Sunday 14 June 2020

The World Turned Upside Down: Britain's Forgotten Revolutionary History [PDF] Socialist Appeal-2020


"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

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