Militant after Grant: the unbroken thread? - pt 2

By March 1990, through an energetic campaign directed at large working class estates and housing schemes across Britain, Militant stood at the head of a mass movement of up to eight million people committed to non-payment of the tax. Though the movement was condemned by Labour and TUC leaders alike, and was given only the most half hearted support by the Labour Left and Communist Party, it was able to organise Anti-Poll Tax Unions in every major town and city. It mobilised 250,000 people to demonstrate in central London on 31 March 1990.

At a local level the anti-Poll Tax movement had thrown up primarily estate-based rather than workplace-based committees, enabling the left, and Militant in particular, to penetrate deeper into the fabric of working class life and struggle than at any time since the miners’ strike.

Two features of Militant’s politics were primarily responsible for the fact that this opportunity to build a revolutionary party with genuine roots in the masses and with significant influence on British political life was utterly squandered.

The first was “general entrism”. As Labour opposed any active resistance to the Poll Tax, mass anger in Scotland, where the tax was introduced a year earlier than in England and Wales, was reflected in a growth of support for the Scottish National Party, the rise of a pseudo-socialist leadership in the SNP and some notable by-election victories over Labour.

In the main the new layer of activists coming forward in the anti-Poll Tax movement showed no inclination whatsoever to join Labour, and Labour was indeed keen to actively prevent it. Efforts were made, such as the attempt to join up 500 anti-Poll Tax activists to Pollock Labour Party en masse, which the Labour party simply refused to countenance, rejecting every membership application point blank.

The idea that the masses would “inevitably turn to the mass reformist party” was simply unsustainable. The unavoidable conclusion was to strike out for a new, independent, fighting workers’ party. But Militant missed the boat.

It was the largest independent grouping—the Socialist Workers Party—that benefited most in terms of recruitment, despite their initial blunder in opposing the non-payment strategy altogether. The sight of their rivals in the SNP and SWP reaping where Militant had sown was simply too much, particularly for those Scottish branches that had won a high profile in their campaign against the tax.

As the Militant majority resolution on Scotland pointed out:

“If the SNP or SWP had led this mass movement they would have pressed home at every opportunity to urge non-payers to join their party . . . In the absence of a recognised Marxist organisation we have been left in an invidious position. Although we have made important gains in the last three years at least in certain areas some of these gains have been cancelled out, partly as a result of the complicated national and international situation. Moreover the gains we have made are as nothing compared to the potential gains to be achieved on the basis of an open banner.”43

The second feature was a result of Militant’s adaptation to the reformist pacifism of the Labourite milieu. On the 31 March 1990 Anti Poll Tax Demonstration Militant discredited themselves in the eyes of thousands of the most determined young activists. The police launched a vicious assault on the mass demonstration—an assault that was resolutely and successfully resisted by thousands of working class youth. The immediate response of Militant’s stewards was to abandon the demonstration to its own fate, thus avoiding responsibility for the “riot” that ensued. In the aftermath leading representatives of the All-Britain Federation of Anti-Poll Tax Unions condemned the demonstrators in terms that directly echoed the response of the Tory media. Tommy Sheridan, the key national spokesperson for the Federation, even went so far as to declare that the Federation would be investigating who was behind the militant resistance, and that “names will be named.” Though many Militant supporters subsequently sought to explain this away as an isolated error, the statement was never publicly repudiated by Militant. Nevertheless it caused them extreme embarrassment. Here was one speech by a leader of Militant that they would not be “prepared to re-issue and debate”.

Of course, this was no isolated error of judgement. If the programme of the Tendency had not been equivocal on the need for working class violence against the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state; if it had not sought to conceal the distinction between the utopia of peaceful reform and the necessity of violent revolution, then Sheridan’s infamous declaration would have amounted to an open renunciation of Militant’s programme.

For such an act he would have had to be expelled from Militant, or at least removed from the limelight. Instead he was elevated ever further in the organisation, becoming the figurehead and leader of Militant’s subsequent high-profile electoral campaign in Scotland.

From then on tens of thousands of youth, particularly the growing numbers influenced by anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, would regard Militant with nothing short of contempt. The debacle was a direct result of Militant’s concessions to reformism on the question of the state.

Militant’s failure to recruit large numbers from their campaign against the Poll Tax was without doubt the principal circumstance that set their leadership searching for new tactics. But even then the spur to a radical departure from general entrism was to come not from within the Tendency, but from outside it.

The first steps along the road to independent electoral campaigning and a new open organisation came as a response to the actions of a layer of left reformist activists in Liverpool District Labour Party who had lost patience with the right-wing Labour leadership and its undemocratic party regime. Expelled members who were committed to a fighting policy for the Labour Group on Liverpool City Council found that the climate of witch-hunting and the gerrymandering of selection procedures by the right made inner-party struggle impossible.

Organised in the Liverpool Broad Left they took the step of standing candidates against the official Labour nominees in the May 1991 local elections. In five wards they actually won, demonstrating that such a policy could yield results.

Militant were initially cautious, but soon saw a way of recovering influence in what had once been their stronghold. In the Walton constituency, which had been the site of Militant involvement since the 1950s, the right wing had carried through a successful coup after the death of left wing MP Eric Heffer. Though Militant had never formally secured the nomination of the Constituency for a candidate of their own, they could justifiably point to the wholesale expulsion of left-wing activists from the local party as having been the precondition for the selection of hard-right candidate Peter Kilfoyle.

In a sudden break with forty years of general entrism, they put forward Militant member Lesley Mahmood as a “Real Labour” candidate and launched a high-profile campaign against both the Liberals and Kinnock’s new model Labour party.

Though this campaign was unsuccessful it marked a turning point. In response to Walton the Labour leadership de-selected Militant MPs Dave Nellist and Terry Fields. This led Militant to stand their sitting MPs as “Real Labour” candidates in the April 1992 General Election, and to put up Tommy Sheridan as a “Scottish Militant Labour” candidate in Pollock. It was on this question that Grant himself launched a faction which was driven out of the organisation in a public split in January 1992.


Militant Labour – a break with Grant’s method?

To what extent did the turn to challenging Labour electorally constitute a break with Ted Grant’s political method? Obviously in breaking with general entrism Militant had publicly slaughtered one of its most sacred cows. But in two respects—tactical and programmatic—there was a continuity of method.

On the tactical level the launch of an open electoral organisation had taken place under far less propitious circumstances than had existed on several occasions in the 1980s. Already for years Labour Party membership had been plummeting as activists disgusted with Kinnock’s inaction over the Poll Tax and support for the Gulf War resigned from the party. The Socialist Workers Party claimed hundreds of recruits from among former Labour members. Yet Militant took next to no forces with them in their turn away from Labour.

Whereas in 1985 the Militant leadership had rejected Hatton’s proposal to split away with up to 10,000 members of the Liverpool District Labour Party, when the break finally came the gains were pitiful. Nevertheless the Tendency refrained from making any honest accounting or explanation of this. No mistakes were admitted. On the contrary, Militant attempted to maintain its adherence to Grant’s schema, claiming that the open turn was merely a;

“detour through which we can strengthen the forces which in the future will lead the transformation of the Labour Party and the trade unions.”

On the programmatic level, the break from the organisational structures of the Labour Party did not lead to a revision of Militant’s disingenuous alloying of Marxism and Labourism.

This was acutely visible in the electoral platforms advanced by the new independent candidates. Mahmood’s campaign in Walton was a case in point. Instead of taking the opportunity to make broad propaganda for socialist revolution and the need for a new party, Militant’s “Real Labour” campaign spoke of the need to return Labour to its (mythical) socialist past.

Thus despite their formal break with the structures of the Labour Party, Militant were still advocating a parliamentary road to socialism. What is more, in one crucial respect Mahmood observed the division between “politics” and “trade unionism” that has always allowed left reformists to refrain from criticising the role of the trade union bureaucracy.

Massive attacks on the council workforce coincided with Mahmood’s campaign. Although she spoke to mass rallies of council workers and got an enthusiastic reception, she failed to use her campaign to agitate for the strike action that was necessary to resist the employers’ offensive.

Her leaflet addressed to the City’s refuse workers declared, “They are trying to provoke us into an all out strike”, a dangerously ambiguous formula. Mahmood should have used the attention that her election campaign had attracted to call directly for strike action as soon as possible. But Militant announced support for such action only after the election was safely out of the way.

Finally, Militant demonstrated quite how far they were prepared to go in sacrificing political principle for the sake of electoral expediency in their response to the attacks on Mahmood from the pulpits of Liverpool’s many Catholic churches. When the Real Labour campaign produced a leaflet directed specifically at women voters, it refrained from making any mention of the struggle for abortion rights.

Thus tactically, programmatically and in the unprincipled conduct of the campaign, there was nothing to distinguish Militant’s “open” candidature from left reformist electoralism—a point Grant himself was to make in his post mortem on the Walton campaign:

“Even the programme that we stood on was not a revolutionary one. There was no explanation of the capitalist crisis and the need for a socialist planned economy etc. The programme we offered the workers of Walton was in effect a left reformist one.”44

In the midst of the internal strife generated by Walton, Militant was then confronted with the small but revealing development of the Liverpool Independent Labour Party (LILP). The left reformist allies to whom it had tailored much of its programme and practice in the Walton campaign, not capable of remaining in Kilfoyle and Kinnock’s party or of waiting for Militant’s “turn” to open work, launched their own organisation.

Militant’s response to this must have driven the nail in the coffin of any spontaneous left movement created by the Mahmood campaign. It opposed the setting up of LILP—not on the grounds of its left reformist politics but because it negated the strategic task of transforming the Labour Party.

As Militant leader Tony Mulhearn wrote:

“To temporarily organise as we have done . . . . because of bureaucratic expulsions and disbandments is one thing. But to set up an alternative party, to turn their backs on Labour and to encourage others to leave the Labour Party is a completely different question. Socialists should not surrender control to the right wing by splitting from the Labour Party. They should stay and fight for every inch of ground.”45

Clive Heemskerk, writing in the aftermath of Walton, reaffirmed Grant’s essential view:

“The historical law formulated by Marxism, that workers will move to reclaim their traditional organisations, is a process in which a complex interplay of different factors are involved.”46

Even as events negated the rationale for strategic entrism, and forced them to abandon it in practice, the Militant leaders clung to Grant’s method like drowning people to a life raft. But it didn’t save them.


Opportunism: then and now

In breaking from Grant’s practice of general entrism, Militant have nevertheless maintained the core of Grant’s methodological error. His breach with revolutionary Marxism on the relationship between spontaneity and consciousness—his fatalistic view that the existing ideology of the working class develops automatically towards revolutionary socialist conclusions—remains unchallenged.

This is essential for understanding Militant’s political evolution after the split of January 1992.

The legacy of the Tendency’s programmatic accommodation to Labourism remains intact. But Militant is now attempting to orient towards working class youth whose illusions lie elsewhere. Militant has simply tried to adapt the Marxist programme to other, non-proletarian ideologies that hold sway over hundreds of thousands of radicalised young people. This, they believe, will give them a path to the masses.

History will perform the rest of the task by pushing those youth steadily to left. The “process” remains central to Militant’s perspective. It’s “complex interplay” requires simply that the road of programmatic adaptation takes a “detour” through Scottish nationalism and black separatism.


Tailing Scottish Nationalism

Militant’s 1979 British Perspectives correctly argued that whilst socialists must defend the right of the Scottish people to self-determination, up to and including separation if they wish, this is not a step that Marxists actively advocate. It would divide the Scottish, Welsh and English workers, who face a common enemy in the British ruling class and who share common traditions of struggle and solidarity. The Perspectives concluded from this that:

“It would be utterly reactionary to form ‘Scottish Marxism or ‘Welsh Marxism’.” 47

This was absolutely correct. To organise Scottish socialists in a separate party from the English and Welsh can mean one thing only—that they face different tasks, different states and different revolutionary struggles.

But in the course of the Poll Tax revolt Militant had had to tackle the growth of the Scottish National Party, and the fact that it was cynically taking advantage of Labour’s right wing stance to pose as a radical alternative. Agitation for independence mounted apace. As a result Militant abandoned its former intransigence and launched Scottish Militant Labour as an independent party.

The initial rationale for SML was the different tempo of class struggle in Scotland. Once the formation of the independent Militant Labour organisation was declared in the rest of Britain, there should have been no possible justification for a separate Scottish group. But SML did not disappear once Militant Labour was formed. It maintains a formally separate identity to this day.

Furthermore, this departure only paved the way for deeper political accommodation to Scottish nationalism. Militant (13 December 1991) declared that if the Tories won the 1992 election then:

“the call must go out to make Scotland ungovernable . . . It should be linked to a boycott of Westminster by Labour and SNP MPs”.

The article then declared agreement with the words of the leader of Strathclyde regional council that:

“‘They must be prepared to break away from Westminster and form a breakaway parliament.”

Thus Militant were prepared to go so far as advocate a step that would in every practical sense be indistinguishable from a declaration of independence by Scotland.

Scottish Militant Labour was launched in response to a specific, national, variation in the terrain of class struggle in Britain. Not only was the anti-poll tax struggle longer and stronger in Scotland, but specific events gave temporary ascendancy to a left talking petit-bourgeois nationalist leadership inside the SNP.

As Militant’s Scottish perspectives document for 1991 pointed out:

“The SNP manifesto will be well to the left of Labour’s. Their programme for an independent Scotland includes the writing off of the capital housing debt of £3.5 billion, full employment, the re-nationalisation of steel and other privatised industries . . . “48

This left movement within Scottish Nationalism was a result of the left movement in the Scottish working class, Militant’s majority argued. On the basis of this they predicted that the masses’ spontaneous anger would lead them in the direction of the SNP if the Tories won the 1992 election:

“If the Tories were to scrape home at the next election, nationalism would rise up with a vengeance”.49

In response Militant adopted the demand for a Scottish Assembly, not one with only partial powers which the Liberal and Labour establishments advocated, but one with “full powers”.

If the SNP with its economic nationalist programme was now to replace Labour as the “mass organisation” to which the Scottish workers would “inevitably turn”, then the Scottish Assembly was to take the place of the all-Britain Labour government as the method of posing the workers government:

“Such an assembly (in which genuine Socialists have a majority) would in effect be a workers’ government acting with the backing of the one million organised workers and millions of unorganised women and young people in Scotland”50

After the Tory election victory Militant focused the demand for the Scottish Assembly around the demand for a referendum which the Scottish local authorities should organise “from below” if it were not granted by the government.

Militant’s demand for a Scottish Assembly pandered to both nationalism and reformism. How would a Scottish Assembly advance the class struggle of the whole British working class? The answer was, it was not designed to. How would the Militant-controlled assembly deal with the repressive apparatus of the British state when it attempted to enact its socialist programme? Again, only the vague answers of yesteryear: the “backing of the Scottish workers” would save the day.

Militant’s “Scottish Turn” was a break from Grant, but not from the essential method of tailing the spontaneous consciousness of the masses.


Tailing black separatism

The same sorry tale must be told of Militant’s attempt to address black separatism. The rise of racism in Britain and the radicalisation of black youth led Militant to take the initiative in establishing Panther UK, an organisation for African-Caribbean and Asian members. This represented a break with the Tendency’s former wholesale rejection of the idea of black self-organisation within the working class movement. In the 1980s Militant had attracted justified criticism by opposing the democratic right of black members of the Labour Party to their own sections—a right to which other oppressed groups such as women and youth were entitled. There was no accounting for this anomaly except through political adaptation to the bourgeois integrationist consciousness of Labourism. Significantly, for all the posters of Bobby Seale on sale at Militant bookstalls, Militant Labour retains a formal position of opposing black self-organisation within the labour movement. 51

At the same time the politics of Panther UK represented an unprincipled mixture of Marxism and black nationalism.

In perfect concord with the entire method of adapting the programme to the existing consciousness of the masses, Panther’s programme, set out on a leaflet under the heading What we Want, What we Believe, declared:

“We believe black people, or any other people, will not be free until they determine their own destiny.”

It went on to state:

“We believe that the black struggle is part of wider movement for change within society and that our liberation is tied up with changing the whole society. Panther stands for the breaking of the stranglehold of the rich minority over society and to construct a democratic socialist society run by workers and youth.”

This was the only declaration within the programme of Panther’s socialist goals. It failed to mention the crucial point–a point which cuts directly against the prejudices of nationalism and separatism–that the black minority of the working class in Britain cannot hope to achieve emancipation without building a joint revolutionary struggle with white workers.

Of course this unity must be constructed through a systematic campaign against racism within the white working class, not by ignoring the discrimination and oppression that face the black population. But the need for unity with white workers is not an optional extra for the programme of a black socialist organisation. It must be given particular emphasis, as must the need for any black socialist organisation to be committed to the construction of a revolutionary political party uniting the action of all workers, black and white, male and female.

Amidst all their uncritical praise for black nationalist figures from the past, this crucial element was missing from Panther’s programme. Indeed, so keen were Militant to adapt to the understandable suspicions felt by many black youth toward the white working class, that they failed even to declare honestly and openly that any formal link existed between Panther UK and Militant.

But it wasn’t hard to work out that such a link existed. Panther’s programme was exactly modelled on Militant’s “transitional” type programme. The crowning, governmental slogans were missing, and the transitional demands turned into a dead series of “maximum—minimum” demands. The socialist goal was divorced from the everyday agitational demands.

This method, bad enough when applied to the whole class struggle, proved even more disastrous when applied to one sphere of the class struggle.

As a programme for black liberation Panther’s programme was inadequate primarily because it failed to explain how the precondition for black liberation was the victory of workers, black and white, in the struggle for socialism.

In the old days of Ted Grant workers were meant to get the impression that Militant was a loyal, historically organic part of the British Labour Party and its milieu. The same method, consciously applied in the pages of Panther, produced the impression that Panther was simply the latest in a series of socialist black separatist organisations going back to the “reformism with a gun” of Bobby Seale and Huey P Newton.

Whereas Militant’s accommodation to Labourism took four decades to backfire, the Panther project blew up within two years. Many black members of Militant chose not to have anything to do with it. These were largely young black workers and students whose everyday struggles and culture led them towards some form of socialist integrationist strategy. Then a group of Panther members—including some long-standing Militant supporters—went over to separatism to such an extent that they split the organisation in 1993 in order to be “free” from Militant “domination”. The exclusion from active involvement—either through design or ineptitude—of many of Militant’s working class black members left Panther open to those developing in the direction of open black separatism.

The first issue of the newspaper of the new Independent Panther UK contains a programme even more adapted to separatism than that of the original organisation. Replete with separatist rhetoric, the front page article announces the formation of the new group under the headline “Declaration of Independence: Free at Last!”.52 The insinuation is that black people must liberate themselves from any organisational ties to integrated political parties before they can fight for their emancipation.

In the 1950s the Labour entrists who dressed themselves up as left reformists, to use Grant’s phrase, became left reformists. In the 1990s a section of those who dressed themselves up as black separatists became black separatists.


Gulf War – ghosts of the Malvinas

On the question of war again Militant’s break with Grant’s position has been only partial, flawed and dishonest.

The Gulf war came in the middle of the growing internal battle inside Militant. Differences over Militant’s line on the war were aired in the time honoured form of an editorial reply to a “reader’s letter”. The reader in question pointed out the difficulty in arguing against the war in the workplace and suggested Militant argue for a “socialist task force” against Saddam, and for “workers’ sanctions” against Iraq.

Peter Taaffe, Militant’s editor, rejected this. But the line would have been consistent with the method applied to the Malvinas war.

Instead of publicly addressing the disparity Militant chose to hide it.

Taaffe claimed spuriously that the Malvinas war had been an “inter-imperialist” war, i.e. that Argentina was an imperialist country, whereas Iraq was not. Any serious Marxist analysis of the two economies would show them to be semi-colonial countries, relatively economically developed, but held back from transformation into imperialist powers (economically and politically) by the existing world system of imperialism, against which the national bourgeoisie was forced to declare a temporary struggle.

In 1990/91, Militant adopted the slogan Troops out of the Gulf. Was this a “pacifist gesture”, as Militant had characterised it in 1982fi Taaffe could only justify the difference by referring to the fact that in 1982 the demand “found no echo among working class people”. That is, for our great “swimmers-against-the-stream” in Militant, it was far easier to raise opposition to the war against Iraq than it was against Argentina.

As against 1982 Taaffe openly scorned the idea of a socialist task force against Iraq:

“It is the task of the Iraqi workers and peasants themselves to deal with the Saddam dictatorship . . . any suggestion of a task force, even with the qualification that it would be ‘socialist’ would be completely opposed by the masses of the Middle East. They have had enough of interventions from the west which have divided the Arab nation, super exploited its wealth . . .”53

And what about the workers and peasants of Latin America? Hadn’t they had enough of imperialist military intervention in 1982fi Wouldn’t they—didn’t they—greet all talk of a socialist task force with derision?

Militant attempted to make this self-correction without an ounce of self-criticism. What is more, Militant’s habitual opportunism meant that, despite assembling all the elements of an Iraqi-defencist position it was never prepared to put this into practice during the war itself.

Taaffe declared:

“It would be a mistake to suggest that Militant can assume a neutral position on the Gulf”.54

So which side was Militant on? Not a single issue of Militant contained the answer, during or after the war. The closest Militant got to defending Iraq was this:

“The imperialists must be forced to retreat and leave the peoples of the whole Middle East to fight for the socialist federation.”55

The same Militant editorial declared “we can give no support to an imperialist war to topple Saddam”, but it refrained from spelling out the logical conclusion of Militant’s position—support for Iraq, despite its right-wing dictatorial government—as the best way to create conditions for the progressive overthrow of the Saddam regime.

In practice, as before, once the shooting started, Militant quickly disappeared from most of the regular demonstrations against the war. Instead of the defence of Iraq—to borrow a phrase from Pablo—they were busy once again fighting for a “socialist Britain”.


The state – covering Grant’s tracks

In the realms of theory Militant Labour has attempted to cover Ted Grant’s tracks on Marxism and the state.

After the disaster of the Anti-Poll Tax Demo Militant found themselves having to defend themselves against the growing influence of anarchism amongst the youth. Militant was obliged to mount a defence of the Marxist analysis of the state against anarchism’s rejection of all state forms—including a workers’ state—as fundamentally oppressive.

In an article by Nick Wrack in Militant International Review 46, they explained that, after the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels concluded that;

“the working class could not simply take hold of the ready made state apparatus of the bourgeoisie but would have to completely replace it with a different form of state, one to serve the interests of the majority in society and to lay the basis for the building of a socialist society.”56

Wrack goes on to explain that a stateless and classless society “could only be achieved by the socialist revolution, that is by the working class conquering state power, by the political destruction of the capitalist state and its replacement by a democratic workers’ state.”57

This apparently represents a qualitative break with Militant’s “parliamentary road”. Or does it? Firstly, they chose to use the term “political destruction”, which could be taken to mean the political transferral of power rather than physical break up of the state—armed forces, police, judiciary and upper layers of the civil service.

Secondly, for any Marxist the next step in the argument would be the explanation of the role of the self-organisation of the masses, of the creation of workers’ councils in both the carrying out and the consolidation of the revolution, and the insistence that it is on the basis of this new, qualitatively different power, that the foundations of a truly stateless society will be laid.

But Wrack says nothing about this. Having deliberately obscured the nature of the revolution, he then jumps over a historic period to concentrate on Marxism’s argument with anarchism over the role of the workers’ state. On such distant terrain, Militant can allow itself a moment of orthodoxy. But on the concrete questions of today’s class struggle Militant remains unprepared to spell out the how and why of smashing the capitalist state.

The current version of Militant’s programme remains firmly on the parliamentary terrain of the 1970s and 1980s, with not one word to say about workers’ power and workers’ democracy, not one word of criticism of parliamentary democracy, or even the slightest nod in the direction of “Marxism” except for the call for “democratic workers’ control and management” in nationalised industries. Militant’s objective of “a democratic, socialist planned economy” is entirely within the scope of their strategic position of “Labour to power on a socialist programme”.58

Recently, Militant have argued that:

“having destroyed the capitalist state it will be necessary for the victorious working class to constitute themselves as a new state, to prevent the defeated bourgeoisie from organising counter-revolution. The capitalists will do everything possible to destroy the gains of the revolution. Unless the working class takes the practical step of organising its own state, that is an instrument of its own class rule, then the working class will be defeated by the violent action of the capitalists and capitalism will be restored.”59

This is absolutely true. But this brief moment of wisdom has no effect whatsoever on Militant’s politics. Far from disproving their centrism, it only demonstrates the proof of it.

Militant are incapable of maintaining a coherent Marxist position, either theoretical or programmatic, with regard to the state. Even when they embrace orthodoxy in the pages of their theoretical journal, the content of their practical intervention remains unchanged. Were the working class to entrust Militant with leadership, the consequences would be disastrous.

Despite its new-found organisational independence from Labour, Militant Labour has been unable to rid itself of the misapplication of the workers’ government tactic. Its local and parliamentary election campaigns have been fought on a programme which is undeniably left reformist.

In local council elections Militant Labour has argued for a “people’s budget”, but suggested no means of imposing that budget in the face of illegality. It has campaigned on the basis that its candidates are “working class”, that they will only take a workers’ wage, that they will help tenants deal with housing problems. But nowhere has it availed itself of the opportunity to explain to tens of thousands of voters that what we need is a revolution, that we need a different kind of government, or that we need a revolutionary combat party to get it.

Even when it is standing independently of Labour, Militant Labour retains the strategic adaptation to the Labourite, reformist consciousness that has shaped its programme and practice for over 40 years.

In the 1920s Trotsky attacked the Labour lefts for their reformism. His words strike home against Militant Labour, even in its renewed, independent, left-talking form:

“Heroic promises to hurl thunderbolts of resistance if the Conservatives should ‘dare’, etc, are not worth a single bad penny. It is futile to lull the masses to sleep from day to day with prattling about peaceful, painless, parliamentary, democratic transitions to socialism and then, at the first serious punch delivered at ones nose, to call upon the masses for armed resistance. This is the best method for facilitating the destruction of the proletariat by the powers of reaction. In order to be capable of offering serious resistance, the masses must be prepared for such action mentally, materially and by organisation. they must understand the inevitability of a more and more savage class struggle, and its transformation, at a certain stage into civil war.”60


Conclusion

How can we characterise Militant’s evolution? The Taaffe leadership seemed to have a purpose when it removed Grant and the obstacle he placed in the way of exploiting the possibility of independent work. But that has not cured the decline of the tendency.

Replacing the central orientation to labour with an orientation to movements of the socially oppressed and to Scottish nationalism has, if anything, accelerated the decline in influence everywhere except Scotland. Today the tendency’s leadership seems uncertain of the way forward but unwilling to retrace its steps and attempt a systematic accounting of Grant’s politics.

Militant’s centrist political past haunts it. Whilst it has certainly moved left on a variety of individual issues, on the essential questions it has only seemed to move.

Schematic, dishonest politics necessitate the construction of a tiny, really sectarian, world where reality does not penetrate. The electoral successes of Scottish Militant Labour, bought at an enormous cost in political opportunism, are today cited as excuses for avoiding the trouble it would cause to really draw up a full account with Grant’s politics.

The change in the global situation in the aftermath of the collapse of Stalinism has shaken the international left to the core. In Britain as elsewhere, the conditions of the class struggle that took shape in the long years of the post-war boom are changing at an ever accelerating rate. Those political organisations on the far left whose programme and practice was adapted not to the needs of the class struggle, but to the two great apparatuses of reaction within the working class movement—Social-Democracy and Stalinism—have been thrown into crisis.

The opening years of this new period in world history have seen important reverses in class consciousness and organisation on a world scale. But at the same time, and integrally linked to this process, the great reformist safety valves for channelling and controlling class discontent are themselves being undermined. It is this historic process that has torn the Militant Tendency apart.

The strategic accommodation of Militant to Labourism could not last. The dates engraved on the tombstone of strategic entrism are the dates which encompass the establishment and decline of the period of the post-war order: 1951—1991.

Without a stable formation like Labourism to which it can adapt, Militant is now chasing after more ephemeral, unstable political formations.

In the years to come, as all manner of maverick and non-proletarian forces endeavour to fill the ideological vacuum, the centrifugal forces acting in Militant will increase. Further instability, further crises and splits, are guaranteed.

There is a way out of this situation. It involves settling accounts not merely with the best known of Ted Grant’s political errors, but with its theoretical foundations. The leadership of Militant Labour are determined not to follow this path, for they sense in the marrow of their bones that it leads to the exposure of the sum total of their aggregated errors, to their own political destruction.

We are convinced that there are hundreds of members of Militant Labour and its sister organisations in other countries who feel a mounting sense of disquiet. They are loyal comrades, hard working activists and cadre who have dedicated their lives to the struggle on which the future of humanity depends. They do not wish to squander their lives in a spiral of ever more demoralised and fruitless manoeuvres. It is to them that this article is addressed. The condition of their future success is that they draw the necessary conclusion—turn to the politics of the LRCI.


Footnotes
1 Militant, 24.1.92
2 By centrist we mean political tendencies that “stand between reformism and revolutionary communism, often borrowing from both or vacillating between the two, or confining its revolutionism to theory and its reformism to practice. It is also essentially a transitional phenomenon, moving either towards or away from Marxism. Paradoxically, its transition can be swift or it can take the form of years of ossified, motionless centrism.” Trotskyist Discussion Bulletin No.1, “What is Centrism?”, Workers Power (May 1986)
3 Trotsky The Crisis of the French Section
4 A detailed and illuminating account of this episode, the first of many subsequent attempts by would-be Trotskyists to establish a centrist current and publication, is given in The Mass Paper a pamphlet by Erwin Wolf) in Trotsky, The Crisis of the French Section
5 ibid
6 Problems of Entrism (1959)
7 The Programme of the International, International Bureau for the Fourth International, London 1970
8 See “The Rise and Fall of the SLL” Workers Power, (February 1986)
9 The New Turn - A Threat to Forty Years’ Work (1991)
10 The Programme of the International, (May 1970) emphasis added
11 Problems of Entrism
12 Militant British Perspectives 1979
14 Problems of Entrism
15 Workers Power was the only tendency in the LPYS that saw the need to prepare for independence.
Our candidate for the leading committee of the LPYS, Gary O’Donnell, argued in his electoral address that a counter-offensive was necessary and that: “such a movement would not co-exist for long in the party of Kinnock and Whitty.”
He urged the LPYS to defy the Sawyer proposals when they were imposed and keep its structures intact. This was a perspective for an independent youth movement. He argued that the movement should adopt unambiguously revolutionary policies.
Workers Power predicted the need for such a course of action well in advance. In 1984 we argued that “a fighting perspective will draw upon us the wrath of Kinnock and Hattersley. This is because it will involve a break with their rotten politics. As they control the bureaucratic apparatus of the Labour Party it may well mean a break with the Labour Party.”
We went on to warn that: “The Militant would never consider this and as a result they help defeat the struggle of youth in advance.”
We were right: the LPYS was surrendered without a fight.
18 Taaffe, P and Mulhearn, T Liverpool: The City that Dared to Fight (London 1988) See also review of this in Workers Power 103
19 Militant British Perspectives 1979
21 What is to be Done?, Moscow 1978
23 Militant British Perspectives 1983
24 ibid
25 Pablo Where are we Going? (1951)
26 Pablo The Building of the Revolutionary Party February 1952
27 ibid
28 ibid
29 Trotsky, The Death Agony of capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, New York 1977
30 “The political backwardness of the American workers” in ibid
31 ibid
32 Militant What we stand for , (London 1985)
33 Foster, S and Hoskisson, M “Militant’s peaceful parliamentary road”, Permanent Revolution 8, (London 1989)
34 Degras, J (ed), The Communist International: Documents (London 1971) Vol 1
35 Militant What we stand for, op cit
36 Working Women and the Struggle for Socialism, Labour Students South West Region, Bristol (undated). First published by the Minority on the National Committee of the National Organisation of Labour Students under the title Women, Sexism and the Labour Movement, 1976.
37 ibid
38 ibid The implication in the first sentence is clear: lesbian and gay liberation is not a class issue and Marxists wouldn’t mention such a “distasteful“ subject were it not for its popularity in the student movement.
39 Militant Northern Ireland - A Marxist Analysis (1984)
40 Militant April 1982, See also Communism and the Test of War Workers Power 33 (May 1982)
41 ibid
42 Militant International Review June 1982
43 Scotland: Perspectives and Tasks (1991)
44 Minority resolution on Walton, July (1991)
45 Militant 30 August 1991
46 Heemskerk, C “After Walton” Militant International Review 46 (Summer 1991)
44 Militant British Perspectives 1979
48 Scotland: Perspectives and Tasks 1991
49 ibid
50 Militant 20 August 1991
51 As recently as December 1993 at the national conference of Youth against Racism in Europe, Militant Labour supporters, without offering a single word of explanation, voted against the right for black trade unionists to organise their own caucuses to identify and combat racism in industry and the labour movement.
52 Panther Winter 1993/4 NB This is the so called “independent” Panther. At time of writing the Militant Labour-controlled Panther has not re-appeared.
53 Militant October 1990
54 ibid
55 Militant 25 January 1991
56 “Marxism, Anarchism and the State”, Nick Wrack, Militant International Review 46, (1991)
57 ibid
58 Militant 2 April 1993
59 ibid
60 Trotsky On Britain

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