘marvellous’ chap, he probably was in comparison to many of his contemporaries, but because in later, much more important tasks Stalin fell far short of what was required.It is true that Trotsky was wrong in 1903 to side with the Mensheviks against Lenin. He understood much later than Lenin that sometimes a split is preferable to unity around the wrong politics. But whatever his fault in this regard it certainly was not individualism. Trotsky was for the unity of social democracy, the party as it was, as the prerequisite for socialist victory. In a sense the individualist was Lenin. In the same spirit Lenin was wrong on his theory of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Workers and Peasants as against the Trotsky theory of the Permanent Revolution. As Adolf Joffe testified, on his death bed, Lenin had admitted to him that Trotsky had been right. For Lenin the limits of the revolution were the eight hour day, agrarian reform and political democracy. The recent suggestion that Lenin really had an open mind on the question, that his theory was modified by the notion: ‘On s’engage, et puis ... on voit’, which roughly translated means: Let’s have a bash and see what happens, does not bear too much examination and does less than justice to Lenin. The truth is that he was wrong and no amount of chuntering about the beauty of his dialectic can disguise the fact. The strength of both men is that while Trotsky could build in to his theory the capacity of the working class to go beyond the democratic tasks, Lenin could, when the event actually occurred, see through all the complexity of the present, and past obfuscation, to the class reality. In 1917 both men came together, neither capitulated, there was really no need so to do."
}
|
{
"content": "In his much quoted, and overrated, Revolutionary Silhouettes, Lunacharsky tells of how, in the first popular, mass phase of the revolution Trotsky seemed to outdistance Lenin:‘... the late M.S. Uritsky once said to me: “Here the great revolution has come, and there is a feeling that however able Lenin is, he is beginning to fade alongside the genius of Trotsky” ...’Such was Trotsky’s popular following that Lenin suggested that he should be the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commisars – Trotsky refused. This tells something about both men, their dedication to the revolution without interest in personal pre-eminence. In the field of mass agitation, Trotsky clearly surpassed Lenin. But Lenin is in no way diminished, his authority in the party, his relationship to the leading cadre, and through them to the worker militants was the vital link in the success of the uprising. Both men were effective administrators, the scourge of slipshod methods and inadequate communication. In the task of mass and party agitation they complemented one another completely, this collaboration was repeated in the Soviet government. IF FURTHER examples are required, we can go on to confess (if that is the word) that Trotsky was wrong when he called for the militarisation of labour during the trade union debate in 1922. But that is not sufficient explanation. The previous year Trotsky had called for the introduction of his own form of NEP. It was the rejection of that policy that forced him to see militarisation of labour as the logical next step if the policy of War Communism was to be continued. Again it must be said that Trotsky was right to oppose the invasion of Poland in 1920 and Lenin was wrong to insist on the offensive. But that does not tell all the story. The prize that awaited the success of the Polish adventure was to bring the revolution right to the German border, the heartland of the European working class. There is a certain irony in the fact, that Trotsky, who was later accused by Stalin and his henchmen of wishing to export the revolution on Red Army bayonets, should have opposed the only time it was tried.From 1904 through to 1917 Trotsky was not a member of any group in the Russian Social Democracy. His role was as journalist, author and agitator. In 1905, the brief interlude of the first Russian Revolution brought him right to the forefront of the class struggle, as chairman of the Petrograd soviet. During that revolutionary upsurge he edited The Russian Gazette and took its circulation in a month from 30,000 to half a million. By way of comparison, the Bolshevik paper, New Life, had a circulation only one tenth of the Russian Gazette. At the same time Trotsky managed to virtually expropriate the Menshevik paper The Beginning and edit that as well.From 1917 to 1923 Trotsky’s fortunes directly mirrored the fortunes of the revolution. With the fading of the chance for the international revolution, the apparatchiks began their long control of the party. It is some measure of the merit accorded to Trotsky by his opponents that no one individual could act as a counterweight. The triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev had to be thrown jointly into the scale to balance the lone Trotsky. The triumvirate was an alliance that rested far more in their mutual fear and respect for Trotsky than in any community of interest.From 1923 until his murder, Trotsky fought for the re-establishment of the party as a revolutionary vanguard and he failed. As he told Zinoviev, to rebuild the party, re-establish democracy within it and to restore the revolutionary role of the Comintern was made extraordinarily difficult in the wake of the defeats in Germany, Britain and China. Even so there was, for him, nothing else to do but to fight, to swim against the stream. In exile from 1929 he struggled until 1933 to reform the Comintern. With the victory of fascism in Germany he devoted the rest of his life to the construction of a new revolutionary international. It is this last period of his life that his biographers leave very much out of account. Deutscher because he thought the whole thing was an aberrant irrelevance and Carmichael because he just does not know. In his Diaries in Exile, Trotsky wrote that he thought his work for the construction of the Fourth International was the most important in his life, because he was uniquely placed to carry it through. He was right. Not because the FI ever became anything like the revolutionary force he strained and worked so hard to construct. Not at all because he continued, against contrary evidence, to describe Russia as a ‘workers’ state’. Nor because he mistakenly assumed that the second world war would usher in the social revolution in its aftermath. He was right because in fighting to build the Fourth he was holding together a genuine revolutionary tendency. In fighting for revolutionary internationalism he maintained unbroken the tradition of Bolshevism. The greatest tribute he paid to Lenin, and he paid many, was his herculean efforts to build parties in the Leninist mould.For many the history of Trotskyism in the 1930s has a slightly ridiculous cast. The small squabbles in the even smaller Trotskyist groups, compared to their cosmic pretensions can be made the subject of some jolly jokes. As a matter of fact the heated debates of the seemingly small change of controversy within Bolshevism before 1912 would look equally ridiculous were it not that the winter of discontent was made glorious summer in 1917. Lenin built the party with what there was to hand, some of his more dubious methods are not new principles of organisation for imitation, but products of a particularly difficult situation. Their justification rests in the fact that the party was built, despite Tsarist terror, jail and exile, in the seemingly barren soil of Russia."
}
|
{
"content": "For twenty five years after Lenin’s death, Trotsky kept alive, sometimes only just alive, the thin red line of the revolutionary tradition. If with a touch of condescension and a lot of hindsight we can look back with some amusement to the ‘dog days’ of the 1930s, congratulating ourselves on our own lack of error, we should still bear an important point in mind. We would not, could not, be here today – as we are – without the work of L.D. Trotsky. Even today a study of Trotsky’s writing can teach us a great deal. The rigour of class analysis (a perfect model of such writing-analysis, perspective and clear prescription for action – is in the writing on Germany). We owe to Trotsky the intensely practical and indispensable notion of transitional politics. He has a great deal to teach on the absolute necessity for internal democracy in the revolutionary organisation and what is a workers’ party. In the brilliance of his historical and theoretical writing he can illuminate many of our present tasks. As, I think, Isaac Newton once said: ‘The reason we can see much further is because we are standing on the shoulders of a giant’. Footnote1*. Trotsky by Joel Carmichael, Hodder and Stoughton, £5.95. Top of the pageLast updated on 30.12.2007"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsA Weekend with the Lumpentrots(Autumn 1963)Source: Young Guard, May 1964. It was written by Jim Higgins but attributed to Mike Caffoor as Jim was too old for the Young Socialists at the time.Proofread: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. (July 2018)Alchemy was the mediaeval pastime of attempting to turn base metal into gold. But we progress, and on Saturday and Sunday, 9 and 10 May, at the West London Federation School held at the Clarion, the Alchemists of Keep Left managed to turn the pure gold of political discussion into the base metal of personal abuse and mindless vituperation. As an observer of, and a participant in, a number of political controversies in the past, it has never before been my misfortune to be assailed by this type of hysteria from a political tendency which claimed to be in any way serious.A cursory glance at the syllabus for the school – containing as it did speakers like Ernie Roberts, John Palmer and Sheila Torrance [1] – promised to provide an interesting and lively weekend. Lively it proved to be; interesting only if your tastes run to morbid psychology.Ernie Roberts opened the Saturday discussion with his usual, and let it be said, arguable, plea for unity of the left. This reasonable, if somewhat centrist, contribution met with extreme displeasure from the Keep Left element. What, they asked him, was he doing about the possible expulsion of John Robertson? [2] It was fairly clear that comrade Roberts hadn’t the vaguest idea who John Robertson was, and in the eyes of the ‘vanguard’ exposed himself as a ‘fake left’. It is a well-known fact the length of Clapham High Street that a close knowledge of John Robertson is the sine qua non of revolutionary purity.Sunday morning, however, was to see the full flowering of Keep Left spleen. During the previous evening something of a palace revolution had taken place, the vice-chairman of West London Federation being replaced as chairman of the school by the ‘people’s choice’, Paddy O’Regan. [3] After protests at this manoeuvre were brushed aside by the KL majority, Comrade O’Regan introduced Sheila Torrance, a member of the YS national committee no less (and if her powers of analysis and speaking ability are anything to go by she should be a lot less). She immediately set the tone for the discussion by indicating her intention of proving the right-wing connections of Young Guard, and their gross betrayal of working-class youth. This she attempted to do on the basis that YG is willing to print articles by such well-known agents of reaction as Ben Sawbridge and Willie Lomax. Not only this – YG had permitted both of these comrades to express anti-KL sentiments at a YG readers’ meeting. But worse is to come. YG had compounded this felony by putting the YS before John Robertson at the Easter YS conference, thus justifying the epithet political scabs. This type of accusation of guilt by association is the hallmark of every rascal who has disgraced the political scene from Titus Oates to that arch-mixer of amalgams J.V. Stalin.After this badly-delivered diatribe, a number of Sheila Torrance’s supporters stood up and, referring to carefully-prepared notes, detailed a number of instances where alleged YG supporters had behaved in an anti-KL fashion in YS branches. One young lady who sat close to me had her speech prepared before the session began (presumably to give more substance to her spontaneous expressions of disgust at YG infamy). To detail all trivia would be tedious, and to answer it would be to elevate it to a question requiring serious consideration. Suffice it to say that the ‘stories’ were compounded of straight lies, distortion and plain misstatement of fact. It would seem from the discussion that anyone who has the temerity to oppose KL is in danger of acquiring the label of a YG supporter. John Austin had better watch out.About the only approach to a serious political point that was made by these comrades was in their assertion that the youth will be providing the leadership in the coming struggles, and as solid proof of this they adduced the rioting at Clacton. Presumably the mods and rockers were disputing for the leadership of the working class. [4]"
}
|
{
"content": "Having listened for two hours to futile accusations and counter-accusations in the morning, I looked forward to the afternoon session when John Palmer was billed to speak on Perspectives for the Labour Movement. In the event I was not disappointed in Comrade Palmer’s introduction. He gave a fairly comprehensive economic analysis in which he detailed the unfolding of the permanent arms economy, automation and the probability of larger technological unemployment. Because I broadly agree with his analysis does not in any way mean that I regard it as revealed truth. There are grounds for argument on a whole number of points, and one would have something sensible to say on the question. Indeed for a few minutes it looked as if sense would hold sway and that a little clarification would take place. The first two speakers referred specifically ‘to the speech’, and argued against it, if rather incoherently and with the odd aside about political scabbery, at least to the point. This could not be allowed to continue and Sheila Torrance bravely stopped the trickle of political discussion becoming a flood. We should return, she said, to the discussion of this morning. Politics was apparently unimportant; to expose the misdeeds of YG was the prime task of the revolutionary vanguard. Right on cue, her comrades responded. One young hopeful obviously ripe for promotion suggested that we examine John Palmer’s record in the YS. This he did, using as his text an obscure internal bulletin produced by an even more obscure organisation. From this he asserted that John Palmer had led the attack on George Brown’s [5] May Day platform, personally wrestling the microphone from George’s nerveless grasp. Some weeks later when Palmer was being interviewed by the election subcommittee, George Brown is alleged to have smiled and said: ‘We have met before.’ This preposterous nonsense purporting to prove YG’s part in KL’s proscription was greeted by applause from the clique. The fact that photographic evidence of the May Day fracas proves quite conclusively that Palmer was nowhere near the platform is beside the point as far as Keep Left is concerned. The fact that the only way actually to know what was said at the NEC sub-committee is to be on intimate terms with George Brown, Sarah Barker [6], et al, is no argument to convince a Keep Lefter with the bit between his teeth. Indeed if one had the sort of mind that dealt in conspiracies, one could hatch up quite a story on the basis of who does the right wing tell its secrets to.After Palmer had wound up the discussion attempting to answer all the slanders (a monumental task), Comrade O’Regan closed the meeting with a few words most of which I didn’t hear because I left when he suggested that John Palmer and YG exposed themselves for fake lefts and political scabs. Flesh and blood, I felt, could stand only so much.To conclude this weary saga of political cretinism, there are one or two points that ought to be made. To mis-educate the young is a job which capitalist education, the press, television and the cinema are able to do without assistance from Keep Left. The pathetic theory that youth and in particular the YS are the central focus of socialist struggle may please the youthful ego, but it has nothing to do with reality and even less with socialist theory. To even consider that with the present relation of forces that YG, even if the lies were true, is an obstacle in the path of socialist advance is to prove yourself blind to the real enemies of the working class. Political hardness is in no way enhanced by the repetition of slanders, the retailing of lying gossip, or the ability to lay your tongue to some choice personal abuse.One supposes – rather sadly – that Keep Left provides a useful object lesson in how not to conduct oneself in the political movement, and it is unfortunate that one day most of them will wake up and find that the intoxicating delights of this form of politics are inevitably followed by a hangover.*Notes1. Ernie Roberts was a leading member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and later a left-wing Labour MP; Sheila Torrance was a long-time lieutenant of Gerry Healy and is today a leader of the rump Workers Revolutionary Party; John Palmer was at this time a member of the International Socialists.2. John Robertson was a member of Healy’s faction in the Young Socialists who was expelled after staging a provocation.3. Another Healyite youth leader, husband of Sheila Torrance, still with the rump WRP.4. In 1964 gangs of hooligan youth, besuited Mods on scooters and leather-clad Rockers on motorbikes, regularly staged punch-ups in British holiday resorts. Healy considered them as potential recruits to his organisation.5. George Brown was a leading right-wing Labour MP and notorious inebriate, subsequently a cabinet minister in Harold Wilson’s government.6. Sarah Barker was a leading Labour Party bureaucrat; her department kept voluminous files on party members. Top of the pageLast updated on 26 July 2018"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsWhat Is To Be Done With Lenin?(1994)From New Interventions, Vol,4., No.4 1994.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.QUITE A few years ago, when she was still interested in politics, Doris Lessing wrote a short story, The Importance of Loving Stalin. If memory serves me right, the story’s theme was the need in many communists for a father figure, an immaculate father who displayed none of the fallibility of the genuine parental article. Maybe it was more than just fatherly omniscience that was needed; perhaps it was a yearning for god, in the Greek rather than the Christian sense. In that age of innocence, before 1956, Stalin did no wrong. His actions might appear, superficially, to be misguided, unhelpful, capricious or plain bloody dangerous, but on closer examination the devotee could easily convince him- or herself that Stalin’s actions were dictated by the need to defend soviet power against the malign plots of Trotskyists, rootless cosmopolitans, wreckers and western imperialists. A rich amalgam, from which any of these bankers could be permutated into a nicely rounded conspiracy.Nowadays, of course, nobody takes Stalin seriously – his stature is measured in terms of whether he was a greater scourge of mankind than Adolf Hitler. His embalmed corpse did not rest long beside Lenin before it was moved to a secluded spot in the Kremlin wall.For those of us who rejected Stalin in 1956, and for those who never fancied him, there was still Lenin and, entering left, Trotsky. Setting aside the lies and obfuscation of Stalinist texts, and much aided by the Foreign Language Publishing House’s decision to produce the Collected Works in English, one’s researches tended to further convince one of Lenin’s greatness. In the years since that initial research, I have seen little that would cause me to modify that judgement. Lenin was a great man; the question is, was he a good thing?There is a long-standing school of thought, composed of old-style social democrats, right-wing academics and disgruntled revolutionaries, who answer my question with an emphatic “NO”. For them there is a thread of malignancy that stretches from Lenin – his methods, his politics, his theoretical work, his organisation – that metastasises to every connected organ.For this school, Stalin did not come out on top because of failed revolution, isolation and Russian backwardness, but because he was the true inheritor of Lenin and Leninism. It was the continuation of the same policy by the same means. Those who adhere to this point of view have to display a mental agility in the Olympic gold medal class. They must hurdle, without so much as a footnote to help, the content of Lenin’s last few months of conscious political life: the Testament, On the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, and Better Less But Better. It was an attempt, in typical Lenin style, to wrench the party and government from the course it was pursuing. That it was probably doomed, whether Lenin lived or not, is beside the point; it was certainly not the action of a man who felt his life work was being ably continued by the faithful J.V. Stalin. Perhaps, then, he moved against Stalin in the manner of an oriental despot, jealous of the success of one of his ministers. If so, it was entirely out of keeping with the recorded instances in his life, where he was fulsome in his praise of those he thought were doing well. Psychologically, politically and on the record, the accusation does not hang together – it is a paper house built on the sand of insubstantial evidence.Nevertheless, the question remains, was Lenin infallible? Now here we must be on common ground with lots and lots of people. The answer is “No”. He was wrong to say, in What Is To Be Done?, that the workers could, unaided, only achieve trade union consciousness. Even so, he made a fundamental correction to that formula in 1905, where he opined that the workers were “instinctively social democratic”. He was wrong about the democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants, just as he was wrong about imperialism and the banning of factions. That is a varied list and one could find additions, but really not to much purpose. The mistakes are those of time, place and experience, and without 1917 would be of no consequence. Because the October revolution did take place and because Lenin led it, and because Stalin was able to filch it in the name of “Leninism” every error, at whatever time it was made and despite Lenin’s subsequent correction, became holy writ. The Lenin of What Is To Be Done? and the Lenin of State and Revolution are the same man, but the politics are very different. Both are revealed truth, however, according to the hagiographers. How often, in our movement, has an argument been conducted, about some current policy, by reference to selected quotes from Lenin that are 90 years old, are about something quite different and were commonplace when Lenin wrote. Never mind the article, feel the quotations."
}
|
{
"content": "Let us take another example: the Bolshevik form of party organisation. On balance, I think that this was the most appropriate for revolutionary organisation in Russia. Whether Russian democratic centralism operated with the same draconian force as in Healy’s WRP is extremely unlikely, if only because the distances were great, the leadership usually in a different country and the consciousness of the members extremely varied. To operate at all effectively, in conditions of Tsarist autocracy and repression, a tight disciplined organisation was needed. It is a pity, however, that Lenin did not say more than he did about the inapplicability of Russian forms when, in the early 1920s, the foreign parties went hog-wild in Bolshevisation campaigns. The fruits of this omission could be seen as late as 1974, when Cliff made much of the CPGB’s 1922 Commission on Party Organisation (authors, Palme Dutt, Harry Pollitt and Albert Inkpin), little knowing that in 1923 they had to issue a new report before everything got totally out of hand. Those who would learn from history should steer clear of the abbreviated version.Lenin’s ultimate justification is the revolution. Almost alone, he saw the demise of Tsarism and the chronic incapacity of the bourgeois parties, together with the tremendous capacities of Russia’s workers. The Letters From Afar and the April Theses are masterworks which formed the basis for the seizure of power. It is probably true that Lenin, through all those tedious years polemicising in the wilderness, was the only one with the authority and prestige to set the party and the class on a revolutionary course. Trotsky certainly did not have the following. Of course, the revolution failed, was betrayed and turned into its opposite.Of course, those with 20/20 hindsight can sneer a bit and point to another sad lesson of history. Unfortunately Lenin did not have 20/20 foresight – he made the revolution and confidently expected to hold on until the working class of Western Europe caught up. As the wars of intervention and the civil war laid waste to an already enfeebled country, Lenin struggled to hold the state and the party together until the German workers came to the rescue. In the process, all manner of mistakes were made, which were subsequently used by Stalin to stifle dissent and install his monolithic regime. It goes without saying that without Lenin no revolution, without the revolution no Stalin. All of which might lead us to suggest that perhaps the revolution should not have been made. Sad to tell, the alternative was not Kerensky, with his windy rhetoric and truncated bourgeois democracy, but General Kornilov with the distinct prospect that fascism would be a Russian rather than a Latin word.The simple question has to be asked, because it is the acid test: whose side would you have been on in 1917? I cannot believe that any revolutionary socialist, whatever his or her reservations, could answer anything but Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It is for this that we mark the 70th anniversary of Lenin’s death; it is for this that it is worth trying to understand the reasons for, and the justification of, the triumphs and the failures. Not because we are preparing a whitewash job of our favourite whited sepulchre, but because Lenin provides an object lesson in how a revolution was made in Russia, given all the exceptional and particular circumstances of that time. Having done that, it is time to move on, to build parties of an even newer kind, with new strategies and perspectives for the 21st century. It is past time for Lenin to vacate the mausoleum and be finally laid to rest, alongside his mother, where he always wanted to be. Let him rest in peace. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsTen Years for the LocustBritish Trotskyism 1938–1948(Autumn 1963)First published in International Socialism (1st series), No. 14, Autumn 1963.Transcribed by Mike Pearn.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.1. The Founding of the Fourth InternationalSeptember 1938 saw the culmination of five years’ work on the part of Leon Trotsky and at least some of his followers, in the founding congress of the Fourth International. The congress (attended by delegates from the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Holland, Greece and Latin America) instituted a new revolutionary international, based not upon a loose organisation of national sections but upon a world party of Bolshevism. The forces were small but the tasks they set themselves were no less than the World Socialist Revolution. [1]The International was predicated upon the complete bankruptcy of both Stalinism and social democracy, in a world situation where capitalism was entering its death agony. The alternative was either socialist revolution or barbarism. If the mistakes and betrayals of the Comintern were to be avoided then the international vanguard must be organised to lead along the path of international proletarian revolution.In Britain the Trotskyists had a history which went back to the left opposition groups in the Communist Party, the most famous of these being the “Balham Group” (c.1931). The Communist Party had, as always, a short way with dissenters and they were almost entirely expelled. For a time the Trotskyists worked as a left opposition attempting to secure readmittance to the party and to reform it from within. This of course was in line with Trotsky’s thesis of reforming the Comintern from inside. [2]By 1933 it became clear to Trotsky and his followers that the possibilities of reform within the Comintern were nil. The grotesque antics of the Communist Party in the face of the rise of fascism in Germany made this plain. If the Comintern was bankrupt then a new milieu was essential. The British Trotskyists were not long in finding a home. Two groups, divided it would seem more on the grounds of personal antipathy than anything else, entered the Labour Party – one, led by Reg Groves, publishing a paper called Red Flag, the other, led by Harber, publishing The Militant. Alongside this a group existed in the Independent Labour Party publishing Controversy. This last group received considerable assistance from the accession to their group of C.L.R. James, a West Indian cricketer and journalist on The Manchester Guardian. [3]In 1936 a group was formed in Paddington, independently of the existing groups and centred around an ex-member of the Communist Party, Jock Haston. This last group worked in the Labour Party, largely in the Labour League of Youth. For a short period this Paddington group joined up with Harber’s Militant group. But in a very short space of time differences arose over allegations of misconduct during a strike in South Africa organised by comrades of Haston. The allegations were farcical and the quarrel degenerated to such levels of abuse that a split was inevitable, a split which made it impossible to found the Fourth International with a united British section.In 1938, as a prelude to the founding congress, a high-powered delegation led by James P. Cannon (General Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, the American Trotskyist party) arrived in Britain to effect a fusion of the various groups. Unity was in fact achieved between the ILP group, the Militant group and a small group of Socialist Labour Party members in Scotland. This new organisation was named the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) and at the founding congress was designated the British section of the Fourth International.The Haston Group had opposed the fusion and maintained a separate existence, publishing two papers, Youth For Socialism and Workers International News. For this heretical behaviour they were dismissed as “a nationalist grouping in essence reactionary” by the founding congress. [4]The RSL did not maintain its new-found unity for long, and within months of the foundation of the Fourth International the official British section was reduced effectively to Harber’s Militant group.From this period Trotskyism in Britain was represented by two tendencies, the Workers International League (Haston’s group) and the RSL. The WIL was certainly the more active of the two, based upon the organising ability of Haston and the dedication of its small membership. [5] The RSL, although an older group and at this stage with a larger membership, was superior to the WIL only in its ability to give birth to factional disputes, and in respect of organising ability was decidedly inferior.Both these groups were pursuing an entrist tactic in the Labour Party although the emphasis of the WIL was more on the Labour League of Youth, where they met with modest successes, despite the fact that the League of Youth was very much under the influence of the Communist Party. 2. The War PeriodAt the outbreak of the war the line of the two groups differed widely. A section of the WIL leadership were directed to Ireland to prepare a parallel section to publish the papers and maintain the organisation against expected attempts to smash the “revolutionary vanguard”. This revolutionary romanticism, which does more credit to the comrades’ fervour and willingness to sacrifice than to their good sense, proved unnecessary and after experiencing some considerable privation they returned to England intent upon turning the war into civil war.The RSL remained safely ensconced in the Labour Party and with the electoral truce which followed the formation of the Churchill-Attlee coalition government, they vegetated with the moribund Labour Party electoral machine.Haston and his followers now began to move out into the open [6] and from this time onward the story of British Trotskyism is the story of the activity of the WIL and the inactivity of the RSL. Nearly all the recruits to Trotskyism were taken into the WIL, while the RSL stagnated and declined."
}
|
{
"content": "In their paper Youth For Socialism the WIL told the workers: “The main enemy is at home ... Down with the war ... Defend the Soviet Union.” [7] They denounced the Russo-Finnish war and in an article by Gerry Healy called upon the workers to stand firm in defence of conditions and hours. [8] The call was made for the breaking of the electoral truce and for the Labour Party to take power the better to expose themselves. [9]With splendidly impartial favour they castigated the Labour, Independent Labour and Communist Parties thus: “The role of the Second International has been even more openly chauvinist and traitorous than in the last war ... The workers cannot fail to observe the unprincipled nature of the twists and turns of the leadership of the Communist Party ... The policy of the ILP is covering the downright betrayal of the ‘defenders of democracy’ and the Stalinist International, and fails to place before the workers the revolutionary alternative to transform the war into civil war.” [10]With the fall of France they called for the arming of the workers, and with the Nazi attack on Russia for “defence of the Soviet Union”, while denouncing the social patriotism of the Dutts and Pollitts.By June 1941 the need was felt for a paper with a wider appeal than Youth For Socialism, and Socialist Appeal was launched. The paper was distinctly agitational in tone, and the politics, contrary to the revolutionary defeatism of the more orthodox Trotskyists, were what can best be called revolutionary defensist. The programme in the first issue of the Appeal was:“Labour to Power on the following programme:1. Arming and organising the workers under their own control to resist any danger from invasion or Petainism at home.2. Election of Officers by Soldiers.3. Establishment of special Officer Training camps financed by the Government and controlled by the Trade Unions, to train workers to become officers.4. Expropriation of the arms industry, the mines, banks, land and heavy industry.5. Workers’ control of production.6. Freedom for India and the colonies.7. A socialist appeal to workers in Germany and Europe for socialist struggle against Hitler.” [11]Apart from the direct appeal of the Socialist Appeal programme, much of the WIL propaganda was directed to the Communist Party and against its pathetic capitulation to the Churchill government after Russia’s entry into the war. The Communist Party was designated “His Majesty’s Communist Party” in the pages of the Appeal. Their strike-breaking activities were denounced and a policy of industrial militancy advocated in opposition to the Stalinist line of class collaboration in the interests of the “Anti-fascist war”. [12]The Communist Party were not long in reacting. A pamphlet, Clear Out Hitler’s Agents by William Wainwright [13], appeared in August 1942. This pamphlet, a prime example of what Trotsky called “The Stalin School of Falsification”, is a piece of ignorant viciousness compounded of straightforward lies and the more tortuous variety of the Moscow Trials. “Trotskyists”, it said, “oppose and hate the leaders of Russia. They want to see Russia defeated and Hitler victorious ... Hidden behind their slogan ‘Workers’ control for Britain’ is the Trotskyist aim to smash workers’ control in Russia.” In an attempt to build up a lynch mentality the pamphlet concludes, “Expose every Trotskyist you come into contact with. Show other people where his ideas are leading. Treat him as you would an open Nazi.” This rubbish was followed by even more grotesque nonsense in the Sunday Dispatch, which suggested that “Directives from Germany were transmitted to the British Trotskyists via a Workers’ Challenge Station”.The WIL were undeterred by this smear campaign, which served to confirm them in their already inflated view of their own importance. Their outlook was one of extreme optimism. In the material for their conference in August 1942 [14] they saw Britain entering a pre-revolutionary situation. In their perspective the Labour Party was heading for a split, with the left possibly joining up with the “centrist” ILP which would for a short time attract workers in large numbers. The need to enter the Labour Party and assist in this supposed differentiation was scorned. The entrist tactic “was to enter a reformist or centrist party which is in a state of flux, where political life is at a high pitch and where the members are steadily moving left. It is essentially a short-term perspective of work in a milieu where favourable prospects exist in a short space of time ... such work must be subordinated to the general strategy of building the Fourth International party”. [15]With the benefit of hindsight we can see that this perspective was almost laughable in its arrogant wrong-headedness. But, despite its crudities and lack of economic analysis, it represented the spirit if not the letter of Trotsky’s perspective. The revolutionary upsurge was to be expected in a short space of time. In his recorded speech to the Socialist Workers Party (American section of the Fourth International), Trotsky said:“Ten years were necessary for the Kremlin clique in order to strangle the Bolshevik Party and to transform the first workers’ state into a sinister caricature. Ten years were necessary for the Third International in order to stamp into the mire their own programme and transform themselves into a stinking cadaver. Ten years, and ten years. Permit me to finish with a prediction. During the next ten years the programme of the Fourth International will become the guide of millions and these revolutionary millions will know how to storm earth heaven.” [16]For Trotsky, there was no other way. The Russian bureaucracy were a parasitic caste, consciously counter-revolutionary, incapable of defending Russia against world capitalism. Social democracy could no longer exist on the crumbs from the table of failing imperialism. The workers would be forced to take up a revolutionary stand under the leadership of the Fourth International."
}
|
{
"content": "In Britain the WIL were frantically waving this same banner under the noses of the proletariat. Tremendous efforts were made in selling Socialist Appeal and by 1943 the sale of the paper had been forced up to between 18,000 and 20,000 per issue and the organisation had grown to some 250 members. What made this circulation possible, aside from fantastically hard work, was the growth of militancy in industry, which had been repressed by three years of war production. Conditions of work and safety were deteriorating and Socialist Appeal supported all attempts by workers to defend their conditions. Besides industrial reporting the paper carried news from members and readers in the forces exposing conditions in the detention centres as well as in the army itself, this in a period when the Communists were opposing strikes, blacklegging, and allowing safety requirements to fall below the minimum.During all this period the RSL remained stagnant and could report no advances comparable to those of the WIL. The Fourth International was in similar straits. Its European sections were smashed or ineffective and contact with other sections was practically nil. The International Secretariat was in Canada, afflicted by personal difficulties between members. The “World Party of Bolshevism” was, in fact, moribund. 3. The Revolutionary Communist PartyThe disproportion between the successes of the British organisations gave rise to pressure for fusion between the two leagues. For 12 months, from 1943 to 1944, meetings were held and the form of the new organisation hammered out. The WIL needed the fact of official recognition by the Fourth International and the RSL needed the WIL’s energy. But, as is invariably the case in such matters, there were difficulties. The RSL was, despite its small numbers, split into three factions: the majority around Harber and The Militant; a “Trotskyist opposition” led by Hilda Lane [17]; and a “left fraction” violently opposed to the fusion with the WIL, whom with unfortunate consistency they still characterised in the same terms that the founding congress had used in 1938. The “Trotskyist opposition” were sympathetic to the WIL and approved of their open activity, while the Militant group were in the hands of the International Secretariat. The trouble was that the WIL, on the basis of limited successes and a crazy perspective, favoured the formation of an open party while the RSL (at least as far as Harber and the “left fraction” were concerned) was firmly wedded to the Labour Party tactic. It was here that the International Secretariat took a hand. They made it clear that no British section, apart from the fused organisation, would be recognised by the International.The fusion conference was held on 11 and 12 March 1944. 69 delegates attended, 17 from the RSL and 52 from the WIL. [18] The resulting party was the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). It was agreed that the position of the RSL elements would remain the same as before, with The Militant as the party’s paper in the Labour Party, while Socialist Appeal and Workers International News would be the organs of the RCP. Hasten was elected the General Secretary and the air was full of optimism. (During the conference a strike of 100,000 miners was taking place.) The party was launched on the expectation of rising industrial militancy and war-weariness leading on to revolutionary victory.In mid-1944 contact was established with a group of Tyne engineering apprentices who were opposed to the Bevin ballot scheme which was being used to conscript young workers into the mines. Socialist Appeal came out strongly in support of the apprentices and assistance was given in the preparation of leaflets calling for nationalisation of the mines under workers’ control and for a strike against the conscription of apprentices. The police became interested in the agitation and the apprentices were questioned at length. The result was a prosecution under the Trades Disputes Act of 1927. Those arrested were Heaton Lee, Roy Tearse, Ann Keen and Jock Haston. Tearse and Lee received sentences of 12 months, Haston of 6 months and Ann Keen 13 days. All the defendants took their stand on revolutionary principle but were somewhat handicapped by the fact that their barrister, Curtis Bennett QC, was not prepared to bring out the revolutionary lessons of the trial. The verdict was hailed in Socialist Appeal as an attempt to gag the vanguard leadership of the Fourth International party. [19]Defence committees were set up [20], protest meetings held, and the support of MPs canvassed. Prominent among those supporting the imprisoned Trotskyists were Aneurin Bevan and Jimmy Maxton. In September 1944 the convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal. But the trial and conviction further embittered the RCP towards the Labour Party. (Bevin was the instigator of the prosecution under the Trades Disputes Act, a piece of Tory legislation resulting from the 1926 General Strike.)The construction that the RCP put on the trial has some measure of truth. The industrial scene in 1944 was one of rising militancy. Some 3 million days were lost in strikes and the government were concerned at this serious threat to war production. Egged on by the Communist Party, they spoke darkly of agitators and subversives. The truth, of course, was that the RCP were only important in so far as they gave assistance after the accomplished fact of a strike. They were never in any continuous sense in contact with large numbers of workers."
}
|
{
"content": "By 1945 it was clear that the war had not long to run. But the promise of European revolution was not materialising. In 1944 the partisan activity in Italy had been hailed as the beginning of Europe’s revolution. It was not to be; the partisan movement which set up Soviets in some of the northern Italian towns swiftly came under Stalinist control and the continuity of Italian capitalism was assured. This was no surprise to the Trotskyists. Even if they overestimated the revolutionary possibilities of the European proletariat, they certainly did not underestimate the counter-revolutionary behaviour of the Stalinists. As a party competing for the leadership of the class they directed much of their effort to the CP-oriented militant and polemicised against the attitude of the Communist Party.The call of the Communist Party for a continuation of the coalition government after the war was denounced in round terms. [21] Their answer to the twin reformism of both Stalinism and social democracy was the revolutionary programme of the Fourth International and the RCP, which regarded the Labour Government as a necessary stage through which the workers would have to pass before they realised the correctness of the revolutionary programme. [22]At a by-election in Neath in early 1945 Jock Haston stood as the RCP candidate. All the stops were pulled out and the workers of Neath were given the opportunity to respond to the voice of revolutionary Socialism. In Socialist Appeal, February 1945, the Neath workers were reminded that “A vote for Labour is a vote for Churchill and the Tories”.The campaign resulted in a regurgitation of all the Stalinist filth and slanders against the Trotskyists. The Labour candidate, D.J. Williams [23] was not averse to this form of electioneering. He was reported as saying “Haston is a Fascist” and “Haston is subsidised by the same people who subsidised Lord Haw Haw”. [24] The Communist Party went even further. In a debate with Haston before an audience of some 1500 Alun Thomas, secretary of the West Wales Communist Party, stated, “If I had my way all those on this platform would be shot” [25] (presumably he excluded himself from this blanket condemnation). Despite the smear campaign and a press blackout on the RCP campaign, some 3,000 copies of each issue of the paper were sold in Neath together with considerable quantities of Trotskyist literature. In his report to the Central Committee of the RCP on the by-election, John Lawrence (South Wales organiser of the RCP) reported that half the Independent Labour Party branch in Neath had joined the RCP. (The Neath ILP had 4 members.)The vote however was disappointing:D.J. Williams Labour)30,847W. Samuels (Nationalist) 6,290J. Haston (RCP) 1,781The headline in Socialist Appeal, “1,781 Vote Revolutionary Communist”, could not conceal the fact that reformism had deeper roots in Neath than the RCP had thought possible.The RSL-WIL fusion, as has been suggested earlier, was not unaccompanied by difficulties. The “left fraction” of the RSL (comprising about 20 people) had been violently opposed to unity with the WIL and had only joined after an ultimatum from the Fourth International. [26] Further difficulty of a more serious nature arose from opposition led by G. Healy on the old vexed question of Labour Party entry. Healy and a minority of the membership were for entry, while the majority were for maintaining a small group in the Labour Party, but concentrating the main work in the open party and building the RCP.As is usual in faction fights, accusations were bandied back and forth of empiricism, eclecticism, menshevism (both right and left varieties), left wing infantilism and, of course, the party regime was likened to Stalin’s.The perspective of the minority was one of deepening capitalist crisis with masses of workers turning to social democracy, which would be unable to solve the crisis. At this juncture a differentiation would take place with the defeat of the right wing rump and, if the correct tactic were pursued, with the Trotskyists in a position to lead the left to victory. The minority’s view that there was not time to build a revolutionary party and that the field of work should be in the Labour Party was the only sensible part of their analysis. The majority denied the short-term catastrophe analysis of Healy (a view of capitalism to which Healy remains attached) although they were of course firmly wedded to it in the rather longer term. They suggested, with some justification, that post-war reconstruction together with the fag-end of Lend-Lease would ease the situation for British capitalism. The need to build the RCP was the primary task: entry into the Labour Party was still a tactic to be used only at the height of a left wing in social democracy and then only as a short-term visit, more in the way of a raid, and this only necessary if the revolutionary party was weak and unable to compete openly.The arguments were all laid out in a succession of interminable internal bulletins. Conferences of the RCP were each year taken up with wrangles on the question of entrism. The minority received considerable support from the IEC whose perspective for the European revolution was closely followed by Healy. [27] It is possible to look back now and to see that the minority were correct in their demand for entrism, although their theoretical basis for entry was nonsense. The majority’s views were less nonsensical but led them to the false position of the open party."
}
|
{
"content": "With the coming of Marshall Aid (a possibility excluded by all the Trotskyist factions and tendencies) the situation altered radically. Reformism and capitalist expansion got a new lease of life and the arms economy later secured their continuity. Stalinism was not dead and had in fact extended its empire into Eastern Europe. The possibility of short-term spectacular gains inside or outside the Labour Party became a dream. In 1948 Healy and about 50 of his followers were designated the official Labour Party group by the Fourth International, answerable only to the International and not to the RCP, and with their own organisation. Although no formal split occurred, the effect was the same. The Haston majority maintained the RCP for a few months with diminishing results and a growing tiredness on the part of the leadership, and in 1949 the party and the press were dissolved. Some of the members joined Healy in Labour Party work, some the Communist Party, while others disappeared into the political wilderness and apathy. 4. ConclusionsThe period up to the dissolution was one where an attempt was made to explain the current world reality in terms of Trotskyist orthodoxy. The class nature of the Eastern satellites was in this respect rather baffling. Trotsky had defined Russia as a “workers’ state” (albeit degenerated) on basis of its state property, planning and the monopoly of foreign trade, together with its alleged continuity with the October Revolution. At the same time he made it clear that the bureaucracy were consciously restorationist and counter-revolutionary, incapable of defending state property except under pressure from the masses. In one respect therefore (state property etc) the eastern satellites were “workers’ states” but the class as an active force had not intervened in the installation of the Stalinist regimes. Indeed they had largely been installed at the points of the Red Army’s bayonets, at the instigation of the “restorationist, counter-revolutionary bureaucracy”. The RCP in the person of Jock Haston and the party’s theoretician, Grant, toyed for a while with the theory of state capitalism, only to reject this in favour of a form of abridged Stalinism which designated the Eastern satellites as workers’ states requiring unconditional defence.At the second world congress of the Fourth International, in 1948, this RCP thesis was rejected at the instigation of the IEC. The congress characterised the “People’s Democracies” as capitalist countries with Bonapartist police regimes. This analysis did not outlast the Stalin-Tito rift when, with rare opportunism, the Fourth International jumped smartly on to Tito’s band-wagon. Yugoslavia was welcomed into the fold of workers’ states and so, by the same token, were the other less independent satellites who must have been pleased to learn (if they ever knew about it) that they were deformed workers’ states just like Mother Russia. The situation became theoretically impossible and laid the basis for subsequent splits in the Fourth International. The RCP went full circle and became once again a left critic of Stalinism, cheered by Stalin’s victories, but unable to affect their course; likewise without influence or effect on British politics. It died of lack of success, false perspectives, and wrong tactics – a sad and chastening experience.The demise of British Trotskyism (and it died some time before the corpse was formally interred) cannot be blamed only on its tactical inadequacies. Although it is true that with a more realistic appraisal of the world they could have continued for much longer. But like Trotsky, they founded their attitude on an erroneous analysis of reformism and imperialism with a fundamental misappraisal of Stalinism. [28] The characterisation of Russia as a counter-revolutionary abortion hid the fact of the profoundly capitalist nature of Russian economy, its dynamism and ability to survive. Far from being a shallow-rooted caste, the bureaucracy was, and is, an integral part of the Russian body politic.Similarly with reformism. To assume in face of all the evidence to the contrary that reformism affected only a thin layer or crust of workers, with a revolutionary mass seething below, was to deny the facts of working-class life, the tendency for differentials to narrow and for larger and larger layers to become permeated with reformism. Capitalism and imperialism changed and the old simplistic ideas were not enough. The RCP foundered on its irrelevance and inability to accept reality. The chances for revolutionary change did not exist in Britain, and on the continent they were murdered by Stalinism.In The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International Trotsky had suggested that the proletariat were crushed between the upper and nether millstones of reformism and Stalinism. The Fourth International in this scheme were to lead this same proletariat and smash both millstones. It did not happen, and as the story unfolded, it was clear that the Fourth International itself was being crushed by the self-same millstones, veering on occasions to Stalinism and on others to social democracy.The sterility and iconography of the present-day Trotskyists is a chastening sight to behold. The ossification of the living thought of Leon Trotsky is a crime to the memory of a man who was always ready to jettison outmoded ideas. His whole political career is an example of the application of the marxist method to real situations. His epigones in doing honour to his every jot and tittle have obscured much that remains valid in his thought and turned what should be a continuous road of revolutionary consciousness into an obscure blind alley.The history of Trotskyism in Britain is a history of failure but it is also a history of struggle and high endeavour ensuring that Trotsky’s revolutionary message was heard, if only in a distorted form. It is on this that we can build.*Notes1. Statutes of the FI.2. “... the proletariat of the USSR has not forfeited the possibility of submitting the bureaucracy to it, of reviving the party again and of mending the regime of the dictatorship – without a new revolution, with the methods and on the road to reform.” Problems of the Development of the USSR, Thesis of the International Left Opposition, New York 1936, p.36."
}
|
{
"content": "3. Author of World Revolution 1917-1938 and Black Jacobins, both published by Secker and Warburg.4. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International (available, with foreword by C. Slaughter, from the Socialist Labour League, price 1s.).5. In 1939 the membership of WIL was 30; the RSL 80. Despite this clear turn to open work the members of the WIL did not relinquish their Labour Party membership. This was the case even in the period of the RCP – neither the WIL nor the RCP was proscribed, an indication of the state of the LP machine at the time, which seems incredible today. From this period onward, however, the main activity and propaganda was away from Labour Party work.6. Despite this clear turn to open work the members of the WIL did not relinquish their Labour Party membership. This was the case even in the period of the RCP – neither the WIL nor the RCP was proscribed, and indication of the state of the LP machine, which seems incredible today. From this period onward, however, the main activity and propaganda was away from Labour Party work.7. Youth For Socialism, September 1939.8. Trade Unionists Stand Firm, Youth For Socialism, February 1940.9. Expose The Labour Leaders, Force Them to Take Power, Youth For Socialism, June 1940.10. A Year Of Imperialist War, Its Lessons For the Workers, Youth For Socialism, September 1940.11. Socialist Appeal, June 1941.12. In August 1941 Pollitt sent a letter to all CP branches in which he said, “... In supporting the Churchill government, we do it wholeheartedly and without reservation”.13. At present assistant editor of the Daily Worker.14. Preparing For Power, WIL, September 1942.15. Ibid.16. Recorded address to SWP conference 1938, reproduced in Socialist Appeal, June 1942.17. Subsequently St Pancras Labour Councillor, and then a member of the CP: recently deceased.18. At the rate of one delegate per five members, the RSL had 75 members and the WIL 760. The RSL was however split into three delegations, seven from the Militant group, six from the Trotskyist Opposition, four from the Left Fraction. Information from the Fusion Conference minutes.19. Socialist Appeal, July 1944.20. The Anti-Labour Laws Defence Committee. Chairman Jimmy Maxton.21. The London District Committee of the CP issued a pamphlet in April 1945 which said: “... provided we get a new House of Commons with a strong majority of Labour, Communist and Liberal MPs. I believe the Labour Party should then form a new National Government and invite others, including Tories like Churchill and Eden to participate.”22. Where Is The Communist Party Going?, D. James, Workers International News, November 1945.23. D.J. Williams, a “Labour Left” who in his earlier days as an NCLC tutor had been sympathetic to Trotskyism.24. Socialist Appeal, mid-May 1945.25. Ibid.26. The Left Fraction was eventually expelled for refusing to accept the authority of the leading committees of the RCP.27. The IS had a theory that Anglo-American Imperialism would set up Franco-type dictatorships in liberated countries, similar to De Gaulle in France and Bonomi in Italy. America would not aid the European countries and the subsequent miseries would lead to revolutionary action. See First Phase of the Coming European Revolution, RCP Internal Bulletin, December 1946.28. For a full treatment of this question see: The Roots Of Reformism, T. Cliff, Socialist Review; Imperialism, Highest Stage But One, M. Kidron, International Socialism, 9, Summer 1962; Stalinist Russia, A Marxist Analysis, T. Cliff, London 1955. Top of the pageLast updated on 26 July 2018"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsRosa Luxemburg & Karl LiebknechtFor them there was only one nation –the working class(1 March 1969)From Socialist Worker, No. 111, 1 March 1969, pp. 2–3.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Born March 5, 1871 in Zamosc, Poland.1886 joined socialist movement.1889 left Poland for Zurich, Switzerland.1894 formed the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland.1898 moved to Germany, joined the SPD.1898/9 attacked the revisionist ideas of Eduard Bernstein in her Reform or Revolution.1904 jailed for three months for ’insulting the Kaiser’.1905/6 returned to Russian Poland to take part in the first Russian Revolution.1906 arrested in Poland, served four months in jail, released because of ill health and deported to Germany.1905–1910 debate with Kautsky and the SPD centre on the parliamentary method of struggle.1913 most important theoretical work The Accumulation of Capital published.1914 sentenced but not immediately detained, to 12 months for ‘inciting soldiers to mutiny’.February 1915–November 1918, held in prison.November 1918 released from prison by the revolution.December 1918 Communist Party of Germany formed.January 15, 1919 Luxemburg murdered.ROSA LUXEMBURG was born in Russian Poland and as a schoolgirl of 15 she joined the revolutionary organisation Proletariat. Within a few years she was recognised as a leading theoretician of Polish socialism. In 1889, warned of impending arrest, she escaped to Switzerland hidden in a haycart. In opposition to the largest section of the Polish movement, Luxemburg was a thoroughgoing internationalist. She despised the nationalism of Pilsudski and saw the national movement as a diversion at best and counterrevolutionary at worst. Together with her friend Jogiches she mounted within the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) a campaign against any tendency to nationalism. Basing herself on Marx and observable facts, she argued that with the development of industry and capitalist economy, the Polish aristocracy, which had once led the national movement, were losing ground socially and economically and were turning to the Russian Tsar for support. Massive marketsPolish industry found that it had a massive market in less developed Russia and was equally against the idea of national independence. ‘Poland’, Luxemburg said, ‘is bound to Russia with chains of gold ... Not the national state but the state of rapine corresponds to capitalist development.’ The working class, she claimed, also had no interest in national independence. Their interests were identical with the Russian workers and their future was indissolubly linked. Under capitalism there was no possibility of national independence and under socialism there was no need for it. This theory, although neatly interlocking, makes a number of quite unwarranted assertions. The description of the attitude of the respective classes involved certainly represented tendencies within those classes and was a fair estimation of what the various class interests should be, but the ideas inside people’s heads do not directly reflect their economic interest. There was a Polish national sentiment and the PPS right-wing did have some support in the country. To understand this uncompromising stand of the Luxemburgists it is necessary to see the context in which their ideas developed. The mainstream of the PPS was devoted more to the national idea than to the struggle for socialism. Pilsudski (later dictator of Poland) engaged in terrorist attacks, intrigues with foreign capitalist governments and the desire for war to fulfill the independence of Poland in the break up of the Russian Empire.CondemnedDaszinski, PPS leader in Galicia, even went so far as to condemn Polish mass strikes because they tended to identify the struggle of the Polish workers with that of the Russian workers and undermine the national unity of the Poles. The opposition to the extreme nationalism of the PPS is understandable and perhaps merited, but the opposition to rights of self-determination is less so. The Russian socialist position, as outlined by Lenin, was more in tune with realities of the situation. The Polish socialists should avoid the establishment of a national state, the Russian socialists should fight for the right of the Poles to have their separate state if they so wished. Under these conditions the question of self-determination is not incompatible with the class struggle, but becomes, in the Russian Empire, an adjunct to the overthrow of Tsarism. As in her polemics with Lenin on the question of party organisation, Luxemburg was arguing from abstract principles derived from the experience of a particular set of circumstances and places. But in all this there is magnificently principled consistency. For her there was only one nation – the working class whose activity and struggle were the centre of socialism.*Reform or revolution – the struggle in the SPDTHE LARGEST, the most influential and the most theoretically developed party of the Second International, was the SPD (German Socialist Party). A million party members, 2½ million trade union members, over 100 Reichstag deputies gave the impression of a powerful and well-nigh invincible organisation. Formed in 1875 as the result of a fusion between the followers of Lassalle and the followers of Marx, it displayed a formidable monolithic unity. Its founder member and great organiser was Bebel and its theoretician, ‘the Pope of Marxism’, was Karl Kautsky. But despite its formidable appearance, the SPD was in many ways an empty shell. Its large Reichstag contingent and its dedicated mass following disguised the fact that the real power in Germany was held by the Bundesrat (the council of princes) that ruled with semi-feudal privilege. Rotten centre"
}
|
{
"content": "The verbal adherence to Marx’s formulations, exemplified by Kautsky’s theoretical work, covered a profoundly reformist practice. It was to this rotten centre of world socialism that Rosa Luxemburg came in 1898. Her arrival coincided with the publication of a series of articles by Eduard Bernstein, who, under the influence of the British Fabians, produced a fundamental revision of marxism. He suggested that continuing prosperity, trade union pressure and increasing Reichstag representation made unnecessary and irrelevant the revolutionary content of the party programme. Luxemburg entered this struggle immediately and in a brilliant pamphlet Reform or Revolution she effectively answered Bernstein, demonstrating that the development of capitalism deepened its contradictions. In her own words, ‘Hardly had Bernstein rejected, in 1898, Marx’s theory of crises, when a profound crisis broke out in 1900’. The trade unions’ attempt to increase the share of the workers in society was doomed to failure because ‘This share is being reduced with the fatality of a natural process, by the growth of the productivity of labour.’ Parliament, she said, was not the citadel of power that was stormed by the aggregation of votes and could in no way be described as a socialist institution: ‘It is on the contrary, a specific form of the bourgeois class state.’ After the fashion of the SPD, the controversy was debated at the party congress and the ideas of Bernstein were rejected in theory but in practice the SPD continued as if he had been right. Mass strikeRosa’s researches into the Belgian general strikes of 1891 and 1893, together with her experiences of the Russian revolution of 1905 in Russian Poland, led her to develop her theory of the mass strike. In brief, she saw the development of industry and the workers’ organisations as making redundant the old revolutionary idea of direct confrontation with the state power at the barricades. As the class became more mature and organised, its ability to participate en masse, breaking down the distinctions between unions and trades, became possible. The mass strike is seen as the first stage in the mobilisation for a revolutionary seizure of power. In this schema the party has a new role to play. It must develop the mass movement in demonstrations and strikes, ‘not as a party government – not as rulers, but genuinely as leaders, as the “advance guard’’ of the proletariat.’ The economic struggle leads on to the political struggle and after every political struggle, ‘there remains a fertile sediment from which sprout a thousand economic struggles’. The movement is thus self-sustaining and self-regenerating, with the revolutionary goal built in to each action. Not surprisingly, Luxemburg’s thesis was not welcomed by the SPD’s comfortable captains of controlled radicalism. Kautsky attacked her ideas and suggested that the revolution must come as the result of a parliamentary victory for the SPD (an incredibly poor joke in the light of H. Wilson). Luxemburg replied with quotations from Kautsky’s past verbal radicalism. The trade union bureaucracy, the SPD functionaries and the SPD centre sided with Kautsky in the argument. The theoretical struggle opened by Reform and Revolution against Bernstein reached its fulfillment in the break with Kautsky and the centre. The real dividing line was not only about who is really for the revolution but also whether the working class would occupy the centre of the analysis or be relegated to a stage army conjured up by the all-seeing, all-knowing leadership. Luxemburg and her co-thinkers were to remain in the SPD until the split in 1916, but the break was really made in 1910. Long before anyone else (including Lenin) Luxemburg saw the inadequacy and incapacity of classical social democracy.*Rosa – the ‘brightest star’FRANZ MEHRING said she was ‘The finest brain among the scientific successors of Marx and Engels’. Lenin thought of her as an eagle, Klara Zetkin saw her as the ‘brightest star on the socialist horizon’. There is no need to attempt to outdo them in praise of Rosa Luxemburg. The correct tribute to a revolutionary thinker and writer is to read her work, to place it and her actions in the perspective of her time and to apply that which is appropriate to our own action today. The task of reading and understanding her thought has been sadly neglected. In Stalin’s Russia she was posthumously designated a Trotskyist, an unconscious tribute to her own and Trotsky’s uncompromising revolutionism. At various times she has been claimed by all manner of anarchists, reformists and literary phrasemongers as a useful stick with which to beat Lenin, and it is true that their controversies were deeply felt and hard fought. But it is also true, and of far more importance, that they shared a common revolutionary socialist objective. In the fight for that objective they discarded and renounced, in their different ways, anarchism and reformism and all the other rubbish that stood in the way. Active factor"
}
|
{
"content": "The very core of her thought was the primacy of the working class as the active factor in socialist change. The structure and organisation of the party should be built from below.She knew that without the widest workers’ democracy ‘officials behind their desks would replace the workers’ hold on political power ... Socialism cannot be decreed by ukase’ (autocratic order). Her major theoretical work The Accumulation of Capital showed that imperialism, while stabilising capitalism for a time, also threatened mankind with war and barbarism. Liebknecht, when compared with Luxemburg, seems to be a much lesser figure. His activity until 1914 was largely carried out in the youth and anti-war agitation and his association with the revolutionary Left around Luxemburg was virtually non-existent. But during the war he completely dedicated himself to the whole Spartakist programme and activity. While he was no theoretician, his courage and activity as an orator and propagandist were an indispensable element in the struggle.Liebknecht was in incredibly brave and indomitable fighter. Luxemburg combined these qualities, with a genius for socialist theory and explanation. Their deaths robbed the international movement of their talents at a time when they were most needed. It is no exaggeration of their stature and importance to suggest that had they lived the whole of subsequent German and world history might have been very different. This is the fiftieth anniversary of their death, but it is not in its martyrs that the movement seeks inspiration. Death always wins in the end. The triumph and the inspiration is in the fight for the emancipation of the working class that filled the lives of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.*‘Down with the Imperialist War!’Born August 13, 1871.1905 anti-war propaganda. 1907 sentenced to 18 months prison for anti-militarist agitation. While in prison elected to the Prussian Diet.1912 elected to the Reichstag.December 1914 voted against the Kaiser’s War Credits.1915 Die Gruppe Internationale (The International Group) formed, later the Spartakusbund.January 1916 Liebknecht expelled from the SPD Reichstag group. February 1916 drafted into the army and posted to a punishment battalion.May Day 1916, calls on troops to ‘oppose the imperialist war’. Imprisoned.September 1916, first Spartakus letters published.March 1917 German sailors mutiny.October 1918, released from prison.November 9, 1918 Liebknecht proclaims the German Socialist Republic.January 15, 1919 Liebknecht murdered.WHEN WAR BROKE OUT in 1914, with the notable exception of the Italian, the Serbian and Russian Socialist Parties, all the sections of the Socialist International rallied to the support of their national regimes. With a complete disregard for their often repeated resolutions in the International Congresses, they voted the money and the men for the greater glory of their respective Kings, Emperors and Kaisers. In Germany 5 members of the Social Democratic Reichstag group called for a vote against the war credits. They were defeated in the caucus meeting and did not carry their opposition to the floor of the Reichstag. The long years of loyalty to the party line were too hard to break. Voted againstIt was not until December 1914 that Liebknecht broke discipline and voted against further war credits. Outside the Reichstag, even as early as December 1914, there was discontent with the war, particularly among the Berlin metal workers and several strikes took place. A letter, signed by Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring, attacking the SPD’s war policy, stimulated the opposition within the party. By early 1915, the anti-war movement had struck roots in the Social Democratic sections in the trade unions. In large measure, it was around the figures of Liebknecht and Luxemburg that this opposition began to crystallise. In February 1915 Luxemburg, was arrested to serve a prison sentence passed the previous year. With the exception of a few short months in, 1916, she was to spend the rest of the war in prison. From this dubious vantage point she directed a stream of articles and letters against the war, the SPD policy and the International. In April 1915 the magazine Die Internationale was published. The police seized as many copies as they could get hold of, but not enough.For the first time the German socialists saw the rounded view of the revolutionary Left. On New Year’s Day 1916 the group around Die Internationale (Gruppe Internationale) met in Liebknecht’s flat and adopted Luxemburg’s document The Crisis of Social Democracy as their policy statement. Ten days later Liebknecht was expelled from the Social Democratic Reichstag caucus. The expulsion was followed in short order, by his induction into the army where he was posted to a punishment battalion. On May Day 1916, Liebknecht, in uniform, went to Berlin and posted himself near the main railway station, where troops were awaiting transport to the front. He shouted ‘Down with the imperialist war’, ‘Get out of the army, long live socialism’. Not lostAt first sight this was a courageous but ridiculous action. but in fact the gesture was not lost on the growing numbers of workers who were rapidly tiring of the war. At the time of Liebknecht’s trial and his subsequent imprisonment there were large demonstrations and several strikes for his liberation. In September 1916 the first of the Spartakus Letters appeared and the Gruppe Internationale became known as the Spartakusbund. All the leading Spartakists were jailed and a number of their supporters in the trade unions were drafted to the front.Naval mutinySmall secret committees were formed, particularly among the sailors, and in March 1917, after a naval mutiny, two sailors were condemned to death and hundreds to long prison sentences.In the factories, trade union officials set up an underground organisation, the Betriebsobleute (shop stewards committees). The ceaseless propaganda of Luxemburg and Liebknecht was having its effect and the impact of the Russian revolution was nowhere felt more strongly than in Germany.The ingredients for the German revolution of 1918/19 were coming to the boil.*1918: the Red Flag flies over Berlin"
}
|
{
"content": "IN FEBRUARY 1918 the Petrograd Soviet elected Karl Liebknecht as an honorary member, the symbol of German resistance. Through Joffe and Bukharin at the Russian Embassy in Berlin, a deal of revolutionary propaganda was funnelled into Germany to add to the already swelling examples of the homegrown variety. Unrest at home and difficulties at the front were causing dissension in the higher echelons of imperial power. A measure of the unease felt by the General Staff is seen in the poster that General von Groner caused to be prominently displayed in Berlin: ‘Only a bastard would strike when Hindenburg calls for guns’. From then on he was known in the factories as ‘Groner the Bastard’. As a last despairing gesture the Naval High Command attempted to mount an offensive. On the eve of the sailing of the battle fleet (October 29, 1918) the Kiel sailors mutinied. Within days the mutiny spread to other ports and army regiments followed suit. General uprisingIn Kiel, Hamburg and Bremen, demonstrating soldiers and sailors were joined by thousands of striking workers. On November 7 the uprising was general in all the major towns. As the result of mass pressure, Liebknecht had been released in October. Making his way to Berlin he made contact with the clandestine shop stewards committees. Two meetings of the committees rejected by small majorities Liebknecht’s call for an uprising on November 2 and November 8. But the indecision of the shop stewards was being overtaken by the spontaneous rising itself.At a mass meeting on November 9 held in the grounds of the Imperial Palace, Liebknecht, standing under an improvised red flag (made from an imperial blanket) declared for the German Socialist Republic and world revolution. The right wing of the SPD who had been toying with the with the continuation of the monarchy under the Crown Prince were thrown into disarray by the speed of events. Mortally afraidCaught in the midst of negotiating a caretaker government with Prince Max of Baden they were forced to declare for the republic and set up a provisional government with six Social Democratic ‘People’s Commissars’. Mortally frightened of the revolutionary fervour in the streets, Ebert, the head of the government, hastened to make an accommodation with the army to quell the disorder.On the streets of Berlin newspaper offices were taken over, the Prussian police chief relinquished his office without a murmur to a Leftwing Social Democrat.All over Germany, state governments were handing over the reins of office to the Social Democrats. Strong points (government buildings, newspaper offices, etc) were temporarily seized and the shop stewards’ committees represented an increasingly substantial alternative focus of power. The government recognised that unless they moved swiftly they would go the same way as Kerensky in Russia the year before. The army was called in. Consisting of contingents of officers and NCOS and any reactionary filth that could be mustered from the remnants of the imperial army, the Reichswehr represented the needs of Prussian Junkerdom, the industrialists and a section of the middle class against the spectre or social revolution. On December 5 a mob of 2000 cavalry sergeants marched through Berlin calling for Ebert to assume dictatorial powers and for ‘Death to Liebknecht and Luxemburg’ and ‘Death to the Jews’. To the working class as a whole the reactionary plotting of the Social Democratic leaders was completely unknown. For them the SPD still represented the party of Wilhelm Liebknecht and Bebel, the uncompromising opponents of capitalism. At the first National Congress of the Workers and Soldiers Councils on December 16, the great majority of the delegates were trade union officials and party functionaries. The debates of the congress were frequently interrupted by delegations from the 250,000 demonstrators outside the hall, calling for the transfer of power to the Workers and Soldiers Councils. But the congress reaffirmed its support for the Ebert government. On December 30 the German Communist Party (KPD) was formed. Luxemburg, who had been released from prison in November, attempted to hold back the excessive enthusiasm of some of the delegates. She held that despite the disorders and intermittent street fighting, the masses were still too firmly wedded to the SPD for them to follow the newly formed KPD. The revolution was being slowly buried under the weight of war weariness and the Reichswehr. Liebknecht and Luxemburg, foolishly disregarding the danger, stayed in the homes of party workers. On January 15, 1919 they were arrested, taken to a hotel, beaten with rifle butts and shot. Luxemburg’s body was tossed into the Landswehr canal. The Freikorps thugs who murdered Rosa and Karl at the instigation of Ebert and Noske were the direct forerunners of the Nazis who in 1933 smashed the remnants SPD. Top of the pageLast updated on 26 October 2020"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsAUEWDecline of a union(September 1975)From the Spectator, 27 September 1975, p.401.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Consider the case of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. It is a sprawling giant of a union with one and a quarter million members. At one time it had branches in the United States; until comparatively recently it had branches in Japan and Australia. Once it was very rich, with a war chest of £18 million. I suppose that most people unacquainted closely with trade unionism would see it as the archetypical trade union – a disciplined industrial band of militant, Morning Star reading shop stewards joyfully ringing bells to get the lads to down tools. At the head of this grim-jawed army, Mr Hugh Scanlon, intent on a rapid march to the socialist millennium and only marginally deflected by the Maoist, Reg Birch, on the left and the Salvationist, Mr Boyd on the right.Well, it is not like that at all. The union is in fact almost ungovernable. Its war chest has dwindled to £5 million. For the last twenty years its income from subscriptions has not met expenditure. Were it not for some wise investments, on solid capitalist principles, it would leave been bankrupt years ago. As one worried official told me recently: “We have a cash flow problem.”The divisions and districts of the AUEW operate very much its independent fiefdoms: little power bases from which the local favourite sons sally forth to do battle, or just to enjoy the comforts of conference accommodation.Today the current problems of the union and the slipping control of the dominant left wing group is not, as many commentators assume, in the institution of the postal ballot but in the fact that the current leadership has not won a major dispute for years. In 1973 the Scanlon strategy was to take on the engineering employers one at a time and roll through a massive and comprehensive claim. The opening battle was on the chosen site at Manchester, Mr Scanlon and the left’s power base. The number of shop stewards holding Communist Party cards ran into hundreds, the local officials were almost uniformly left wingers. After a protracted struggle of sit-ins, lock-outs and plain strikes the union settled for what they could have easily obtained by negotiation. In the aftermath a number of shop stewards found themselves replaced, and one of the officials, Mr Bernard Panter, failed to get re-elected. Since that time Mr Panter has relinquished his party card and is now employed by the more sedate and middle class Electrical Power Engineers Association.From the Manchester debacle we can trace Mr Bob Wright’s difficulties, in his current bid for re-election to the executive council for that district. It is this problem that makes it necessary for Mr Scanlon to give his casting vote to the dubious manoeuvres to stop postal balloting and to alter the boundaries for electoral districts and the date for elections. Even so, while we hold up our hands in horror at these antics, we should recall the precedent set by governments who delay by-elections and hold up boundary changes to bolster their sagging electoral fortunes.For the truth is that Mr Scanlon is, if otherwise a rather limited man, basically a democrat. In marked contrast to his predecessor, Lord Carron. Carron it was who set out what he called ‘Carron’s law’. The principle enunciated here was roughly as follows: conferences and delegations can vote the way they like but I will vote they way I like because I hold the block vote card. At one or two conferences the AUEW delegation were set into something of a turmoil from Carron’s somewhat arbitrary application of his law.Hugh Scanlon is not like that. Indeed, it may well be that his attempts to run the AUEW rather like an oversized shop stewards’ committee – he was by all accounts a very accomplished convenor at Metro Vickers in the dim past – are at the root of some of his problems.The basic malaise, however, is rather more deep-laid than the personality of Mr Scanlon. The AUEW is ungovernable because the men who drew up its constitution in the early 1920s had a well developed antipathy to being governed at all. Animated, as they were, by the confused principles of revolutionary syndicalism they built into the rules a whole series of checks and balances and a vastly complicated and cumbersome election machinery. The periodic election procedure does at least have the advantage of ensuring that the officials get round to see the members in the last twelve months of their office, rather in the manner of politicians kissing babies.Another factor in the decline of the AUEW has been the widening, now almost unbridgeable, rift between Mr Scanlon and Mr Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers Union. In the past this formidable duo struck some terror in hearts as far apart as Cheltenham and the General Council of the TUC. When Mr Wilson told Hugh Scanlon to get his tanks off his lawn, during the 1968/69 confrontation on trade union legislation, there is little doubt that Mr Jones supplied the petrol that got them there.Through their affiliation to local Labour Parties the two unions were able, by those little agreements that oil the wheels of progress, to ensure the selection of not a few left wing candidates for the parliament.But all good things inevitably come to an end. With the election of the 1974 Labour Government Mr Jones was developing into a statesman. The TGWU, which elects its General Secretary once and that for life, invests its leader with immense power, including the selection of all the other officials. Such a union is capable of rapid and far reaching policy changes in the time that it takes Jack Jones to change his mind. The AUEW, with its cumbersome procedures would take years to accomplish similar shifts."
}
|
{
"content": "It was at Brighton for the 1974 TUC that the growing disenchantment between the two leaders became apparent. Mr Jones, acclaimed as the principle architect of the social contract, let it be known that he might well pop over and straighten out the AUEW delegation who were obtusely opposing his policy. Mr Scanlon who can, on occasion, turn a neat phrase, said ‘I do not care if Jack Jones is Jesus Christ, and he thinks he is, but he will not change the AEUW’s decisions.’ Significantly, perhaps, the AUEW did change their mind, taking the less than glorious course of abstention.The apotheosis of Mr Jones is now complete. Where last year a few euphoric souls saw him as a future Labour Prime Minister, this year he is seen as rather more than the Labour Prime Minister we have got. As the Jones star rises that of Mr Scanlon declines. At the TUC this year he was unusually quiet. The main running for the AUEW was made by Ken Gill, the Communist leader of the Draughtsmen’s section. But it is not at all the same. Mr Gill, even if Jilly Cooper does think he is sexy, is no substitute for a confident Hugh Scanlon on form.The reality of the AUEW is of a union with lots of members and not much money. Finances steadily flow away into the drain of a succession of expensive strikes. Its leadership is tired and very unsure of the future. Currently they have to fight court actions brought by their own members and produce a pay policy that is credible to the members. Nothing short of a spectacular breach of the pay limit could be counted a victory and that is not possible. The emperor is not only naked but manifestly impotent into the bargain. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsThe Locusts, Cankerworms, Caterpillars and PalmerwormsWill Get You If You Don’t Watch Out(1999)From What Next?, No.14, 1999.Copied with thanks from the What Next? Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.“I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army that I sent among you.” – Joel 2:25THIS ARTICLE is very loosely based on a talk I gave to the AGM of Revolutionary History in 1997. Although the overwhelming majority of this text is new, I believe it reasonably accurately reflects the spirit of what I said two years ago. Because I had just published a book about the IS/SWP, Ted Crawford who convened the meeting advertised the subject as A History of IS. At the time, having sated myself on the fractured rhythms of Cliff’s turgid prose, I could think of nothing more tedious than going through all that again so soon after I had said my last word on the subject. In consequence I chose to speak about the movement in general, emphasising that, regardless of differences on Russia, the Labour Party and much else, there was a common thread running through all the groups adhering to our tradition, one that we had to come to terms with if we were not to spend even more of our lives in grinding irrelevance. Having apologised for gathering the comrades under a false prospectus and, as a practised navigator of the revolutionary interstices, having laid the blame squarely, if unfairly, on Ted Crawford, this is roughly what I had to say.ALTHOUGH I HAVE been asked to speak on it, the IS/SWP is not the problem. It is just an integral part of the overall problem of the revolutionary left. That problem is of a movement that is almost totally irrelevant, one that is immured in a tradition that was once vibrant and alive but has become ossified, as a result of slavish adherence to form without reference to content or context. The SWP fondly imagines that it is building the British Bolshevik party. Others basing themselves just as rigidly in what they too see as the Bolshevik frame are rebuilding, reconstructing, organising for, or just plain proclaiming: the Fourth International.The political justification for all this has not advanced one whit from the time when Lenin and Trotsky first enunciated it. Indeed the argument now takes on a course much like that of the oozelum bird, with a better than even chance of ending up like that unfortunate bird in a wisp of blue smoke. The working class, in so far as they see or hear us at all, find the theoretical underpinnings incomprehensible or just plain risible.Strangely there are those among us who glory in their obscurantism, who boast of their utter fidelity to the work of L.D. Trotsky, who assiduously work through Lenin’s Collected Works looking for some apposite quotation that will set up today’s problem with the day before yesterday’s solutions. For some demented souls, merely to have found the quote is to have successfully concluded the discussion.It is difficult to understand how anyone can believe that Lenin, who died 75 years ago, or Trotsky, who died 59 years ago, could have possibly produced answers to today’s difficulties. One would have thought that anyone with that kind of posthumous infallibility should have made a rather better job of things while they were alive. Surely it is unlikely that the chap who wrote What Is To Be Done?, promulgated the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants, insisted on the 21 conditions for affiliation to the Third International and banned factions in the Russian party will be an infallible guide about how to get close to the working class in the post Stalinist, post Social Democratic age of Tony Blair, even to someone as good at reading the chicken bones as a Sybil from Cumae or Tony Cliff.As part of the homage to the Russian Revolution there is this romantic attachment to recreating the events of Petrograd in October 1917. Will the British Revolution not start until the leader has arrived at the Finland station in his sealed train? If the Bolsheviks took over the Smolny as their headquarters will the onlie begetters of British Bolshevism have to take over Cheltenham College for Young Ladies? What is the British equivalent of storming the Winter Palace? Balmoral I suppose, although how we are going to get the battleship Aurora up there God alone knows.As one of those who came to the Trotskyist movement from the Communist Party in 1956, in my case after some nine years of CP membership, I can recall the various meetings where the contending Trotskyists set out their wares. Ted Grant’s pitch, as you might suppose, was delivered at enormous and infinitely tedious length. Unity it seemed was possible on the basis of the first four congresses of the Communist International, the Transitional Programme of 1938, Preparing for Power, nationalisation of the 100 biggest companies and the banning of under-21s from employment in billiard saloons. These high points were expounded like a recitation of the Stations of the Cross, a Via Dolorosa of the saddest kind, calculated to confer a certain charm on imminent crucifixion. Suffice it to say that I had no sense of a Damascene revelation nor any need to even consider joining the Revolutionary Socialist League. More to the point, neither did anyone else in a similar position to myself.Gerry Healy, who was at that time adopting a smiling non-sectarian image, was much smarter. He addressed the actual concerns of the political minority among the 7,000 people leaving the CP. What had gone wrong? What was the cult of the individual? Was Marxism valid in the light of the experience of Stalin? These and much else were questions that were patiently and persuasively discussed."
}
|
{
"content": "The solid foundation to all this was a small arsenal of the works of Trotsky and especially, for that sort of audience, The Revolution Betrayed. The net result was that Healy’s Club took the overwhelming majority of ex-CPers who moved to Trotskyism – people of the calibre of Brian Behan, Peter Fryer, John Daniels, Ken Coates, Cliff Slaughter and Tom Kemp, to name but a few, and a small but not unimpressive sprinkling of experienced industrial militants. I yield to no one in my distaste for that truly dreadful man Gerry Healy, but for a brief year or so in the late 1950s he was the most serious exponent of revolutionary politics in Britain. In a few months in The Club I learned more about Marxism than I had done in the all the years in the CP. For that I am grateful.But then having built it he proceeded to destroy it. Like the child who takes his ball home when he cannot have his own way, Healy felt the need always to be in control politically, personally and, it transpired, sexually – he was a small plump obnoxious embodiment of a power mania, of a similar character to domestic tyranny, but written just a little larger. As Brian Behan said, if the organisation gets so big that he cannot get into his Rififi-type Citroen (it was actually Tony Banda’s Rififi Citroen) and drive frantically round the country quelling any dissent, then he has to have a smash up. And in 1959 the smash up came and Healy’s organisation went from being the least sectarian of the 57 varieties to become the most exclusive and sectarian of the lot, a finely tuned machine for burning out the cadre.The Socialist Review Group started off in 1950 as an orthodox Trotskyist group, with what it fondly hoped was a better theory on Russia. Its early correspondence files contain urgent appeals to Pablo and Co for SR to be installed as the British section in place of Healy’s Club. There were dreams of forming a rival Fourth International with Mangano in Italy, Chaulieu in France and maybe Shachtman in the US. In this scheme, the new International was to be headed by Natalia Trotsky – an example, perhaps, of that hereditary principle which was so fatal for the Romanovs, but more likely an early manifestation of Cliff’s inspirational opportunism. Like Healy, Cliff also believed briefly that Tito might take on a revolutionary orientation. The area of activity was the Socialist Fellowship (a left Labour organisation which served as a vehicle for the Pabloite deep entrism of Healy and Lawrence) and the recruitment area the ex-members of the Revolutionary Communist Party. In the circumstances the Socialist Review magazine was not at all like a Labour Party entrist paper, far more a Trotskyist journal replete with its cover picture of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.After a brief time it became clear that the ex-members of the RCP were very few and far between. Discussions took place with Ted Grant’s group, who were slightly later expellees from Healy’s Club. These foundered on Ted’s view that state property was the most significant prerequisite for a workers’ state. Indeed, at the time he was debating whether the Labour government already had sufficient state property brownie points to qualify as a workers’ state.Trotskyism was clearly approaching its post-war nadir. The movement was declining by the week, a condition that far from inducing conservation led to an acceleration of splits – the break in the FI (International Secretariat and International Committee), and the consequent splits in the sections.Cliff, who learned the phrase from Trotsky, adopted primitive socialist accumulation as his guiding principle to build his minuscule group. The Labour Party was not a particularly fruitful area, but it was the place where a group of 30 could become 40 or at least replace lost members. Socialist Review became an entrist paper and the Labour Party a subject of investigation. It seemed that the workers were less enthused by the reforming abilities of Labour and more keen on do-it-yourself reform at the workplace, spearheaded in engineering with its tradition of shop stewards and local negotiation by lay union militants. This was indeed a profound insight and became dignified by the title “the Changing Locus of Reformism”. But like so much else in SR/IS theory, having elucidated a few insights that could be spatchcocked into the overall Group politics it no longer became necessary to elaborate or confirm that which was handy enough as it stood. Onto all this was added the Luxemburgist phase of the Group, in which Rosa’s organisational prescriptions were infinitely preferred to Ilyich’s. This approach was a great deal more attractive to the Labour left, CND and later Young Socialist audience that the Group’s magazine was addressing.It has to be said that SR and IS were most pleasant organisations in which to be working in those halcyon days from 1959 to 1968. There was a great deal of inefficiency, but no more than I have personally experienced in far more Bolshevik organisations; there was a turnover, but an astonishingly large number of comrades stuck, and the group grew slowly but at a gently accelerating pace. By foresight or good luck, the growth of trade union militancy developed at the same time as the growth within the Young Socialists slowed down, and with the aid of IS theory on the rank and file it became possible to modestly recruit among militant workers, though the attrition here was greater, as the local struggles that secured recruits died down or were defeated. But recruit we did, sometimes spectacularly, as at ENV where we recruited a majority of the shop stewards’ committee."
}
|
{
"content": "It was this event that made us think of the way that transitional programmes could be worked out for industries and unions, which would promulgate comprehensible demands that would inevitably lead on to considerations of power and the need for political organisation to win the workers’ ultimate demands. The overall strategy would itself be the transitional bridge to the revolutionary party. It seemed to me at the time that this was a genuinely creative way to apply the inspired essence of Trotsky’s Transitional Programme of 1938. Once again this was an insight where, once it was discovered that it required little hammering to fit it into the Group’s overall political jigsaw, nothing much was done to elaborate the ideas.Within IS and certainly among the leadership this was accepted as the line of march. Rank-and-file papers were produced and loose organisations grew up around them, and at their height they were distributed in tens of thousands. Here was a tenuous but hopeful base. Cliff produced two pamphlets that were successful in popularising the IS among industrial workers, one on incomes policy and the rank and file, and the other on productivity bargaining. Both sold in thousands of copies and were an earnest in themselves that non-sectarian activity addressed to advanced workers’ specific concerns brings its own rewards.In 18 years the Cliff group had grown from 30 to about 800 members, practically all of that growth taking place in the course of the 1960s. It seemed to indicate that patient work which eschewed stunts and sudden changes of line might start to build a tenuous but real presence in the workers’ movement. During those years, most of them lonely and not rewarded with success, the recruiting focus changed from ex-RCP members, to Labour Youth, to CND and the Young Socialists, all of this to build a group that, it was hoped, would be able to recruit workers into a significant socialist organisation. The focus might change but the objective was unchanged.For a time it seemed that the IS Group might transcend the constrictions of Trotskyist orthodoxy. If that was less the result of taking organisational thought than happenstance, then that is the way things actually happen in even the most Leninist organisation, including Lenin’s. It is at moments like this, where an organisation sits on the brink of modest successes, that the members should be most vigilant. It is just at such times that organic growth can be forsaken for some get rich in a hurry scheme.The catalyst was Enoch Powell’s racist speech about “the Tiber foaming with much blood”, which caused a furore and gave an opportunity to some Mosleyite dockers at Tooley Street to set up a dockers’ demonstration in support of Powell. On the left there was a panicky discussion on the urgent menace of fascism, predicated on Powell acquiring a mass base among disaffected workers. In fact, there was no urgent menace and Powell was almost as surprised as the rest of us at London dockers rallying to his support – such fellows were hardly in accord with his romantic notions of empire. This did, however, provide Cliff with the opportunity to produce a plan of Baldrickesque cunning that, he fondly imagined, might make him member-rich at an accelerated rate. He embarked on a unity campaign, with approaches made to organisations ranging from the CP to Militant and taking in Healy’s Socialist Labour League and the International Marxist Group. Naturally enough, such a dive back into the past required the 1903 Lenin mode rather than the 1904 Luxemburgist style.In the event, nobody answered the call, with the exception of Sean Matgamna and his minuscule James P. Cannon fan club. This particular “historic” fusion was arranged at a meeting between Cliff and Matgamna in the former’s back room. The IS Group acquired a fully fledged “Trotskyist Tendency” without its members or its elected committees having any say in the matter. This was hardly the result that had been planned, and the dubious benefits of a handful of extra members was made entirely nugatory by the time expended in rehashing old disputes, a pastime Sean enjoyed immensely and indulged in at tedious length. If today he rejects the Cannon Fan Club for the Max Shachtman Appreciation Society, he is still as prolix as he ever was. It is a measure of the liberal regime in the IS Group that it took three years of faction fighting to lose the Matgamna group, whereas Healy and Grant had previously dispensed with his membership far more expeditiously.The failure of the unity campaign was of considerably less significance than the fact that the Group came out of it a markedly different organisation. It was not noticeably more efficient for all its democratic centralism, but it was markedly less tolerant of dissent than previously. Cliff, having invited Matgamna in on his own say so, felt that he should be able to banish him with equally arbitrary facility. The fact that an entire conference had devoted itself to framing a new “democratic centralist” constitution which enshrined the rights of factions seemed beside the point to Cliff. His Lenin bore an uncanny resemblance to Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts.After the unravelling of the fusion with the Trotskyist Tendency in 1971, tolerance of any form of dissent was increasingly harshly treated and all too often a desire to carry on a discussion beyond Cliff’s patience was seen as a particular case of dissension. If the growing harshness of the regime could in part be attributed to the faction fight with Matgamna, this was merely the accelerant rather than the primary force. The theoretical underpinnings were provided by Cliff’s four volumes on Lenin. It was the story of the sort of man Lenin might have been if he had only had the advantage of reading Cliff’s biography of him. But the Group did grow, although whether there was any connection between the growth and the adoption of democratic centralism is doubtful."
}
|
{
"content": "Rather more significant was the growing industrial militancy and the development of the print shop into an asset capable of generating significant surpluses. This was effected by an extremely large donation from one comrade. It is possible to run a substantial apparat by exacting extortionate subscriptions and quotas from the members, but this will always be problematical because the largest costs are incurred in producing agitational and theoretical material. Not only that, if the membership falls it is just not possible to double up on the already high subscriptions to maintain the same infrastructure. All of which can mean that an organisational hiccough can become a downward spiralling crisis. Nothing beats a print shop for ironing out the bumps and troughs in the building of a small group. Print and paper for your own journals are at cost, printers come at full time revolutionary wage rates and jobbing work supplies the surpluses for full timers’ wages, posters, leaflets and travel expenses. The great technological breakthrough of web offset printing has been the making of many a revolutionary socialist group. The forerunner in this was Gerry Healy, of whose faction fight with John Lawrence it was said that he won because, although he had fewer votes, he had more shares in the Socialist Outlook publishing company. The Militant Tendency had their print shop and a vast complement of full time workers. Nowadays any group who can raise a few grand can, even if they cannot run to a web press, purchase a very serviceable sheet-fed machine. Thus, unfortunately, has photo-setting and offset technology conspired to give life to that which would otherwise have been happily stillborn. Otherwise poverty stricken organisations can now operate as a capitalist entrepreneur, able to maintain a subsidised full time apparatus far beyond anything they could afford on the basis of working class members’ subscriptions.Local organisers are responsible to the centre and their tasks and instructions emanate from that location. In the early 1970s a number of IS membership campaigns were launched in which Cliff, with his charts and league tables, encouraged a spirit of competition among the organisers that had more than a passing resemblance to Stakhanovism. Last month’s inflated figures were surpassed by this month’s even more optimistic results, while both would be easily outstripped by next month’s daringly imaginative claims. The new members were rarely seen or heard from again, and I was reminded of a report sent in by Will Fancy some years before, which detailed the work of the Eltham Socialist Review Group branch. “Comrade X”, he wrote, “does not attend branch meetings, does not sell the paper and does not pay subs, but he can otherwise be considered a keen and enthusiastic member of the Group.”The Group quite quickly became, whether as IS or as the Socialist Workers Party, a place where opposition was rapidly extirpated, and very soon a culture developed where there was no facility for disagreement and no culture of discussion or constructive debate. In its dash for the Leninist party, it had created something very similar to the pre-1956 Communist Party, without anything like that party’s industrial cadre.The sort of complaints that IS and SWP expellees make are not new and can be replicated in other organisations. I remember talking to Harry Wicks who bitterly complained about how, in the early 1930s, Reg Groves maintained a correspondence with Trotsky on Prinkipo, which Harry only found out about in the 1960s when the American SWP published Trotsky’s replies from the archives. At the time, Harry and Reg were living in the same house.The Revolutionary Socialist League of Denzil Harber and Starkey Jackson before the fusion of the British Trotskyists in 1944 maintained a regime of which Yezhov and Yagoda would have been proud. One particularly choice piece of Machiavellian sadism occurred during the war, when Harber’s faction, who happened to have a majority, put the Right faction, known as the Trotskyist Opposition and led by John Lawrence and Hilda Lane, under the direct and individual discipline of the Left faction. The RSL had perhaps 30 members at the time, although it was the British section of the Fourth International.At the time of the formation of the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1944, James P. Cannon, doing his cut-price Zinoviev act, set up a minority faction led by Healy and Lawrence even before the fusion conference. After the war Pablo and Mandel, described by Cannon as “our young men in Europe”, carried on in the worst traditions of the Comintern, nurturing and sustaining Healy and making and breaking international leaderships while generally playing the fool with both the cadre and the politics of the International.The RCP, which was in many respects the best of the bunch although a massively flawed organisation, found that all the brave promises of the Founding Congress of 1938 were empty, and drizzled away their remaining time in endless faction fights. As Jock Haston said: “We produced so many internal bulletins that we did not have time to do anything else even if there had been anything to do.”The stories about Healy are beyond counting and his name has become a byword for everything that is obnoxious and repellent about our movement. There are those who say in his mitigation that he had a sense of humour, which is true. Whether you find gallows humour attractive or not is probably dependent on how close you are to dangling from the end of his gibbet.The story is repeated again and again for different organisations. The Militant Tendency (now the Socialist Party) has over its long lifetime produced a few little gems that will sound familiar to practised malcontents. In a paper published on the Internet, Dennis Tourish of the University of Ulster, a specialist in Cultic Studies, produces this quotation from a disgruntled supporter of Ted Grant during the faction fight with Peter Taaffe:"
}
|
{
"content": "“To cross the General Secretary would result in a tantrum or some kind of outburst. Comrades became fearful of initiative without the sanction of the General Secretary. Incredibly, even the opening of a window during an EC meeting would not go ahead without a nod from him! Under these conditions, the idea of ’collective leadership’ is a nonsense.... The EC as a whole – which is supposed to be a sub-committee of the CC – is out of control. In 99% of cases the CC is simply a rubber stamp for the EC.”And so say all of us, because we have been saying something similar whatever organisation we happened to be talking about.The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has developed from a couple of fusions with the Matgamnaite core that was defused from IS. First with the Left Faction, who were expelled from IS in 1974, and later with Alan Thornett’s group the Workers Socialist League. Strange to relate, for a man who was a serial expellee from the SLL, the RSL and IS and complained bitterly at this cavalier treatment, Sean had a fairly short way with his own dissenters, and before too long the Left Faction took on an independent role as Workers Power and Alan Thornett was working elsewhere on a less taxing project. The AWL’s journal Workers’ Liberty, has a spurious air of openness that is in fact a stratagem to solicit contrary opinions and then subject them to such a remorseless weight of Matgamna’s polemic as to make the peine forte et dure seem like a pleasurable alternative.For group gurus, the organisation is an extension of their personality. Like some corner shopkeeper they retain it to themselves, defending their control with a fervour that can spill over into savagery. It fulfils their everyday needs, and nourishes their fantasies in a milieu in which they are definitely more equal than others. Matgamna is just such a case in point, and as editor of Workers’ Liberty he ensures that hardly an issue passes without an article of wearisome length and dubious relevance from his hand. In addition, and this has got to come close to abuse of privilege, he frequently puts in one of his own poems – and the most we can say about that is that Ireland now has its own champion to compete on equal terms with Scotland’s William McGonagall.One of the other dubious characteristics that we have inherited from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party is the studied air of absolute certainty that suffuses their work. Lenin and Trotsky continually give the impression that Marxism is an exact science, and is because they say so, and that because they are Marxists then what they say is, by definition, correct. (Prior to 1917 their claims lacked a certain credibility because they argued violently with one another and they could not both be right.) This feature of their work, which is as much a matter of style as of anything else, has been adopted with particular enthusiasm by the Church of Latter Day Trotskyism. Those whose record of achievement should be accompanied by an attitude of modest stillness and humility are given to statements of such mind blowing arrogance as to make one’s colitis become general. I cite a statement from a 1977 internal bulletin of the Militant Tendency, which is a paradigm of this particular conceit:“What guarantees the superiority of our tendency ... from all others inside and outside the labour movement is our understanding of all the myriad factors which determine the attitudes and moods of the workers at each stage. Not only the objective but the subjective ones too.”If you believe this one, then you will readily accept that, despite my advancing years, nubile young women frequently mistake me for Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s hell I tell you, comrades.This is the movement we inherited, and with all its faults it has maintained the thin revolutionary thread that would allow us to pass it on to the next generation. Without taking thought and making extensive amendments, I do not think we should. Its organisational forms have been the endlessly repeated vehicle for the petty careers of small time power maniacs, whose pathetic compulsion to be cock of their own small malodorous midden would be an object of sympathy if they had not wrecked far too many useful and irreplaceable comrades. We have all been here before, some of us several times, and as Denis Healy said: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” Traditionally our movement’s response to this dilemma has been quite the contrary – the comrades are called upon to make an especial sacrifice to buy a bigger shovel and then, with passionate exhortation, directed to prolonged and frenzied digging on a three-shift system.The Leninism of 1917 was addressing problems that have not existed for three-quarters of a century, and are of little help to revolutionary socialists in 1999. The Leninism of the 1930s, which we call Trotskyism, offers us the same thing only written very, very small. The yearning for an international leadership that would bestride the world workers’ movement turned out to be the plaything of Cannon, Pablo, Healy and Lambert. The brave hopes of 1938 have ended in the petty squabbles and squalid manoeuvrings that have characterised the years since Trotsky’s death. The organisational principles that were intended to sharply differentiate the revolutionaries from Social Democracy and Stalinism need to be re-examined in the light of the political demise of these false doctrines. The FI, which was to stand as a rallying point against the upper and lower millstones of Stalinism and Reformism, went into a flat spin when both of these abominations shuffled off the stage. Trotskyism seemed unable to define itself without the twin evils it never quite came to grips with."
}
|
{
"content": "The workers deserve much better than the spectacle of endless splits over trifles and unquestioning adherence to outdated formulae. I am in general against quotations from the pen of the masters, but there is one from Trotsky that I like to consider in moments of high emotion or depression: Learn to Think. If we apply this maxim seriously then there are no eternal verities, and everything is open to re-examination and argument.Recently I have been cheered by the work that Cyril Smith has done, and Mike Jones is doing us all a service by shedding light on the early years of German Communism and the founding of the Communist International. Al Richardson, who has a splendid habit of blowing raspberries at radical chic, has challenged the myths that have for too long been our smelly comfort blanket. Whether they are right or wrong I don’t know nor do I care. They are doing what Marxists should be doing and have not done nearly enough – putting things up for scrutiny and deciding if they are needed on the voyage. Revolutionary History, New Interventions and What Next? are another welcome novelty of recent years. All of these journals are unaffiliated, open, intelligent, not afraid to deal with any subject and valued by a small but significant readership. Such independent publication is, of course, anathema to the confirmed sect-dweller and it will come as no surprise that Sean Matgamna has allowed himself several splenetic yelps of rage at the iniquities of these magazines.This has been a long voyage and we have made much less progress than I imagined we would when I was a 12 year old who thought he was a Marxist. So there is still a long way to go and the journey will be that much easier if we clear out some self-constructed obstacles that bestrew our path. The broad socialist movement remains the place where we can transcend our own limitations and limited vision. Most of us have been at our best in that movement; it is where have experienced those fleeting certainties about how we can transform ourselves in the cooperative process of transforming society.I would like to finish with a verse from a poem by Erich Fried, a German Socialist who died quite recently:Speak One More TimeAbout the joy of hoping for JoySo that at least some will ask:What was that?When will it come again? Top of the pageLast updated on 9.10.2008"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsThe Origins of the Communist Party(October 1969)From International Socialism (1st series), No.40, October/November 1969, pp.33-36.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Every individual, every organisation, every movement should be aware of their own history. In the case of individuals and most organisations and movements it is quite possible for them to live out their existence with a history built on myths, half-truths and plain untruths, indeed, in the case of many individuals and political organisations an objective and impartial history would be an absolute bar to further existence. For the socialist movement history as a collection of sustaining myths is possible but undesirable. Unfortunately that is often what it becomes. Too frequently, in our movement, the history books are resorted to provide a substitute for rational argument in the present, historical experiences are transposed to other and quite inappropriate situations. The words are examined, often with microscopic care, while the context in which they were written is studiously ignored. In extreme cases a type of historical lunacy is observed in which the sufferer relives the high points of the lives of great revolutionaries in the petty details of his own political work. A study of Walter Kendall’s book (The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-1921, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 5 gns) will provide a welcome addition to much over-used Russian revolutionary heroes and villains in the lesser, but important, figures of British revolutionary history. More importantly it will, in its careful research and detailed exposition, provide an antidote to some of the more poisonous myths that abound. Most pernicious of the myths and one that was recently aired in the pages of New Left Review is that which denies the British working class any meaningful revolutionary tradition of militant organisation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The ferment that took place in the British Labour movement under the influence of revolutionary ideas and revolutionaries in the early years of this century changed the face of the trade union and labour organisations in quite fundamental ways. The Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist Labour Party, the Shop Stewards Movement, the Plebs League and the syndicalist movement all acted and reacted in a medium that was ripe for change.That all these organisations had shortcomings and made countless mistakes, some of cardinal importance, is a simple matter of record. They were sometimes opportunist, more frequently sectarian, oriented mainly on propaganda and more inclined to talk at the class rather than work with the class when the opportunity existed and their notion of revolutionary change and how it could take place was hazy in the extreme but through internal fights and splits, through the study of a rich international experience and in their own practice and experiment they maintained a clear revolutionary tradition that it is possible to trace to the present day.It is fashionable today to find these early struggles rather naive and to treat them with condescension, but for all our latter-day sophistication none of us has been able to organise 4,000 out of 10,000 workers into a new radical industrial union (The Industrial Workers of Great Britain) and to maintain a strike for nearly three weeks as members of the SLP did at the Singers factory in 1911. John Maclean was considered such a dangerous adversary during the course of the 1914-18 war that he was sentenced to eight years in gaol for anti-war agitation. This same Maclean had 500 students enrolled in his Marxist economic classes in 1917. The great Dublin strike of 1913 [1*] was led and assisted by members of all the revolutionary groups. At its high point in 1912 the BSP (British Socialist Party) claimed 40,000 members and although this is probably exaggerated their average over the period 1900-1920 is probably in excess of 10,000 and while this is far from being a mass party it is rather better than we can muster today. The SDF (subsequently BSP), the largest and oldest of the British Marxist organisations, had, particularly under the Hyndman leadership, a somewhat chequered history punctuated by bouts of chauvinism and in Theodore Rothstein’s words a general assumption:‘that the educational work ... can be carried on mainly, if not solely ... by bringing our principles before the public ... things which, despite our professed programmes, very frequently leave us indifferent, are of the utmost importance to the proletarian class ...’The trade unions and the organised workers were, despite the odd resolution to the contrary, seen as fixed entities that must accept the SDF’s message whole or be consigned to the outer darkness. But throughout its history there was a long battle against the line of the leadership, conducted by Rothstein, Maclean and many others, for a consistent revolutionary line on internationalism and working-class struggle. In 1916 Hyndman and his supporters split from the organisation, having clearly lost the fight against the now predominant, anti-war ‘Internationalist’ Wing of the party."
}
|
{
"content": "The Socialist Labour Party, which never numbered more than a few hundred members, derived from a split in SDF in 1903. Dedicated to a harsh Marxist orthodoxy, as revealed by Daniel De Leon, the British SLP had an influence on the tradition far beyond the areas of its strength (the Clyde) and its sparse membership. The reasons for its influence and, at the same time, its failure to reach take-off point as an organisation derive from an interesting contradiction. The SLP theory counterposed the revolutionary industrial union to ‘bread and butter’ trade unionism. The working-class through a pervasive industrial unionism would build up the organisation and experience to control society. Straight political and electoral activities were of secondary importance, at the moment of achieving electoral victory the party would hand over power to the industrial unions. The notion of the one big union arrived at a fortunate time. The existing trade unions were rotten with craft exclusiveness at a time when industrial expansion was bringing more and more unskilled and semi-skilled workers on to the scene. These workers were excluded from existing organisations at the same time as they occupied an important place in the productive process, potentially they were a powerful industrial force. It is in this context that a very few advocates of industrial unionism were able to recruit thousands of workers in the large-scale industries of the Clyde. It is at this stage with very real success to their credit that the problems began.A too rigid revolutionary theory can be more disastrous than a reformist practice, with the latter it can at least be changed in the future, with the former every struggle has to be seen in cataclysmic terms. Every fight that is not the final battle with capitalism is seen as a capitulation, an accommodation with ‘bread and butter’ trade unions. The SLP was caught in this contradiction. The quite profound insight into the development of industrial society and the elucidation of a theory and tactics to approach the new working-class was made fruitless by an inability to lead them anywhere but direct to the promised land particularly if you have no boots, only a rudimentary map and no compass. While it is impossible to overthrow capitalism by licking its boots (no matter how rough your tongue) it is also impossible to deliver a knockout blow if it’s standing on your fingers.The SLP’s rigid theory also encompassed rigid organisational discipline. The internal regime was such that probably only a member of the present-day SLL would find himself at home there (indeed, with the transposition of Trotsky for De Leon they could probably accommodate the lot, theory and all). Kendall, in his book quotes the example of one unfortunate SLPer who ‘had entertained Neil Maclean the expelled national secretary, in his home; he was threatened that he would be »severely dealt with« if he did it again’. Despite all this members of the SLP along with members of the BSP and affiliated and unaffiliated Marxists and syndicalists formed the backbone of the Clyde Workers Committee and the Shop Steward’s Movement, and subsequently the driving force for the formation of the Communist Party.All of these developments are examined and explained with admirable precision and clarity in Walter Kendall’s book together with a great deal more. The syndicalist movement in Britain and its particular British development into dual Unionism is detailed. Its failure, inherent in the anarcho-syndicalist position, to unify the rank-and-file movement that it influenced because only through a coherent political organisation could the necessary links be made. This revulsion from politics affected many of the revolutionary militants and condemned the Clyde Worker’s Committee and the shop stewards generally to isolation and an inability to mobilise their full potential.As I say all of this, and much more, is in Kendall’s book. As an explanation of the development and history of the organisations that eventually coalesced (in part or in whole) into the CPGB it fills a long felt want. It would be pleasant to continue in this vein and to be able to report that Walter’s conclusion flow logically from his material and that the continuing revolutionary tradition has at last been vindicated. Unfortunately this is not the case. Flying, as I believe, in the face of all his own evidence, Kendall marks an abrupt break in the British revolutionary tradition at the formation of the CPGB in 1921. His conclusion, and it is hardly original, is given most clearly on page 234 of the book, as follows:‘The view of the CPGB was in some sense the logical culmination of previous developments propagated by the Communist Party is far from the truth. The evidence suggests that the Russian ideological and organisational conceptions were so far divorced from the logic of British reality that, without outside intervention, and without the provision of relatively speaking enormous subventions, they would never have taken root at all.’Now all this, and it is quite a lot, is a bit more sophisticated than the usual Moscow Gold type of analysis, and it is delivered in the text more in sorrow than in anger, but it comes from the same stable.According to Kendall, Russian money, Russian ideology and Russian organisation combined to ensure the infant CP’s isolation from any meaningful participation in British politics and eventually condemned them to subservience to a Stalinised Comintern.Superficially there is some evidence to support these conclusions. The Russian revolution did mark a turning point for British Marxists. The prestige of the Bolsheviks did confer added interest and validity to their organisational and ideological principles. It is almost certain that they disbursed money to the sections, or would be sections of the CI. But so what? I have no doubt that the man who discovered fire was considered something of a genius by his fellows and if he was kind enough to share a bit of the warmth a generous and splendid genius and certainly a chap to be listened to on practical matters like cooking and central heating; so with the Bolsheviks."
}
|
{
"content": "Walter Kendall’s proposition that the formation of the CP was out of line with the previous experience and tradition of British Marxism, is of major importance. It goes without saying that without the Russian revolution the development of the British movement would have been quite different, but then so would all of post-1917 history. The logical development of a Marxist organisation does not take place in isolation from the real world. In a very real sense the pre-war struggles in the BSP and SLP, the syndicalist experience and its limitations, the struggle against the war and a discredited social democracy prepared the disparate Marxist groups in Britain for a united revolutionary organisation. This did not happen in Britain alone, the situation that led Lenin and Luxemburg to break with the corpse of the Second International and to call for a new International were reflected to a greater or lesser degree throughout the international movement. That Lenin formulated his ideas with greater clarity and audacity does not detract from the fact that his conclusions were a brilliant exposition of the logic of the situation for revolutionary socialists. In Britain, as in Germany, France, etc., the experience of the Russian revolution and the assumption of the Soviet power clarified the ideas of a whole generation of the most dedicated revolutionaries. To say that would not have happened this way without the Russian revolution is not helpful, to say that it should not have happened that way is, if one is serious, to take on the responsibility of providing an alternative path that avoided the pitfalls (and there were many) of the CP on the one hand and on the other build a principled revolutionary organisation unencumbered by the crimes of social democracy, in a world that was polarised between the Soviet power and reformism. The ILP tried it, the KAPD tried it, the Swedish Social Democrats tried it and they all failed and failed miserably. To deny the necessity for the Third International in 1919 is to justify the Second International. This is, of course, a point of view and it is held by many, but for a Marxist to reject the 21 conditions for affiliation to the CI and then to swallow whole the traitors of 1914 and the allies of counter-revolution in 1917 and 1919 is to show a lack of discrimination that borders on the perverse.What was the policy that the CI wished on the British Marxist Groups in the strict context of Britain? It was for a unified revolutionary party, working within the mass organs of the working class (the trade unions and the Labour Party) and dedicated to the overthrow of British capitalism. According to Kendall’s own testimony the organisations in Britain while paying lip service to the need for a unified party were busily paddling their own canoes. The BSP’s attitude to the trade unions was half hearted and sectarian, the SLP’s attitude was fixed in De Leonite orthodoxy imbued with syndicalist notions. With the exception of the BSP all the constituents of the united CP were violently opposed to Labour Party affiliation. Walter Kendall criticises and rightly criticises the policies of Shop Stewards, the BSP and the SLP and then complains when the advice and direction emanating from Moscow coincides with his own estimation of the situation. It is certainly not a matter for regret that the unity of revolutionaries in Britain was achieved. Anyone who has anything to do with attempts at regroupment of the left will be aware that probably no lesser event than the Russian revolution would be sufficient to unite the different groups and set them on a fundamentally correct political and industrial strategy. Walter Kendall’s second proposition concerns the malign influence of the Comintern functionaries and the effects of Russian money. In by far the least satisfactory chapter of the book (The Russian Influence) the evidence is produced. Most of it is hearsay and some of the sources are, to put on it the best construction, dubious. It is in this chapter that phrases like ‘it seems unlikely that ...’ or ‘it seems likely that ...’ occur frequently, as in:‘On February 26, 1918 Litvinov took Kamenev, a member of the Russian Politbureau to see the Webbs. That Litvinov would have introduced Kamenev to the Webbs and not the British revolutionaries seems unlikely. Tom Bell tells us that in February he was urgently called to London by MacManus, where he discussed the British and Russian situation with Litvinov. It seems likely that the other Russian present on this occasion was Kamenev.’Leaving aside the fact that ‘the other Russian’ has crept into the text for the first time in the last sentence of this quotation there is still sufficient there for us to get the full flavour of the evidence. Further on we have the evidence of .a Special Branch Officer called Fitch who apparently arrested a man called Segal who ‘was an official representative of a powerful revolutionary society in Moscow who had brought with him £4,000 in gold and bonds ...’ with this money Segal was apparently going to set up a press ‘... for producing anarchist literature ...’ A courier called Zachariassen is alleged to have brought Sylvia Pankhurst ‘the sum of between £280 and £6,000’, let’s hope that the CI’s accounts were better arranged than Sylvia’s.To bolster up his case of the lavish, scale of CI subventions to its sections Walter Kendall calls in aid that scandalous old gossip Angelica Balabanova. In 1917 Balabanova was working for the Bolsheviks in Stockholm. In her memoirs My Life as a Rebel (this is the quotation used in Kendall’s book, page 250) she quotes a letter from Lenin:‘... the work you are doing is of the utmost importance and I implore you to go on with it. We look to you for our most effective support. Do not consider the cost. Spend millions, tens of millions if necessary. There is plenty of money at our disposal. ...’"
}
|
{
"content": "Now this, if true, is quite a significant piece of evidence, the lady, who was subsequently to become the secretary of the Comintern, is authorised by no less a person than Lenin to spend tens of millions to further the sinister Bolshevik design. Unfortunately it is not true, it is indeed a lie. The quotation above is taken from the 1938 edition of Balabanova’s book. In the German edition of her book (published in Berlin in 1927) the Lenin letter is quite different:‘Bravo, bravo, your work, dear comrade, deserves the highest recognition. Please do not spare any means ...’There are, you will see, no tens of millions and no promises of any. There is no reason, I suppose, why Walter Kendall should be aware of Balabanova’s tendency to bend the facts a little, but he does have some responsibility to evaluate his evidence. The best advocates always ensure that their witnesses can stand up to cross examination. Evidence from Special Branch men, distraught and disillusioned old ladies and speculation as to who met who and when are not evidence but hearsay.It would of course be strange if the Comintern had not sent cash its more impoverished sections, indeed it would probably be cause for even greater criticism, if they had not. The scale of the aid was almost certainly less than Walter Kendall suggests and is undoubtedly less than Balabanova’s mythical ‘tens of millions’. The scale of the activities of the early CP do not suggest, despite the enthusiasm and energy of the members that the Comintern aid went further than the sort of fraternal assistance that one would expect. Whether the assistance was entirely disinterested or not – and how many members of political groups can truthfully say that when, for example, they assist workers on strike and make their donations to strike funds, they are totally completely disinterested – there can be no doubt that any whiff of suspicion that the price demanded by the Comintern in return for an organiser’s wages, or assistance with the printing bill would be conditional on being the CI line would have resulted in a considerable scandal. But why is all this important? Why should we feel it necessary to defend the early years of a Communist Party that did degenerate and degenerated rapidly, whose subsequent record of grovelling subservience to Stalin and Stalinism is second to none. The reason, and I have touched on this earlier, is that October 1917 did represent a watershed in the socialist movement. All that is genuine in the revolutionary tradition derives in some way from that experience. From the gains of October and the world communist movement came the left opposition as the revolutionary response to the isolation and degeneration of the Russian revolution. Of the pre-1917 British tradition that did not join the CPGB there remains the SLP, wrapped up by endless reprints of De Leon and with a member for each word of their name, the ILP was a past, lots of money and no future and the SPGB, fixed like an chicken in aspic in the halycon days of 1907. All of them bankrupt, if not in cash, in ideas.There really is no other tradition of value and meaning (unless there is value in nostalgia and historical wishful thinking). The possibility for revolutionary change in the future resides in the inheritors of. the early communist movement.The other and related reason to dissent from Walter Kendall’s conclusion is this: If it was the fact that the Leninist CI of 1919 imposed upon its sections an alien bolshevism that ensured the latter subjugation of each and every section to the dictate of Stalinism then there is completely justification and validity in the formula Leninism equals Stalinism.If this is true then the ‘river of blood’ that divides Bolshevism from Stalinism is bridgeable, indeed it does not exist, one hundred and twenty years of Marxism have gone for nothing, the Russian revolution far from heralding the liberation of mankind is merely a more subtle instrument for mankind’s enslavement. A review of this kind is really not a place to argue against this proposition, for those who find it at all attractive I recommend a study of Trotsky’s work on the question, there is no better antidote for this particular poison.It is unfortunate that in reviewing Walter Kendall’s book I have had to dwell at such length on, what I consider to be, its defects. There are in its pages a number of extremely good things. John Maclean is rehabilitated after years of smearing and character assassination at the hands of the CP and the grossly over-estimated Gallagher. Both Gallagher and Maclean are restored to their rightful places in importance in Kendall’s book. The chapter on the shop stewards is particularly useful and detailed and a useful corrective is given to those who over-emphasise the importance of Clyde Worker’s Committee. The book is a good one despite its faulty conclusions. It is this perverse judgement that stops the book from being of the highest quality. Note by MIA1*. In the published version the date is given incorrectly as 1907. Top of the pageLast updated on 30.12.2007"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsThe year of Scanlon?(April 1976)From the Spectator, 10 April 1976, p.12.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Last week British Leyland settled with their former second-in-command Mr John Barber. By a payment of “substantial compensation” they ended the long dispute over Mr Barber’s dismissal. Under the terms of his service contract, Mr Barber was entitled to a very large sum – not to be measured in under six figures.Ironically, in the same week Leyland were prevented from settling with thirty-two toolmakers at their SU Carburettor plant, whom they were extremely anxious to maintain in full-time employment.A further irony is that the toolmakers had an agreement which, if not as watertight as Mr Barber’s, was accepted by the company. The difference was one of degree. The SU toolmakers would have agreed to a once and for all payment totalling £3,200.Why did so trifling a sum cause such a difficulty? It was not a “red plot”, Indeed the “reds”, if you so consider Mr Scanlon and Mr Reg Birch were at one with their moderate colleagues on the AUEW executive in ordering the men back to work. The explanation is complicated and the solution not at all clear. Not only that, the SU strike was only one of five to hit Leyland. There were in addition the toolmakers at Triumph Coventry, toolmakers at eight Rover plants, machine tool fitters at Drew Lane suspension works and press operators at Llanelli. All of them were strategically placed to cause considerable loss of production, and none more so than the SU workers. You cannot get a car off the production line, let alone sell it, without a carburettor.The disputes are in fact grounded in a contradiction between the need to rationalise pay and grading structures in a period of rigid restraint. Leyland has grown through the takeover and assimilation of a number of car and truck firms: Austin, Triumph, Rover, to name but a few. While this enabled a great deal of rationalisation and integration in production terms, it also brought hundreds of different payments and negotiating procedures. It is a measure of the size of the problem that even after a long period of industrial relations reorganisation, there are still fifty-eight bargaining units in British Leyland’s thirty-two plants.It is this anarchic organisation, plus bad management, that has given rise to the present rash of disputes. Before 1 April, in seven representative Leyland toolrooms the lowest pay (at SU) was £60 a week, while the highest (at Rover Solihull) was £70. Between these two were four different wage rates. Moreover, for these same toolroom workers there were five different pay review dates ranging fairly evenly over the year. British Leyland, the unions and the toolmakers were anxious to harmonise both rates and review dates. Previous settlements have included promises to this effect. But with a restriction of twelve months between settlements and a £6 pay norm, differentials as high as £10 could not be reconciled. Different review dates also ensured constant leapfrogging.This was the dilemma that the SU carburettor men were attempting to force to an issue. In April 1975 they accepted, with true altruism, a £5.50 increase, which was £1 less than they could have obtained. They agreed to this because they accepted management statements about the sad state of the company and because they were promised a further review in December 1975 to bring their pay up to the highest toolroom rates. When December came they were caught by the twelve-month rule. They were prepared to acknowledge that they could not achieve complete parity but they wanted the full £6 from December, without having to wait a full year until this April. They did not get the money and on 9 March they struck work. Everyone was very sympathetic and did not begrudge them the actual cash – but to pay it would breach the previously immaculate pay rode and, according to the Department of Employment, provide a green light to some 80,000 similarly placed workers throughout the engineering industry. That is why this strike went on for three weeks.At Triumph Coventry, 350 toolroom workers demanded £1.85 which would give them parity with the tinsmiths. But this too, would have broken the twelve-month rule. The next settlement date for these workers is October. Despite the local AUEW, who told the men to stay out, they have returned to work. At Rover, 400 toolroom workers are asking £2 a week extra backdated to February 1975 which, they claim, is due from a previous settlement and is also within the pay code. They will probably get it.At Llanelli, it was not AUEW members who were on strike. There it was Transport Union members, 650 press operators, arguing about the rate and the form of their grade’s transfer to the more highly skilled press maintenance work – which, to complicate matters further, is an AUEW job. Last, there are the machine tool fitters at Drew Lane, where they make suspensions for Austin and Morris cars. These men are demanding parity with the demonstrators, which would increase their pay from £66 to £78 a week-and that would break the pay code every way, defying mediation. This is probably why the Drew Lane workers are the remaining group on strike, with Austin and Morris car production still in jeopardy.What sort of men are these toolmakers who have displayed such bargaining strength? One thing is certain: they are not militants in any accepted sense of that abused word. They are highly skilled men, with pride in their abilities. Within their union, the AUEW, they have always been a moderating force. Their craft pride entails a certain elitism, heightened by the fact that the less skilled production workers are generally members of the TGWU. These men measure their skill, obtained after long, low-paid, apprenticeships in the simplest way: by cash differentials. The current pay policy has struck at their central concern and turned their basically conservative attitudes into effective bloody-mindedness."
}
|
{
"content": "By their feelings, and in displaying their industrial muscle, they have already brought about great changes in the thinking of the principal architects of the next round of pay policy. Mr Jack Jones has accomplished a great shift from his previous insistence on the flat rate principle. Now he and Mr David Basnett – secretary of Britain’s third largest union, the GMWU – are calling for a combination of flat-rate and percentage in Phase Two pay policy. But even this dramatic change of front may not be sufficient for the AUEW. Mr Scanlon, writing in the latest issue of Industrial Management, insists that only a percentage principle will satisfy his union. It is interesting to speculate that, with his recent conversion to a voluntary incomes policy and with the sure backing of his previously moderate skilled members, Mr Scanlon may displace Mr Jones as the main author of the Mark II policy. If 1975 was the year of Jack Jones, 1976 may be the year of Hugh Scanlon. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsTrade unionsAUEW election(November 1975)From the Spectator, 29 Nov 1975, p.690.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Hats off for Mr Scanlon, two minutes silence for the blasted career of Mr Bob Wright, a little respect for the fallen, if you please. In the current round of elections in the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, the members have cast their votes in a way that may change the political complexion of the union’s leading body, the executive council. The much publicised and execrated three-all split on the executive, which has permitted Mr Scanlon to exercise his casting vote on some very contentious questions, will be ended.Before anybody starts celebrating the demise of the AUEW left wing and buying heavily in engineering company shares, they might like to pause and contemplate one or two facts. Just for starters, the three-all deadlock is a very recent phenomena. There are, in fact, seven seats on the executive council. The difficulty arose when the previous General Secretary, right-winger Jim Conway, was killed in the Paris air crash. His successor, John Boyd, another right-winger, had to vacate his Scottish division executive seat to take up the post of secretary. This left a vacancy and reduced “moderate” strength by one. The vacancy has now been filled by Mr Gavin Laird who last week defeated Jimmy Reid by a two to one majority. The latest line-up is really a reversion to the right-wing majority that has existed for years, with the very brief interlude I outline above. It is a chastening thought that the AUEW’s left-wing image was formed and hardened over a period when both the Executive and the policy-making National Committee were invariably under moderate control.The simple, not to say simple-minded, calculations of too many commentators leaves out of account the complex factors of union politics. Like most other spheres of endeavour, our union hierarchs are often motivated by personal rivalry and antipathy as much as ideological differences. Mr Reg Birch, for example, a Maoist executive councilman, although very much a man of the left, is not overly fond of Mr Scanlon. This probably dates back to the time when Mr Birch was a leading member of the Communist Party. He was told by the CP bureaucrats not to run against Mr Scanlon, a Labour Party member, for the office of President. This instruction was ignored and eventually led to Birch’s expulsion from the party and a certain strain between the two gentlemen. Which may also explain why, on occasion, Mr Birch has voted in solidarity with Mr Boyd, rather than his natural, if more orthodox, left-wing colleagues. Indeed the voting record of the AUEW’s executive would show some very strange alignments. All of which points to the danger of attempting to import the standards of conventional parliamentary politics into analysis of the trade union movement. It can only be misleading and, in the case of the AUEW, destructive of serious analysis. Consider, on any single trade union question there are at least three answers. Because most leading trade unionists are first and foremost trade union patriots, they will divide in all sorts of ways depending on their own experience and estimation of the interests of the union. Even the allegedly disciplined battalions of the CP have found themselves on different sides on a number of occasions.It would be a mistake for us to imagine that Mr John Boyd has a total aversion to strikes. Moderation is, after all, only a relative term. Mr Boyd has led strikes in his time and may well do so in the future. In the engineering industry, with its multiplicity of pay rates and payments systems, with its, generally, bad to intolerable working conditions, there are countless situations arising daily, not to say hourly, that can give rise to bitter disputes. Under such circumstances no AUEW official who wants to be re-elected can let the members even suspect that he is against strikes in principle.If we can accept this unpalatable truth, then the future development of the union becomes far less clear-cut, much more uncertain. In truth, the future will depend on factors far outside the control of the AUEW electorate. Today the urgent threat of unemployment, short time and rationalisation are facts that bear heavily on rank and file engineering workers. Against this background of economic disaster, Mr Wilson has won a substantial ideological victory over the trade union left wing. As is proved by their voting patterns, AUEW members have come to the conclusion that a left-wing union leadership would involve them in a confrontation they cannot win. Just as well sit back and hope to get £6. The urgent question, however, and one to which the Government would dearly like the answer, is, how long will this quietism continue? Suppose that the economic recovery is too long delayed, suppose – not a large supposition this – that unemployment and inflation continue to rise. Suppose that the £6 limit gives way to a £3 limit. Then the tide of resentment might well start to run very powerfully.In the AUEW the most influential group of members are the time-served, highly skilled men. If differentials are significantly eroded over time by flat rate increases there could be serious difficulties with this key section of workers. Difficulties that could snowball throughout the engineering industry. Once a wave of mass militancy of that sort occurs British capitalism would be in a very bad way indeed and all the legions of moderates in union head offices could do nothing to stop the rot."
}
|
{
"content": "That, of course, is an extreme projection and for the time being you may still sleep uneasily in your beds. The AUEW right wing are celebrating their famous victory, even Mr Boyd, himself a teetotaller, is no doubt blowing his Salvation Army tuba with increased vigour. Conversely, the left wing is much put down. Bob Wright, that pillar of the “broad left” caucus, finds himself without a job and very dim prospects. He could, as they say, “go back to the tools” but at his age and with his record that might prove difficult. He could run for lesser AUEW office, but for one who was Hugh Scanlon’s handpicked successor that would be quite a come-down. More likely he will take on a job in another union but it will not be the same.In some ways the defeat of Bob Wright will be a loss for the union. He is an accomplished negotiator, in a union not over-endowed with such talent. His successful opponent Mr Terry Duffy, a previously, unknown assistant divisional organiser, will find his path rather difficult, with militant activists lying in ambush, unless he displays more form than his track record indicates so far.Also suffering will be Hugh Scanlon; his tenure of office has not been crowned with unsullied success. He cannot boast a massive increase in his members’ living standards, as can Mr Joe Gormley. He cannot give evidence of far-reaching political influence, as can Jack Jones. His drive to build the union through amalgamations is faltering on the difficulty of achieving a joint rule book. The union is financially under par. And now, on top of all this, he is faced with a rejuvenated, right-wing, executive majority flushed with victory. All of which will add to the aggravation of life at his Peckham Road headquarters. Even before this last blow there were signs that Mr Scanlon was beginning to feel the strain. Of late he has left the projection of union policy to others, his appearance; in the public eye and on our television screens less frequent.Still he has three years to go before he retires. That will cover a crucial time in the calendar of industrial relations. Mr Scanlon, contrary to premature reports, is not dead yet. To achieve and hold high office in the second biggest union in Britain requires a certain intestinal fortitude. One small example may give some insight into Hugh Scanlon’s character and possible future conduct. A while ago, consistent with his station in life, he purchased a weekend retreat atop a cliff on the South Coast. Not long after, this seaside “dacha” slid, uninsured, into the sea. Undeterred, our Hughie has now purchased another such residence at Broadstairs – guess where – on top of a cliff! Now there is determination for you. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsTrade unionsClive Jenkins – Tomorrow the world(November 1975)From the Spectator, 8 November 1975, p.596.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The great trade union growth area of the last fifteen years has been among the white collar workers. In weighty sociological articles, the phenomenon has been analysed and reasons adduced. Big industry has become more impersonal: those with white collars have become numbers in the book just like their blue collar colleagues; differentials between the two types of work have narrowed, with manual workers earning more than those enjoying staff status; aggressive trade unionism has benefited those with dirt under their finger nails and the lesson has not been lost on those with a pen behind their ears.No union saw this white collar revolution with greater clarity than the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staff (ASTMS). No trade union leader has calculated so carefully or played his cards so cleverly as Clive Jenkins, ASTMS General Secretary. The central core of the union was the old Association of Supervisory Staff, Executives and Technicians (ASSET). In 1945 ASSET had 11,000 members, a mixture of engineering foremen and a few managerial types with a bit of a conscience. It really was of no account, dismissed, slightingly, by other unions as ‘the foremen’s union’. In 1946 ASSET made one of its wiser decisions in appointing Mr Jenkins (at the time a twenty-year-old manager of a tin-plate works) as a Birmingham Divisional Organiser. Within a year Clive had moved on to ASSET headquarters and by the time he was thirty had assumed the office of Deputy General Secretary. Four years later, in 1961, he was General Secretary. With only 23,000 members he was, nevertheless, one of the highest paid trade union officials. Whatever his salary, and it is a closely guarded secret, the union has no reason to regret the cost.From this comparatively lowly peak Mr Jenkins surveyed the world, decided it was good and that ASSET should get its significant share of the action. With astute calculation he developed his public image, his own private image writ large, that has made him a natural choice for chat show producers and earned the envious enmity of his trade union peers. Brash, abrasive, witty, outrageous, on occasion cruelly cutting, and all cast within a torrent of literate eloquence. In the same way as ladies will block the high street to catch a glimpse of Bruce Forsyth opening a boutique, so will managers, technicians and other white collar elements turn up to hear Mr Jenkins extolling the virtues of collective bargaining. They may come to jeer but they invariably stay to cheer and take out a union card.Within seven years of taking over as General Secretary the membership was raised to 50,000 and the time for the next breakthrough had arrived. The Association of Scientific Workers, with 20,000 members, was assimilated together with its General Secretary, Mr Dutton, and half a dozen Nobel Prize winners. The AScW was just the first of a succession of smaller unions merged into the ever burgeoning ASTMS: the Medical Practitioners Union, Midland Bank staff, a number of insurance staff associations, and the development of bargaining units for administrative personnel in ICI and other large combines. Today ASTMS has 350,000 members and is growing at the rate of 50,000 each year. Because the field has been so badly organised in the past the perspective is one of almost uninterrupted growth for the foreseeable future. By usual trade union standards subscriptions are low, only 85p per month, but they still yield a healthy head office balance of £2,750,000 per annum.Now that is real money and ASTMS does not have a cash flow problem. The money is invested in ASTMS offices up and down the country, which provides publicity, saves money, and is a useful hedge against inflation. The union’s headquarters, a somewhat garish item, whose orange exterior lightens the gloom of Jamestown Road, Camden Town, cost £650,000 and is now worth £1,500,000. With luck like that, being clever must be counted a bonus.But success of this order is not achieved without some cost. There have been jurisdictional disputes with other, less successful, white collar unions. The clerks’ union, APEX, have had their jurisdictional disputes with ASTMS. Most notably and recently the TUC’s instruction to APEX to hand over 3,000 insurance workers to Mr Jenkins’s union has been successfully challenged in the courts. The draughtsmen’s union, the Bank employees have all had their little difficulties with ASTMS in the past. Each year the TUC report contains long and detailed reports of the accusations of ‘poaching’ against ASTMS.If the number of such cases has declined in recent years that may be because the Bank employees’ union has been out of the TUC due to their registering under Mr Heath’s Industrial Relations Act. This year NUBE has been readmitted to the TUC, despite ASTMS’s strenuous opposition. The outlook is one of less than fraternal amity in this field. If APEX and the NUBE fear that Mr Jenkins wishes to swallow their organisations, that is certainly not a perspective articulated by ASTMS. At present there is enough slack among the unorganised without the need for head-on confrontation with established unions. Time alone will tell the ultimate ASTMS strategy."
}
|
{
"content": "Perhaps, however, time will induce, as it has for so many others, a mellowing in Mr Jenkins. Despite the fact that he has a large framed photograph of Ramsay MacDonald outside his sumptuous office, to act as a ghastly warning, there are signs that, as he enters his fiftieth year, he is less concerned to project the well tried public persona. For years he was kept off the General Council of the TUC, by those less talented but with command of the necessary block votes. In 1974 the size and influence of ASTMS could no longer be ignored, the establishment capitulated and Mr Jenkins took his place among the elect. Even now, though, those who take some malicious pleasure in these things, have arranged that Mr Jenkins’s General Council seat should be next to that of Mr Reg Birch, the AUEW Maoist.For all the smarty boots image, Mr Jenkins is in reality a trade union leader in the pragmatic mould of the British labour movement. Despite his five year membership of the Communist Party in the late 1940s, he is not an ideologue, He joined on a wave of revulsion from Ernie Bevan’s foreign policy and left when the CP bureaucrats tried to tell him how to write a Fabian pamphlet. Like the leaders of the most craft-bound society of artisans he is a union patriot. The membership he hoped to recruit was less easily defined, more difficult to organise and unused to the procedures and ethos of trade unionism. Having got the members it has become necessary to inculcate a level of trade union consciousness, to politicise them.That ASTMS and Mr Jenkins have been successful is a matter of record, measured in members recruited and cash in the bank. The future, with inevitable problems, is comparatively bright for ASTMS. No recognisable group of white collar workers are beneath Mr Jenkins’s interest. It occurs to me that one grossly underpaid group of workers, suffering mediaeval conditions of service are Church of England parsons. If their collars are reversed they are still white and Mr Jenkins would still have them. It would be a pleasurable thing to see Clive Jenkins in action against the Church Commissioners. He would undoubtedly have his research department diligently searching the Scriptures for divine support. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsThe Minority Movement(November 1970)From International Socialism (1st series), No.45, November/December 1970, pp.12-18.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Revolutionary Marxism is about the working class. The beginning, middle and end of analysis is the working-class. Revolutionary theory that does not connect at some stage with the real movement of the workers is a meaningless abstraction, useful only to warm the craniums of the devotees. This simple notion, a commonplace in the movement, is more frequently ignored than diligently pursued.The essence of sectarianism is encompassed in this definition. Sects, as opposed to sectarianism, have, of course, a rode to play. For long periods of capitalist stability and working-class decline the maintenance of the marxist tradition and the future worker’s party is secured by ‘sects’. Marx in his letter to Bolte makes the point clear: ‘Sects are justified (historically) so long as the working-class is not yet ripe for an independent historical movement’ [1]None of this, however, is to deny the need for a party. It is, nevertheless, to put the question into perspective. Too frequently do we find the most vociferous worshippers at the shrines of Lenin and Trotsky doing the gravest injustice to the spirit and intention of their writing. For Lenin even less than for Trotsky, was the party the end product for which they fought. The party was a tool, albeit an indispensable tool, by means of which the working-class could carry through the revolution. For the blinkered ‘Bolsheviks’ who see What is to be Done, abstracted from time and place as the last word, there is no redemption from sectarian futility and isolation. The Lenin of 1903 is also the Lenin of State and Revolution, The Worker’s and Peasant’s Inspection and much else in similar vein.Historically every serious revolutionary tendency has attempted to carry through the job of welding together revolutionary theory with the worker’s movement. At no time has the task been easy, at some times it has been impossible.All of this is still unexceptional, and it is possible having said it to relapse, virtuously and with easy conscience into the small change of group politics. Knowledge is never dangerous to anyone, including the ruling-class, unless it is translated into action. The dilemma still remains: how does a small group of committed revolutionaries, with limited resources and personnel, make serious contact with significant groups of workers. The difficulties are legion. Lack of contact, non-working-class social composition, age differences, lack of experience. All of these things plus the womb-like warmth of inbred politics, where the sweeping generalisation has only to convince other members of the elect and is not subject to the cold complexities of the real world. Overriding all other difficulties in importance is the existence of reformist traditions and institutions encompassing the trade union bureaucracy, the Labour Party and, by extension, the Communist Party.Despite all these problems the attempt to cut through and circumvent the obstacles has been made. The lack of success, in the past, has not only been due to sectarianism: as often as not the objective conditions made more than passing progress impossible.For long years the Trotskyist movement suffered from an inability to approach the class in any but the most oblique fashion – in the early 1930’s as a minuscule left opposition in the CP, subsequently in the ILP, the Socialist League and the Labour Party. Of these organisations only the CP, and that illusory, saw itself as providing a complete industrial and political answer to working-class problems; the ILP and the Socialist League were already operating, consciously or otherwise, at one remove from the working-class.Only during the special conditions of the second world war were the Trotskyists able to maintain a precarious independent existence. After the Russian entry into the war the CP became a super partisan of the Labour-Conservative coalition, completely abdicating its role in industry and conniving at the erosion of working conditions in the interests of the ‘great patriotic war’. In these circumstances the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and its predecessor the Worker’s International League (WIL) were presented for the first time with opportunities for autonomous agitation among industrial workers.The Trotskyists were active in, and virtually controlled, the Militant Worker’s League an organisation mainly based in the important Royal Ordnance Factories, but which acquired affiliation from some shop stewards committees, a few district committees and a number of individual militants. However the high revolutionary hopes of the war years, epitomised in the WIL conference document Preparing For Power were rapidly evaporated in the harsh realities of the post-war world. Virtually the entire industrial membership and periphery of the RCP disappeared. In 1949 the RCP went into voluntary liquidation, its hopes wrecked on the twin rocks of a revived social democracy and a strengthened Stalinism, a possibility not only catered for in its perspective, but also one specifically denied in the works of Trotsky.The Militant Worker’s Federation is poorly documented, even in the pages of the RCP press, and apart from some obscure internal bulletins only the fallible recollection of a few participants is available. In the case of the Minority Movement (MM) we are a little more fortunate and Roderick Martin’s recent book [2] is an important addition to our knowledge of the way revolutionaries in the 1920’s attempted to bridge the gap between the revolutionary party and the organised working-class.An understanding of the Minority Movement and its early comparative success is impossible without setting the movement within its own historical context. Both the CP members involved and their non-CP co-workers were, in the main, people with an experience of rank-and-file movements going back to the pre-1914 period. Without these contacts even the limited success of me MM would have been impossible.Rank-and-file movements do not exist because revolutionaries will them; as Brian Pearce says,‘The source of rank-and-file movements is the conflict between the struggle of the working class for better conditions and a new social order, and the increasing reconciliation between the leaders of the trade unions and the capitalist class, their growing integration into the upper reaches of bourgeois society.’ [3] Background to the Minority Movement"
}
|
{
"content": "The growth in the 1860’s of financially stable trade unions with an assured continuity allied to the extension of the franchise meant that trade union leaders, as Engels observed, ‘... had overnight become important people’. They were visited by MPs, by Lords and other well-born rabble, and sympathetic inquiry was suddenly made into the wishes and needs of the working-class. [4] In short order the trade union bureaucracy was accepted as a viable estate of the realm. Resting on British industrial supremacy and the fruits of empire, the trade union leadership swiftly acquired the dress, demeanour and life-style of the employers and politicians they mixed with more frequently than their members. Mass production of clothing has today somewhat obscured the external differences (Burton’s natty gents suiting has, to the untutored eye, much the same appearance as the product of Savile Row) but fundamentally the phenomenon is the same. Indeed with the growth and expansion of the system it becomes possible to suborn wider and wider layers of the worker’s representatives. In America, the closed shop, the check off, maximum seniority and overtime for committee men, with management paying committee men’s wages, gives rise to a privileged stratum within the workshop itself. For the payment of a few more dollars the management acquires another supervisor to police the agreement and the workers acquire another gendarme in the process of production. [5]The period before the first world war saw the natural consequences of the quietism and collaboration of the trade union bureaucracy. Reform movements sprang up in industry after industry. James Connolly introduced the ideas of the American SLP on politics and industrial unionism into Britain. Tom Mann, strongly influenced by French syndicalism, together with Guy Bowman, formed the Industrial Syndicalist Education League in 1910. The year before, a strike at Ruskin College resulted in the Plebs League-Labour College which gave added impetus to the propaganda for rank and file control and revolutionary change. The Miner’s Next Step was the product of graduates from the Labour College.Enterprises of this sort, multiplied throughout the country, influenced a whole generation of militants. Apart from Mann and Connolly, men like A.J. Cook, Richard Coppock, A.A. Purcell, Ben Tillet and Noah Ablett were well to the fore. A further layer of young workers was also coming into local prominence: Arthur McManus, Tom Bell, Gallagher and others who were later to become the leadership of the CPGB.Trade union membership grew by leaps and bounds and a series of strikes broke out, frequently unofficially inspired, that bore a reluctant leadership on. In 1908 man-days lost through strikes quadrupled. Between 1910 and 1913 strikes never fell below 10 million days each year. [6]The notion of the industrial union was a powerful weapon in the propaganda of revolutionaries. In the period it had profound transitional significance. The simple idea of maximum solidarity in the face of the employers was immediately relevant to workers faced by rising prices, the incapacity of parliamentary reformism and the trade union bureaucracy. At the same time k emphasised the realities of class difference and gave me possibility of working-class politics. An integral part of the agitation for the industrial union was the notion of rank-and-file control from the workshop floor. The transformation of industrial capitalism to the socialist society was to be ensured by present working-class organisation. The experience of the Soviets in the 1905 Russian Revolution was one influence acting on the practical agitation of the industrial unionists.Practically all of the massive amalgamated unions of today derive in some measure from this period of pre-1914 agitation. That the problems remain is a measure of the complexities of the situation undreamed of by early industrial unionists.The impact of the war in 1914 stilled for a time the upsurge of industrial militancy with a wave of chauvinism. As in 1939-45, the trade unions virtually abandoned their traditional defensive and bargaining role, in aid of the war effort. A vacuum existed that could be filled by the residual activists of the pre-war period. Unofficial committees of militants and shop-stewards acquired a new accession of strength and, despite a deal of harassment and persecution, were able to organise, at rank-and-file level, thousands of workers in sporadic but important struggles. These battles inevitably spilled over into political agitation. The government prescription on normal trade union activity made me simplest defensive struggle of necessity political. The predilections of many militants aided this tendency and strikes and demonstrations were successfully fought against rents, conscription and dilution, Not all were successful. Poor communications made organisation difficult. As with the IWW in America, successful struggles, whatever their national significance, were fought locally and the problem of spreading disputes at the right time was often insurmountable. Deportations to other towns and imprisonment, under the Defence of the Realm Act, of the unofficial leadership added to the difficulties. In the nature of the movement, with its strong syndicalist tendency, the need for a disciplined centralised leadership was specifically excluded. Yet working-class militants engaged full-time at their trade are, no matter how their imagination may soar, physically confined to a limited geographical location.The development of the shop stewards’ movement in the first world war set the essential form of shop-floor representation that even in the worst periods of reaction has saved the movement from the worst excesses of the trade union experiences abroad. Today it represents a considerable rank-and-file organisation into the trade union machine.The Russian Revolution of 1917 provided a living proof of the viability of the revolutionary’s propaganda. Worker’s control through Soviets was a living reality. Enthusiasm for the revolution extended far beyond the limited circle of groups that, in 1920 coalesced to form the Communist Party. Aneurin Bevan gave a – perhaps – romanticised but essentially truthful account of the feelings engendered by the revolution in a speech to the 1951 Labour Party conference:‘... when the Russian revolution occurred. I remember the miners, when they heard that the Czarist tyranny had been overthrown, rushing to meet one another in the streets with tears streaming down their cheeks, shaking hands and saying “At last it has happened”.’ [7]"
}
|
{
"content": "At the Leeds Workers and Soldiers Convention of June 1917 some 1,300 delegates attended from Labour parties, trades councils, ILP branches, trade unions and other Labour organisations. The strength of the sentiment that called the conference into being compelled such dyed-in-the-wool reformists as Ramsey Macdonald and Philip Snowden to participate and sit on the Central Committee (a fact that may have something to do with its ineffectiveness).As early as January 1918 the Russian Congress of Trade Unions called for a new trade union international to replace the discredited Amsterdam International. In 1920 at the second congress of the Communist International the famous 21 conditions, (for affiliation to the CI) were passed, point 10 of which called for: ‘Uncompromising opposition to the yellow international of Amsterdam’. The decisions were taken against the background of a massive strike wave in Western Europe and revolutions in Hungary and Bavaria. In Britain the strike wave was also accompanied by the Hands Off Russia Campaign which led to the formation of a joint Labour Party-TUC National Council of Action to organise ‘the whole industrial strength of the workers against the war’. Twelve months of such experiences, following the founding conference, convinced the Second Comintern Congress that the time was ripe for the formation of a revolutionary trade union international. In September 1920, after some fairly heated debate about the need for a revolutionary party and the degree of independence allowed to the sections, a Provisional International Council of Trade and Industrial Unions was set up with the task of organising a conference in July 1921.The newly formed Red International of Labour Unions produced a Programme of Action [8] which laid down in some detail the strategy and tactics to be followed by ‘Red Trade Unions’. All trade union action was to be seen as leading on to mass actions – demonstrations, street actions, factory occupations, armed insurrection. Industrial unionism was to be pursued, by a programme of amalgamation, through local, district and national trade union machinery. The basis of organisation of the red trade union was no be the democratically elected workshop committee to replace the redundant geographically based branch. Members of the national RILU sections were to form factory cells and press for the implementation of such a policy.Trade Union strategy was cast within an offensive framework – unemployed workers to receive full pay from the employers; closures and short time to be fought, special worker’s commissions to examine the books, factory occupations to continue production. Arguments from the national interest and against foreign competition had to be ignored, the only interest of the red trade unions being to maintain and increase working class power. Alliances were to be made across industries (e.g. Rails, Transport and Mines) to prevent divide-and-rule tactics. All strikes had to be carefully prepared with particular emphasis on defence and offence squads to beat blacklegging and ‘White Guard and fascist elements’. Workers’ control of production, and the organic unity of the CP and the revolutionary trade unions was to be aimed at.Now this is not a bad programme at all but in the conditions of 1921 it had one serious drawback. The programme was specifically tailored to a period of mass ‘radicalisation and pre-revolutionary ferment. Unfortunately the strike wave was beginning to wane.In Britain the post-war boom was beginning to falter and the employers used the opportunity to reassert their control over industry. In 1921 the mine owners proposed to eliminate the wages pool that had operated during and after the war, and to institute local rates based on local profitability. Ill-concealed in this proposal were wage cuts, as much as 42s per week in some cases. [9] The miners at this time were the largest and most powerful union in the country. The mine-owners’ attack was seen, correctly, as an attack on organised labour as a whole. The miners invoked the triple alliance with the Rail unions and the Transport union; all the miners were out, including the safety men, in the most complete shutdown up to that time. On April 12th the transport and railway workers were due to strike in sympathy, but at a worried conference the triple alliance leaders were able to persuade the miners to return the safety men and to postpone the strike to Friday, April 15th.A statement by the mineworker’s secretary (Hodges) to an audience, largely composed of Tory MP’s, which spoke of conciliation on the miners’ claim was rejected by the Miner’s Federation Executive. On this pretext the Railwaymen and Transport union leaders reneged on the triple alliance an act which caused many miners to describe it as the ‘cripple alliance’. [9a]The miners fought on for 13 weeks until funds ran out. As a result of this defeat wages were cut by some 34 per cent. [10] The defeat of ‘Black Friday’ set the whole trade union movement back. Between 1921 and 1923 affiliated membership of the TUG dropped by 2,000,000 rather more than the increase since 1918. [11]It is against this background that the British section of RILU was formed. There was no attempt to form new unions and, when the South Wales Miners Federation was threatened with expulsion from the TUG after declaring for affiliation to the Red International, there was little point in pressing individual unions to affiliate, although they were to return to the question of international trade union solidarity with a considerable difference, after the formation of the Anglo Russian Trade Union Committee.The revolutionary optimism of the Programme of Action was transformed into a ‘stop the retreat’ campaign. The drain of TU membership was combatted and the leadership urged to fight back. Minority movements, so-called because a trade union leader complained about a ‘minority of troublemakers’ [12], appeared in a number of industries, particularly mining."
}
|
{
"content": "The prestige of the Russian revolution and the Russian leadership, together with the shared experience and tradition of many CP and non-CP militants ensured a considerable community of interest and aspiration. Despite the objections of Tanner and others to the organisational form and political content of the RILU, the Shop Stewards and Worker’s Committee Movement (SS & WCM) were content to leave the main direction and control of the rank-and-file movement to the Communist Party. At a meeting of the National Administrative Committee of the SS & WCM, in 1920, it was decided:‘... The NAC of the SS & WCM recognise the necessity for acting in close contact with the Communist Party ... It will stress the need of its active members joining the Communist Party ... The SS & WCM and the Communist Party should devise some convenient arrangement to ensure the perfect harmony of the two organisations.’ [13]At a joint meeting between the NAC and the CP early in 1921 the need for a national unofficial industrial movement under the hegemony of the CP was agreed.Agreement on shared perspectives and common organisational objectives between communist and non-communist activists was important, but the action that flowed from these agreements was even more difficult. The miners’ defeat was closely followed by an attack on all working class living standards; by the end of 1921 some 6,000,000 workers had suffered a decrease of 8s per week. In 1922 the employers felt able to take on the powerful AEU in a lock-out over control of overtime and managerial functions. From March to June the AEU funds were milked dry and the engineers beaten. In 1923 the dockers were engaged and defeated. In a period of general working-class retreat the hard facts of the class war were all too nakedly apparent but the way to fight back was not nearly so clear.At the Fourth Congress of the CI, J.T. Murphy replied to criticism from Zinoviev, that the British Party had little influence in the workshops and in the formation of factory and workshop committees, by saying that‘in England we have had a powerful shop stewards movement. But it can and only does exist given objective conditions. These necessary conditions at the moment in England do not exist. How can you build factory organisations in empty and depleted workshops’. [14]Despite these difficult objective conditions the British section of RILU were urged to set up a national organisation. Gallagher was put in charge of the enterprise and preparations were in hand by 1924 for a conference for a National Minority Movement (MM). Although the formation of a national movement was slow, the intervening period was not without success. In particular the Miner’s MM increased its influence considerably, especially in the Scottish and South Wales coalfields and in early 1924 the MM were influential, if not decisive, in obtaining the election of A.J. Cook (a prominent and active supporter of the MM) to the secretaryship of the Miners’ Federation. Less spectacular, but significant, advances were also made in Rails and Engineering. The party already had a fairly large influence in some smaller trade unions, like the Furniture Workers and the Tailors and Garment Workers.The conference, that was to unite the various industrial sections into a National Majority Movement, was held on August the 23rd and 24th, 1924. Some 270 delegates representing 200,000 workers attended. [15] If the figures as to workers represented may be a little suspect, the conference was nevertheless a considerable achievement on the part of the organisers. In a way it was the high point of the Minority Movement, for even though in the future this was to be able to claim far greater and wider representation, the original intention – to unite the rank-and-file industrial movement with revolutionary communist politics in the interests of working-class socialism in Britain – was to come under considerable strain almost immediately. The independent movement of British workers was very quickly subordinated to the needs of the growing Russian bureaucracy and their foreign policy interests. Revolutionary Trade UnionismAt the founding conference of the National Minority Movement Tom Mann was elected chairman and Harry Pollitt secretary. Pollitt explained the objectives as follows:‘We are not out to disrupt the unions, or to encourage any new unions. Our sole object is to unite the workers in the factories by the formation of factory committees; to work for the formation of one union for each industry; to strengthen the local Trades Councils so that they shall be representative of every phase of the working-class movement, with its roots firmly embedded in the factories of each locality. We stand for the formation of a real General Council that shall have the power to direct, unite and co-ordinate all struggles and activities of the trade unions, and so make is possible to end the present chaos and go forward in a united attack in order to secure, not only our immediate demands, but win complete workers control of industry’. [16]Allied to this general programme were the bread-and-butter demands; a £1 a week wage increase; a minimum wage of £4; the 44-hour week and no overtime. As a leavening to the demand for more power to the General Council, they also added demands for the direct affiliation to the TUC of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement and the Trades Councils.The whole programme was set within the context of the primary aim of the Minority Movement:‘... to organize the working masses of Great Britain for the overthrow of capitalism, ... the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth; to carry on a wide agitation for the principles of ‘the revolutionary class struggle ... and against the present tendency towards social peace and class collaboration ...’ [17]"
}
|
{
"content": "The introduction of straight economic demands connected the immediate pre-occupations of workers with the strengthened organisational form that might give them substance. The organisational form also provided a unified working-class army that could be directed to revolutionary action. The factory committee structure, directly represented on local trades councils, which in their turn were directly affiliated to the TUC, displayed, in embryonic form, the idea of the Soviet. The affiliation to the TUC of the Unemployed Movement also had some considerable advantages, not only because the NUWCM (National Unemployed Worker’s Committee Movement) was firmly under CP control, but also because the organised unemployed, despite their immediate lack of industrial power, displayed a satisfyingly militant spirit, particularly so during the Engineer’s lock-out.Of more far-reaching significance, in terms of its debilitating effect on the later development of the movement, was the inclusion of the demand for greater power for the TUC. The demand had been heard before 1924 but in different circumstances. The defeat of Black Friday, with individual unions breaking solemnly concluded agreements to help others, was seen as the result of a lack of unified command. The industrial unionist tradition, in the final analysis, saw the working-class as whole and indivisible. The logic of a union built from the workshop to cover a complete industry, regardless of trade, cannot stop short at the single industry. The top of the pyramid had to be a body that represented the entire industrial working class, regardless of trade or industry. The interests of die class would have to override all sectional interests. In America, in vastly different conditions, revolutionaries built their ‘one big union’ the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). Apart from a brief and disastrous, flirtation with independent revolutionary unions before the 1914-18 war, British Revolutionaries had, wisely, set their face against dual unionism. An attempt to set the Minority Movement in place of the TUC would not only be dual unionism with a vengeance, but also sheer lunacy in the light of the relation of forces.The saving grace, in this situation was seen in the growth of a rank-and-file movement that would influence and direct the TUC from the grass roots. In the event, the attempt to influence the TUC led to a neglect of the grass roots that was to make impossible any chances that might have existed.The factor which changed the direction of the National MM almost at its inception, emanated from Moscow. In October 1923 the German Revolution had gone down to defeat. This event proved to the Russians and the Comintern that the period of revolutionary offensive was at an end. The Russian revolution could no longer expect its salvation from imminent revolutions in Western Europe. The Russians would have to seek allies and security from imperialist attack elsewhere. One field in which this might be secured was in a rapprochement with the IFTU (International Federation of Trade Unions – Amsterdam) of which the largest and most influential constituent was the TUC.At the Third Congress of die Profintern in 1924 Tomsky gave voice to the new conciliatory line: ‘We have no desire to break up the Amsterdam International. What we want is to create a strong, vigorous International’. It is interesting to contrast this statement with the ‘uncompromising opposition to the yellow International of Amsterdam’ of the 21 conditions. In the same speech Tomsky indicated the route the Profintern had chosen to the heart of the TUC General Council, when he spoke in laudatory terms of Purcell, a ‘left’ member of the General Council: ‘Beyond question a man upon whom we can rely in an emergency is Purcell, a true-hearted champion of the workers’. In retrospect it all sounds like a rather sick joke.At the Hull TUC in September of that year Tomsky again spoke for unity in a very conciliatory spirit. Following the Congress a delegation from the General Council (Purcell, Bramley, Tillet, Turner and Findlay) attended the Sixth Congress of the Russian Trade Unions, and in early 1925 the Anglo-Russian Committee was set up. In 1924 the Labour Government had, despite Liberal protests, signed an Anglo-Russian trade treaty and guaranteed a loan to the Russians. A strong pro-Soviet tide was running not only through the TUC but also through the organised workers. The economic situation was improving and the coal industry made large coal exports. One reason for this was the French occupation of the Ruhr following the failure of the Germans to meet their reparations bill, which effectively handicapped a prime competitor of British coal. Economic improvement gave an opportunity for workers to regain some of the losses of 1922-23. But the recovery was short lived. The Dawes plan stabilised the mark, enabled reparations to be paid and helped the recovery of Germany as an international competitor.The advent of the first Labour Government in 1924 shifted, to a degree, the political centre of gravity of the General Council. Right-wingers like J.H. Thomas, Bondfield and Gosling were taken into MacDonald’s government. As a result Swales, Hicks, Purcell and other ‘lefts’ gave the TUC a verbal militancy that corresponded to the more genuine swell in the unions.In the period following the founding of the national movement, the MM made some advances. Affiliations from some small national unions and from numbers of district committees were secured. Between 1924 and early 1926 affiliation rose from 200,000 to 957,000. [18] Allowing for some exaggeration, duplication and, perhaps, triplication, this still represents a sizeable increase in influence. In mining, always the largest supporter of the MM, 200 MM branches were formed and very large delegations sent to the Movements’ conferences. Slightly smaller representation was forthcoming from Engineering (156 delegates at the August 1926 conference) and Transport (NUR and TGWU some 76 delegates). [19] However, apart from these main areas of strength, and a few small unions based primarily on the East End of London, the MM made little impact. Even in these industries the support was in specific geographical locations – South Wales, London, Scotland, the NW areas – interestingly enough, that corresponded closely to the successes of the pre-1914 rank-and-file movement and to the later SS & WCM."
}
|
{
"content": "In this period the NMM not only acquired greater membership, but also engaged activity in the struggles in mining, railways and engineering. MM policy was discussed in a number of the unions and parts adopted in some. The South Wales Miners Federation adopted the MM programme in full, including TUC affiliation to the RILU. But already the pattern was beginning to take shape. Greater and greater emphasis was given to the importance of international trade union unity and the part that the Anglo-Russian Committee could play in this venture. MM delegates to the TUC were urged to act as a bloc. At the 1925 Trades Union Congress the MM were able to get a resolution committing the General Council to fight, through the IFTU for Russian affiliation. At the same Congress the Tailors and Garment Workers moved and Pollitt, for the Boilermakers, seconded a resolution which called for the trade unions to organise for the overthrow of capitalism ‘in conjunction with the party of the workers’, opposition to ‘capitalist schemes of co-partnership’ and strong workshop organisation. After a card vote, the resolution was carried by 2,456,000 votes to 1,218,000 votes.The 1925 Congress represented a high point in the relationship between the MM movement and the TUC ‘lefts’. Alonzo Swales, in his Presidential address had said that‘a militant and progressive policy, consistently and steadily pursued is die only policy that will consolidate and inspire our rank-and-file ... there cannot be any community of interest between the working-class and the capitalist-class’. He went on to urge the Congress to give the General Council ‘full powers to create the necessary machinery to combat every movement of our opponents.’ [20]The background to these largely verbal pyrotechnics is to be found in the events of July 31st, 1925 ‘Red Friday’.The effects of the Dawes plan, and the Baldwin administrations decision to return to the gold standard, produced, as Keynes succinctly put it, ‘an atmosphere favourable to the reduction of wages’. Export prices fell rapidly, particularly for coal – suffering especially from the Dawes scheme of payment in kind with Ruhr coal. The mine-owners proposed a return to the wage structure of 1921 and an increase of one hour in the working day. The actual effect of this cut is best expressed in Symons’ book The General Strike:‘... the proposed wage cuts were between 10 per cent and 25 per cent of the wages earned and these wages vary between £2 and £4 a week.’ [21]On top of this, of course, it would take an extra hour a day to earn the decreased wages. The miners’ leaders, A.J. Cook and Herbert Smith adamantly refused any attempt to compromise. Herbert Smith, a taciturn Yorkshireman, seems to have restricted his contributions to the discussion to the simple, yet telling phrase ‘nowt doin’, on one occasion while cleaning his false teeth on his handkerchief.The triple alliance had not survived Black Friday and, although a new ‘Industrial Alliance’ was in train it had not made much progress. The TUG was the only organisation capable of bringing aid to the miners. The TGWU agreed to call a strike in solidarity, and the General Council put a complete embargo on the movement of coal from July 31st, the day the employer’s notices were to come into effect. The government, whatever the wishes of the coal-owners, felt compelled to enter the debate. At a meeting with the mine-workers the Prime Minister, Baldwin refused to agree to subsidise the mines. In a prophetic statement he indicated that the miners were merely the first of many workers to pay for the country’s difficulties: ‘All the workers in the country have got to take a reduction in wages.’ [22] Only hours before the July 31st deadline the government caved in and agreed to pay a subsidy to the industry until May 1st, 1926. The subsidy, estimated to cost £10m, in fact cost £23m [23], but, whatever the subsidy cost the government, it certainly bought them nine months in which to prepare. The lack of preparation displayed by the TUC and the MM were to cost the working-class far more than £23 million, which they repaid many times over in lower wages and worsened conditions. They also lost for years the possibility of revolutionary change.The Scarborough (1925) TUC that reflected, in words, the working-class elan induced by Red Friday made little or no attempt to prepare the movement for the decisive struggle that all agreed had merely been postponed for nine months. It was also significant that, apart from the speeches of Swales and A.J. Cook, no left-wing member of the General Council spoke in any of the major debates. The right-wingers were not so shy. Bevin, Thomas and Clynes all spoke against the idea of turning the TUC from a federation to a directing centre of the working-class. Clynes went so far as to declare,‘I am not in fear of the capitalist class. The only class I fear is our own.’In this Clynes merely reflected the general attitude of the Labour Party right-wing. Ramsey MacDonald called Red Friday ‘a victory for the very forces that sane, well-considered, thoroughly well-examined Socialism feels to be probably its greatest enemy’. J.H. Thomas said ‘the subsidy is wrong and will prove a disaster to the country’ and Hodges (General Secretary of the Miners’ Federation before he entered Parliament in 1924) thought it ‘a sure step in the direction of national bankruptcy’. In the order of social upheaval a General Strike is the next best thing to an armed insurrection and inevitably the very suggestion of such an event raises directly the question of power. The logic of May 1926 draws one ineluctably to this conclusion. Capitalism had clearly and manifestly failed; at one trade union conference after another the straight experience of the members gave witness to this truth. Resolution after resolution expressed determination, in words, to carry through the socialist revolution. Realistic analysis was not in short supply; there was no premium on the discussion of radical solutions. The missing factor was any sort of direct class preparation."
}
|
{
"content": "The right-wing trade union leadership were opposed to the strike, seeing it only as a never to be played bargaining counter to obtain concessions from the Government. The centrist elements on the General Council saw the strike as a continuation of normal trade union pressure that might well, in some undefined way, enhance the social influence of the workers and could, at some other time, give rise to social change. Neither of these groups, for their different reasons, made any serious preparations.The Communist Party and the other militants of the Minority Movement were quite clear as to the revolutionary implications of the General Strike. It was the event which accorded with their whole history and traditions, as industrial unionists, and also the likely route that a mature working-class with a developed trade union movement would follow.The basic problems that vitiated their efforts were two-fold. The first and least important, was the small size of the CP (5,000 members in the CP, 5,000 in the YCL [24]), and the psychological inhibitions that this lack of numbers induced. Second, and more important, was the Russian influenced emphasis on the General Council as the vehicle on which the party should ride.The first problem could have been overcome. The CP, at that time, had far wider working-class periphery than they have ever enjoyed since. In the Minority Movement they had a far reaching influence in at least three major unions and a wide following in trades councils and trade union branches. It is in just such circumstances as this that a small organisation that prepares to operate independently can become a mass party. There is no guarantee, of course, that had the party had Lenin at the helm and Trotsky organising the operation they would have succeeded. What is clear, however, is that there was no chance of success in the policy and procedure they adopted up to and during the strike.The General Council were instructed to extend the Industrial Alliance, to create Councils of Action, to strengthen workshop committees, to form workers’ defence squads and to prepare for the maintenance of essential services. The General Council could not, would not and did not do any of these things.Despite the clear warning of Government intentions in the arrest and sentencing of 12 leading members of the party (Inkpin, Pollitt, Rust, Gallacher, Hannington, McManus, Bell, Murphy, Campbell, Page Arnot, Wintringham and Cant) in 1925, its precautions and preparations were rudimentary. During the strike over 1,000 party members were arrested. Although leading members were sent out to the provinces, communication was almost impossible because the necessary provisions had not been made. Decisions taken by the Political Bureau during the strike were not transmitted to the branches for four days.The slogans of the party were defensive slogans – ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day’ – cast within the framework of defence of the miners. As the report to the Eighth Party Congress confessed in October 1926,‘Once the masses were on the streets the business of Central Committee was to extend these slogans at the same time malting them aggressive in character.’ [25]In their manifesto, The Political Meaning of the General Strike, published during the strike, the main emphasis was on the miners’ demands, nationalisation and the replacement of the Tory government with a Labour government. Even when the CP considered raising demands for groups of workers other than the miners they decided to operate through the appropriate unions. [26]The story of the General Strike is too well known to rehearse it here. It suffices to say that whatever opportunities the situation offered to the revolutionary movement were not grasped. The working-class paid and paid heavily for the debilitating influence of the Comintern. For the Minority Movement and the Communist Party the first real chance not taken was the last chance to take anything at all. The Minority Movement lived on until the early 1930’s, the Communist Party is still with us bereft of the certainties of outright Stalinism yet incapable of drawing any lessons from its failures. Its main function as an organisation is to stand as an obstacle in the way of a genuine revolutionary organisation.The post-strike history of the Minority Movement stands in no way as an object lesson for revolutionaries. It is unlikely that any future revolutionary organisation would perform the grotesque antics that drove the movement into oblivion. The whole ‘third period’ insanity of the ‘Class against Class’ policy and the dual unionism of the early 1930’s cannot be explained except through the abject subordination of the CPGB to the dictates of the Stalinist bureaucracy.The tragedy of the Minority Movement and the infant Communist Party is not, however, in its failure; for every movement has its failures. The tragedy is in the loss, from meaningful class politics, of a whole generation of working-class militants. The early CP contained thousands of workers, dedicated to revolutionary socialism and with a wealth of rank-and-file trade union experience. That men like Pollitt, Mann, Murphy, Gallacher, Bell and hundreds of others spent their talented lives in the sterile service of Stalinism, through all the betrayals, small and large, that were entailed, says a great deal for the conviction that originally brought them to the socialist movement.The Minority Movement is no more and the conditions and traditions and the men that gave rise to it, in its specific form, no longer exist. Attempts to set up its latter day equivalent are an exercise either in historical nostalgia or attempts to repeat the tragedy of the 1920’s in the farce of 1970."
}
|
{
"content": "Nowhere in Britain today does the revolutionary movement have the working-class base or the working-class periphery to set in motion an organisation that can operate as a coherent opposition within the unions. The immediate task is not to build meaningless paper organisations but to expand our influence and membership among the class. The job is more exacting and less exciting than the search for surrogates at any number of points on the third world compass. Nor is it as exhilirating as the construction of an exclusive super bolshevik party, with all of 400 members, that, in its own estimation, teeters on the brink of power. (How long can one teeter without actually falling on one’s face?) Nor is it as easy as the illusory soft option of snuggling up to the ‘left wing’ of the trade union leadership and the parliamentary Labour Party. It is much more difficult than all of these things, but ultimately it is the only way to success. Top of the page Notes1. Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence, p.326.2. Communism and the British Trade Unions, 1924-33, Oxford University Press, 50s.3. Some Past Rank-and-File Movements, Labour Review, April-May 1959.4. Quoted in Pearce, op. cit.5. See Martin Glaberman, Be His Wages High or Low, IS 21.6. Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, p.25.7. Quoted in Coates and Topham, Workers’ Control, p.95.8. Thesis of Third Congress CI and RILU, quoted in Coates and Topham, op. cit., p.85.9. Allen Hutt, Post-War History of the British Working Class, p.59.9a. ibid., p.61.10. R. Fox, Class Struggle in Britain, p.79.11. Hutt, op. cit., p.63.12. Pearce, op. cit.13. NAC Report, September 1920, quoted in Martin, op. cit., p.18.14. Quoted in Coates and Topham, op. cit., p.134.15. Report of the First NMM Conference, R. Martin, op. cit., p.36.16. Hutt, op. cit., p.9317. Report of the NMM Conference; 1924, quoted in Martin, op. cit., p.37.18. NMM Reports, quoted in Martin, op. cit., p.57.19. ibid.20. TUC Report, 1925.21. Julian Symons, The General Strike, p.9.22. ibid., p.14.23. ibid., p.16.24. Figures from K. Newton, The Sociology of British Communism.25. Martin, op. cit., p.73.26. ibid. Top of the pageLast updated on 30.12.2007"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins1956 and All That(1993)Originally published in 1993 in New Interventions.Republished in What Next?, No.25, Spring 2003.Downloaded with thanks from the What Next? Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” Oliver CromwellA Brick to the MidriffAt the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, Khrushchev delivered his secret speech. In it he detailed a partial, but nevertheless lengthy, list of Stalin’s crimes, ranging from murder on the grand scale to making Mikoyan, despite his advancing years, dance the gopak. The shock wave emanating from this congress hit the World Communist movement like a well aimed brick. A further, directly connected, shock came with the Russian invasion of Hungary. British Communists were treated to the irony of discovering that the reports from Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker correspondent in Budapest, were being spiked in favour of uncritical pieces from J.R. Campbell in Moscow. These two world-shattering events put the CPGB into turmoil, and for the first time since the 1920s a genuine debate took place around a real issue. The leadership was closely questioned not only about the abuses in Russia but also about their own guilty knowledge of these crimes.Rajani Palme Dutt, the Communist Party’s leading theoretician, stumped the country attempting to explain the inexplicable and justify the unjustifiable. One of his little gems, expounded at full throttle, was to suggest that, although Stalin had a few faults, we should bear in mind that even the sun – from which all life flows – has spots. This inspired allusion to solar acne was not universally well received.In the wake of the Khrushchev revelations and after a party congress, some 7,000 members left the party. Of that number many were on their way out of politics altogether, just too tired to take on another unequal struggle. Some saw it as an opportunity to jettison the political ballast holding back their trade union careers. Others built themselves a new politics in the Labour Party and even today a few of them adorn the Labour benches in both Houses of Parliament. There was also a minority who were not exhausted, had no career prospects to improve and were dubious about the Labour Party. What they did have was a desire to remain communists, albeit with a small “c”. For them, the root of the problem went rather deeper than the simple formula: “the cult of the individual.” Marxism, was the general thought, can do better than that. The New Left and especially the New Reasoner, edited by John Saville and E.P. Thompson, provided an important forum for discussion and new thinking within a Marxist framework.Isaac Deutscher addressed meetings of many hundreds and showed there was another tradition that differed markedly from Stalinism and was superior in every respect. Valuable though these contributions were, neither Thompson and Saville nor Deutscher were able to build an organisation. Indeed, Deutscher was a self-proclaimed tenant of that ivory tower, from which vantage point he might comment knowledgeably on the passing scene.The few thousand ex-Communists did not form their own organisation, as had occurred in several countries abroad. If they had, one has the distinct impression, they would have been the subject of some fairly determined entrism from several quarters. The Reasonable HealyThere was, however, the British Trotskyist movement – small and divided, like ancient Gaul, into three parts. They were, in ascending order of size: Ted Grant’s Revolutionary Socialist League, Tony Cliff’s Socialist Review Group and Gerry Healy’s Club. Size is, of course, a relative term and between the three of them they probably organised no more than 200 to 300 members. Even so, this crisis of Stalinism was the event for which they had waited and worked for so long. The chance had arrived to build a cadre with roots in the labour movement.At least half of the British Trotkyists were in Healy’s group and it was certainly the Club that made the only significant inroads into the disaffected Communists. Their numerical superiority was, however, of less significance than the fact that the Club possessed a printing press and, even more significant, via the good offices of the American SWP, the plates to several key works of Trotsky. For those who had for years struggled through Stalin’s clotted prose, to read Trotsky was akin to finding a clear mountain spring after a lifetime of drinking from a puddle in a livery stable. The clarity and masterly exposition of The Revolution Betrayed was both exciting and convincing. Much of the credit for this rubbed off on the Club, who were generous enough to supply the book. It also has to be said that the Gerry Healy of that time was not at all as unpleasant as he had been in the past, nor as repellent as he became subsequently. An altogether calmer and more tolerant chap who, if not actually allowing a hundred flowers to bloom unhindered, would permit the odd blossom a modicum of eccentric conformation. So long as Healy leant heavily on Trotsky’s theoretical underpinning, the superiority of his Marxist analysis went unchallenged. Sectarianism was heavily suppressed, with not a mention of Pabloite revisionism or the crimes of the state caps that was to come later."
}
|
{
"content": "Among those whom the Club recruited were some very talented people. Peter Fryer, a fine journalist and outstanding expositor of Marxist theory, Brian Behan, a leading building worker and one of the best stump orators of his day, Brian Pearce, historian and translator, John Daniels, a leading educationalist, and a number of academics such as Ken Coates, Cliff Slaughter and Tom Kemp. Not only that, there was in addition a number of workers with considerable trade union and political experience. Peter Fryer edited The Newsletter as a lively entrist paper and John Daniels and Bob Shaw edited Labour Review, a theoretical journal of high quality. Even today the early issues of the magazine have a freshness that one does not usually associate with the products of the Healy stable. The new members were inducted into work in the Labour Party and an intensive education detailing the history of the movement and Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism: the first four congresses of the Communist International, the Left Opposition, Germany in 1923, the General Strike, the Chinese revolution, the Third Period, fascism in Germany, Spain, etc, etc, etc. It was fascinating stuff, coherent, imbued with revolutionary spirit and conferring confidence on comrades who had been starved of genuine Marxism in the CP. One has to be grateful that this education was made available, together with the printed texts. The South Bank Strike and its ConsequencesThen, in 1958, Brian Behan obtained work as a labourer on McAlpines South Bank site. Whoever took him on very quickly learned their mistake, a very costly mistake. Behan was fired and, despite the fact that there were a number of inexperienced and unorganised workers on the site, the shop stewards committee – which was led by Hugh Cassidy and was both experienced and resolute – called a strike. The whole organisational weight of the Club was thrown behind the dispute. Special issues of The Newsletter were produced and strike bulletins and leaflets rolled off the press. For the first time since the general strike of 1926, middle class revolutionaries joined the workers on the picket line. Brian Behan’s brother Brendan (the playwright) appeared dispensing ten bob notes and not a few pints of Guinness. The police were much in evidence, arrests were made and, after one fracas, Brian Behan was arrested and given three months in Shepton Mallet prison.The builders’ union, the AUBTW, alarmed at the nature and background to the strike, took on the role of strike-breakers. For the Club leadership this was not just an important struggle from which the group could build a revolutionary presence in the unions, but a life and death struggle where the employers, the state, the police, the judiciary and the trade unions were hell bent not only on breaking the strike, but also on destroying the revolutionary movement. It was, in a word, Healy’s own Minneapolis-St. Paul. From this small, but potentially valuable, base Healy extrapolated to a mass movement with power as a prize not too long delayed.On the wave of enthusiasm engendered by the strike, and quite correctly in line with a policy of building bridges to the organised workers, a National Rank and File Conference was called on a programme of aggressive rank and file trade unionism, workers’ control of the unions, and average wages and an end to perks for trade union officials.The conference was well attended, by some 800 delegates, most of whom were genuine, with a good discussion and acceptance of the programme. Here was a chance for a left group to break out of sterile isolation into the workers’ movement. To do so would require patience, sensitivity and an ability to transcend immediate difficulties in the interest of future gain. Unfortunately, Healy had none of these qualities. As a result of some fairly inaccurate reporting on the Club in the News Chronicle, and some rather more accurate reporting in the South London Press, Healy was panicked into ill-considered and precipitate action. Under pressure from Behan, whose prestige was high and who had always displayed a distinct apathy to the Labour Party, Healy called for the formation of the Socialist Labour League. It might have been possible to argue that the time had come for an end to entrism, but that would have required a serious campaign of discussion and activity, testing the water both inside and outside the Labour Party. None of this was done – the group was presented with a virtual diktat. For a bigger, more sophisticated organisation it might have been possible to run an open political group and also carry out the hard slog of rank and file activity. The Club lacked these qualities and, in any case, it was about to become quite a bit smaller."
}
|
{
"content": "Many of the ex-CP members had required a deal of convincing of the necessity of entering the Labour Party. Now, a few brief months later, they were to ignore yesterday’s orthodoxy. Aggregates were conducted in an acrimonious spirit, branch meetings degenerated into abusive slanging matches. Peter Fryer, who had been in the eye of the storm, centred on Clapham High Street, was distressed by the tantrums and uncomradely spirit and abruptly resigned and disappeared. Healy took this very hard, and old friends of Peter’s, correctly assumed to be oppositional, were treated to midnight visits by Healy and two or three heavies for a “discussion” and to see if Peter was concealed in the attic. Appalled by this behaviour and opposed to the way the SLL turn had been thrust on the organisation, a faction was formed. The Stamford faction (so named after the grounds of stately home at which the first meeting was held) had about 25 members, among them Peter Fryer, John Daniels, Edward Thompson, Ken Coates and Peter Cadogan. Also among the 25 was the obligatory spy to keep Healy abreast of developments. A document, “The 1959 Situation in the SLL”, was produced, which Cadogan – who acted as faction secretary – for reasons known only to himself advertised in Tribune. In short order, Healy’s tame solicitor was issuing writs for libel against the signatories. Expulsion followed the writs with some speed. Not long afterwards, Behan and his co-thinkers, now characterised as ultra-left, were expelled. In the space of a couple of years, Healy had recruited, alienated and expelled practically all of the 1956 levy. Nearly all of them were lost to revolutionary politics. What Stalin could not accomplish, Healy managed in record time. Building the Party by ExpulsionsOnly a handful of that levy remained, perhaps the most notable being Cliff Slaughter, who carried on for another 25 years providing a small intellectual fig leaf for Healy. How he, and some others, supped so long with such short spoons at Healy’s table I have not yet seen satisfactorily explained. Perhaps, like Alasdair MacIntyre, they have made their peace with God.The destruction of that particular cadre was just one episode – and probably the most important – in a continuing process of finding a likely area for recruitment, performing Herculean tasks of organisation, followed by draconian measures of discipline and expulsion. It seemed that, as soon as the group began to grow to the point where it could not be controlled by Gerry Healy leaping aboard his “Rififi-type Citroën” (the description is Brian Behan’s) and nipping round the country suppressing dissent, the group needed to be reduced to manageable proportions. In this way a legion of ex-Trotskyists was created. Indeed, if one were inclined to conspiracy theory, one might hazard that all along Healy had been in the pay of the Mikado, the Axis, the State Department and the Deuxième Bureau.How, one might ask, could one man, aided by a few Satraps, manage for so long to maintain this kind of regime? From the outside it is almost impossible to answer such a question. Suffice it to say, the very fact of membership implies a belief that this is the revolutionary party, if only in embryo. Whatever the immediate discontents, there is general agreement on the politics, in essence Trotsky’s politics. Given this, the critic is already half disarmed.The Socratic dialogue goes thus:Q. What vehicle will enable the working class to build socialism?A. A revolutionary party.Q. Is the CIub/SLL/WRP the revolutionary party?A. Yes, otherwise I would not be having this discussion.Q. As the revolutionary organisation, does not the Club/SLL/WRP represent the objective interests of the working class?A. Er ... yes.Q. If the Club/SLL/WRP represents the objective needs of the workers, then your opposition must be based on alien class forces, with all this implies for your continued membership.As Tommy Cooper used to say: “Get out of that.”There is, however, life after expulsion, and with a little time to reflect one becomes aware that the Club/SLL/WRP is not a revolutionary party of any kind and that the class must look elsewhere for its objective needs to be serviced. The truth is that with the steady erosion of the cadre, any opportunity to become active in a genuinely working class milieu is made impossible. The mutual interaction between the Marxist organisation and advanced workers is the only guarantee of an unfolding programme and a growing party. Trotskyism is not the last word, it is a stepping stone to a higher synthesis.Since Trotsky’s exile in 1928, the movement’s relationship with any significant group of workers has been episodic and peripheral. Given the circumstances, this may have been inevitable, but this enforced isolation has given rise to some very strange organisational forms and even more eccentric practices. To recruit, given something coherent and different to say, is not impossible, so long as it is worked at hard and steadily. To retain and to utilise that recruitment is something that the movement has signally failed to do. The fault may lay in ourselves not the stars.For fifty years Healy strove to build a group in his own image and today it is shattered into half a dozen tiny fragments. Any worker with a passing knowledge of the history of Healyism would have been half-witted to see any of this as a vehicle for socialism. Inevitably, in an account like this, the name of Gerry Healy looms large. Nevertheless, we can take comfort from the fact that neither Healy nor his less talented clones represent the essence of the Trotskyist movement. Clique politics operate on idiosyncratic rules, in a land when psychology provides more answers than class analysis. Certainly, before any reasonable tribunal, Healy could seek refuge behind the McNaughton rules. When you think about it, there are suburban tennis clubs with their share of megalomaniac officials. Do We Need So Many “Vanguards”?"
}
|
{
"content": "Of greater concern is the fact that, at a time when Stalinism has collapsed, there are more Trotskyist groups than ever before. Practically all of them fall neatly under Marx’s definition of a sect, in that they take as their point of honour that shibboleth that separates them from the movement. There is no organisation that is immaculately constructed no matter how ideologically correct because ideology is not a fixed or finished category. It follows from this that an aggregation of like-minded sects, masquerading as an International, with a capital “I”, cannot substitute for the pathetic inadequacy of its sections. This form of substitutionism leads to disillusion, intrigue, factionalism and further splits, elevating irrelevance to a global scale.An organisation of tens, a few hundred, or even a few thousands will not succeed unless it gets rid of the dross that has accumulated over the years. It is particularly distressing, for example, that the great rift between defencists and state caps should still generate so much heat. For my part I agree with the sentiments expressed by Ken Tarbuck in a recent letter: “I came to the conclusion that none of the theories were adequate, their main merits were in showing the deficiencies of the opposing views without really taking one forward.” Neither theory has stood the test of real life (incidentally, by the same yardstick, bureaucratic collectivism also looks pretty moth-eaten). It would be nice if there could be a self-denying ordinance, restricting discussion on the class nature of Outer Mongolia to the pub, after the serious business of the meeting had been concluded. Stalinism is gone, capitalism is in crisis and there are distinct signs of a renewal of working class struggle, printing technology is more accessible than ever before (which is one reason why there are so many small groups with their own little journals).This happy conjunction of circumstances cries out for a united revolutionary organisation, committed to work in and around the class, and equally committed to learn from experience. None of us has all the answers and, when all is said and done, we have nothing to lose but our sectarian chains and a world to win. Top of the pageLast updated on 8.1.2005"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsThe Ideas of Leon Trotsky(Summer 1996)From Revolutionary History, Vol. 6 No. 2/3, Summer 1996, pp. 265-69.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Hillel Ticktin and Michael Cox (eds.)The Ideas of Leon TrotskyPorcupine Press, London, 1995, pp. 386, £14.95A QUARTER of a century ago in the publishing world Marxism was big. Almost anything that was not straight Stalinism found a publisher. Menshevik, Austro-Marxist, left Social Democrat, all was grist to the publisher’s mill. In particular, there was a good sale for books by and about Lenin and Trotsky. They led the field, and the rest were also-rans. Those days are long past, but I am pleased to see that genuine quality still sells, and Trotsky is most definitely quality. Indeed, it is clear that in the current popularity stakes he is well ahead of Lenin. It occurred to me, fleetingly, that this might be because Isaac Deutscher wrote three volumes on Trotsky, and Tony Cliff wrote four volumes on Lenin. Then I recalled that Cliff has also written a few volumes on Trotsky, which should have redressed the balance. Poor Lev Davidovich; after a life full of tragedy, that he should suffer the farce of being snipped by Cliff’s scissors and drowned in his paste.The Ideas of Leon Trotsky, a selection of articles from Critique, is one of the better examples of the genre, although I would not go so far as the editors, who claim in their introduction that it is “the most significant volume ever to be published on Trotsky”. One of the less endearing traits to be found in the revolutionary movement is the making of grandiloquent claims. Gerry Healy, for example, used to claim that he had “the finest political headquarters in Britain”. This would have been true if he had deleted “Britain” and inserted “Clapham High Street”, because it was certainly grander than the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s head office in the same street. Perhaps it would be better to say that it is the most significant volume on Trotsky ever edited by Hillel Ticktin and Michael Cox.While on the subject of the introduction, it might be as well to include another small niggle. On page one, as part of a generally laudatory paragraph about Trotsky, our editors feel moved to say: “Even his mistakes live on in the works of those who might not even be aware of Trotsky’s contribution to thought.” Try getting your mind round that after a few bottles of Carlsberg Special. Alternatively, try it stone cold sober. It seems to mean that there is someone – I picture an unworldly academic, in the public baths at Syracuse – who cries: “Eureka, I think Stalinist Russia is a workers’ state, better found the Fourth International.” Whether our idiot savant might further decide to stay away from Lenin’s funeral, and regret his failure to militarise labour, probably depends on whether he had overfulfilled his norm of mistakes for that week.As I say, though, these are really niggles, and the volume here under review is worth having. Whilst the content obviously represents the concerns of the editors, the contributors nevertheless do not all come from the same stable. We have, for example, an article by John Molyneux quite effectively taking Baruch Knei-Paz and his book, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, to the cleaners (why is it that whenever I hear the name Knei-Paz I think of the protection worn by carpet layers?). Immediately preceding this we have an article by David Law rubbishing Molyneux’s own book, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution. One assumes that this juxtaposition is intentional, but one hopes that it is not intended to cause offence.This is a collection that is, broadly, attempting to come to terms with the immensely rich, but extremely complicated and sometimes contradictory heritage of Leon Trotsky. Inevitably, it covers a lot of ground that has over almost 70 years been trampled to concrete hardness by the tiny feet of several generations of Trotskyists. The class nature of Russia and the satellites is raised by both Ticktin and Cox, and without too much difficulty they dispose of the “workers’ state” theory. If LDT was in error, he is at least awarded marks for his willingness to shift on the question, and for the indications he made that a Stalinist workers’ state was a special case, limited in time, a contradiction that would inevitably find its resolution in class-based exploitation or a second revolution. The bureaucratic collectivist thesis also comes in for some stick, and whilst state capitalism is not directly attacked, the secondary evidence suggests that at least the Cliff and Dunayevskaya variants are not acceptable either. Which might lead one to ask: “Tell us please, comrade editors, what is this bloody monstrosity then?”"
}
|
{
"content": "One feels this particularly in an otherwise excellent piece by Michael Cox, Trotsky’s Misinterpreters and the Collapse of Stalinism, in which he gives vent to the following statement: “Trotsky had few problems fending off critics such as Shachtman and Dunayevskaya because both individually and collectively they really didn’t provide much of a theoretical alternative.” Now it is perfectly respectable to prefer Trotsky’s arguments to Dunayevskaya’s state capitalism or Shachtman’s bureaucratic collectivism. The thing you cannot have, however, is Trotsky getting the better of them both, because he did not argue the Russian question with Dunayevskaya, and Shachtman did not adopt the bureaucratic collectivist theory until after LDT’s death. This is slipshod and a pity, because one is preoccupied with the howler, and is liable to miss the meat of the paragraph, which goes on to say something that is both true and needed saying: “This highly charged discussion, however, had a number of unfortunate consequences. Most obviously, it tended to push Trotsky and his followers into an ideologically rigid mould from which they never escaped. It also made the whole debate on Stalinism highly sectarian. Thus what began life as a potentially fruitful dialogue on the left about the nature of Socialism was soon transformed into a sterile fight between ideological militants who neither cared nor listened to what their opponents had to say.” It is an unfortunate fact, here attested by Michael Cox, that each contending theory is far more convincing in its criticism of different evaluations than as a theory in its own right.The problem, though, was not only that the varying schools of thought could only contend at a distance, beyond the range of sticks and stones, but also that LDT taught his followers that nationalisation, plus planning, plus the monopoly of foreign trade were good and sufficient reasons for a nation to be hall-marked as a workers’ state. For Trotsky it may have been axiomatic that the working class had to be involved in creating this state of affairs, but unfortunately he did not say so. The export to Eastern Europe of these three elements, on the points of Russian bayonets, required orthodox Trotskyists to perform mental gymnastics to account for the post-war reality which would have done severe damage to any psyche less pliable than that of Ernest Mandel. In commenting on this phenomenon in the pages of the New International in 1948, Hal Draper quoted the immortal lines of Samuel Hoffenstein:The small chameleon has the knack,Of turning blue or green or black.And yet, whatever hue he don,He stays a small chameleon.Lines that have lost none of their resonance over the years.I particularly liked the essay by Lynne Poole, Lenin and Trotsky: A Question of Organisational Form, even if I hated the title. It argues persuasively that in the pre-1917 disputes, Lenin did not always have the best of the exchanges. This, of course, flies not only in the face of received wisdom in our tradition, but also the words of Trotsky himself. Regardless of all that, I confess I am with Lynne Poole on this one. It really is well past the time when we should stop making shamefaced excuses for What Is To Be Done?. Trotsky and Luxemburg were undoubtedly correct in their criticisms. It is an interesting fact of revolutionary group life that every small-time autocrat shows great enthusiasm for this work. Not only must the Socialist message be brought down from on high to the workers by benevolent non-proletarians, but it must be done again and again and again. Such munificence must, naturally, be rewarded by leadership, preferably in perpetuity. What can only be justified, if then, by the special case of Tsarist Russia acquires, for the faithful, all the strength of an Eleventh Commandment with universal application. In the process, great chunks of Marxism, like the dialectic, are flushed away. Incidentally, another slightly different, but also excellent, treatment of this subject is to be found in Duncan Hallas’ article Building the Revolutionary Party (International Socialism, no.79, June 1975). This, which purports to be a review of the first volume of Cliff’s Lenin, is both eminently sane and a salutary lesson in tightrope walking that would have made Blondin look a right amateur.I am also indebted to Lynne Poole for calling to attention another example of Tony Cliff’s increasingly spastic sleights of hand. She mentions an article of 1901, that Trotsky had written in favour of a strong Central Committee, even going so far as to suggest that branches failing to accept the CC’s instructions should be cut off from the party. Unfortunately, this particular piece has been lost, and the sole evidence for its existence is Trotsky’s Report of the Siberian Delegation. Here Trotsky specifically refutes his article of 1901 in favour of the position set out in Our Political Tasks. This disavowed article of 1901 is, according to Cliff, Trotsky’s real position, and his attack on What Is To Be Done? was merely an expression of his affection for Martov. The reason for Cliff’s retailing this load of old cobblers is probably because some years ago in the first flush of his renewed love affair with Vladimir Ilyich, while writing Volume One of his Lenin biography, Trotsky came off rather badly in the text. In his more recent biography of Trotsky, the main character emerges unsullied, a closet Bolshevik all the time. If this fantasy is intended to aggrandise Trotsky, it does nothing of the sort. We are expected to believe that LDT, a man of unflinching dedication to his politics, should have spent 14 years perpetuating a split with a powerful co-thinker, because Lenin had been nasty to his chum Martov. The notion is as insulting as it is grotesque. Apart from anything else, if there had been any truth in this story, it is certain that Trotsky would have found a way to use it in his defence against the accusations of anti-Bolshevism levelled by Stalin in the 1920s."
}
|
{
"content": "Trotsky’s conversion to Bolshevism, when it came, was root and branch. His encomium, “without the party we are nothing”, despite its all-embracing character, applies to just one party, the CPSU(b), and that judgement was time-bound in application. When it failed he built, in microcosm, parties on the same model, and, possibly because it was the only way he could play a rôle, there must be an International, a world centre to direct the coming revolution. To construct a chain with a small collection of weak links is to ensure that, at the first sign of strain, it will break into even smaller chains. The Fourth International is the (I almost said “living”) proof of this assertion. Given a certain generosity with the assumptions, it is of course a powerful idea, and one that still exercises the minds of some people; the break-up of the Workers Revolutionary Party, in the wake of Gerry Healy’s expulsion, has let loose on the world several additional sets of people, rebuilding, or reconstructing, or whatever you do to get a Fourth International. Experience does, however, suggest that proclamation is as good a method as any.Trotsky at least had the justification that, for him, capitalism was in its death agony and Stalinism would not survive the hammer blows of war; therefore the Fourth International had to be in place to try and lead the revolution. Unfortunately, when the war did come, the thing that succumbed first was the Fourth International, under the impact of Russia’s pre-emptive annexation of the Karelian Isthmus, which in terms of world war was hardly a hammer blow. Nevertheless, for Trotsky the stark choice was Socialism or barbarism, and no one else was even aware that a choice had to be made. What for him was a duty, an obligation, for his latter day disciples is more of a hobby. There are few things better calculated to keep a chap out of mischief than working up a few theses on the world economy, or revolutionary prospects in faraway countries of which he knows little.Of some interest too is Susan Weissman’s article, The Left Opposition Divided: The Trotsky-Serge Disputes – you will have gathered that the titles given to the articles are not the most inspired part of this volume – in which she details the rather extreme abuse that Trotsky heaped on the unfortunate Victor’s head, in such phrases as: “What do people of the Victor Serge type represent? ... these verbose, coquettish moralists, capable of bringing only trouble and decay, must be kept out of the revolutionary organisation even by cannon fire if necessary.” Susan Weissman suggests that some of this was due to misunderstanding, and some due to the machinations of Étienne (Mark Zborowski), Stalin’s agent in the Left Opposition in Paris, and she is probably right. What she does not mention is the fact that a number of people in Europe, including Trotsky’s son Sedov, were suspicious of the circumstances of Serge’s escape from Stalin’s clutches. Elizabeth Poretsky, who was married to Ignace Reiss, in her book, Our Own People, indicates that she wrote a report for Trotsky on Serge’s laxness in security matters. Walter Krivitsky also wrote a report for Trotsky, in which he came to the conclusion that Serge was a GPU agent. Henk Sneevliet, too, was convinced that there was a Stalinist agent in Sedov’s circle, finally and correctly concluding that it was Étienne. In all this welter of suspicion and accusation, very little of it susceptible to genuine proof, it was possible to see political disagreements as part of a cunning plan to sow discord in the ranks. Perhaps Serge was one of those innocents who needlessly suffered in an atmosphere poisoned by Stalinist terror.There is much more in this book that is interesting, stimulating and provocative. Paul Flewers has done an excellent job in producing a clean and attractive text. The cover, on the other hand, is a bit weird; it has a picture of Trotsky’s head wearing what looks like an astrakhan hat, which is in the process of melting all over his face. I know astrakhan hats do not melt, but this it what it looks like. On closer inspection, the offending fur turns out to be people’s heads. Perhaps I am old fashioned, but the symbolism of all this escapes me. Top of the pageLast updated on 29.9.2011"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsA Day with the Leadership(March 1968)From Labour Worker, March 1968.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.In the last ten years it has been my pleasure to attend conferences organised either directly by the Socialist Labour League or through one of its rapidly changing front organisations. Each conference was hailed as the most important working class gatherings to date, each conference hailed the new revolutionary leadership and at various times the cadre was to be replenished and expanded from dockers, building workers, the ‘revolutionary youth’, and, more recently, the left MP’s.It is my impression that SLL conferences are not what they used to be. Perhaps time is lending glamour to a failing memory, but the first such event I attended (the Newsletter Conference of 1958) was the best of the lot. The maturity of the delegates and the quality of their contributions was matched by the ability of the platform, which included Peter Fryer, Brian Behan and Harry Constable (all of them long gone from Clapham High Street).Measured by this standard, the February 3rd conference, held under the auspices of the Oxford Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unionism, was a sad degeneration. The speeches were poor stuff, many of the speakers were distinctly ‘revolutionary youth’ and a recent levy at that, the numbers were down and the platform speaker who announced 550 delegates should clearly stop counting feet and start counting heads.Now obviously these are not major questions for complaint. Numbers are not crucial to a successful conference and bad speeches which contain some thought and an attempt to contribute from real experience are always worthwhile. There were, however, only two such speeches – one from a provincial busman and another from R Hamilton of DATA.The first gave some indication of the difficulties in the busman’s fight. He explained how an overtime ban that took a third of the buses off the road resulted in far more work for the busmen, while revenue was little affected because more people crowded on the buses that remained on the road. The final decision to strike, with its consequent complete shutting off of revenue, brought the employers to heel in short order. This victory is real even though Cousin’s grotesque resort to the courts will obviously squander much of the advantage gained.Bob Hamilton made a closely reasoned and factual speech on the shipbuilding consortia on the Clyde and the employer/trade union leader drive for rationalisation and speed-up.That however was the lot and two speeches do not make a conference. For the rest we were treated to a farrago of ill-connected nonsense. The need for leadership renewal ran through the proceedings like Andrews through the alimentary tract. This intangible quality was seen to reside in the queerest places, at one stage it was the SLL, at another the Young Socialists and at another it was being constructed that very day in the deliberations.The Communist Party came in for its well-merited share of abuse (can it stand much more of this and live?) With some knockabout comedy at the expense of Dick Etheridge, which seemed to go down well with the locals. A new demon on the SLL index of untouchables is, apparently the ‘syndicalists’. At the first intimation of Healy’s latest anathema I was puzzled, assuming that the reference was to the few organised anarcho-syndicalists still extant, but by paying close attention I was able to unravel the mystery.The fractured logic seems to go something like this: syndicalists are anti-politics; the only real politics are SLL politics; therefore if you are opposed to SLL politics you are a syndicalist. As my old school-master used to say, there is a brain at work somewhere.Another piece of frivolity that had the faithful rolling in the aisles was the suggestion (seriously intended apparently) to reconvene the Labour party conference. This, it seems, is part of the campaign to expose the Wilson administration; that Wilson can no further on the road to self-exposure without eviscerating himself seems to be missed by the rising new leadership.A touch of light relief (and it was needed) came when an unemployed worker told the conference that the only organisation to help the unemployed was the ‘Socialist Labour Party’, a statement that may please the shade of De Leon, but is unlikely to win friends in the Socialist Labour League.But what comes out of all in this case is a meaningless committee with pretensions to national leadership firmly under the control of the SLL. The opportunist politics are the same; only the focus has been slightly shifted. The problems half raised and badly analysed at the conference do exist. But the fight against the employers and the Government is not helped by the arrogant assumption of leadership by those who have the greatest difficulty in coherently putting over their policy, particularly when that policy is an attempt to graft on to the actual needs of the situation the special interests of a small but hysterically vociferous organisation. Top of the pageLast updated on 1.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsR.P. Dutt: Stalin’s British Mouthpiece(February 1975)From International Socialism (1st series), No.75, February 1975.Transcribed by Mike Pearn.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.“He was the working class in action, with all the shackles and fetters fallen: he was the spirit of the future age living and acting today. And therefore, workers of the world do honour and will do honour to all that is most real and most imperishable in themselves and their own future.”Thus Rajani Palme Dutt in his final paragraph to an obituary of Lenin, published in April, 1924. It would be pleasant to say something, less grandiloquent perhaps, of like of Palme Dutt himself, now that he too is dead, if only because it is customary and well mannered. Unfortunately that is not possible. In his 60-odd years in the movement Dutt provides an object lesson in the politics of Stalinism and the abuse of great talent, in the service of those politics.Born in 1889, he took a first class honours degree at Oxford but a promising academic career was blasted when he was sent down for opposition to the 1914-18 war. In 1919 he was made international secretary of the Labour Research Department, a post where he contracted his life long love of all things Russian. A foundation member of the Communist Party, he almost certainly owed his advancement to his Russian connection. Despite his comparative youth and lack of following in the party he became in 1921, editor of the theoretical magazine Labour Monthly. The following year he was appointed chairman of the party commission on organisation. Together with Harry Pollitt and Hubert Inkpin he was charged with the task of implementing the organisational theses of the Comintern. After six months of almost continuous session Dutt drafted the report that was accepted without dissent by a special party conference. In many ways the report went a long way to overcome the loose federalism of the party’s geographical branches. Functional work groups, with effective command structures and reporting were established. Nevertheless, the report had a strong “Russian” flavour, in content if not in style. Not all the recommendations were implemented and even so subsequent party congresses were much exercised, mitigating the rigours of the “Dutt-Pollitt” report.In the streamlined “bolshevised” party that came out of the re-organisation, all three signatories reaped the reward of their work. Inkpin was elected chairman of the Central Control Commission Dutt and Pollitt were elected to the party executive. Thus started the long and close association between Dutt and Pollitt. Palme Dutt, the cool intellectual with a facility for theoretical exposition, with friends in the Kremlin and Pollitt the talented mass agitator and organiser.As a member of the executive and editor of Labour Monthly Dutt occupied the role of leading theoretician as populariser and apologist for the line of the Comintern in whatever direction it happened to be moving. Labour Monthly in the early years was required reading for anyone with a theoretical turn of mind and a desire to see theory turned into practice. At one time or another almost every ‘left’ wrote for the magazine, and in the process exposed themselves more effectively than volumes of marxist critique. At no time, however, did Labour Monthly stray far from the line of Palme Dutt’s Russian mentors. Not a single zig of Comintern policy, not yet a zag or even both at the same time failed to find support in the Notes of the Month modestly signed “RPD”. The Anglo-Russian Committee, policy towards the TUC “lefts”, the so-called “third period” policy of “class against class” and the “popular front”, all were joyfully taken on board and extolled as the latest revealed truth. Even so if the Notes were long, complex and seemed more an exercise in squaring the circle than dialectics they were interesting if only to try and see how the trick was done.As a fluent Russian speaker Dutt was well placed as a link with and interpreter of the directives emanating from Moscow. That this was not always appreciated by less loftily connected comrades is evident from the words of Ernie Cant (London District Secretary): “... once again Comrade Dutt intervenes at the last minute in a party discussion, crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s and giving pontifical blessing to Comrade Pollitt. But Comrade Dutt has not only been divorced from the masses he has been divorced from the actual life of the party for a considerable period – he knows only resolutions, theses, ballot results and newspaper clippings.” But as every Catholic knows and perhaps Ernie cant had forgotten, the “pontiff” gets his authority from God. RPD’s deity was in Moscow and smiling on his protegé.Interestingly enough the dispute that occasioned Cant’s outburst occurred in 1929. It concerned the lack of fervour with which the British CP leadership were introducing the “third period” policy. Dutt, Page Arnot and J.T. Murphy led the “ultra left” opposition of Comintern loyalists. So acrimonious did the dispute become that it finally had to be sorted out in Moscow. There the majority of the leadership were transformed into a minority. Harry Pollitt who changed sides just in time was made party secretary, the dissident ex-leadership being dumped.Always a prolific writer, Dutt was in his element justifying the unjustifiable during the whole of the “third period”. If party membership declined, and it did, the party was stronger, because purer. If fascism succeeded in Germany, all to the good because: “After Hitler, us”. In this last context Dutt spent some time preparing a book proving the objectively fascist nature of social democracy, only to find that when the volume was published the “third period” had evaporated into the gaseous vapours of the “popular front”. The prospect of such a failure of vision must disturb the sleep of all votaries of capricious gods.But the lurch from ultra-left idiocy of “social fascism” to the social pacifism of the “popular front” was a contradiction easily encompassed in Dutt’s own special dialectic."
}
|
{
"content": "Together with D.N. Pritt he was an enthusiastic apologist for the Moscow frame-up trials. Russian communists he had known, some as friends, disappeared in the horror of the great purge, not a words, not a whisper escaped Dutt’s lips or his pen to indicate anything but peace and socialist construction were going on in Russia under the avuncular beneficence of Joe Stalin.The fruitful partnership with Harry Pollitt was interrupted in 1939. Harry with a logicality that years or training had failed to completely overcome had decided, at the outbreak of hostilities, that the war being against fascists must be, an anti-fascist war and so proclaimed it. He had, however, neglected the fact that the Stalin-Ribbentrop pact had been signed. Germany and Russia had a non-aggression pact. Palme Dutt, more versed in the signals, characterised the war as “imperialist”. Pollitt was removed from the secretaryship and returned to boilermaking, while Dutt took over his job, a situation that lasted until Russia entered the war when its character was immediately transformed into an anti-fascist crusade.To chronicle each twist and turn of Palme Dutt’s devotion to the line from Moscow would be repetitive and tedious. Suffice to say his last big service to the Russian comrades was in 1956 when he stumped the country, attempting to calm the fears of party members distressed by Khruschev’s revelations at the 20th Party Congress and the Russian crushing of the Hungarian revolution. Palme Dutt’s discourse in justification of Stalin, was know as the “spots on the sun” speech. The sun, according to Dutt, is the source of energy, life, growth and was an all round good thing to have, nevertheless, there are spots on the sun: so it was with Stalin. The argument , for once, did not go down well with the comrades. Over 7,000 left the party and the monolith cracked in a way that defied restoration.Dutt went on of course, he still edited Labour Monthly and wrote his increasingly tedious Notes of the Month. But it was not the same. Russians with H bombs and Sputniks have less need of foreign communist parties. The central links weakened, the party virtually rudderless, discipline almost non-existent, Palme Dutt’s last days must have been sad indeed. He surfaced briefly in 1969 to attack the party leadership for not supporting the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia at the party congress that year. It was a last very faint hurrah.Intellectually Palme Dutt had all the equipment for penetrating analysis and a dedication worthy of better causes. He lived through and did his small part in assisting the degeneration of official Communism into the grotesque caricature that it is today.It is appropriate to conclude by quoting again from RPD’s obituary of Lenin, words that were strikingly prophetic and that he would have done well to have taken to heart.“Hideous things will be proclaimed and advocated in the name of Leninism. All the traitors to socialist principles will endeavour to hide themselves behind the man who was bigger than formulas. The audacious compromises of an indomitable fighter will be made the excuse for the dirty compacts of petty bargainers and timid self-seekers.” How very true. Top of the pageLast updated on 19.10.2006"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsHagiography or HistoryReview of Birchall’s History of IS(April 1976)From Workers League Bulletin, April 1976.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.If there is one thing that the revolutionary left requires it is a good, objective, Marxist history of the movement.Failing that a more restricted history, often the same rigorous intention, of one or other of the left’s component parts would not come amiss. To answer that second need presumably, Ian H. Birchall has produced his article on the History of the International Socialists – the second part of which is being reproduced by the Danish comrades and for which this article serves as an introduction. It would be pleasant to be able to say that Ian Birchall has overcome those difficulties, of the committed and partisan historian, that have afflicted so many others in the past. James Klugman, is one such that immediately springs to mind, his pious history of the CPGB seems to have got stuck somewhere between the General Strike and the Third Period, for obvious reasons. Even making allowances for his much more restricted space allowance, Ian Birchall does not escape the Klugman trap. It is I fear another work of piety, its omissions – to the initiated at least – more significant than its actual content.Its purpose is not to tell it as it was, so that we may the better order ourselves in the future, but to indicate to the faithful, and to the doubting, that all is well, that I.S. has an even, logical grasp on reality and always has had. That the sacrifice and the struggle are justified, the movement moving from change to consolidation and eventually to victory. Would that it were so.As one who was rather closer to the centre of IS affairs (from 1958 to 1976) than Ian Birchall I can say with some confidence that what appears, in the History, as an ever, ever upward, progression was in fact a series of episodic attempts to close with reality, too often botched and often-wrong. Increasing membership was all too often a species of “Lenin Levy” drive to bureaucracy, that is not mitigated now that membership has declined to little more than half its 1973 high point of 4,000.Of course, it would be unreasonable to expect the official, “short course”. History to be overly critical. It is reasonable, however, to expect some element of self criticism and a great deal less evasion and half truth. To illustrate this I would like to take several of the key issues raised in Birchall’s work. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, the Democratic Centralist debate, The Left Unity issue, the various Membership campaigns and the most recent faction fight with, and the expulsion of the IS Opposition, this last is diplomatically skirted around in a few less than well chosen words.The picture presented in the History, is one of great IS interest and involvement in the VSC. It is frankly not true. At the very outset of the VSC, a Bertrand Russell Foundation spokesman approached IS, as one of the larger and saner left organisations, to provide full time workers for the Campaign including the Secretary. This was refused, it would have involved working with British partisans of the Fourth International – at that time going through an ultra left student vanguard phase – and IS control was not assured. In the development of the campaign, IS was largely noticeable by its absence. Certainly IS participated in the Grosvenor Square demonstration and the massive (100,000) march to Hyde Park, but only as those accepting the accomplished fact of a growing movement, in which it might be possible to recruit. That species of opportunism has characterised IS attitudes to all too many other issues, Irish Solidarity, Troops Out Movement and earlier the Greater London Council Rents Campaign. The result of all this has been a failure to capitalise on whatever correct political analysis has been made, a growth of suspicion among the uncommitted and other left groups, and a reputation for good mannered sectarianism, which of late has lost a great deal of the good manners.On the issue of Democratic Centralism, Ian Birchall is certainly right to characterise this as a turning point in the life of IS but not to see it as any more than a very dubious, mixed blessing. Interestingly enough, the issue of Left Unity was very much intermingled with the internal shift in the IS regime. Democratic Centralism was not a response to the objective needs of the class struggle, an exercise in party building; it was in fact an exercise in inner group manoeuvring. At the time there had been an influx of young students, much exercised by the growth of racism, the May 1968 events in France and the wave of unrest in the universities. Generally ultra left by enthusiasm and inclination, they nevertheless accepted the important IS thesis of the central role of the working class as the active factor in revolutionary change. Numbers were involved in the campaign against rent rises. Others took a very ultra left position on the Labour Party and trade unions. As generally articulate and active elements they were, given the then federal structures of IS, most likely to form a significant minority, perhaps even a majority, of the policy making National Committee. It was in response to this danger that the democratic centralism debate was opened by Tony Cliff, with a one side of quarto collection of aphoristic notes on the question. The storm that greeted this was considerable and the debate went on for over a year. The issue and the contestants were very evenly divided, with such weighty figures as Michael Kidron and Peter Sedgwick supporting the federalist case."
}
|
{
"content": "It was at this point that the Unity of the Left issue was raised. The main target of this “unity offensive” was the then recently formed IMG. This group had displayed some success in the VSC and were attracting numbers of youth and students. As a section of the FI, and. therefore committed to the notion of democratic centralism, they would provide a useful, no doubt decisive counter weight to the libertarian federalists. Thus the four points for unity, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-state control of trade unions and for workers’ control, were coined. They avoided such key obstacles to unity as the FI, state capitalism and other theoretical differences. In the event the IMG refused, although some of their members were captured. All that came of it was the accession of the very small Matgamna group (Workers’ Fight), who were inducted, against the wishes of the IS Executive, as a result of a private deal between Cliff and Matgamna which allowed them to join as individual members.Once joined the Workers’ Fight comrades formed their own faction, the Trotskyist Tendency, which immediately lined up with a group of ultra Bolsheviks, a leading member of which as I recall was Ian Birchall. In and of itself none of this is worth very much more than a footnote in a boring academic treatise. But what is important is that the grand principles, bolstered by historical references to Lenin and Trotsky and countered by Luxemburg and Johnson-Forrest, were reflections of an idiosyncratic view about what was necessary to build the group, rather than an objective assessment of what was required in a real world.It is possible to trace the subsequent difficulties of IS, its internal wrangles and current autocratic regime, insulated from working class reality, to the actual lessons for the democratic centralist debate, the method of its conduct and its outcome, which, in terms of members lost, was much greater than Birchall allows.There is a myth, perpetuated by every sectarian and organisational fetishist, that democratic centralism is a set of principles acceptance of which is the sine qua non of revolutionary purity. According to this myth, Lenin elucidated the organisational question for us way back in the past and all we have to do is to fit our current problems into some past Bolshevik experience. It is of course nonsense and pernicious nonsense at that. The debate of 1903 is not only irrelevant to today’s concerns but as irrelevant in 1903, as all the participants – including Lenin – acknowledged. The very idea that dead 70 year old controversies should animate and guide present day revolutionaries should be the object of derision for Marxists.Democratic Centralism cannot be defended according to a simple set of rules culled from the experience of Russian social democracy in 1903 or1917 for that matter and then rigidly applied in a British context in 1976: The command structure of emigré Russian Bolshevism has no place, is indeed counter-productive, in a country with a sophisticated working class, operating under conditions of bourgeois democracy. It is not only unnecessary but alien to the working class tradition in Britain, whose study has always taken second place to the pre-1917 disputes of Russian social democracy.Democratic centralism is the self imposed willingness to act in solidarity with others as the result of free, open and structured discussion, there is no way, short of surgery, that minds can be changed because of some imperative command from an immaculate central committee. Any other definition sets aside Marxism and makes us devotees of a form of church where we wait for a pontiff to tell us God’s will.The current IS cant on the subject: “Discussion of disputed questions inhibits our capacity to act”, leaves out of account the loss inherent in acting blind, without maps or a compass. The so called “Leninist” form of democratic centralism is clearly not essential to revolutionary growth, witness the fact that IS managed to exist for nearly 20 years of its existence, without recourse to its rigours. The more that IS insists on alleged Leninist forms, of late, the more its external influence and membership declines.There is, in revolutionary groups, a great dilemma which involves the contradiction between building a stable apparatus and, at the same time, involving the worker members in the vital process of decision making and action. The revolutionary worker by definition works and is political exactly because of his experience as a militant against capitalism in his factory or workplace. In addition he will inevitably acquire trade union and related commitment in his spare time. By the limitation of his life, he is unable to devote the attention to the reading, attendance at meetings and discussions that gives him the facility to argue against the sophisticated eloquence of the middle class functionary. Even, in the few cases where workers have left industry to take on full time work for the movement he finds that by doing so he ceases to be a worker.Interestingly enough, it is the case that every worker who has worked full time for IS, in a leadership capacity no longer does so, most are no longer in IS. The current IS central committee contains not one single worker, although there are a couple of postgraduates who have performed a ritual stint in industry before taking on a full time revolutionary post.That would be of less significance if there were special arrangements made to consult with, to submit policy to, to learn from, the worker members. In fact the development has been entirely in the opposite direction. Last year the sole remaining vehicle for workers to express some sort of control, the National Committee was dispensed with to be replaced by an “Advisory” Council."
}
|
{
"content": "Today the only effective policy body is the six man C.C., which has absolute control between annual conferences, resting its authority on some half learned and ill assimilated lesson from Lenin’s Collected Works. It seems to pass their comprehension that the occasionally dubious organisational practices of Lenin were not justified in the eyes of history because in his hands they somehow became good, but because in 1917 the revolution was actually made. I see no Lenins around today, although I do see a number of dubious organisational practices. In particular, the epigones and pretenders seem most unfitted to make another revolution in Britain or anywhere else.The building of a revolutionary organisation is, in fact, not in discovering the quickest way to come to decisions. It is the patient development of policy through bringing everyone involved into the decision making process. The bigger and more important the organisation the greater the need for such care.If this is not done we have the manifestation of the small group psychology. The revolutionary functionary lives in a close and closed peer group. His life becomes the small change of inner party concerns and gossip. In that hothouse all manner of exotic thoughts can bloom, that would be impossible in the colder atmosphere in the workers movement. Cut off from the sources of reality, the limits of ambition become the limits of imagination. They are internal emigrés and the dog days of bolshevism are recreated by choice rather than necessity.For myself, I reject this completely. Democratic Centralism can only be the method, whatever rules are appropriate at any time or place, by which the worker members and militants can be involved in policy decisions and action.Similar mistakes were made during the years of the Tory government from 1970 to 1974. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the various membership campaigns. The procedure was described by one member driven to despair as: “Find a picket line and then throw a handful of membership cards at them, if anyone picks one up give him another five cards for his mates.” If that is an exaggeration it is not much of one. During the growing working class offensive against the Industrial Relations Act and the mass strikes against pay restraint a whole new audience was opened up to revolutionary activists. Instead of developing a serious recruitment policy that carefully explained the long term perspective, IS relied on emotional meetings reducing complicated political questions to demands or more and better industrial militancy. In the overheated atmosphere of such meetings, which frequently gave the impression of revivalist fervour, quite large numbers joined, who were never seen again. At the height of this spasm in 1973 IS organisers in the provinces were subjected to the pressure of a league table system, in which good marks and praise were accorded for members recruited. Inevitably those most praised were those with the sharpest pencils and the easiest way with spurious claims. There was no attempt to monitor or check the results, no recognition that the organiser who recruits a convenor in a car factory, after some months of careful political discussion, has probably done a better job than the man who in the same time recruits fifty none of whom stay more than a few weeks. The membership campaigns were in fact exercises in membership turnover; which in 1973 amounted to over 1,500 members. Not only that the emphasis on showy but shallow successes placing, as it did, the emphasis on undirected activism was the issue that caused considerable disquiet in the leading committee. As a result those leading figures, like Cliff, who had placed greatest stress on the issue of democratic centralism, operated – effectively – outside the ambit of the Executive Committee, discipline and collective responsibility became the duty of those who disagreed, whether a majority or not, while free action and indiscipline was reserved with those claiming self appointed political rectitude. This apotheosis of hard necked individualism was, whenever it was questioned, justified by reference to Lenin and his injunction on the necessity of breaking discipline in the greater interest of the revolution. This anecdotal method of analysis which had been used to demand a politically elected leadership was, in its turn, in 1973-4 used to justify a federally based Executive composed of full time workers from the “leading areas”. By further reference to the Collected Works that federal EC was discarded in short order for an EC based on function in the central apparatus, IS Journal editor, SW editor, industrial organiser, etc. These absurd and frequent shifts gave rise to disillusion and mistrust. The expression of one or two individuals prejudices and impatience. Collective leadership, under such circumstances, becomes a screen for manipulation and the expression of political differences in personalised terms. In the process, effectiveness is damaged, and the principles and objectives lost sight of.Frenetic hopping from one issue to another, one set of leaders to another; from one ill-conceived campaign to the next can appear to be no more than the expression of personal disorder in the leading comrades. In fact it has a logic and an inevitability. It stems from the notion of the vanguard party as the sole repository of the historic experience of the class. It follows from this that the party cannot be wrong. At the same time the party contains a diversity of opinion and experience which if much more homogenous than that in the class as a whole, is nevertheless very real. Any internal divergence must therefore be mitigated by the leadership, circumvented or expelled. If that divergence enters the leadership itself then the only true ark of the covenant must be carried on by the most experienced and prestigious member of the leadership. The result centralism, let alone democratic centralism, is destroyed."
}
|
{
"content": "It was exactly this syndrome that afflicted IS in the faction fight with the IS Opposition. The ISO argued, in the wake of the Tory defeat in February 1974 that the new Labour administration would have a very long honeymoon period in which, by their special relationship with the trade union bureaucracy, they would far more effectively damp down industrial and political militancy. In such circumstances the emphasis should be less on campaigns and more on the unspectacular but more fruitful work among the worker militants, shop stewards and trade union activists. The real tasks, said the ISO, was the construction of a genuine rank and file movement that would be capable of initiating the trade union struggle abdicated by the trade union leaders. In the process the rank and file movement would be forced to develop a politics that would act as the bridge to revolutionary activity. That of course would require a great deal of patient explanation, a serious analytical style in the paper, less denunciation more explanation.Counterposed to this, the leadership put forward the perspective of a short term honeymoon, followed rapidly by a resurgence of mass industrial struggle. In that perspective there was not time for the patient work of explanation, agitation was the watchword, the propaganda of the deed paramount. The trade unions, the shop stewards it was seriously argued have been rotted by full employment and thirty years of reformism. The new element the youth, traditionless and therefore revolutionary, inexperienced and therefore undaunted by the forces arrayed against them, in which presumably was numbered the middle aged militants. The paper should therefore contain short jazzy agitational articles in line with this infectious, youthful activism. Great hopes, even promises, were, held out that this would result in the increase of circulation to 80,000 perhaps over 100,000. (It is ironic to note that at the time of the debate the paper’s circulation was 40,000 and today is down to 20,000).It will be noted that in this little debate the IS group had come full circle. At the time it broke with the Fourth International in 1950 the comrades had argued that state capitalism was the only theory that could arm the movement against the tendency to substitute non proletarian forces for the working class. In 1975 we find that the working class had acquired a new surrogate in the form of “revolutionary youth”. The organisation then had triumphed but socialist prospects had taken a severe knock.All of this is a great pity and a great crime. The International Socialists were the most impressive group on the revolutionary left in Britain. Theoretically superior, organisationally more tolerant and politically more flexible, it had an attractive force denied the more orthodox and rigid competitors. With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to see all manner of faults in the early years of IS, but none of these was as significant as the misconceived breakthrough to an ill-understood example of the Leninist model in 1968-69. It is not necessary to find in this the great political error, to dignify it by reference to the alien pressure of capitalism, except in the sense of general cultural loss within capitalism. The same things occur in tennis clubs and other social groupings. The trouble is that IS that could have been so much more., has sacrificed its chance at a small but organic relationship with advanced workers for an internal homogeneity that stifles criticism and eventually sacrifices growth.Ian Birchall’s article does not refer to these problems except in the most exculpatory way but it will not be wasted if it causes those with the willingness to think again. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsThe unionsTUC Running Scared(December 1975)From the Spectator, 13 December 1975, p.755.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Official statistics are truly wonderful not just the ones that tell us we have two and a half children, but those trade figures, cost of living indices and the like. They have such an air of certainty about them, inspiring confidence in the statisticians, if not the facts they reveal. Governments, who normally have the appearance of bemused incompetence, display great expertise in taking all credit for good sets of figures which, they manage to suggest are a tribute to their wise and prudent stewardship. While bad figures call forth stern warnings not to he misled by one month’s returns, which are distorted by unique, unrepeatable factors. With these reservations in mind, and leaving aside the nagging doubts engendered by the Treasury’s seeming capacity to lose £4,000 million in their accounts, it could prove instructive to examine some of the figures released last week by the Department of Employment. Not just the figures but some of the surrounding circumstances.First of all, you will he pleased to hear that by April 1975 the average male worker in this country had broken through the £3,000 per year wage barrier. Up to that date the average male’s weekly increase for the year was £13.10, several percentage points above the cost of living increase. Beside giving some added credibility to the ‘wage push’ theorists this fact pays a tribute to the effectiveness of trade union pressure during the period. Even more it points to the pressure during the period. Even more it points to the altruism being displayed by trade unionists in their acceptance of the £6 limit. For, since July this year there have been no increases over the limit and several below it. That represents the reversal of a trend, since the war, for wage increases to be based on last year’s claim plus a bit more for expanding living standards.This “ragged trousered philanthropy” is not unknown in the trade union movement. It has been displayed at the cost of great sacrifice in two world wars and, in peace, to the greater glory of several Labour administrations. In the post-war Attlee government. Sir Stafford Cripps, a vegetarian who considered snoek a gastronomic indulgence, was able to impose a crude wage freeze that held for some time. During the early days of the first Wilson Administration, a great fund of good will was expended in voluntary restraint. So great was this in some trade union quarters, that one union insisted on taking less than it could have obtained for a section of its members, because to do so would have exceeded the 5 per cent norm.Of course none of this lasted for very long. Pent up demand and rising expectation always broke through after a year or so. Each new attempt to control wages found the price of trade union acceptance a little higher. More and more it became necessary, not just to consult but to involve in wider and wider areas of policy, the TUC and trade union leadership, and to accept TUC social policy objectives as those of the government.Nice though this may be for Congress House mandarins, it does carry with it some disadvantages. The closer the coincidence of view between government and unions, the greater their mutual dependence, the wider the gap between the trade union leadership and the activist rank and file member in the branches and shop steward committees. The TUC’s commitment to the £6 limit and deferred reflation, with its concomitant of even higher unemployment, will inevitably bring them into greater conflict with dissident minorities within the union.This problem, of the dissident minority and how to deal with it has exercised the mind of a whole swathe of academics, a Royal Commission, countless politicians and leader writers. One short answer, favoured during Mr Ray Gunter’s time at the Ministry of Labour, canvassed at the Donovan Commission on Trade Unions, was to give the trade union leadership powers, through encouragement of the closed shop, to discipline and remove from employment any troublesome elements.There is, though, a problem in attempting to discipline the active militants. In almost all unions the militants are the chaps who earn the right to be listened to by their fellows by carrying out the vital but very tedious work of local administration, sub collection and so on. Most negotiations with management are carried out by lay union officers, which makes them popular with the lads and essential to the functioning of the trade union. Without them several trade unions would falter and fail and the rest would be very ineffective indeed. Not only this, the avenue of communication with the average member is through these activists. Press and television appearances are no substitute for the union network, media communication is part of the public relations effort rather than an attempt to disseminate information.This problem may be further illuminated by smother brief glance at the DE statistics. They indicate that there was a distinct lowering of days lost in strikes in October. At 278,000 it was the lowest for five years. Only 32,000 workers were involved in the comparatively small number of 110 disputes. All of this would tend to prove that unemployment is biting deep in the consciousness of industrial workers. A more significant fact about these same figures is that there were nearly as many strikes over redundancy problems as there were over money. If this tendency continues we will be able to learn the bitter truth that redundancy strikes are as destructive as money strikes.Again, on the same day as the DE figures were released, a very large demonstration of trade unionists marched on the House of Commons to protest at unemployment levels. The TUC had publicly and loudly dissociated themselves from this enterprise. Circulars had been sent to all branches of affiliated unions indicating the TUC’s displeasure with the demonstration. Despite this some 20,000 workers took the well worn road from Euston to Westminster."
}
|
{
"content": "A manifestation of this size is not easily explained away as Mr Murray attempted to do, by references to sinister extremists. The extremists, no matter how sinister, would have considerably difficulty getting two men and a dog to demonstrate on say the £6 limit but on unemployment they are cutting with the grain. Mr Murray’s horrid dilemma was nicely displayed in the statement he issued shortly after the demonstration had passed Congress House shouting: “Murray Out” He said “Unemployment is unacceptably high ... the proposals the TUC will put to Mr Healey will be consistent with the need to beat inflation, not promote a consumption-led boom.” Translated into language trade unionists will understand that means the TUC is as committed to the government, and rising unemployment, as is the government to the TUC. They will sink or swim together. If they do sink, on a wave of rank and file, trade union revulsion, it is highly unlikely that Mrs Thatcher will benefit very much from the resultant mess. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsWorkers’ power or jobs for the boys?(29 March 1969)From Socialist Worker, No. 115, 29 March 1969, p. 3.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Control or participation? As the Workers Control conference meets this weekend, JIM HIGGINS suggests there is some confusion on the LeftIN RECENT YEARS workers’ control has acquired a more general currency in trade union and political discussion than it has enjoyed since the period leading up to the First World War.The notion of workers’ control that has been kept alive through the dead years in the small circles of the Left now emerges to be taken up and transformed to its opposite by every trade union and Labour opportunist with a sharp eye for the main chance.‘Industrial democracy’ is the cry from Jack Jones of the TGWU. Participation is the cry of almost any vice-chancellor suffering the onslaught of the student militants.The Liberals weigh carefully the relative merits of shareholders and workers and decide, with some justice, that the man who gives his labour to an industry should have more rights than the man who just gives his money.In all of this there is something missing – real control. The elaborate blueprints for workers’ representatives on management boards, shares for the workers and variations on the theme of advisory councils all leave aside the question of power and who exercises power.In all societies with any pretensions to development, power is not exercised by the man with the biggest muscles. (If that were the case, Mohammed Ali would be President of the USA – not a bad idea at that.) ControlIn the capitalist system power is exercised by the capitalists not because they are tougher a because they know more about the industries they own (frequently they know nothing) but because they control the state.In Britain today the police, the judges and the army are there to ensure that the capitalist system remains. The comparative liberality of the state machine and its alleged neutrality will last as long, and not one minute longer, as the system is not seriously challenged.From the Weimar Republic to Hitler Germany was but a short step. The police, the judiciary and the army were, with minor alterations, composed of the same people; the only difference was that, under the Nazis, they were operating a militant defence of German capitalism.To imagine that it is possible to legislate changes in effective control is to cast doubts on one’s good sense and it is not the good sense of the supporters of participation that we need to doubt.Their notion is to change nothing. Workers’ representatives on management boards may give the impression of control while effectively disarming or degutting the representative. OperateIf the bosses have the majority their only need for us is to provide a smokescreen behind which they can operate. If the workers have a majority they do not need the bosses, but to hold their control of the enterprise they must control the state.The role of the worker director, in the capitalist enterprise, is merely a reversal of the historical role of the harlot: responsibility without power.A very real problem for trade unionists at any level of contact with management is to avoid accepting the bosses’ aims for those of the workers.The pattern is set right at the top with trade union leaders taking their fat salaries for jobs on NEDDY, the IRC, the CIR and any other government sponsored body that can be utilised to bring the unions into closer contact with the government and its policies.The fundamental policies of British capitalism are invariably taken with some tame trade unionist to second the decision. DeniesThe idea of a national interest that stands above class lies at the bottom of the philosophy of participation. The individual may achieve harmony and agreement with the bosses only to the extent that he denies the class interests of his fellow workers.Capitalist interests are fundamentally different and opposed to working-class interests and the final resolution of those differences will not come in cosy chats in the board room but in the streets and on the factory floor.Anyone who adopts a class position on workers’ control is eventually faced with the question of what to do about it now. It is clear that although militancy is rising in the face of capitalist rationalisation, most workers are not yet convinced of the need to struggle for state power.But, between the existing situation and the fight for control of the state there are a number of useful and instructive struggles that can be fought against management prerogatives.Control over hiring and firing, grading, overtime and speed-up are all matters that are most hard fought in any industry. The struggle to wrest control over these factors of the workers’ everyday life completely from the employer’s grasp, to remove, if only partially, the employer’s stranglehold on the workers’ life in the factory,is a policy that nearly all workers will recognise as worthwhile and worth fighting for.And in the process they might well develop the muscles and the will to do away with the employers altogether. DisciplineIn many of the struggles, big and small, that take place today, control of the day to day life on the job is the major component of the strike. At Ford the battle was not so much about the size of the increase and the differential with the Midland car factories but about how far management would be allowed to go in disciplining the workforce.Whatever the formal result of the official discussions (and there is room for criticism of Scanlon and Jones for their acceptance of back-door penal conditions) it is clear that from a situation where the workers were defending their position against a management attack they are now in a position to mount an offensive against Ford rationalisation and denial of shopfloor organisation.The nonsense of the remote official machinery has been exposed and broken irreparably.The struggle for real control is continuous and will continue while society is divided into classes."
}
|
{
"content": "The Labour and trade union fakers who see ‘participation’ as the soft option that will give content to their demagogy are either daft or deluded.To elect a worker director is to change nothing and will give nobody any sense of participation. It will merely serve to emphasise the desperate stupidity of our captains of industry and their labour lieutenants. Top of the pageLast updated on 26 October 2020"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsThe lessons of Linwood(February 1976)From the Spectator, 14 February 1976, p.16.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.GlasgowWorking in a car factory is not very pleasant – computerised production lines, repetitive work in noisy and unpleasant conditions frequently add up to a Modern Times type of alienation. The spectacular strike record of most of our motor car factories gives eloquent testimony to the fact that, even given the financial loss, it is pleasant to stop occasionally. At the Chrysler Linwood factory they have, in addition to the standard aggravations, difficulties peculiar to Linwood.Opened in 1962, with the aid of large lumps of government money, it was intended to provide an alternative source of employment to the declining heavy industry of the Clyde. The factory, like Linwood town itself, looks as if it were put up in a bit of a hurry. Like some single-crop, banana republic its future was invested in one model, the Imp.The labour force was “green”, not I hasten to add unskilled – the Clyde probably has more-timed-served workers than anywhere else, but certainly unused to modern mass production methods. The management were not “green” in the same way, but they certainly were not familiar with the robust independence of Glasgow workers.The Imp was basically as good a small car as you could buy, but it had too many teething problems in its design, it was probably too late and, in any event, it never seriously challenged the Mini.With all of these difficulties of settling down it is not very surprising that industrial relations at Linwood were not very good from the beginning. It may surprise a number of people without much knowledge of the situation, among whom we can clearly count Messrs Varley and Wilson, that over the last three years there has been very little native industrial disruption. Such stoppage as there have been were a result of difficulties outside Linwood.The slow but steady course of Chrysler in the direction of the knackers’ yard, over the last couple of years, has not been lost on the workforce. Before Christmas 1975 the men were on a three-day week. When they left for the Christmas holiday it was assumed by many that there would be no company when they returned.In January there was more three-day working and the trauma of the Varley-Riccardo talks. Those talks, fate and Mr Harold Lever’s faith in private enterprise resulted in the £162 million rescue bid which, incidentally, has a certain crazy logic about it. To let Chrysler go to the wall would have cost £150 million in lost revenue and unemployment payments, not to mention the loss of the Shah of Persia’s big order for cars.Whatever the merit of the rescue operation, it was accepted by the somewhat punch-drunk Linwood workers, even though it carried the condition of 1,300 redundancies. Surprisingly, 2,300 volunteered to be made redundant – a response to the apparent lack of enthusiasm for Chrysler’s future shown by a number of government ministers, not least by Mr Varley. The attitude of several workers I spoke to was, “Why wait until everybody is sacked before looking for another job”.It is against the background of these events that the latest Chrysler strike must be viewed. The sequence of events is complicated, but suffice it to say that there is good and sufficient evidence to conclude that the workers’ representatives were convinced that their long-standing, factory agreement and disputes procedure were being cavalierly treated by a local management, who were themselves the helpless creatures of the overall Chrysler UK management.Matters were not at all improved by the statement made by the abrasive Mr Don Lander that: “We are here to make cars, not to go through procedures.” Whatever the subtleties of this phase of the dispute, and they will elude all but the dedicated, the Chrysler managers were obviously expecting an early cave-in by the hired help. Their expectations were, in the event, sadly disappointed. Glasgow workers and Chrysler men are nothing if not Glasgow workers, have a tradition of independence and a predeliction for complicated argumentOnce the idea got abroad that the management were attempting to renege on agreements then the old Adam was roused. Craft skill and basic trade unionism are matters that bite deep on the Clydeside consciousness. Whatever psychological victory might have been won in the effete south was not possible at Linwood. A mass meeting almost unanimously, decided for strike action. Even then the stewards, who were as well aware as anybody of the precarious state of the company, begged the management to reconsider but without success.The strike was on and so, also, was a rather unpleasant press campaign against the Chrysler strikers. The Evening Standard produced a cartoon by Jak, which showed mindless elements rushing over a precipice above the heading “Linwood lemmings”. The Daily Mail went one better and described them as nation-wrecking mercenaries. None of this was lost on the workers, who had one or two less publicised and unprintable things to say about the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail.The comments of Mr Varley and Harold Wilson, who both suggested that the blame lay with the strikers, left out of account the point made with some force by Norman Buchan (MP for the constituency) that employers do not strike very often, they have other methods of exerting pressure, while for workers it is sometimes the only answer that they have.In the outcome the strike that started off for a few pounds and was then elevated to a matter of principle was settled by the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service. The men got the cash and retained their agreements. A complete victory you might think. Funnily enough the stewards are not crowing over this “victory”. As John Carty, the convenor says: “We want to build cars, that is how we earn our living. We did not want this strike and it is certainly no precedent for the future”. I, if nobody else, believe him."
}
|
{
"content": "If the workers side can be absolved from most of the blame, apart from a certain ingrained stubborness, then what of the management. Perhaps it is that after driving Mr Varley and the government, against their will, into the rescue plan they felt confident enough to take on the workforce at LinwoodIn his statement issued just after his ignominious defeat Mr Lander, in an attempt to make the best of a bad job, claimed that the strike had now made it possible to start serious negotiations with National trade union officials on a number of outstanding problems. If this is so it seems a very expensive way of communicating with national officials, even given the cost of first class post these daysThe suggestions that the strike may well have cleared the air in such a way as to facilitate the smooth introduction of the Avenger line later this year has the strong feel of post facto rationalisation. Whatever the Chrysler UK tactics may have been, there can be little doubt that there are a few uneasy heads among the management this week.The moral of the story is quite a simple one, even if it has escaped Harold Wilson this time. Trade unionists may well bend quite a lot in the face of rising unemployment, but while they are still actually in a job they will not lightly let go of that which they think they have won. At Linwood the retreat was genuine enough, but it was certainly not a rout.Nor can it be said, as Wilson suggested last Thursday that they are idle. For a mixed production line, the Linwood track is the fastest in Europe, turning out some 60 cars an hour. It might be a good idea now if everybody, including politicians and journalists, shut up and let them get on with producing cars. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsSeamen back from the brink(September 1976)From the Spectator, 18 September 1976, p.16.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.The National Union of Seamen is an interesting little union. Its history is studded with examples of its willingness to be very unpopular with the rest of the trade union movement. Under its then General Secretary, Havelock Wilson, it was expelled from the TUC in 1926. Much more recently it was expelled for registering under the Tory Industrial Relations Act. A very long time ago one of its officials tried to shoot Emmanuel Shinwell, who happened to be running a rival Seaman’s Union at the time. All of which seems to indicate a certain spirit of independence among seafarers.Most recently, of course, they have been brought back from the brink of a very damaging strike through the combined blandishments and bullying of the General Council of the TUC.In the brief time that is left to us, before the next crisis occurs, it might be as well to consider one or two questions arising from the recent unpleasantness. For a start there is the strange lassitude displayed by the Government. From their conduct, one might imagine that the business, of imports and exports was the sole concern of Len Murray and Jack Jones. The Government’s sole contribution to the dispute seems to have been the rather negative stratagem of not supporting the pound, apparently in the hope of convincing the seamen of the gravity of the situation. A ploy that was almost certainly quite lost on Mr Jim Slater (NUS General Secretary) and that almost as certainly contributed to the smart rise in Minimum-Lending Rate.In a way, even stranger is the conduct of the TUC. Those with good memories may recall that the TUC is the central trade union body designed to improve the pay and conditions of Trade Unionists. For the present they have taken on the role, traditionally by employers and governments, of saying “No” to demands for more money. All of this in defence of a demonstrably feeble Labour government, the strict letter of the social contract, and a handful well-worn truisms.It is a piece of received wisdom, for example, that if the seamen get £2 extra, then the gates will be opened to a tidal wave of excessive wage claims. Now this can only be true if there are large numbers of trade union leaders anxiously awaiting the chance to break the social contract. Such willingness is obviously the case in the NUS; not so in the overwhelming majority of unions.There will of course always be unofficial strikes but these alone cannot cause wages explosions, for that you need large-scale official action.What is true that the TUC, in their anxiety to ensure adherence to the strict letter of the contract have made of the seamen a cause célèbre, and pointed to the prospect of obtaining benefits other than those by the social contract. Now this sort of gap in the fabric of the contract is just the sort of thing that quite a few groups of workers are looking for and no doubt we shall be hearing more such cases in the future.The NUS executive now occupy a rather enviable position They will be able to represent themselves as being held back by the diktat of the TUC while avoiding the ignominy of a long drawn-out, probably unsuccessful, strike. Not only that: as Mr Jim Slater has said the net result of the TUC investigations will probably be rather more money spent on the seamen than if their original case had been met in full. As employers usually discover to their cost special payments (in the NUS case, captive time, waiting time and improved pensions) are difficult to quantify accurately and inevitably cost more than originally planned.The whole case, represents a useful insight into the bureaucratic mind. The essence of the bureaucrats problem is not to ensure that money is not spent but that it should not be spent under a particular label. Like so much in trade union negotiation, the effort expended is to find an appropriate formula rather than a just solutionFor the fact of the matter is that the seamen have suffered rather a rough deal. Their 1975 settlement was large but split into three parts, because the employers were pleading poverty. After some heart-searching the NUS agreed to defer their enjoyment of the full settlement. This generous gesture was turned against them by the introduction of the social contract and its twelve month rule. Which of course brought them smartly up against the flinty-hearted TUC.It is very much an open question as to whether the non-support of the TUC would have materially affected the course of the strike had the seamen decided to go it alone. No doubt Jack Jones would have instructed his docker members to cross NUS picket lines. But the dockers even today have a very strong aversion to “blacklegging”. It would have been interesting to see whether Mr Jones had more control in the docks, than the rank and file militants. That is certainly an open question.But these are but interesting speculations. The strike has been deferred for at least a fortnight, and probably for ever. In the process of this little comedy of errors, the government has proved cowardly, the TUC has proved itself inflexible, and the seamen have done rather well. If it is a story without heroes, it has at least has a victor. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsThe Prophet’s Children(Winter 1995/96)From Revolutionary History, Vol. 6 No. 1, Winter 1995/96, p. 197 200.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Tim WohlforthThe Prophet’s Children: Travels on the American LeftHumanities Press, New Jersey, 1995, pp. 332ACCORDING TO Robert Louis Stevenson: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.” Whatever universal validity this particular aphorism may possess, it is the one that immediately sprang to mind when I read this account of Tim Wohlforth’s travels through the wide Sargasso Sea of Trotskyism. He travelled far and he laboured mightily, and nobody could have had higher hopes for the marbled splendour of the destination, until finally, after 30 years, he arrived at the low-rise squalor of reformism. Such a well-trodden path, such an irritating inevitability.In 1953 Tim Wohlforth joined the Independent Socialist League, purveyors of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism – originated by Bruno Rizzi, codified by Joe Carter, modified by James Burnham, brought to full fruition by Max Shachtman, and most recently adopted by Sean Matgamna. For sure, the ISL was one of the better choices for a young comrade to make. It had a relaxed internal regime and a number of very talented and intelligent members, all with a profound knowledge of the movement. Unfortunately, by 1953 Shachtman was beginning the process of dumping the organisation into the soft, soggy lap of the American Socialist Party. In 1958, having signed a humiliating document which denied all connection with Lenin or revolutionary Socialism, Shachtman was allowed to take his depleted forces into the Socialist Party/Social Democratic Federation. As it happens, the SP/SDF was in an even more dilapidated condition than the ISL, and within not too long the Shachtmanites were in control, not, as you might imagine, to turn it to the left, but further to the right, aligning it even more firmly with the Democratic Party.By 1957 Tim Wohlforth, together with his co-factionalists Jim Robertson, later to take the Kirk Douglas rôle in the Spartacist League, and Shane Mage, who subsequently became a follower of Timothy Leary dedicated to the proposition that the opium of the masses was alright so long as it came from the Golden Triangle, could see the writing on the wall. In great big letters, it said: This lot are moving to the right, better join the Socialist Workers Party. So they did.The SWP was not averse to having them, because they had some recent experience of youth work, whereas the party cadre’s most recent brush with youth had been the Young Communist League in 1928. Tim makes no reference to the fact that the SWP thought bureaucratic collectivism was a reactionary theory, and adhered to the classical Trotskyist workers’ state thesis. It seems he passed from one theory to the other without breaking step. From his account the difference between the two organisations was that the ISL’s headquarters was pretty scruffy, whilst the SWP’s was pretty smart. It may be that this is a factor left out of account by us revolutionaries in our recruitment policy. Perhaps we should draw them in with the subtle texture and colouring of our soft furnishings, or slip them a membership card as they enthuse over the plush opulence of our uncut moquette. It might just work, and, for what it’s worth, I give it free to Tony Cliff, as by now he must have tried every other stratagem. Life in the SWP was dull, routine stuff. The leadership at most levels were the people from the 1930s. These were Socialists who had forgotten Lenin’s terrible warning that the worst crime a Communist could commit was to be over 50. Some, like James P. Cannon, seemed set to commit the same crime twice over. If life is dull, of course, you can always juice it up a bit by forming a faction. Sam Marcy, at about that time, showed the way. His group took the view that the Hungarian Revolution was Fascist, and that the SWP should seek an orientation to the ultra-Stalinist, Foster wing of the US Communist Party. Wohlforth was, reasonably one might think, not impressed either with the policy or the man: “... in the centre of the mass was a little animated man talking non-stop ... he had a high-pitched voice and I thought he spoke in a completely hysterical manner. Yet I noticed that the Marcyites were enthralled by his performance ... and responded to him en masse. It was my first experience with true political cult followers.” Given that Wohlforth spent the next best years of his life in thrall to that true political cult leader Gerry Healy, it is a pity that he did not pay more attention to the awful example of Sam Marcy. It would have saved him a great deal of pain.The critical time came when the SWP fell in love with Fidel Castro. Cannon and his ageing cadre so wanted a revolution they could support, that they were prepared to shut their eyes to the leading rôle played by the Stalinists in Cuba, and to the suppression of the Cuban Trotskyists. Here, without doubt, was their “workers’ state”. Tim Wohlforth disagreed. For reasons not unassociated with the fact that the SWP was becoming close to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the carrier of the dreaded bacillus of Pabloism, Gerry Healy also disagreed with them about the progressive nature of Castro. Wohlforth had a backer, and the SWP had a new faction fight. For a short time Healy could not make up his mind between the two contenders for his favour, Robertson and Wohlforth. Robertson, however, was foolhardy enough to suppose that he was permitted to fight back when attacked, and was quickly consigned to the outer darkness (from which vantage point he sends out his followers from time to time to make everyone else’s life bloody miserable). Wohlforth was awarded Healy’s North American franchise."
}
|
{
"content": "One might have thought that the separation enforced by the Atlantic would mitigate the worst effects of the Healy regime. Not a bit of it, the Workers’ League was to become a Socialist Labour League clone forged in the furnace heat of Healy’s random and splenetic rage. Everything and everybody was to be worked and exploited to the limit of endurance and beyond. Party life was an endless round of paper sales and fund-raising, with recrimination and fault finding the punctuating light relief. Wohlforth was summoned to Clapham High Street on Gerry’s whim, charged with gross dereliction of duty, given just enough time to confess, and then stuffed on the plane back to the States. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s a rich full life, it isn’t.Inevitably, ritual abuse in Clapham was not enough. The humiliation needed an appropriate audience. The opportunity presented itself at a Workers League camp in Canada. Healy arrived, and in short order he was accusing Wohlforth’s partner, Nancy, of being a CIA agent. A vote to dismiss Wohlforth as Secretary and to expel Nancy was carried, Nancy and Tim both voting for. How pathetic can you get? The last hurrah was a brief return to the SWP to discover that under Jack Barnes the party was even more besotted with Cuba than before. He spent time in Mexico and visited Coyoacan, and he went to Cuba, but his heart was no longer in it. Nowadays, apparently, he agrees politically with Robin Blick. Oh well, as the old song says: “You can tell a man that boozes by the company he chooses, whereat the pig got up and slowly walked away.”The Prophet’s Children is a strange book. At the end of it one does not understand why Tim Wohlforth did what he did. He was, it seems, motivated by goodwill to others, he was hardworking and unselfish, and prepared for sacrifice. But why he made those sacrifices is unclear. He thought Shachtman was a great man, and also James P. Cannon. To be fair, they certainly stood out in a field full of the vertically challenged, but to confer similar status on Healy shows a lack of judgement that sets you firmly amongst those who cannot tell Stork from butter. Still, Wohlforth has an endearing foible of larding his tale with little vignettes from everyday life. He visited a female comrade, Deborah, who worked in the party office, but was off sick. She was, it appears, not sick, just in love with him. Before you can say knife: “... we kissed passionately and started to undress each other. We staggered to her bed and were soon making passionate sweaty love.” Afterwards, Tim gets up, gets dressed, and is about to leave when the phone rings. Deborah answers the phone. “Hello, Trina”, she says, “I just fucked the Great Pumpkin.” Tim does not say so, but I think it must have been Halloween. What other explanation can there be? Top of the pageLast updated on 28.9.2011"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsHow Not to Hammer Hitchens(2002)Letter to What Next No.22, 2002.Copied with thanks from the What Next? Website.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.I HAVE little doubt that Christopher Hitchens is deserving of a swift kick up the bum for his peculiar and rather hysterical support for America’s war on Afghanistan. On the evidence of his article, Christopher In Khaki, in What Next? No.21, it is much more doubtful that Dave Renton is the man we should trust to do the kicking. David seems overly fond of the scatter gun approach to criticism, just that sin of which he accuses Hitchens.For example, David writes:“Describing the Islamic defeat of 1683, he [Hitchens] wrote: ‘In our culture, the episode is often forgotten or downplayed, except by Catholic propagandists like Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton.’ This last reference is puzzling. Why are these two alone praised? Is it Belloc's arguments against the (‘servile’) welfare state that appeal to Hitchens now or Belloc’s 1922 book calling (in the words of one, friendly, reviewer) for ‘the elimination of the Jews’? There is something truly nauseating about an ‘anti-Nazi’ argument that could justify itself only with reference to the work of real, self-acknowledged fascists.”There are quite a few things wrong with this passage. Chesterton-Belloc are not singled out for praise in Hitchens’ text, merely acknowledged as the authors of a piece on the Muslim defeat at the gates of Vienna. All talk about the Servile State or the elimination of the Jews is quite inappropriate and is included only to add a nicely prejudicial colouration to David’s narrative.Dave informs us that Hitchens has never failed to back our rulers “since Thatcher and Reagan came to power”. Now Thatcher came to power in 1979 and I have a clear recollection of Chris Hitchens attacking her Falklands adventure, with some spirit, but then maybe, according to Dave Renton’s fractured logic, what he really wanted was for her to re-establish the crusader kingdom of Outremer.It seems from his text that David met Hitchens for a full minute in 1999 but several of the references in the article suggest a close knowledge of his life. He apparently misses the “old Christopher Hitchens, lost to excess, alcohol and the seductive embrace of the system”. I have often thought that I only just escaped the seductive embrace of the system by my puritanical eschewing of excess and alcohol, although I did know quite a few members of the SWP whose alcohol consumption was such that excess and seductive embraces were totally beyond their powers.Finally, let’s just examine another of the prejudicial little squibs in Christopher in Khaki:“The great chip on Peter Hitchens’ shoulder – or so they say – is his failure to live up to the charm of his extraordinary brother. The unkindest of former friends suggest that the great chip on Christopher’s shoulder was his inability to become a second Paul Foot ...”Though I cannot say whether Peter is jealous of Christopher, I can say that I knew Peter 30 years and more ago and he was charmless and talentless then, and ensuing decades have changed this not one whit. Christopher was a quite different kettle of fish, a stylish and original writer and an accomplished speaker with a great gift for conversation and conviviality. I find it difficult to believe that, even in the darker recesses of his mind, he wanted to be Paul Foot, but then I am not even certain, in the dark recesses of his mind, that Paul Foot wants to be Paul Foot.Dave Renton is convinced, however, that Foot’s 40 years of subservience to the leadership of the SWP guarantees him a place among the elect. Well good luck to them – it’s a cosy, closed world, full of certainty and eventual disappointment. Chris Hitchens spent, perhaps, seven years in the International Socialists and a couple of decades or so writing articles and books from a left perspective, so naturally he is not part of the movement, although he was until 1999 sufficiently alright to be accorded a 60-second audience with Dave Renton.I do not know where Chris Hitchens will finally come to rest. If he continues on his present course, and it is a well worn path along which many have gone before, then we will be able to say with certainty that he has left the movement that he adorned for so long.Jim Higgins Top of the pageLast updated on 9.10.2008"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim HigginsGood soldiers?(April 1976)From the Spectator, 24 April 1976, p.14.Published here with kind permission of the Spectator.Transcribed by Ted Crawford.Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.In that fine novel The Good Soldier Schweik, there is an episode, early on in the volume, where Schweik through no fault of his own is immured in a hospital ward for malingerers. There the sick and infirm are encouraged to volunteer for the front by liberal does of aspirin and vigorous applications of the stomach pump and the clyster. When it came to Schweik’s turn for the treatment he smiled sweetly and said, “Don’t spare me. it’s your duty to the Emperor ... Try hard to think that Austria rests on these clysters and victory will be ours”. And so it seems with a majority of trade union members, if the latest opinion polls are to be trusted. The three per cent, plus tax concessions, package has, apparently, the support of over two thirds of organised workers. A truly magnificent response for Mr Healey and a tribute, perhaps, to the complexity of the deal.Consider: since last August wage increases have been running at a rate of ten per cent while inflation has been running at something in excess of twenty per cent. The budget policy will introduce a limit of three per cent for wage increases plus two per cent in tax concessions at a time when inflation, at the Chancellor’s best – and highly optimistic – estimate, will be running at ten per cent. Whichever way you write the figures, and the Treasury is developing a fine line in tortured dialectics on the subject, it represents two years of declining living standards.Not only that the rates of inflation on such items as electricity, gas, public transport and food – all items bearing most heavily on working class budgets – will inevitably rise faster than average prices. Truly the average worker will have to close his eyes and think of England.It does not end there either. A small item, not much noticed by the commentators or probably by all the trade unionists questioned, is that the present six pound limit is a supplement to wages not an addition to hourly rates. In consequence it is not calculated for overtime and other premium payments. It will also not be part of the calculation of any percentage increase in stage two. Which means that the man getting £66 per week now will have his next increase calculated on £60. Further to that, it is still unclear as to whether the increases under stage two will also be counted a supplement rather than an integral part of the hourly rate. This of course is particularly useful to those firms and industries who have a deal of overtime and shift working but it could be very dangerous in the future. At some stage it will become a part of trade union strategy to get consolidation of all the supplementary additions. When that becomes irresistible it will, at one fell swoop, add as much as fifteen per cent to certain companies’ wage bills, in additional premium payments.But for all that a majority of trade unionists are showing an admirable degree of altruism about the budget proposals though there are still a number of obstacles to overcome. First of these is the problem of the TUC. To date the members of the General Council have been unnaturally quiet, apart from the ritual negotiating stance of saying: “it’s not enough”. But the apparent calm exterior and the evident desire to come to an accommodation with the Government mask a considerable disagreement between the leading trade union figures. Mr Jack Jones may have abandoned the flat rate scheme but there are still those who see the best interest of their members served in just such a scheme. Mr Scanlon takes the view that a much larger percentage-only scheme is the way to restore differentials and keep his skilled members quiet. All other things being equal he is probably right.Mr Jones, eager to regain his position as the main architect of any agreement, has produced a plan for a five per cent increase, plus the tax concessions, that would be based on established bargaining units. The figure of five per cent would be calculated on the global wage bill and apportioned according to the priorities decided by the unions. Such a plan would have the advantage of introducing some flexibility into bargaining and allow regrading schemes with differential increases such as might have avoided the recent Leyland difficulties. I say, “might have avoided” because there would be considerable difficulty in persuading production workers to forgo part of their rise for the more highly skilled toolmakers. That is Mr Jones’s scheme and because it is his it must be taken seriously. Indeed, leading figures on the TUC’s Economic Committee were rather miffed to find that the only trade union leader permitted an audience, so far, with Mr Callaghan was Mr Jones. Leading to the suspicion that he was getting the inside track before an agreed policy had been hammered out within the TUC.In some ways, though, these are marginal considerations. The TUC will arrive at a deal with Healey and Foot. It may be rather more inflationary than the ideal set out in the budget but not much more. The TUC, along with the overwhelming majority of their members, are now convinced that one man’s increase is another man’s price rise. It does not matter that this is an oversimplified view of economics: it is believed, and that is what counts."
}
|
{
"content": "The worry for the Government is not the achievement of some kind of deal; it is how long any deal will stick. In the unlikely event that all goes smoothly and phase two holds the line for a further twelve months from next August, it will be the longest period of wage restraint since Sir Stafford Cripps. Sir Stafford had all the advantage of a hangover of wartime controls and siege economy and a much lower level of expectation among the work force. Since then a great deal has changed and, as Mr James Prior sadly remarked in the Financial Times this week, “Public opinion is schizophrenic. It hates the abuse of power and yet does not support a government which stands up to the abuse of power by certain trade unions at the national and shop floor level.”In this extremely truthful point Mr Prior gets to the heart of the problem and raises the fundamental question: how schizophrenic are the two thirds of trade unionists who accept the Healey package? That is a question that the TUC, Mr Healey and the rest would dearly like to know the answer to. On the estimation of how long the altruism will last must certainly depend the date of the next general election. With this in mind my money is on for October. Top of the pageLast updated on 2.11.2003"
}
|
{
"content": "MIA > Archive > Neurath Alois NeurathThe Conference of the Enlarged Executiveof the Communist International(31 May 1923)From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 3 No. 40 [22], 31 May 1923, p. 384.Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2021). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.The Session of the Enlarged Executive of the Communist International will begin on June 10. As all sections affiliated to the Third International will send delegates, the conference of the Enlarged Executive will possess all the significance of a world congress. The agenda include the most important and urgent problems of the international labor movement. Even before the IV. Congress the relations between the sections and the Executive of the Comintern were excellent, but these relations have become much more intimate since the last World Congress. The international situation of capitalist society and the exceedingly precarious political situation in all bourgeois countries, have forced the class-conscious workers to take steps towards the practical realization of the resolutions passed by the IV. World Congress. When the principles of the proletarian United front, and of the Workers’ Government, were first definitely formulated, resistance was aroused in many of our most important sections, the call for the proletarian United Front was confused with a desire to unite with social traitors; the summons to form a fighting front of the exploited was interpreted as if meaning an alliance with the social democrats, or with the leaders of the Amsterdam trade union movement. This crisis within the sections of the Third international was not so much overcome by the resolutions passed by the E.C. of the C.I.. as by the actual economic and political facts. The bourgeoisie, feeling confident that the Amsterdam secretaries would not venture on any real battle, proceeded to involve the workers of the most important branches of industry in isolated struggles, in which they were able to defeat them. These hard facts have taught the whole of the workers and their leaders that the demand for the proletarian united front is not merely an agitation catchword, but the most decisive slogan of present-day class war. The broad masses of the workers are gradually accomplishing the task of forming the united front of the exploited and are doing this against the will of the social democratic and yellow leaders. These last are beginning to find themselves in a desperate situation, and shrink from no measures which offer any prospect of strengthening their shaken position. The sections of the C.I., therefore, have still many obstacles to face in their struggle for the unity of the proletarian masses. The Enlarged Executive will have to occupy itself largely with the results of the work done in this direction since the IV. Congress.The question of the workers’ government has become, in some states, a question of immediate importance much sooner than might have been expected at the time of the IV. Congress. The German proletariat has been able to acquire the best practical experiences in this respect. The German bourgeoisie realizes perhaps better than many workers, that the social-democratic-communist agreements will rapidly lead to a very definite struggle for a workers’ government for the whole country. The working masses, including not only those under the immediate influence of the German C.P., but wide masses beyond, recognize that the Communist Party is the only party possessing the necessary power and determination to lead the proletariat to emancipation from its desperate situation.It is easily understood that today, when Germany’s situation is so critical, the experiences of the Kapp and Rathenau days receive different judgments within the German C.P. Revolutionary impatience on the one hand, and cautious estimation of forces on the other, have led to many differences of opinion; these have already been smoothed out for the most part, but the Enlarged Executive will occupy itself with them in detail, as it is highly desirable that this knotty point be thoroughly cleared up.The so-called Ruhr action has gradually opened the eyes of the overwhelming majority of the proletariat, and has clearly exposed the intentions of the French and German bourgeoisies. The Ruhr crisis is not merely a crisis between the German bourgeoisie and French imperialism, but the crisis of capitalist world economics, in 1914 the various groups of the world bourgeoisie were able to carry on a bloody war in their own interests, at the expense and with the aid of the working class. Today the bourgeoisie encounters immediate resistance, first from the masses led by the Communist Party, and then, in the course of action, from the serious opposition of the decisive strata of the working population. The world bourgeoisie is fully aware that the beginning of every war is a fateful hour for the bourgeoisie. First it endeavors to employ every conceivable means of overcoming the conflict of interests in its own camp, and then it seeks forcefully to increase the exploitation of the proletariat But it becomes more and more difficult to overcome these great obstacles by “peaceful means”. The ruling class in the present social order cannot escape its destiny, it cannot avoid the bloody collisions in its own ranks, that is, it has not been able to prevent the economic decay of the capitalist social order from having already provided, to a very great extent, the prerequisites for the successful class war of the proletariat. The discuss on of the lessons taught by the Ruhr action will doubtless form the central point of the deliberations of the Enlarged Executive."
}
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.