"The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles."
Karl Marx -Frederick Engels-The Communist Manifesto.
"The British bourgeoisie has erased the very memory of
the 17th-century revolution by dissolving its past in 'gradualness'. The
advanced British workers will have to re-discover the English Revolution and
find within its ecclesiastical shell the mighty struggle of social
forces."
Leon Trotsky
"England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases".
Leon Trotsky
"England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases".
Leon Trotsky
The world Turned Upside Down: Britain's
Forgotten Revolutionary History is a new pamphlet by the Socialist Appeal Group.
The pamphlet is made up of a collection of historical events which it believes are
part of "Britain's Forgotten Revolutionary History".
The majority of these events it is true do not get enough
historical recognition, and it is correct to bring them to the attention of the
British working class. After all the revolutionary party is the memory of the working
class, or as the writer, George Orwell wrote, "Who controls the past
controls the future".[1]
Given that the pamphlet is only forty pages long and covers
hundreds of years of history, it is quite natural that some things are left
out. In many cases, this must have been an editorial nightmare.
However, what is not acceptable is several cases of
political amnesia. It would take a book-length reply to go through all of them,
but two cases spring immediately to mind. The first one being The General Strike
of 1926. The role of the Stalinists in betraying the General Strike was crucial,
yet not a word is written in this pamphlet. For a group purportedly to be Trotskyist,
this would appear to be a little strange.
It would not have taken much to expose the nature of
Stalinism. The Communist Party rejected a revolutionary perspective. Instead,
they boosted illusions in the TUC
General Council and the left. It led to the political disarming of the working
class and facilitated a historic betrayal. The Stalin faction of the Soviet
Communist Party and the Comintern imposed this line on the Communist Party of
Great Britain (CPGB).
What was Trotsky's position on the political situation in
Britain and the policy of the Stalin faction? In his autobiography My Life, he explains:
"England's fate after the war was a subject of absorbing interest. The
radical change in her world position could not fail to bring about changes just
as radical in the inner-correlation of her forces. It was clear that even if
Europe, including England, were to restore a certain social equilibrium for a
more or less extended period, England herself could reach such an equilibrium
only by means of a series of serious conflicts and shake-ups.
I thought it probable that in England, of all places, the
fight in the coal industry would lead to a general strike. From this, I assumed
that the essential contradiction between the old organisations of the working
class and its new historic tasks would, of course, be revealed in the near
future. During the winter and spring of 1925, while I was in the Caucuses, I
wrote a book on this—Whither England? The book was aimed essentially at the
official conception of the Politbureau, with its hopes of evolution to the left
by the British General Council and of a gradual and painless penetration of
communism into the ranks of the British Labour Party and trade unions."[2]
The second case of political amnesia is The Miner's Strike
of 1984-85. The Strike was undoubtedly the most important struggle undertaken
by the working class in decades. While a semi exposure of the Trade Union and
Labour leadership is mentioned again, there is no mention of the critical role
of Stalinism. Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Miners, is not even
mentioned. Scargill in his politically formative years was an ardent Stalinists
like Mike Ingram, and Chris Marsden writes "Even after he broke officially
with the CP, Scargill maintained close relations with it and relied on CP
support within the NUM's broad left for his continued rise to prominence. Whatever
his disagreements, none of them amounted to a political break with Stalinism.
Indeed as subsequent events have proved, the most important for Scargill was
the attempt by the party to distance itself from Stalin's crimes and his belief
that party discipline could hamper his career".[3]
Although this pamphlet is not a major document, it was
published by an organisation that nominally calls itself Trotskyist. While any
organisation can occasionally put forward an incorrect line, the fact that that
this pamphlet was allowed to go out is a clear indication of the non-revolutionary
politics of the Socialist Appeal group.
It is also a tradition in the Marxist movement that whenever
it undertakes a review of historical events, it always tries to situate its
history within the analysis of these events. It is striking that the Socialist
appeal does not even attempt to do this.
Maybe it knows that that to do so would expose the
organisation for what it is. Even a brief examination of the history of the
Socialist appeal group would show that it is not a revolutionary organisation but
a group that hangs on the coattails of the Labour Party.
The founder of the Group was Ted Grant who died in 2006 aged
93. As Ann Talbot brings out in excellent obituary of Grant: "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 were 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.
In Britain, the organisation Grant led, which was known as
the Revolutionary Socialist League in private and the Militant Tendency in
public, trained young people in the reformist political outlook of the Labour
Party. Militant's claims to revolutionary socialism were always reserved for
speeches and historical articles. This outlook insisted that socialism would
come about as a result of a Labour government passing an enabling act through
Parliament to nationalise the top 200 or so monopolies as the basis for a
planned and publicly controlled economy".[4]
The one mention of the Militant in the pamphlet is the
section entitled From Poplar To Liverpool. As the Pamphlet States Militant were
in the Leadership position inside Liverpool City Council, it states: "Sixty
years later it was the turn of the Liverpool working class to fight back. Local
authority funding was under attack. As with Poplar, the areas with the greatest
poverty were hit the hardest. Liverpool City Council, increasingly working
under the guidance of the Marxists of Militant, began to take measures to
alleviate the grinding poverty within the city. As with Poplar, excessive rents
and rates increases would not be imposed on the people. This meant a deficit
budget. By 1984, Tory PM Thatcher knew Liverpool - a beacon of resistance - had
to be stopped".[5]
This whitewash of what happened in Liverpool confirms that
Socialist appeal is still participating in what amounts to be "fantasy
politics". Despite making mild criticisms of the Labour Party's treachery
during the Liverpool city council struggle, the Militant Tendency pursued a
centrist course during the struggle and did not stop working inside the Labour
Party as a local pressure group. In the mid-1980s it became the target for a
witch-hunt by the Labour bureaucracy—supported by the trade unions—as it sought
to finally sever any connections between the party and its previous reformist
policies.
To conclude despite over one hundred years of betrayals Pseudo
Left groups like the Socialist Appeal still maintain that the Labour Party can
still be a vehicle for socialist or even revolutionary change. The last hurrah
of this perspective was seen in the election to the leadership of the Labour
Party of Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn recently gave his last speech as a Labour Party leader.
His craven performance was the final proof that not only of his personal
political bankruptcy but it also refuted Pseudo Lefts groups insistence that Labour
can be a vehicle for socialism. Corbyn's demise was not the rebirth of Labour.
It ended once and for all the possibility of workers being able to defend their
interests through national reformism.
There is a tendency amongst Pseudo Left groups such as
Socialist Appeal for a glorification of English national radical traditions. It
goes back to the 1930s popular fronts used by the Communist Parties. From a
political sense, this adoption of an uncritical approach to radical history
undermines the need for a revolutionary scientific perspective.
[1] George Orwell, 1984
[2] See- Stalin, Trotsky and
the 1926 British general strike-By Chris Marsden-27 December 2008- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/12/bgnl-d27.html
[3] The Socialist Labour
Party: Scargill seeks to resurrect Stalinism under a flag of convenience.
[4] 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
[5] The World Turned Upside
Down: Britain's Forgotten Revolutionary History [PDF] Socialist Appeal-2020
