Evan Smith and Matthew Worley's Waiting for the Revolution
is the second volume of collected essays that
examine British left-wing politics from 1956 to the present day. The first
volume was called Against the Grain[1].
As in the first volume, these two radicals express their hostility to any orthodox
Marxist analysis or critique of the left groups. Trotskyism is not mentioned,
and there is no chapter examining the Socialist Labour League the then section
of the Fourth International. Their choice of political groups and movements is
a reflection of their parochial and nationalistic outlook.
Smith and Worley's book is not intended to deliver a
perspective for the coming struggles of the working class but seeks "to
uncover and explore the traditions and issues that have preoccupied leftist
groups, activists and struggles". The second volume explores anti-nuclear
and anti-apartheid struggles, alongside introductions to Militant and the now-defunct
and very right-wing Revolutionary Communist Party.
In the Introduction: The continuing importance of the history
of the British far left Smith and Worley maintain that despite its numerous
betrayals that the Labour Party is still a vehicle for change and that left
groups should move away from entryism and pressure the party to the left. As
Smith and Worley write "many on the far left had written off the Labour
Party as unreformable in recent years, but Corbyn' s entry into the leadership contest after the
2015 election made a number of the Party' s leftist critics reassess their
analysis of Labour. Corbyn' s victory seemed to suggest that there was
political life left in Labour, awoken from its slumber by the thousands of
veteran activists from the social movements of the 2000s that Corbyn had been
involved in, primarily Stop the War, the and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign".
Jeremy Corbyn was put forward by Britain's pseudo-left
groups such as the Socialist Workers Party and sections of the Labour and trade
union bureaucracy as proof that the rightward swing of the Labour Party,
beginning in the 1970s, including Neil Kinnock's betrayal of the miners' strike
of 1984-85 and culminating in the New Labour government of Tony Blair and
Gordon Brown could be pegged back.
As the Socialist Equality Party(SEP) stated "No one can
seriously propose that this party—which, in its politics and organisation and
the social composition of its apparatus, is Tory in all but name—can be transformed
into an instrument of working-class struggle. The British Labour Party did not
begin with Blair. It is a bourgeois party of more than a century's standing,
and a tried and tested instrument of British imperialism and its state machine.
Whether led by Clement Attlee, James Callaghan or Jeremy Corbyn, its essence
remains unaltered."[2]
Suffice to say Smith and Worley do not agree with this
analysis saying only "an understanding of the history of how the far left
has operated and functioned in Britain since the 1950s is therefore important
to understand the limits of a radical agenda within a reformist framework. It
is hoped that this book, as well as the previous volume, will help provide
readers with this understanding". What they do not say is that this book
offers no way out for the working class and contains rehashes of previously failed
perspectives.
In Revolutionary vanguard or agent provocateur: students and
the far left on English university campuses, c. 1970-90 Jodi Burkett examines
the Pseudo Left groups attitude towards the student movement. There is nothing remotely progressive or left-wing or even
Marxist about the attitude of the radical groups towards the student movement
and its leadership. The pseudo-left group's promotion of identity and gender
issues which are prevalent in student politics over class issues belong not to
the Marxist tradition but the tradition of irrationalism and anti-Marxism.
The adoption by the pseudo-left groups of identity politics
is one confirmation of their extreme subjectivist and postmodernist nostrums.
The philosophical outlook of these groups has enabled them as one writer puts
it "to furnish a plethora of alternative justifications for lending "critical"
support to imperialism.
Burkett says nothing of the pseudo lefts groups uncritical
attitude towards the student leadership the NUS.The NUS in the past regularly
banned individuals and organisations from hosting meetings and delivering
speeches on campuses across the UK, in line with the student union's
long-standing policy of providing "no platform" for offensive
speakers in the name of securing campuses as so-called safe spaces.
The British pseudo-left pioneered this policy in the early
1970s as a means of lobbying the institutions of the capitalist state to
proscribe speakers from the far right. The chapter 'The Merits of Brother Worth': the International
Socialists and life in a Coventry car factory, 1968-75 by Jack Saunders
provides an academic cover for the IS's kowtowing to the labour and trade union
bureaucracies.
Towards the end of 1968 the International Socialists (IS)
decided to adopt what central committee member Alex Callinicos termed "a
Leninist model of the organisation". It would not see the IS turn to the working
class but would see it develop very cosy relations with the trade union bureaucracies
across the United Kingdom and internationally.
The IS decided to adopt the term as Chris Marsden points out
" in 1968 revolutionary movements
it had spent almost two decades saying would never emerge erupted across Europe
and internationally. This pose of orthodoxy was considered vital in combating
the danger of workers gravitating to the genuine Trotskyists of the Socialist
Labour League. But the essential line of the SWP, as the IS became known in
1977, remained its insistence that the reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies
were the natural leaders of a reformist working class".[3]
Making miners militant? The Communist Party of Great Britain
in the National Union of Mineworkers, 1956-85 - Sheryl Bernadette Buckley. Buckley's article is a very friendly
piece of a whitewash of an organisation that has the blood of thousands of
workers on its hands. The CPGB played a central role in the betrayal of the miner's
strike of 84-85.
As Chris Marsden and Julie Hyland point outthe Stalinist
leader of the NYUM was "Far from
being the revolutionary of popular right-wing mythology, Scargill is a
life-long supporter of the Stalinist Communist Party and an advocate of its
national reformist programme. To the extent that he spoke of socialism, it was
as a perspective for the distant future. In the meantime, what was required was
the creation of a nationally regulated economy based on a mix of import
controls and subsidies that would provide the basis for protecting Britain's
nationalised coal industry. This was the "Plan for Coal" that he
sought to commit the Labour Party and the TUC to fight for in a struggle
against the Conservatives. What was demonstrated in 1984, however, was not only
that the ruling class was no longer prepared to tolerate such a policy, but
that there was no longer any significant constituency for such a programme
within the labour bureaucracy of which he was a part.[4]
While Buckley mentions the SWP's mild criticism of the CPGB she
glosses over the fact that the SWP saw the miners strike as a fight between two giant
forces, the Thatcherite state apparatus and "Scargill's Army". This
conception of the struggle conveniently lets the Trades Union Congress (TUC),
its affiliated unions and the Labour Party entirely off the hook.
Origins of the present crisis? The emergence of 'left-wing'
Scottish nationalism, 1956-79 - Rory Scothorne and Ewan
Gibbs. This is quite a shocking and blatant attempt to whitewash
the role Stalinism played in the rise of "Left-Wing" Scottish nationalism.
Scottish nationalism is neither left-wing wing nor progressive in any way shape
or form. It is a reactionary development and goes against Vladimir Lenin's
advice "not to paint nationalism red".
Despite Scothorne and Gibbs attempt to gloss over the
Scottish Nationalist Party's (SNP)right-wing origins the bourgeois nationalist
parties such as the SNP have no tradition in the workers' movement. The SNP is
now the ruling party in Scotland's devolved Holyrood parliament. Scothorne and Gibbs also downplay the role the pseudo-lefts
promotion of a Left Nationalism in both Scotland and Wales. These lefts do not constitute,
in any sense an independent political force. They are propagandists for the
Scottish bourgeoisie and its chosen party.
"The SWP has shifted from being opponents of Scottish
separatism to its most ardent proponents. It is a change of course driven by a
realisation by the privileged, middle-class layers for which it speaks that
independence could offer an excellent opportunity to gain access to political
influence and financial resources—drawn from the speculative capital swilling
around Edinburgh and then channelled via the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood
into innumerable academic and governmental sinecures".[5]
The British radical left and Northern Ireland during 'the
Troubles' - Daniel Finn. Perhaps
another title for this chapter should be the pseudo lefts in Ireland a disastrous
and treacherous legacy. It was only the Socialist Labour League the then British
Trotskyists who opposed the sending of troops to Northern Ireland. The work of
the SLL was crucial in exposing the crimes carried out by the British bourgeoisie
including Bloody Sunday. It outlined the only principled and revolutionary
political tasks for the British and Irish working class.
For further articles that illustrate this principled record,
in contrast to the rank political opportunism of the Stalinist and fake left
groups such as International Socialism, the forerunner of the British Socialist
Workers Party, and the International Marxist Group, affiliated to the Pabloite
United Secretariat see footnote.[6]
The point is to change it: a short account of the
Revolutionary Communist Party by Michael Fitzpatrick. The fact that that this
tiny and insignificant organisation gets a full chapter is indicative of the
attitude the editors of this collection have towards orthodox Marxism.
The RCP began life as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency in
1976. It changed its name in 1981 to the Revolutionary Communist Party. This
party was vomited into existence through a series of unprincipled splits and
expulsions from Tony Cliff's state-capitalist International Socialist group,
now the Socialist Workers Party. The RCT had been a faction inside the IS called
the Revolutionary Opposition whose leader was Roy Tearse. This organisation did
not have any distinct programme or theory. When Cliff expelled it, the
organisation exploded into many different parts each one as reactionary as the
other.
Tearse formed a group called the Discussion Group which
predictably ended up inside the Labour Party. Another splinter group under the
leadership of David Yaffe, an academic at Sussex University was called the Revolutionary
Communist Group (RCG), formed in 1974 it was made up of predominantly of
students. Its programme was a mix of Stalinism and bourgeois nationalism. It
would go to denounce the working class as the beneficiaries of imperialism.
Fitzpatrick is either incapable or does not wish to explain
how an organisation that was purportedly Trotskyist was to become a vehicle for
right-wing bordering on fascist nostrums. As Zach Reed points out "Through such self-serving and
dishonest claims, Spiked provides both an apologia and a platform for
corporations and right-wing individuals and groups. Indeed "free speech"
for Spiked overwhelmingly centres on the democratic rights of such layers,
often in alliance with Conservative Students societies. In the 1990s, in
response to the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy,
the RCP developed many of the concepts that underwrite the politics of
Spiked-Online.
In 1990, in its magazine Living Marxism, Furedi expounded
the RCP's new political line in an article, "Midnight in the Century."
The liquidation of the Soviet Union and the disavowal of national-reformist
programmes by social democracy were cited as proof that socialism was dead. The
article typified the pervasive atmosphere of renunciation among a layer of the
middle-class worldwide that was lurching to the right, repudiating any past
association with working-class and "left" politics as they sought to
integrate themselves into the state apparatus, academia and the trade unions.[7]
The Militant Tendency and entrism in the Labour Party -
Christopher Massey. With
the number of whitewashes in this book, you could paint a whole house. Massey's
article is no exception. The Militant Tendency must be the only organisation
that began life as a tactical orientation to the Labour Party and turned it
into a strategy. The origins of the party were in Britain and was called the
Revolutionary Socialist League led by Ted Grant. Anyone joining the
organisation was not trained as a Marxist but were trained in the reformist
political outlook of the Labour Party.
Grants claim that the organisation adhered to revolutionary
socialism was always reserved for speeches and historical articles. The party's
outlook that socialism could come about by a Labour government passing an
enabling act through Parliament to nationalise the top 200 or so monopolies.
This perspective was very similar to the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain.
As Ann Talbot correctly points out "It must be said at
the outset that Grant was not a Trotskyist when he died and had not been for a
long time, if by the term Trotskyist we are to understand a revolutionary
Marxist who defends the principles of socialist internationalism expressed in
the Russian Revolution of October 1917. It might seem churlish to deny an old
man in death the epithet he so much craved in life, but Grant's politics was
not a personal matter. They were characteristic of an epoch in which
bureaucratic apparatuses dominated the working class and in large part came to
be identified as the legitimate leadership of the working class.[8]
It is quite apt that The last chapter Understanding the
formation of the Communist Party of Britain Lawrence Parker is on the CPGB. This
organisation is steeped in betrayals of the working class too many to list
here. There is an intimate connection between the pseudo-left groups and the Stalinist
CPGB. The SWP printed its newspaper The Morning Star for God's sake. But you
would not get this from Parker's article. In truth as Chris Marsden points out "the
ability of these bureaucracies to dominate the political life of the working
class in the twentieth century was rooted in the murderous suppression of the
Marxist and revolutionary opposition to Stalinism in the Soviet Union, as
represented by the followers of Leon Trotsky".
To conclude, it is hard to understand why Manchester
University Press(MUP) gave these two radicals access to the significant resources
of the university to produce another volume of what amounts to radical pulp
fiction. The majority of the essays amount to a hostile attack on any
conception of the working class building a revolutionary alternative to the capitalist.
This is the reason that in two volumes next to no mention is made of any
orthodox Trotskyist group inside or outside of Britain. As was said before the
Fourth International is not mentioned in nearly six hundred pages of text tells
the reader about the orientation of the two editors. The MUP should allow a
rebuttal of these two volumes.
[1] See review -http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2019/02/against-grain-british-far-left-from.html
[2] UK general election result
confirms protracted death of the Labour Party
[3] Britain’s Socialist Workers Party
descends into factional warfare- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/02/14/swps-f14.html
[4] Britain: 20 years since the
year-long miners’ strike- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/03/mine-m05.html
[5] Socialist Workers Party’s Alex
Callinicos backs Scottish nationalism-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/08/12/call-a12.html
[6] Trotskyism and the Bloody Sunday
massacre: a record of principled opposition to British imperialism-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/irel-j18.html
[7]https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/05/31/spik-m31.html
[8] Ted Grant: A political appraisal
of the former leader of the British Militant Tendency-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/09/gra1-s27.html
