Datasets:

pkd

/

marxism-medium

like 1

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins From Gangrene ... to the Danger of Amputation (July 1993) From New Interventions, Vol. 4 No. 3, 1993. Downloaded with kind permission from the What Next? Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. On the Shoulders of a Giant “If you stand on the shoulders of a giant, it is possible to see even further than the giant.” I first heard this piece of homely wisdom from the lips of Tony Cliff, none of which detracts from its truth or, indeed, its appositeness to the current discussion, in the pages of New Interventions, between Jim Dye, Mike Jones and Ken Tarbuck. Cliff’s little aphorism is, of course, only true so long as two conditions are satisfied. First, that you do not use the advantage of the giants height to look steadfastly backwards (this seems to be Jim Dye’s stance). Second, that you do not abuse this privileged position by kicking the giant repeatedly in the ear (this seems to be Mike Jones’ standpoint). If I could, without offensive compression, summarise the arguments of the contestants, I think it would go like this: Jim Dye, while accepting a number of errors and omissions by Lenin and Trotsky, still maintains the essential validity of the Bolshevik tradition of the vanguard party, with all the trappings of democratic centralism. This seems to me to be a viable, if mistaken, stand for Jim to take. Less convincing, is his insistence that the Fourth International was “one of Trotsky’s finest achievements” and that the priority today is for a “reforged FI”. Having said that, what I do find heartening is that a member of one of the fragments of the shattered Healy WRP can debate in a non-sectarian fashion without recourse to vituperation. I am not familiar with Workers News, the paper of the Workers International League (Leninist-Trotskyist), but I intend to be so in the future. Incidentally, why do revolutionary organisations have these awful portmanteau titles? If they want to locate themselves with total accuracy, perhaps they should include a PO Box number. Mike Jones, it seems to me, with his impressive knowledge of German Communism, is attempting to resuscitate a different, Luxemburgist, tradition with which to beat the Trotskyist model. In some ways, this is an admirable effort; if only because Luxemburg has a great deal to teach us all, including the most unreformed orthodox Trotskyist. Nevertheless, it seems perverse for Mike to correctly emphasise that the revolution is the task of the majority of the working class while denying any credit to the only political current that attempted, however badly, to connect the movement of the workers with Marxist theory. With all due respect to Paul Levi and Brandler-Thalheimer, they were not quite in Trotsky’s league. With Ken Tarbuck’s contribution, I confess I feel more at home. I think he is saying that Trotskyism had its rationale in the fight against Stalinism, from a revolutionary perspective. In that sense it was a positive contribution, for which all honour is due and to which most of us owe our presence in the revolutionary movement today. Trotsky’s written work does stand as his monument and, as Ken points out, without the movement he founded it would be gathering dust in some archive of socialist ephemera. Making a Fetish of the International If I have not done too much injustice to the three comrades’ views, I would appreciate the opportunity to develop my own arguments. On the question of the vanguard party and democratic centralism, I find the first term vainglorious and conducive to the view that we, not the class, are the key factor. The second term is either a meaningless contradiction or a recipe for self-perpetuating leaders to avoid accountability. “To mess about with the cadre”, in James P. Cannon’s immortal phrase. Discipline in the revolutionary movement comes about from shared conviction and common objectives, not at all from concern about some immaculately conceived party line, the breaching of which will land you in front of the control commission, twisting your cap nervously in your sweaty hands. The party does have a number of functions, however, that only it can perform. It provides the forum for discussion, the exchange of experience and the decision about programme and policy. It provides the written material – papers, journals and propaganda – with which the members operate more effectively in the working class movement in so far as the material and the work of the comrades is accurate and effective, the experience of the workers themselves is fed back into further analysis and further action. The party grows and its work in the class becomes influential, in setting the broad movements agenda. The prospect of building a mass party then stands in the realm of practical politics. The very essence of all this is that the movement is subjected at all times to the critical gaze of the workers. If the party does not accord with workers everyday experience and assist them in their struggles it will be rejected and rightly so. The tragedy of the Trotskyist movement has been that it was largely irrelevant to the workers as a class. That this was, in large measure, due to the overpowering presence of Stalinism and social democracy on the one hand and a series of working class defeats on the other, cannot gainsay the fact that some of the wounds were self-inflicted. For example, the American Trotskyists who tried bravely and so hard at Minneapolis-St Paul, then proceeded to engage in a faction fight about entry into the barely breathing corpse of American social democracy. Having shed members on the way, they then performed their “French turn”. In due course, they departed the American SP having recruited a large chunk of the Young Peoples Socialist League. The period of their self-immolation coincided with the explosive growth of the CIO, while the Trotskyists were giving Norman Thomas a seeing to.

The period of their self-immolation coincided with the explosive growth of the CIO, while the Trotskyists were giving Norman Thomas a seeing to. Even more pathetic, the newly augmented Socialist Workers Party then engaged in a near fatal faction fight between Cannon and Shachtman. The subsequent split took almost half the party into Shachtmans Workers Party, including practically all the recently won YPSLs. A nice little exercise in futility that is in no way mitigated by the spin off of In Defence of Marxism and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, two volumes that have seen service in the cause of many a subsequent and destructive faction fight. Of similar proportions was the failure of the IS Group in the early 1970s when the group in this country possessed a thousand-plus industrial workers and a chain of rank and file papers. This happy conjunction, certainly the best of any group in Britain, with its prospect of building a genuine rank and file movement on the tide of working class militancy, was rejected by Cliff and his co-thinkers for that shop-soiled nostrum “the revolutionary youth”. (I hope to write in a future issue of New Interventions a more detailed account of this episode from the SWP’s past.) Building a revolutionary workers organisation has to be based upon the class as it is, not how we would like it to be. If we cannot show how our socialism connects realistically with workers lives, it seems unlikely that they will help us to “reforge the FI”. There is a sort of fetishism about the notion of the International that I find puzzling. It must surely be apparent to everyone that at no time has the FI (in any of its many guises) done anything that brought it to the attention of, let alone gave assistance to, the worlds workers. So far as the Trotskyist groups were concerned, such benefits as it conferred were more psychological than practical. The one-day get-together of 1938, in Rosmer’s barn, bears as much relationship to the founding congress of a world party of Bolshevism as Gerry Healy did to Leon Trotsky. Even that pipsqueak event required the Tammany Hall talents of Cannon to ensure a smooth outcome. Sadly that was the high point; from then on it was downhill all the way. The manner in which Cannon passed on the mandate to “our young men in Europe” (Pablo and Mandel) was rather like Colonel Sanders granting a franchise for a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. The way in which Cannon and Pablo adopted and cherished Healy is responsible for more ex-Trotskyists than a small movement can readily bear. Every major pronouncement of the FI’s “theoreticians” turned out to be wrong. Mandel could tailor you a theory that was an un-seamed garment, that sometimes fitted where it touched. The next week, when hard reality gave the thing an unseemly bulge, he would – without a backward glance or word of regret – run you up a new one, guaranteed to last until at least next Tuesday. Pablo thought more deeply and gave us “Centuries of Deformed Workers States” (tell that one to Mikhail Gorbachev). The ISFI had a more polished brand of bullshit than the ICFI, but both of them and their splinters were frequently malevolent and always irrelevant. Internationalism to mean anything implies influence and activity outside the closed circle of the organisation, otherwise it is empty rhetoric and that is what we have had: the world party of rhetorical socialism. The Heritage of Luxemburg There are then a lot of things to complain about in the heritage that LDT left us and it seems to be Mike Jones’ argument that we should look to another tradition. The problem here is that there has been something of a 70-year gap in the alternative he espouses. The tragedy is that Luxemburg was murdered, because she was probably the only individual who enjoyed comparable prestige to Lenin and Trotsky. Indeed, in the international movement, she was the outstanding figure on the revolutionary left, much better known than Lenin, before the Russian Revolution. It is perhaps fruitless, although enjoyable, to speculate what would have happened if she had lived. One finds it difficult to believe that a KPD with Luxemburg in the leadership would have been a party to the March Action of 1921 or the 1923 fiasco. It is also possible that her unique prestige would have tipped the scales in the building of a mass party that was able to carry through the German revolution. The subsequent course of world history would have been vastly different and all to the good. Even so, I have no doubt that there would have been a different Mike Jones anxious to point out that there wee one or two skeletons in the Luxemburgist closet. Such a comrade might say that Jogiches was quite a few cards short of the full democratic pack when it came to his leadership of the Polish party (SDKPiL) and that Rosa supported him almost unfailingly, whatever her private reservations. Her attitude to the trade unions was one of profound mistrust, preferring the underground Polish unions under the hegemony of the party to free and independent ones. She also supported Jogiches in his fruitless attempt to take over the Russian Social Democracy. But none of this is the general method of Luxemburg, and her mistakes were made, like Trotsky’s, in the heat of political controversy. The overwhelming weight of her politics, like Trotsky’s, is benevolent and positive. Unfortunately, Luxemburg did not live to exert her benevolent influence on the infant KPD and the CI. After Jogiches’ murder by the Freikorps, the KPD leadership was taken by Paul Levi, one of Luxemburg’s most talented protégés. Levi, a lawyer by profession, was not a theoretician in the Luxemburg mould, nor an organiser in Jogiches’ style, but he was, nevertheless, a figure of authority in Germany and the International. Both Lenin and Trotsky thought very highly of him, which may explain, at least in part, why Zinoviev cordially detested him. Even so, Zinoviev had to take account of the fact that Levi led the most significant party in the International, one whose success would guarantee the Soviet power in Russia.

Unless Levi managed some unforced errors he was a difficult man to dislodge. Unfortunately, that is just what he did make. At the Leghorn conference of the Italian Socialist Party, Levi supported Serrati, who opposed the expulsion of the PSI right wing. This was a nice excuse for Zinoviev to move against Levi. Through the CI delegates Rakosi and Kabakchiev, Thalheimer was persuaded to move a censure vote on Levi. When that was carried by 28 to 23, Clara Zetkin and three others resigned from the central committee. In their absence, once more under CI urging and under the leadership of Brandler-Thalheimer, the ill-fated and misconceived March Action was mounted. A few bombs were set off to stir up the Reichswehr, scattered strikes occurred, guerrilla raids were mounted. The Reichswehr, suitably stirred up, suppressed the action with some ease, artillery and much bloodshed. Levi immediately, before the dust had settled, published a pamphlet denouncing the action as a putsch, claiming that it was “war by the Communist Party on the working class”. In short order he was expelled from the KPD and the CI. Lenin, in discussion with Clara Zetkin, said: “You know how highly I value Paul Levi ... Ruthless criticism of the March Action was necessary, but what did Paul Levi give? He tore the party to pieces ... he gave nothing to which the party could usefully turn. He lacks the spirit of solidarity with the party and it was that which has made the rank and file ... deaf and blind to the great deal of truth in Levi’s criticism, particularly to his correct political principles ... The Leftists have to thank Paul Levi that up to the present they have come out so well, much too well.” (Degras, Communist International, Vol. 1, p. 218) In the wake of his expulsion Levi formed the Working Committee for Communism, a short-lived group that joined the USPD a few months later and stayed when it fused with the SPD. Brandler and Thalheimer stayed on in the KPD to participate in and serve as scapegoats for the failed revolution of 1923. No Whited Sepulchres The reason for banging on at this length is to show that in revolutionary politics, where the stakes are so high, there are no whited sepulchres and that correct politics are no guarantee of success, if the tactics both within and without the party are faulty. Luxemburg had no closer disciple than Levi among the younger comrades and no one better able to develop her heritage. He just might have done so in the KPD, but he signally failed outside. In a very real sense the coining of the terms Leninism, Luxemburgism and Trotskyism confuse more than they clarify. In so far as they have meaning it is that they represent the ideas that revolutionary Marxists have developed to answer problems they face in the real world. It is not surprising that Lenin emphasised discipline in the chaos of Tsarist Russia and that Luxemburg emphasised spontaneity in the bureaucratically ordered world of German Social Democracy. This silly “ism” business was started by Stalin, with his pamphlet Foundations of Leninism, a shrewd attempt to recast Lenin in Stalin’s own image. Lenin himself certainly did not see the body of his work as a universal panacea worthy of an “ism”. Discussing the entire process of the revolution he said: “[It] had to be admitted to have some fundamental significance on an international scale. Of course it would be a great mistake to exaggerate this truth and apply it to more than a few of the fundamental features of our revolution. We must not make the error of forgetting that once the proletarian revolution has been victorious in at least one of the advanced countries, things will in all likelihood change very considerably, i.e. Russia will shortly cease to be the model country and become once more the backward country, in a Soviet and socialist sense.” (Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 21) Luxemburg, I have no doubt, would, with equal modesty, have rejected any claim to an “ism”. How Many “isms” Do We Need? The word Trotskyism, to describe a body of ideas, was coined by Stalin as the reactionary antithesis to Leninism. The label stuck, but to turn it back on the Stalinists we acquired the bracketed Bolshevik-Leninist suffix. In discussing Trotskyism Ken Tarbuck makes the point (one also made by Al Richardson in New Interventions) that it had its raison d’être in the existence of Stalinism. With the demise of Stalinism it is irrelevant to the future of the movement. I think that is probably true. I also think that Luxemburgism as a separate strand, in the absence of anything like the orthodox social democracy she was fighting against, has also had its day. In the process of moving on, however, we must not make the air hideous with the screams of babies being hammered down the plughole with all the dirty water. Transitional politics, as opposed to the Transitional Programme, are crucially important, the centrality of the working class and the workers self-activity to any socialist analysis are also vitally important. There are, perhaps, 10,000 people organised in revolutionary groups in Britain today and there is a much larger number of people who once were in one or other of the groups. For many of these groups their principled reason to exist is not discernible to the naked eye.

For many of these groups their principled reason to exist is not discernible to the naked eye. The question of the Fourth International is not, for example, a matter of principle. It may or may not be desirable but it cannot be said that the work of socialist agitation is attenuated by its absence. I take the view that the existence of the Potemkin FIs we have had were almost totally malign for the Trotskyist groups. The relinquishing of sectarian shibboleths may be as heart-wrenching and difficult as removing a child’s comfort blanket, but in both cases it must be done if maturity is to be achieved. The exclusive rectitude of groups, who could hold their aggregates in a telephone booth, is tragic and absurd. It is a sort of perverse hobby that cannot hold a candle to train spotting, where you see more of the country and might even meet some real workers. It is long past the time when we should continue playing the fool with contending “isms”. Marxism is really the only one we need and we should be able to incorporate all that is valuable for class struggle from the different traditions under that one umbrella. Revolutionary regroupment is necessary if Jim Dye is to see the realisation of his dream of the kids dancing on the rubble of Buckingham Palace. I wonder, though, if I might move a small amendment: could the kids have Centrepoint and Buckingham Palace turned into a museum after the style of the Imelda Marcos’ one in Manila. Just imagine all those thousands of sensible shoes and hats designed like chamber pots. Now that would be something to show your grandchildren. July 1993 Top of the page Last updated on 9 May 2021

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Tony Cliff (2002) From Revolutionary History, Vol. 8 No. 2, 2002. Transcribed by Alun Morgan for Revolutionary History Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Dear Editor In the last issue of Revolutionary History (Volume 8, no. 1), Ian Birchall took Ted Crawford and myself to task for our criticisms of Tony Cliff’s autobiography A World to Win. Ted dealt with most of Ian’s letter in the same issue, but there are a couple of matters I would like to set straight, if possible. In a patronising passage, calculated to strain my amiability to its limit, Ian writes: Personally, I always found Jim Higgins an amiable and amusing individual, and I should be quite happy to let bygones be bygones. But since he insists on scratching at the wound, let me say that the real difference between Cliff and Higgins is as follows: if Cliff had lost the 1975 faction fight, he would have got on with rebuilding what was left of his organisation; he would certainly not have spent the next 25 years writing articles about how badly he had been treated. In this short half-paragraph Ian marks up an impressive score of errors, which suggests to me that for all his closeness to Cliff he was not too aware of what was going on. For starters, I do not, so far as I am aware, have any ‘bygones’ with Ian. Indeed, I can recall quite vividly some fairly acrimonious debates that I had with Cliff, but not so much as a cross word with Ian. He may, of course, have voted for Cliff’s side of the dispute with noisy enthusiasm, but that would be quite insufficient to be noticed among the strident clamour of Cliff’s noisier loyalists. Again, contrary to Ian’s suggestion, I have not spent my time for the last 25 years whinging about how Cliff did me wrong. I have, of course, written fairly extensively about the International Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party when requested to by various journals. In all of that I have attempted to keep my own part in this out of the narrative, except in so far as it clarified the text. Where I have written with some defence of my personal involvement, it has been in response to Ian, who has been pursuing me through the pages of these same journals with such doggedness as to put him in danger of prosecution under the anti-stalking legislation. Ian’s most substantial error is in the passage where he guesses what Cliff might have done if the IS Opposition had won the 1975 faction fight. The fact is that the ISO was a most reluctant opposition and, assuming that we had won, had no intention of expelling Cliff and his camarilla. The ISO was a response to Cliff’s depressingly ingrained inability to operate in any kind of collective where there was a chance that he might not get his own way. Now this failing, observable and forgivable in kindergartens, is destructive and ultimately pathetic when practised in an organisation with pretensions to Bolshevism. Had he lost the faction fight, he would have been expected to abide by the line that he had supported (and had been in large measure responsible for initiating) until a few months before the arguments erupted. This outcome might have saved him from the embarrassment of fathering the ‘all shop stewards are bent’ line that with total irresponsibility he tossed into the 1975 debate. This particular piece of crass stupidity is described in Mike Sheridan’s moving obituary of Sean Halloran in the same issue of Revolutionary History as Ian’s letter. The real difference between Cliff and Higgins was that I was unwilling to discard valuable parts of the IS heritage, much of which I had originally learned from Cliff, for a passing factional advantage. Cliff embraced the opportunity, performing political convolutions of herpetic proportions, that by some alchemy damaged neither his backbone nor his credibility among the faithful. But as Ian Birchall knows perfectly well, Cliff was prepared to lie and cheat to retain his untrammelled control of the organisation. Ye Gods, on occasion he was even prepared to perpetrate such notorious porkies as his rewriting of the anti-Lenin bits of the first edition of Rosa Luxemburg, then denying he had done so, so that he could pretend that his Leninism was pure, unwavering and lifelong. In his concluding paragraphs, Ian presents a vision of Cliff as candidate for imminent beatification, well good luck on that one Ian. Perhaps if he eventually gets round to producing, Tony Cliff: The Movie, he might cast Julie Andrews in the title rôle. Jim Higgins Ian Birchall adds that he does not wish to continue this correspondence, but wishes to point out that the republication of Cliff’s pamphlet on Rosa Luxemburg in the first volume of his Selected Works does include both of the passages to which Jim Higgins refers. Top of the page Last updated on 12 May 2021

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins The arrogance of the long distance Zionist [1*] (March 1998) From Workers’ Liberty, No.38, March 1998. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. This will be the third time I have ventured to disagree with Sean Matgamna on the vexed question of Zionism. I do so with some trepidation because, or so it seems, even when I am right I am in reality exposing myself as fundamentally wrong and mischievously so. In my first article I attempted to lighten the subject with a few mildly humourous quips. I was sternly rebuked for this failure of seriousness. Chastened, in part two I adopted a serious tone. Sean responded by regretting my humour had been replaced by “choler, rodomontade, unleavened abuse, some of it purely personal ...” Did I really do all of that? I feel particularly cheered to hear that I was guilty of choler and rodomontade, rather like the man who discovered at an advanced age that he had been speaking prose all his life. Normally, of course, I only use unleavened abuse during Passover. Sorry about that. Having reviewed Sean’s articles I can see that they fit quite nicely into the Matgamna mode of polemic. First and foremost, his views are lumped together in such a way that they will sharply divide him from other socialists. This is what Al Richardson calls “consumer socialism” and Marx calls “sectarianism.” In practice this means that since Bernard Dix died, there have been no adherents of the Shachtmanite school of bureaucratic collectivism on these shores and if Sean were to occupy this vacant franchise he would acquire a whole slew of politics to differentiate himself from everybody else. All you need is a file of New International (published monthly between 1936 and 1958) and you can start to kid yourself you are writing with all the style and eloquence of Max Shachtman. Along with all the clever nonsense about Russia you will also inherit the Workers’ Party-International Socialist League line on Israel. A comparison of Sean’s article with a sampling of the WP-ISL texts shows that whatever Sean lacks in originality he has made up for in the diligence of his researches into the New International. In the September issue of Workers’ Liberty we have Sean as follows: “Cliff’s 1946 pamphlet does not deal at all with the political questions in the Middle East, having more to say about the price of oil than about the rights of national minorities. Where politics should have been there is a vacuum ...” Now here is Al Gates in the New International in September 1947: “T. Cliff’s competent analytical work on Palestine, and here too we observed a fine study of the economic growth and problems of the Middle East and the place of Palestine in that situation. Yet the whole work was outstanding for its studious evasion of the political questions of the class and national struggles taking place there.” Gates is more polite than Sean, but that will probably surprise no one. Another standard feature of Sean’s method is the one where he complains bitterly that he is being abused unfairly as a prelude to unleashing a little of his own venom into the argument. For example, I raised the case of Deir Yassin because it took place in April 1948 and set in motion the Arab refugees, countering Sean said they only fled in May 1948 when the Arab armies started their offensive. In so doing I neglected to mention the killing of 60 Jews by Arabs in the bloody attacks of 1929. For this I was accused of hypocrisy. Perhaps now I should go on to apologise for failing to condemn the similar outrages of 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936 and 1938. In the interests of balance perhaps I should also throw in the massacres of Sabra and Chatila, because I condemn them as well. In the same vein, Sean insists that he does not believe that I, or the SWP, are racist, but in virtually breath he repeats his accusation that we are anti-semitic. This does not come from the WP-ISL. I have nowhere in the pro-Israel polemics of Al Gates and the rest seen them accuse their socialist opponents of anti-semitism. For that we must look to official Zionist spokesmen and Sean Matgamna. It is, I suppose, always nice to have two sources of inspiration. Let us now turn to Sean’s predilection for discovering sinister and malign purposes in the motives of others and constructing a sort of retrospective amalgam. About a quarter of his piece is devoted to a partial and not very informative trawl through Cliff’s works on the Middle East. On the strength of his 1948 pamphlet Middle East at the Crossroads, this apparently made Cliff, along with Abram Leon, one of the Fourth International’s two experts on the Jewish question. Unfortunately, Leon was killed by the Nazis, so after 1946 Cliff must have stood pre-eminent, although Sean assigns a subordinate role to Ernest Mandel. Thus we have the sinister Cliff leading the FI along the road of “anti-semitic anti-Zionism.” Unfortunately, by the time Sean got round to this particular fantasy he had forgotten what he had written on the previous page: “In 1967, after the Six Day War, Cliff wrote a pamphlet which is closer in its political conclusions and implied conclusions to what Workers’ Liberty says than to what the SWP or Jim Higgins say now. The decisive shift came after 1967 and was brought to the present level of nonsense after the Yom Kippur war of 1973.

The ‘honour’ of having established the post 1973 IS/SWP line belongs, I think, to none other than Jim Higgins (in an article in IS Journal).” There you have it comrade readers, Cliff set the style for the FI and especially the American SWP, except that until 1973 his views were not much different from those of Workers’ Liberty, which I assume are the same as Sean’s. Far from Cliff being the deus ex machina of anti-Zionist anti-semitism, I am. In International Socialism No. 64 in 1973, I wrote this seminal offending piece, Background to the Middle East Crisis. At the same time, the ground-breaking significance of the article passed without a murmur. Nobody, including the author, was aware that it was any more than a short explanation of the IS Group’s attitude to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, which I had reported for Socialist Worker. In the 23 years since it was written probably only Sean Matgamna has read it, now that Sean, with Holmes-like skill, has unmasked me as the eminence grise of “non-racist anti-semitic anti-Zionism” I too have read it, and regret that it has no claims, subliminal or otherwise, to trend-setting originality. Delving further into the Matgamna polemical method we find encounter that special form of arrogance that insists on setting all the terms of any debate and finding significance in a failure to follow him up any logical blind alley he may choose. Let us then consider his “serious and not entirely rhetorical question, why the Jewish minority, a third of the population in the 1940s, did not have national rights there.” Let us leave aside the fact that rhetorical questions are precisely the ones that are not looking for answers, and think about this one. First, in those terms of realpolitik to which Sean is so addicted, who was to afford them national determination in the 1930s and 1940s. Was it the Arab majority? Not a bit of it, the very notion of any kind of accommodation with the Arab majority was totally anathema to the Zionist leadership. Should they have addressed themselves to the British? Actually they did and were turned down. The fact is that there were no rights for self-determination for anyone in Palestine. British policy had been to utilize Zionism as a force to divide and discipline the Arab masses. That is how the Jewish population rose from fewer than 100,000 in 1917 to over 400,000 in 1939 (a third of the total population). The plan was for eventually a Jewish homeland under strictly British tutelage. The turning off of Jewish immigration in 1939 was because the British were concerned to pacify the Arab majority to safeguard Palestine as a British controlled Middle East hub, especially the oil pipeline, in the war. The question of self-determination for the Zionists had nothing to do with democracy, because any solution, while the Jewish population remained a minority, would under democratic norms have to be cast in such a way that came to terms with the Arab majority. It is for this reason that the Zionist leadership fought so hard for unrestricted immigration and why the Arabs were against it. It is for the same reasons that the Zionists while demanding Jewish immigration were opposed to Arab immigration. It is the same reason why Zionist policy was bitterly opposed to the idea of a constituent assembly. This vexed question of population arithmetic is what distorted the political agenda of Palestine. With two thirds of the population the Arabs would seem to have a fairly safe majority. In fact, they had a plurality of only 400,000. For the Zionist leadership this was the magic number and to overhaul it took precedence over all other considerations. Such a number might just, with massive difficulty and at the expense mainly of the Arabs, be accommodated. This was the emphasis of Zionist propaganda, despite that Palestine, assuming a complete disregard for the Arabs, could take only a small proportion of the Jews threatened and eventually murdered by Hitler. The massive propaganda effort was expended on altering Palestine’s population statistics, instead of demanding asylum from the US and Britain (who were infinitely better able to provide for it) for these and many, many more Jews who were to be lost in Himmler’s ovens. This was not a matter of emphasis, shouting louder about Jerusalem than New York, it was a positive opposition to Jews going anywhere other than Palestine. If the intention had been to save Jewish lives at all costs, the argument should have been: “If you will not let Jews into British-mandated Palestine, then you have an urgent and absolute moral responsibility to give them asylum elsewhere.” no such campaign was mounted. Nevertheless, comrades might ask, is not the hallmark of socialist internationalism the free, unfettered flow of all people throughout the world? Why should Palestine be different? The short answer is that immigration as part of a concerted plan that will take over the country, expropriating, expelling and exploiting the native masses, is less immigration and more a long drawn out and aggressive invasion. For socialists, the reactionary character of Zionism is defined by its racist ideology, imbued with the spirit of separation and exclusion, the very reverse of socialist solidarity. It was prepared totally itself with every reactionary force that might help its purposes. It lobbied such figures as the Kaiser, the Sultan of Turkey, for twenty years it cosied up to British imperialism, finally snuggling into the embrace of the biggest imperial power of them all, the United States. In the process, it has treated the Arab population as a species of untermensch and has effectively driven a large portion of the Arab masses into the hands of Islamic obscurantists and bigots. It stands in the way of any socialist advance in the Arab world, operating as imperialism’s gendarme in the region, a far more effective force for imperialism than, for example, the feeble Saudi royal family or the Hashemites.

It stands in the way of any socialist advance in the Arab world, operating as imperialism’s gendarme in the region, a far more effective force for imperialism than, for example, the feeble Saudi royal family or the Hashemites. If Zionism has had one redeeming feature over the years, it is that it never bothered to conceal its intentions, but it is difficult to commend a man for his honesty in telling you that he is going to beat your brains out, especially if he then delivers the mortal blow. As Sean indicates, the development of ideas on Zionism in the Trotskyist movement is quite interesting. So Sean says, Cliff in his New International article of June 1939, was for Jewish immigration into Palestine and for the sale of land to the Jewish population, both points vigorously opposed by the Palestinian CP. His argument for this, and it is a thin one, is: “Yet from the negation of Zionism does not follow the negation of the right to existence and extension of the Jewish population in Palestine. This would only be justified if an objectively necessary identity existed between the population and nothing more.” Like a lot of Cliff, this takes a bit of time to get your head around. With perseverance one is, however, struck by how abstract it is as a serious formulation. Whether this is a reaction against the Arab chauvinism of the PCP I cannot say, but it clearly suggests that unless Zionism is 100% in the pocket of British imperialism it is OK to augment its forces. But as we well know, nationalist movements are not wedded to any particular sponsor, and their interests are never seen as identical and often antithetical. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem could make overtures to Hitler, Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism, was a great admirer of Mussolini, and, during the war, Chandra Bose, the leftist Indian nationalist, worked with the Japanese, building an Indian national army. In the same way, the Jewish population were not 100% identified with Zionism, Cliff and the handful of Jewish Trotskyists were not and neither was the PCP, but in the absence of anything of consequence, Zionism certainly had at least the tacit support of an overwhelming majority of the Jews. After the war and the holocaust, that support became far more active. I have a suspicion that it is from this 1939 article that Sean acquired his idea that the Comintern were not opposed to Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1920s. In truth Cliff, as is his wont, is being a bit economical with the actualité here. He says: “The members of the Comintern in Palestine ... while absolutely opposed to Zionism (against the national boycott [of Arab goods and Arab labour - JH], against slogans like the Jewish majority and the Jewish state and the alliance with England, etc.), declared at the same time that the Jewish population is not to be identified with Zionism and hence demanded the maximum freedom of movement for Jewish immigration into Palestine ...” You will notice the odd usage of the “members of the Comintern in Palestine”. He is trying not to refer to the PCP, which he excoriated earlier in his piece, and also neglects to say that the PCP was formed of resignées from the Zionist Poale Zion in 1922. Whatever the PCP’s policy may have been, up to 1926-27, it was not the Comintern’s. Cliff’s article concludes by proclaiming that the only solution is socialism, but in the meanwhile calls for a secular, unitary state in a parliamentary democracy. The suggested programme included: compulsory education for all, pensions, minimum wage and all the other appurtenances of the welfare state. All of this seemed to have a familiar ring about it, especially when taken with the call for Jewish immigration. Then it struck me, Cliff’s 1939 policy was the same as that of the WP-ISL, as set out in various resolutions of that party. Shachtman never acknowledged this fact, but then he always denied that the theory of bureaucratic collectivism came from Bruno Rizzi. We are now left with a terrible problem. We have it on no less authority than Sean Matgamna that Cliff, in 1946, had set the political line for the Fourth International, especially of the Cannonite SWP. Now I find that such is the dastardly cunning of T. Cliff, he had previously masterminded the opposing Shachtmanite WP-ISL policy. With the brain reeling, one realises the full horror of it all. The Cliff-inspired Shachtman variant has now been taken up by Sean Matgamna. When one recalls that for some years there was no greater fan of the US-SWP and James P. Cannon than Sean Matgamna (he endorsed their defencism, violent anti-Shachtmanism as well as their anti-Zionism), we might describe this phenomenon as “deviated apostolic succession.” In all this chopping and exchanging of opinions, we can confidently affirm that Sean’s “two states for two peoples” formulation did not come from Lenin, Trotsky, Cliff (pre- or post-1946), Shachtman, Cannon or any other international socialist source. In Sean’s thesis it seems that if most Jews support a Zionist state, although the overwhelming majority of them do not and would not live there, then socialists must support them regardless of the democracy of numbers or the rights of others. By the same token, presumably, the rural Afrikaaners who want their own state must have it because they represent a significant minority. It is possible to argue that after the war the people who suffered the ultimate barbarism of the holocaust deserved special treatment from the world that bore no little responsibility for that horror. It is a persuasive argument and one that struck the heartstrings of many in the aftermath of 1945. It was that public sympathy at the condition of the Jews, who had endured so much, languishing in displaced persons camps, that put pressure on the Allied governments to solve this humanitarian problem.

What none of them were going to do was open their own doors to a flood of immigrants. Not least of their calculations concerned the fact that there were also hundreds of thousands of displaced people and prisoners of war who might have claimed similar privileges. Their attitude was rather like that of Kaiser Wilhelm II who thought of a Jewish homeland as “at least somewhere to get rid of our Yids.” The people’s conscience about the Jews was salved at little cost to the world but at the expense of the Palestinians. Many of the other refugees were herded callously to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain. In both instances, a cheap and easy solution for the Allies, but not one that readily commends itself to international socialists. It is ironic that the displaced persons camps in Europe emptied as the displaced persons in the Middle East were filling with Arabs. Why should the world’s debts be paid by the poorest people? Of a piece with this affectation for the accomplished fact and his perverse inability to fight for it, is his sneering response to the suggestion that the answer is revolutionary socialism. For Sean, the fight must be for the maintenance of Israel. The socialist Matgamna is the eager partisan of this robustly capitalist state, this proud possessor of an arsenal of atomic bombs, this outpost of imperialism that enshrines the expropriation and exploitation of its Arab citizens and finds its justification in the notion of the exclusive and superior character of its Jewish people. Sean might condemn (but not too loud) the denial of human and democratic rights, the legal theft of property and land, the arbitrary arrests, the rigorous application of collective guilt, the deportations and curfews, but he draws no political conclusions other than to excuse this on the grounds of the right of Israel to be secure. For my part, I believe that so long as Israel exists as a Zionist state, then Jews and Arabs will continue to die needlessly and to no good purpose, as they are dying while we conduct this argument. There will be no peace. I further believe that only under socialism can the national question be solved for both peoples, because only then can there be any chance of fairness and equity. The history of the last 50 years is the negative affirmation of that fact. Scattered throughout Sean’s text are four footnotes. Footnote 3 is quite charming, because it bangs on at length abusing the leadership of IS, during Sean’s recruiting raid within its ranks from 1968 to 1971. As part of the leadership during that time I was overjoyed to discover that, along with Cliff, Duncan Hallas, Chris Harman and Nigel Harris, I had displayed “Malvolio-like snobbery, self-satisfaction, and brain-pickling conceit, built on small achievement ...” As Malvolio said: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust on them.” I have to say that, since he transferred his loyalty from Cannon to Shachtman, Sean has acquired an entirely better class of vituperation, although he still has some way to go before he is in the same street as Max Shachtman for his high-grade abuse. Probably better to get the politics right, Sean, especially the WP-ISL’s opposition to Zionism and two nations theory. The disconnected footnote 4 concerns an anecdote told to Sean by James D. Young, concerning a discussion about Israel, in the late 1950s between Cliff and Hal Draper, witnessed by James. According to Sean: “Suddenly Draper turns on Cliff in irritation and repudiation, and accuses him: “You want to destroy Israeli Jews! I don’t!” leaving aside the “irritation” and “repudiation” - this is Sean spicing up the story - this little anecdote is actually more revealing of Sean’s method than of Cliff’s. We hear what Hal Draper said, as recalled by James, forty years after the event. But what did Cliff respond to this accusation of his wanting a pogrom of holocaust proportions? Did Sean ask James for this information and he could not remember? Or is it that Sean, having acquired the evidence for the prosecution, did not want to confuse matters with any defence? Or did Cliff have no explanation and confess that he, along with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, wanted to drive all the Israeli Jews into the sea? If the answer to this last question is “yes”, then he should have been scandalised out of the movement. Or is this just something that Sean has failed to check properly with James D. Young? What we do know, however, is that Draper was against the Zionist state and wanted to replace it with an Arab-Jewish socialist state. And so say all of us, including Cliff, I think. Throughout Sean’s reply there runs an accusatory thread that I am conducting this argument as some way of making my apologies to Cliff. If I defend his line on Palestine in Workers’ Liberty it is to cover my “social embarrassment before [my] SWP friends and former comrades.” Which ones are those, pray? Paul Foot, Chris Harman, Jim Nichol? I think not. I do not defend Cliff’s line on the permanent arms economy, because I no longer agree with it. I no longer defend his line on Russia, because I no longer agree with it. I defend his line on Zionism, because I agree with it.

I defend his line on Zionism, because I agree with it. I defend the IS line on the Minority Movement that both of us held and he abandoned. It may come as a surprise to Sean but there are those of us who can disagree on fundamentals with Cliff without consigning everything he has said or done to the dustbin of history. At the same time, I do feel a degree of bitterness that what I saw as the best hope for the revolutionary movement in Britain since the 1920s, that I spent some time in helping to build, should have been diverted down various blind alleys at the behest of Cliff’s impressionism and caprice. Most of all, my real complain is not that Cliff has maintained his position on various matters, it is that he is capable of jettisoning almost any of those positions for at worst imaginary and at best transitory benefit. All of this and a great deal more, I have set out in a recently completed book on the IS group. [2] At the end of it I do not think anybody, including Cliff, will think that I am apologizing, or wonder why I, and many others, are a touch bitter. Finally, I would like to apologize to those Workers’ Liberty readers who have got this far, for taking up so much of their time, but they really should blame Sean. He started it. Footnotes 1*. Jim Higgins’ suggested title for this piece was Sean Maxshachtmana. 1. Current medical research suggests Alzheimer’s may be caused through eating from aluminum cooking utensils. If Sean still has such pots in his kitchen, I suggest he replaces them without delay. 2. More Years for the Locust by Jim Higgins, to be published by the International Socialist Group. Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Doon in Troon (April 1976) From the Spectator 3 April 1976, p.9. Published here with kind permission of the Spectator. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Troon, Scotland “Politics,” said Lenin, “is concentrated economics” and whatever you may think about the rest his ideas, you have to agree that he had a point there. This thought is occasioned by a three day stint at the Scottish Council of the Labour Party conference in Troon. This annual event does not normally attract much attention from the press but these are not normal times. The Labour Party in Scotland is not at all happy about its future electoral prospects. On the right, Mrs Thatcher seems to be quite popular among the Scottish voters. On the left they are facing a potentially powerful challenge from Mr Jim Sillars’s Scottish Labour Party. They also have the impression that they are surrounded on all sides by the Scottish Nationalist Party. For years the Labour Party was able to dismiss nationalism as the eccentric pursuit of minds befogged by Celtic vapours. Scotland, it could be said, was poor, for whatever historical reason, its industry outdated, its energy resources declining and its agriculture inadequate. The English connection, with a redistributive Labour government at Westminster, was the only hope for the Scots. For a long time it worked, Scotland provided a solid bedrock of Labour MPs, that in the current political line-up are essential if a Labour administration is to be formed. Now that is the simple political expression of elementary concentrated economics. But then a new economic factor set the whole political equation awry – North Sea oil. The SNP, in a cleverly orchestrated campaign, set out the slogan: “It’s Scotland’s oil”. From then on every time some Westminster politician extolled the great benefits to the UK of the North Sea bonanza, it proved to the Scots that it would be even more of a boon to Scotland if they kept it all to themselves. The ‘Nats’ suddenly became credible to a much larger Scottish audience. Even more horrendous, they began to win seats. The initial response was abusive, the must printable being “Tartan tories” and “kilted fascists”. Incidentally, in the light of his subsequent course, Mr Jim Sillars was the greatest hammer of the Nats and their policies. Things were not too bad while the SNP was taking seats from the Tories, or replacing the Liberals in the mid-term protest vote stakes. But lately they have shown a distinct capacity for taking seats from Labour. Late, very late, the Labour establishment in London decided that it was necessary to head off this threat. The very idea of a future Labour administration was put into the realm of impossibility. As Mr Willie Ross wittily observed in Troon “There is a Labour majority of one and he is out on bail”. Thus it was that the White Paper on devolution was born. If it was an advance on the extreme restriction of Tory policy and eschewed the Liberals’ federalism, it fell far short of what was acceptable to the devolutionists and dangerously permissive to the anti-devolutionists. In the event, Mr Sillars denounced the document as inadequate and, with Mr John Robertson MP, bolted the party to form “the Scottish Labour Party”. The Scottish Labour Executive majority, and probably a majority of the members, objected to it as a concession to the SNP and an offence against internationalism. These same internationalists were, of course, violently opposed to the Common Market. The situation was impossible, the only beneficiaries the SNP and possibly Mr Sillars. Pressure was brought to bear both from London and, more importantly, from the Scottish trade union establishment to accept devolution. As the British TUC has shown they are convinced of the need for continuing series of Labour governments. In the Scottish TUC they feel the same, with the added feature that the Communist Party has a much greater influence in its councils. The Communist Party has the shrewd suspicion that it would have a better chance of getting its members elected to a Scottish Assembly than they have shown in Westminster elections. Their weight and the weight of the STUC was sufficient to swing the balance toward the idea of a devolved assembly, but an assembly with much greater powers than the White Paper envisaged. The Scottish executive, in their statement at Troon, accepted the STUC line completely. No veto power for the Secretary of State over Assembly legislation, control over the Scottish Development Agency, the right to raise finance – over and above the block grant – other than by a surcharge on the rates and a number of other amendments to the White Paper. Such has been their acceptance of the devolution case, at least on paper, that there is very little that separates them from the Sillars Labour Party. Which may explain why speaker after speaker offered forgiveness and a warm berth to the prodigal SLP. What is most significant is that they look very much like getting most of what they want. Mr Short let it be known that he welcomed constructive amendment to the White Paper. In this he was echoed by Messrs Ron Hayward, Michael Foot and Willie Ross, this last seemingly intent on relinquishing any reserve powers the White Paper accorded him. On this basis they achieved, as one speaker observed: “... unity doon in the toon of Troon”. Lions laid down with lambs all over the place, Mr Alex Kitson tipped as a likely successor to Jack Jones – if the government will ever let him retire – expressed his complete agreement with John P. Mackintosh MP, a very unlikely piece of solidarity. Only the perverse Mr Willie Hamilton, a dab hand at lese-majeste, managed to get to the rostrum to say that the policy was “blatant political appeasement”. He was abruptly told to get off and concern himself with his proper study, the Royal perquisites.

He was abruptly told to get off and concern himself with his proper study, the Royal perquisites. Mr Tam Dalyell, who agrees with Hamilton and also has a political death wish, made valiant attempts to achieve martyrdom at the rostrum but the chairman, a gentleman with selective vision and a sketchy idea of the rules of debate, studiously ignored him. So it was that unity was achieved at Troon. The delegates were told that now they had a real policy with which to fight the SNP. They were urged to go over on to the offensive. The comrade delegates must counterpose the Troon policy to the complete lack of everybody else, particularly the SNP. And so it may be, except that the public unanimity masks a very wide range of differences. In private, or in their cups, or both, leading members of the Scottish party and a large number of rank and file delegates will confess their lack of faith in devolution. Many of them see it as the slippery slope that will inevitably end up in complete separation. More than a few think that the further they go along this path the more hostages they give to the SNP, who can always outflank them on this issue. They are haunted by the possibility of Assembly elections turning into a landslide win for the SNP, who will then have an unanswerable mandate for independence, It matters not that the SNP has no discernible coherent policy for an independent Scotland. It does not help to point out that the oil will be extremely costly to acquire and will, anyway, run out in twenty years. All of that is of little consequence to those justly disenchanted with the major parties and intoxicated with a handful of slogans. Even assuming that the refurbished policy attracts support in Scotland it may well have some difficulty south of the border. A sassenach cloud, no bigger than a barrage balloon, hovered briefly over Troon in the person of Eric Heffer. Mr Heffer, a not inconsiderable force in the Labour Party, represents a Merseyside constituency where the problems are as great as Scotland, without benefit of oil and with a 20 per cent lower government handout. Describing himself as “a Heffer with horns”, he demanded a referendum of the constituent parts of the UK on the question of devolution. Mr Benn’s success with his call for the Common Market referendum suggests that Mr Heffer might be on a winner here. After all this worthy and weighty debating it was something of a relief to listen to Mr Michael Foot’s fraternal address. In it he promised to reappoint Willie Ross if he is elected prime minister, a statement unaccountably popular with the delegates. In a further bid for all imaginable ethnic votes he told the conference that he was part Irish, part Cornish, part English and part Scottish. A statement that drew the comment from a sneering Young Socialist, “and part socialist”. It is clear that in Scotland, more than anywhere else, you cannot please everyone. I fear that is what the Labour Party in Scotland is trying to do. Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Too much Cogitation is bad for Monty’s eyesight (August 1976) From Workers News, No.10, Aug-Sept 1976. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. YOU CANNOT help having a sneaking regard for Monty Johnstone. He is quite un-putdownable. Not only that, by a quirk of an unjust world, he seems to have discovered some spring of eternal youth. Perhaps that is why his best writing is reserved for the pages of the Young Communist League magazine, Cogito. In the late 1960s he produced a lengthy critique of Trotsky and Trotskyism part 1. Despite a promise, in part 1, of an early appearance of part 2, we have had to wait 7 years to get the full beauty of Monty’s thought on the question. But now it is with us and it would be surly to cavil at the delay. Monty Johnstone has some credentials, that set him apart from his fellow CP authors on the subject, to write on Trotskyism; In his extreme youth he was a Trotskyist, a trauma which – if it did not last long – must have left lasting scars. He has actually read the source material, which as I say puts him one up on such as John Mahon, Willie Gallagher, William Wainwright, Betty Reid, Marjorie Pollitt, J.R.Campbell and a host of others – who have vented their ignorant literary spleen on Trotsky. Monty knows that Trotsky was not in the pay of the Mikado (the one in Japan, not the Labour MP), Adolf Hitler or anyone else and, refreshingly, he says so. He takes some pains to point out that on Germany, during the rise of Nazism, Trotsky was right and Stalin, and the Comintern, were wrong. That, however, is as far as Monty will go. On every other question Trotsky was wrong, apparently. The “fallacy” in Trotsky’s thought is traced back to his theory of Permanent Revolution. This theory, placing as it does the working class as the central core of socialist strategy and action, blinded poor old Trotsky so it seems, to the great revolutionary potential of the middle classes, the peasantry and the “progressive” capitalists, as represented, for example, by the Kuo-Min-Tang. Now, of course, this is a point of view, and one that has activated the minds of the Stalinist wing of communism for many years. It is not, nevertheless, the only view on the question. It is for example the view of quite a number of people that the theory of permanent revolution is one that explains, in a Marxist way, the developments of the post-war period in Eastern Europe and China and several other “workers’ paradises”. The pity of Trotsky’s theory is that the “old man” did not follow through its logic. Perversely, in my view, he insisted on calling Russia a “workers’ state” long after the working class content had been crushed. But all of this is, perhaps, beside the point. Monty is, of course entitled to his point of view. Trotsky, for the sake of the argument, could have been wrong, on all the major questions – on Russia and the world, in the 1920s and 1930s. But he was not wrong historically. It was in the context of a debate about the future of the Soviet state, the nature of the workers parties, the prospect of world revolution. Now those are very big themes, and so heated was the struggle that a lot of people had to die before Stalin felt that he had won. Stalin was in alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky from 1923 to 1925. Then he was in alliance with Bukharin, and Tomsky against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Not very much later between 1936 and 1938, Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev and Kamenev were judically murdered by Stalin (Tomsky committed suicide). In part 1 of his work Monty Johnstone conceded, readily, that the Moscow trials were a frame-up: What he did not make clear, though, was the reason for the need of such a method of winning an argument. The fact is that Stalin was neither right or wrong on the questions Monty Johnstone discusses. Zinoviev and Kamenev were right, or wrong. Bukharin was right, or wrong. But Stalin just won the arguments and in the end it was with a gun or a long distance ice-axe. In the process the Communist International was transformed into an instrument of Russian policy. The Communist Parties became the extension of Russian diplomacy. And almost without exception the men who made the revolution were killed, disgraced or capitulated completely. Now sophisticated CP apologists will argue, with the characteristic dialectical chop-logic of the breed, that whatever the crimes of Stalin, whatever the inadequacy of his theoretical grasp, it all came right in the end. Well that too is a point of view. Even if it flies in the face of all the facts, and it ignores the divisions in the Communist movement, and the abject failure of the Western Communist parties to see any route to socialism except via a bourgeois parliament. It is true that Trotsky had his failings but he never dreamed that working class power could be exercised through a capitalist institution. For Monty and his chums in the Italian CP this may smack of ultra-leftism; for others it sounds dangerously like marxism. Our advice to Monty Johnstone is that, now he has completed his work on Trotsky, he should reexamine the Stalinist tradition and attempt to explain the phenomena of the late J.V.Stalin. It will be instructive, worthwhile for the YCL and will undoubtedly get him a highly paid post squaring circles. Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Paul Foot & Jim Higgins Rank and file movement: the first links are forged (April 1974) From Socialist Worker, 6 April 1974. Reprinted in In the Heat of the Struggle: 25 Years of Socialist Worker, Socialist Worker/Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.115-9. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. THE ENORMOUS response to the first National Rank and File Conference for trade unionists surprised even the organising committee. More than 500 delegates were signed in at Birmingham. Conference chairman Will Fancy, a member of the government officers’ union executive (NALGO) and supporter of the rank and file paper NALGO Action, said more than 300 trade union bodies had applied for delegacies. These included 40 shop stewards’ and combine committees, two strike and occupation committees, 19 trades councils, seven district committees of unions. There were 239 from trade union branches and chapels: 58 from Engineering, 38 from Transport, seven from Construction, 16 from print unions, five from miners’ lodges, 20 from the supervisors union ASTMS, 14 from the public employers, 22 from NALGO, eight from the civil servants and 32 from teachers’ associations. Said Will Fancy: “The rank and file must be organised. Constant vigilance to control the trade union leadership and militant policy are essential if we are not to lose out. We have got to coordinate rank and file activity across trade and industrial boundaries.” LARRY CONNOLLY, shop steward at Lucas Birmingham, moved the first section of the resolution, on the fight against employers’ and government attacks on trade union rights. Larry is on strike and had to be released from picket duties to speak at the conference. In a powerful speech he outlined the economic background of a predicted £5,000 million balance of payments deficit: We face cutback, rationalisation, redundancy and lower living standards. By the end of the year one million unemployed are planned. Unemployment is a powerful weapon of the employers to demoralise the workers and the trade unions. The Industrial Relations Act was still on the statute book. Phase Three still held force and the Pay Board was with us, just as under the Tories. “We need a rank and file movement to fight the proven treachery of the officials,” he said. “If we do this the employers will tremble in their boots. The working class will not be hammered.” An emergency resolution was moved by FRANK HENDERSON (Sheet Metal Workers’ shop steward at British Leyland): “This conference sends a message of solidarity to Lucas strikers and resolves to send a delegation to the picket line.” This was carried unanimously and six delegates carried the message to the Lucas strikers. MIKE BRIGHTMAN (Cricklewood AUEW) told the conference: “All industrial legislation, Labour or Tory, presents a sinister picture. Even under a Labour government we still have conspiracy laws. The Shrewsbury lads are still in jail.” GEOFF WOOLF (Lewisham NALGO) said: When it comes to the crunch the Labour government will be no different from any other We often hear that a voluntary incomes policy is better than a statutory policy. Well I for one am not volunteering and neither will my branch. We should use this new movement to fight Phase Three and whatever follows. We will not permit the trade union leader to do the job for the government that repressive laws could not do. MIKE MARRIOT (South Norwood ASTMS) said: “We have just spent three years fighting the Tories. With a Labour government we must be prepared to fight even harder.” In a rousing contribution HUGH KERR (North London Polytechnic ATTI) said: “On the government’s own figures, living standards will be cut by at least 10 percent. We must reject the philosophy that rent freeze and increased old age pensions can be exchanged for a cut in wages. We want the rent rises reversed and the Housing Finance Act withdrawn,” he said to applause. We are going to see the finest examples of class collaboration when the trade union leaders lie down for the Labour government. We must involve ourselves in every sphere and level of the trade unions. We have to make it clear they cannot collaborate in the cutting of our living standards. This theme was emphasised by JOHN WORTH (Coventry AUEW) who said district committees and trades councils became inactive because “we don’t fight for them and give them the fighting spirit.” JOHN MAGEE (TGWU Holloway Bus Branch): “We will help Heath if we do not give support to Labour. Otherwise we will dig our own graves. The most important thing is to get a majority Labour government.” He concluded by appealing to Engineering leader Hugh Scanlon and train drivers’ leader Ray Buckton to cooperate with Labour It was clear that a large majority of delegates were opposed to the views of John Magee, but as a delegate said at the lunch break a genuine rank and file movement must take account of and patiently explain the reasons why the Holloway bus delegate’s views would disarm the trade unions. Such views form the thinking of a great number of workers. FRANK DRAIN (UCATT, Edinburgh) asked: “What happens after this conference? I think we must take this resolution back to the factories and workshops and really fight for it.” DAVE ADSHEAD (shop steward, Bryant’s city centre development Birmingham) spoke angrily of the obstruction of union officials on the Shrewsbury campaign. Militants in Birmingham had argued for a rank and file committee with a programme of leaflets, meetings and action. Building union officials refused for fear of embarrassing the Labour Party. They worked actively against the holding of meetings. There were no leaflets. Of course we must work in the official union structure, but we have also got to organise mass pressure to keep full-time officials in line.

The way forward now THE FINAL part of the conference resolution dealt with the work which had to be done to carry the rank and file movement forward. An amendment moved by JOHN CLOSSACK (NUT) calling for a general newsletter for the movement was clearly defeated after PETE GLATTER, a London busman, had called for more specific organisation around rank and file papers. FRANK HENDERSON (British Leyland, Longbridge) said that it was the job of all the delegates to involve everyone on the shop floor in the sale and production of their rank and file paper Although he liked organising secretary Roger Cox and admired his hairstyle (laughter), the Carworker would be useless if it was all written by Roger. “We want to have workers reading it during their lunch hours,” said Frank. “We want to see them jumping up, spitting a mouthful of blood and saying: ‘Right, I’m going to write off and let that bastard know what I think’.” STEVE ABBOTT (NUM Calverton Lodge) said all the delegates had to go back to their trade union branches and fight against the backward leadership of the trade unions. STEVE LUDLAM (Hospital worker) said that the conference had meant a great deal to him. Last year, after six weeks’ struggle, we hospital workers lost our claim. We had no support. Many of us asked why-why had we been sold out. We’ve found since then that there’s more to a rank and file movement than determination. We’ve got to organise callously to win. More than 100,000 trade unionists bought one or other of the rank and file papers which had called the conference. That figure had to be doubled and trebled, he said. An additional resolution moved by GEORGE BARCLAY (GMWU branch at Stanton Works of the British Steel Corporation) called for more specific commitment on racialism, abortion, contraception and expropriation. It was defeated by more than two to one after KEN HUME (TGWU, Coventry) asked conference to concentrate on the minimal demands which could unite the maximum number of rank and ffle trade unionists. JIMMY McCALLUM (TASS/AUEW convenor, John Brown Engineering, Glasgow) said that the election of a Labour government had not changed the struggle against Phase Three. In fact, the co-operation of trade union leaders with Phase Three was now even more apparent. He reminded delegates of the strike at Maclarens factory at Glasgow, owned by the multi-national giant ITT. The strikers had stuck fast to their objective, and had been forced to seek support in other ITT factories in Britain. The result was an ITT stewards’ combine across the country. “That is the sort of rank and file activity we should be fighting for,” he said. The conference resolution was carried with only a handful of delegates opposed. AT THE afternoon session JOHN LLYWARCH, one of the six pickets in the first Shrewsbury trial, moved part two of the conference resolution, on the organisation of a rank and file movement. After delighting the conference with some of his more juicy memories of the Shrewsbury trial, he castigated union leaders and Labour politicians for their refusal to fight to get the six men in prison for picketing released. TREVOR BALL (NUM, Lea Hall Lodge) spoke about the economic crisis of capitalism. He said the crisis existed in all capitalist countries. Everywhere employers and government were holding wages down. It was the capitalists’ crisis, and they should pay for it. His members had shown that they were not prepared to be sacrificed to someone else’s crisis, he said. The miners had used their strength and blown a “whopping great hole” through Phase Three. TERRY HORAN (UCATT) attacked the officials of his union for their apathy over Shrewsbury. He said UCATT was run by men completely out of touch with the rank and file. His site – John Laings in Edinburgh – and another had come out over Shrewsbury, but had found that other protests, demonstrations and strikes were being held on different days. There was no coordination, and that was why a rank and file movement was so important. ERIC BRIGHT (President of UCATT branch at Clifton, Notts) said he had asked Edward Short, Labour’s deputy leader, at an election meeting what Labour would do about the 1875 Conspiracy Act which had led to the prison sentences at Shrewsbury. “He said he’d repeal all but the conspiracy section,” said Eric. “But that’s just the bit we want scrapping.” Eric attributed the “massive loss of membership” in UCATT to the behaviour of the executive, especially their “puerile” response to the Shrewsbury case. Shrewsbury showed more than anything else in his experience the importance of a rank and file movement. “I’ll do all I can in my small way to bring this movement forward,” he promised. RAB DAWSON (EETPU, Glasgow Corporation Central Electrical Workshops Stewards Committee) sounded a note of caution over part of the resolution which called for support for “all candidates in union elections fighting the right wing.” The emphasis, he said, should be on “rank and file candidates,” or delegates would find themselves supporting all forms of opportunists from the union bureaucracy who called themselves ‘left’ at election time. ALAN WATT’S (Ponders End No.5 branch, AUEW) put the caution to the test by moving an amendment to delete the word ‘all’ in the resolution. “The rank and file movement supports those people who support the rank and file. It does not support those people who do not support the rank and file”, he said to applause. The amendment was carried. BETTY COATES (a candidate in the elections for the teachers’ union executive) was worried that the resolution said nothing about the accountability of union officials, once elected.

BETTY COATES (a candidate in the elections for the teachers’ union executive) was worried that the resolution said nothing about the accountability of union officials, once elected. GEORGE POGMORE (a bus inspector from York and member of the national committee of his section of the TGWU) spoke about the “fight for militant policies” called for in the resolution. In November 1972 all bus platform staff had got shift pay, but the inspectors had been denied it, though they worked shifts, he said. A year later, the Pay Board said the shift pay was impossible under Phase Three. We called a national conference which told the Pay Board that unless we got the shift pay, we’d all work 8am to 4pm. Then, suddenly, a week before we took the action, the Pay Board changed their mind and paid us the shift pay. EUROPE SINGH (Southward NUT) argued that the resolution’s call for action against racialism did not go far enough. An anti-racialist declaration on its own could be found in most TUC statements. What was needed was a clear commitment for more specific demands. First the conference should insist on equal status and pay on the shop floor for all black workers. Second, it should call for the repeal of the Immigration Act 1971, and third, should continue the argument against all immigration controls. “These are nothing to do with over-crowding. They are simply used by people like Powell to spread racialism through the country and through the working class,” he said. The part of the resolution calling for stronger combine committees and better links between shop stewards drew the two most authoritative contributions of the conference. GEORGE ANDERSON (TGWU chairman of the joint shop stewards committee at Coventry Radiators) asked: “What kind of combine committee do we want?” Should it be based entirely on the boundaries created by management or should it be industry-wide? He had found that as long as his stewards’ combine committee was based on Associated Engineering, a management creation, it served little purpose. But when they had tried to spread it, for instance, through all press work in the components industry, its effectiveness was enormously increased. We try to change the concept of the combine committee. If Associated Engineering isn’t drawing all the companies with workers doing our kind of work, we say we’re not bound in by management boundaries like sheep. We say, why don’t we amalgamate with some other combine of like workers – why don’t Associated Engineering combines link with those at British Leyland? George was followed by JOE McGOUGH (chairman of the joint shop stewards committee at Dunlop, Speke, and chairman of the National Dunlop Combine Committee): “The fact that there are 400 delegates filling this hall today shows that there’s a large body of people who are somewhat disenchanted with the union leadership.” If ever there was a need for joint shop stewards’ committees, it is now. We’ve every reason to believe that we should extend the combines across the national boundaries. In June 1972 we had a stoppage in Britain and Italy against the Dunlop-Pirelli combine. It made history. It showed that if the rank and file organise, they can confront the same employers in different countries. Hardly had the cheers died down for Joe McGough than chairman Will Fancy was reading out a telegram of greetings and encouragement from the Italian rank and file movement. “Pay back AUEW” RON MURPHY (AUEW/TASS office committee, Manchester AEI) moved an emergency resolution on the fines on the AUEW over the Con-Mech case, and called for delegates to pledge support for the union in its stand against the Industrial Relations Court. He said the refusal of the AUEW to appear before the court had been an important factor in keeping the whole trade union movement from “sliding down the slippery slope to acceptance of the Industrial Relations Act.” “Of course the AUEW has not fought consistently enough, but at least they had fought,” he said. He called not only for this judgement to be set aside but for the return of previous fines imposed by the NIRC and a pledge of no further seizures. “We have real, important people here today. They must exert the maximum pressure to get the government to agree to our demands,” he said. The resolution was passed unanimously. Report from a sit-in CONFERENCE GAVE a rousing reception to MALCOLM VASS (AUEW Eastleigh No.2) speaking for the Strachan Joint Unions Occupation Committee. Strachan builds Ford van bodies under contract. As part of rationalisation plans the workers were given one minute’s notice. After three days of picketing they occupied the plant, to stop £2 million worth of car bodies and machinery being taken away. When management became a nuisance they got rid of them. Ford shop stewards had agreed that any Strachan vans that got out would be blacked. A delegation to Michael Meacher, a new Labour minister, had been told the firm had a right to sack them. Said Malcolm Vass: “Social Contracts mean nothing if they can treat workers as they have treated us at Strachans. “They want to get their hands on those vans and machinery,” said Malcolm. “They bloody well won’t.” Greetings from Dublin CHRIS GIBSON, from the Irish Transport and General Workers Union No.14 branch, gave the conference fraternal greetings from the Dublin Shop Stewards and Rank and File Committee. He said that the committee had been set up because of the way wage settlements had been agreed every year between union leaders and employers without taking the workers’ interests into account. The rank and file had organised to great effect, and conferences of up to 350 delegates had been held in Dublin. They were not yet strong enough to combat the propaganda of the employers and union leaders but they had dented the national wage agreement, and hoped to do more next year.

They were not yet strong enough to combat the propaganda of the employers and union leaders but they had dented the national wage agreement, and hoped to do more next year. He wished the conference and the British rank and file movement every success, and promised solidarity from across the Irish Sea. Solidarity with Express AN EMERGENCY resolution on the Scottish Daily Express closure received unanimous support. It called for condemnation of the management, all possible support for the takeover and messages of solidarity. STEPHEN CHILDS (Sheffield NUJ) told the conference the action of the Beaverbrook management was “the biggest scandal to hit the newspaper industry for years. The NUJ has done nothing to save the jobs of the Scottish Daily Express members. These jobs are lost forever once the workers leave the plant.” Top of the page Last updated on 9.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins The deluge after Blackpool (September 1975) From the Spectator, 6 September 1975, p.304. Published here with kind permission of the Spectator. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. George Woodcock’s dictum that what happens during the other fifty-one weeks is infinitely more important than the decisions of a five-day seaside junket receives adequate confirmation at this week’s Blackpool TUC. The vital question had already been decided in advance. The mineworkers will, for the time being, support the Government’s £6 limit. Now that is crucial. Whatever the majority for the Government’s policy might be this week, if the miners decide to get more, they will undoubtedly get what they want, and the central feature of Labour policy will be worth much less than the paper on which it is written. It is thus the Government’s good fortune that the miners have been balloted and come down in Mr Wilson’s favour. This simple fact illuminates with great clarity the actual nature of the TUC. Mr Jack Jones with his 1,700,000 is reckoned to be something of a power in the land. Journalists, captains of industry and government ministers hang on his every word. The truth is, as you would suppose, that Mr Jones presides over an extremely ramshackle coalition of different interests. There is no way, short of revolution, that he could bring the different sections of his vast empire into coherent action. For everyone of his members who could get £60 he has ten who would be lucky to get 60 pence. Trade union leaders’ calculations are based not on ideology but on a realistic calculation of what the relation of forces are in any prospective struggle. For the Transport and General Workers Union £6 all round is, in global figures, a great deal more than they hope to get by the vagaries of “free collective bargaining”. It is because of this that the miner’s ballot decision in favour of the Government pay policy is of the utmost short-term importance. Messrs Gormley and Daly do not, like Mr Jones, have to calculate what will be attractive to the lowest common denominator of their members. For them, the lowest common denominator is quite the same as the highest common factor. If they say ‘out’, then the industry will stop. Not a knob of coal will be dug – not even a slice of nutty slack. But to describe, and thank God for, the altruism of the miners is not to tell the whole story about the TUC. There are others, less devoted to their trade union perhaps, who are almost as capable of bringing industry to a halt and governments to their knees. The electricians, the tanker drivers and a host of others. Why do they not to so? The answer is not clear cut and may be less than satisfying. But it is abundantly clear that the steady drip of propaganda that equates large wage increases, with increasing unemployment has had its effect. Great numbers of rank and file trade union members are dimly aware that their jobs are at risk. These same members require from their trade union officials that they both guard their living conditions and maintain their jobs. If that seems, and is, a contradiction, it is one that exists in life. The Joneses and Scanlons must, whatever their subjective desires, make proper obeisance to their members’ wishes. It is out of this proper respect for the rank and file that there will be an overwhelming vote in favour of the £6 limit. Any other result would signify that the trade unions are on a course that would set them directly against not only the Government but also the whole notion of parliamentary democracy. Neither Mr Jones nor Mr Scanlon, nor for that matter Reg Birch or Ken Gill, has any intention of moving beyond the confines of the system as it is. For Hugh Scanlon the very worst result of this week’s deliberations would be the success of his union’s resolution Which states, inter alia: “opposition to any incomes policy having as its aim wage regulation through intervention from any source.” He knows, as does Mr Jones after his experience with the dockers jailed under the Industrial Relations Act, that if the TUC insists on going its own way, it will inevitably face the prospect of taking state power. Trade unions have neither the will, the conscious base nor the organisation that could make that a reality. Mr Scanlon may, because of internal pressures within his own union, oppose the Government’s policy, but he will not be disappointed if he fails. Trade unions do not wish to take on or take over the government of Britain. Their task this week, as they savour the two-star splendours of Blackpool cuisine, will be to support the efforts of Mr Wilson’s administration to hold back wage increases and at the same time distance themselves from the Government by insisting that the £6 is for all and sundry, not the outside limit. Trade union leaders, even in the NUM, do not wish to bring down governments merely to bring home such bacon as their members will accept. Their clear calculation is that their members will accept, in the short term, a slight diminution in living standards. They are almost certainly right. They undoubtedly calculate that the pressure for militant action will be mitigated by the pressure of unemployment as it rises to and beyond a million and a half. Once again they are probably right. But in a real world, that still moves, to be right is a very transitory phenomenon. Increasingly larger numbers of workers, well organised and in key sectors of the economy, will realise that they are supporting a policy whose major sanction is marginally to reduce their employers’ ability to raise prices. It is at that stage that all the fine speeches of Mr. Jones, and all the moderation of the General Council of the TUC, and a great deal more, will be required to hold to an even keel. It is a very nice calculation about how long trade unionists will restrain themselves in the interests of lower unemployment and greater social justice when both of these commodities are manifestly in short supply and becoming scarcer by the hour.

It is a very nice calculation about how long trade unionists will restrain themselves in the interests of lower unemployment and greater social justice when both of these commodities are manifestly in short supply and becoming scarcer by the hour. It is for this reason that the deliberations of the TUC are important, if the line is to be held. As with every serious facet of politics today, the upper reaches of trade unionism continue to exist and be reasonably effective on the basis of psychology rather than hard coherent policy. As with the voters, the members must be convinced against the evidence of their own experience that the sweet by-and-by will come if not next year the year after, that sacrifices now will be rewarded and that there is pie not just in the sky but in late 1976 or early 1977. Now that is a trick that no trade union leader has managed to pull off to date. Contrary to prevalent myth they are not elderly devotees of a sinister conspiracy dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism nor are they idiot bureaucrats uniformly obsessed with their own grandeur. Some are one or the other and a very few are both, but most are quite talented and socially concerned human beings, limited in time, space and experience and generally doing their best. Today’s trade union leaders and their organisations are reckoned to have more power than ever before in their history. Paradoxically they are unable to realise on that power, for to do so would be to destroy the source from which improvements aright come. At Blackpool this week they huff and puff and make much of their commitment to full employment and greater social justice. They talk about further more draconian controls on profits. In all probability they will pass resolutions calling for import controls and the institution of some kind of siege economy. But that is not serious, not a policy they expect to be adopted. It is the policy sweetener that, they hope, will make the pay limits, palatable for at least twelve months. We had better hope that they are right. The alternative is not at all nice to contemplate. Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins [Mike Kidron] (1965) From our Readers, International Socialism (1st series), No.21, Summer 1965, p.23. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The need for discussion of theory in the Marxist movement is frequently insisted but less frequently acted upon. One of the brighter (probably the brightest) exceptions to this rule has been the regular appearance of International Socialism. The magazine has consistently maintained the best traditions of Marxist scholarship and this has been, in large measure, due to the work of the editor, Mike Kidron, who, with scant resources, and often without the help the undertaking merited, has regularly produced the journal up to the standards of excellence that have won praise throughout the international socialist movement. On the occasion of his relinquishing the editorship I and a number of other friends and supporters of IS would like to place on record our appreciation of the work that Mike Kidron has done in the past, work that will ensure IS an even brighter future. Top of the page Last updated on 11.9.2007

MIA > Archive > Higgins Robert James [1*] Trotsky: a documentary (1973) From International Socialism (1st series), No. 54, January 1973, p. 25. Transcribed by Mike Pearn. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Trotsky: a documentary Francis Wyndham and David King Penguin. £1.50 This book is probably as complete a pictorial record of Trotsky’s life as we are likely to get. It contains all the well-known pictures together with a number that 1, for one, have not seen before. We find pictures of the nine-year old Trotsky tastefully posed against a chair with a background of ferns; of his mother and father, of Alexandra Sokolovskaya – his first wife – Trotsky in a Tsarist jail after the crushing of the Soviet in 1905. Through the heroic triumphs of 1917 and the creation and direction of the Red Army, to exile and murder in Mexico. Of almost equal interest are the pictures that include members of Trotsky’s staff and his co-thinkers. Max Shachtman, Yvan Craipeau, Van Heijinoort, the Rosmers, Albert Goldman, Joseph Hansen and many others. All looking, with the exception of the Rosmers, incredibly youthful. A stark reminder that so very few of Trotsky’s own generation remained alive, or endowed with the stamina to carry on the revolutionary struggle. As with all books on Trotsky this moves with horrific inevitability to the assassination. The gruesome fact of violent death does not cease to shock even if the pictures are among the most publicised. Mercader (Jacson-Mornard) looking miserable, as well he might, preparatory to 20 years in a Mexican jail. A sentence mitigated by a well-appointed suite of cells, together with female companionship and radio equipment. All financed by a grateful CPU. It is an interesting sidelight on the small change of history that the Socialist Workers Party, who financed and staffed Trotsky’s Coyoacan fortress, should be so fond of Castro’s Cuba. The country in which Mercader found temporary refuge on his release. His stay lasting long enough for Czech citizenship to be conferred. You cannot say the CPU does not pay its debts. The text that accompanies the pictures is flat, pedestrian and at no time rises above the level of the Sunday Times Colour Supplement. Those who want to see the pictures should read the original works from which Francis Wyndham freely and often inappropriately quotes. Note 1*. Robert James is a pseudonym used occasionally by Jim Higgins. Top of the page Last updated on 23.9.2013

MIA > Archive > Hallas > Higgins Duncan Hallas & Jim Higgins Marxism and Terrorism (March 1972) Duncan Hallas & Jim Higgins, Marxism and Terrorism, IS Internal Bulletin, March 1972. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. “Individual terrorism is in its very essence bureaucratism turned inside out. For marxists this law was not discovered yesterday. Bureaucratism has no confidence in the masses. Terrorism works in the same manner; it seeks to make the masses happy without asking their participation.” Trotsky “Running like a red thread through my 37 years of revolutionary and literary activity is my irreconcilable attitude towards the adventurism of individual terrorism” Trotsky (Both quoted from The Kirov Assasination, 1934) At the EC meeting of 6.3.72, a division of opinion arose about the line of the editorial No Substitute for Mass Action in Socialist Worker of March 4th. A resolution endorsing the general line of this editorial was carried, although the vote did not reflect adequately the division on the committee. It is no doubt the case that the differences on the E.C. reflect similar differences amongst the membership and that the matter needs to be discussed in the organisation. This contribution explains the position of the E.C. majority. What the Dispute is About Objection was taken to one sentence in the editorial, namely ‘The extension of that self defense (i.e., by the IRA of the Catholic community) into killing of individual politicians and the bombing of buildings cannot be supported by socialists,’ Naturally this statement has to be considered in its context – the whole line of the editorial – and that is summed up in the conclusion ‘Indiscriminate terrorism hinders the growth of the mass movement.’ The Marxist Tradition This question has a very long history in the movement. It was one of the issues in dispute between marxists and anarchists in the last century. In Russia the marxist movement developed in the course of a systematic struggle against the advocates (and practitioners) of terrorism as a method of struggle (the Narodniks), The Narodnik terrorists had a record of heroism, self-sacrifice and indeed success in the sense of successful ‘executions’, that was and is second to none. They could and did accuse the marxists of avoiding the ‘real struggle’ in favour of ‘handing out leaflets outside factories,’ of being arm-chair theorists (‘dogmatists’ was the favourite term). The Russian marxists, Plekhanov, Lenin and the rest, spent a considerable part of their early political activity, in patiently but firmly (‘dogmatically’ if you like) arguing against terrorism. The core of their case was summed up very simply by Trotsky: “Is individual terror, for example, permissible or impermissible from the point of ‘pure morals’? In this abstract form the question does not exist at all for us. Conservative Swiss bourgeois even now render official praise to the terrorist William Tell. Our sympathises are fully on the side of Irish, Russian, Polish or Hindu terrorists in their struggle against national and political oppression ... However, not the question of subjective motives but that of objective expediency has for us the decisive significance. Are the given means really capable of leading to the goal? In relation to individual terror both theory and practice bear witness that such is not the case, To the terrorist we say: It is impossible to replace the masses; only in a mass movement can you find expedient expression for your heroism.” (Their Morals and Ours, 1938) All sides in the dispute would accept the above statement. It is the essential basis for the discussion. The question is whether or not certain of the activities of the Provisionals end the Officials constitute terrorism. It is common -round that many of their activities do not, As the editorial stated, ‘The violence used by both wings of the IRA is not, for the most part, terrorism in the proper sense of that term’. What is at issue is the attitude to the bombing campaign of the Provisionals and to the reprisal raids (e.g. Aldershot, the shooting of Taylor) of the Officials. A State of Civil War? The planting of bombs in factories, cafes, pubs and shops, a practice actively pursued by the Provisionals, is a classic example of terrorist tactics. So too is the shooting of particularly hated politicians like Taylor. If that was all that there was to it there could be no dispute. It is the clear duty of marxists to oppose such tactics and to attempt to influence supporters of these methods towards the building of a revolutionary working class organisation. But, it is argued, we have, in the six counties, a civil war – and the shootings and bombings have to be seen as part of that war. If it is true that a state of civil war exists, then certainly the case would be entirely different. We would be dealing with military operations as in Vietnam. In these circumstances attacks on individuals, destruction of buildings and so on would be part of attempts to defeat the army by military means. Even in this case the expediency of indiscriminate bomb planting could questioned, However, the argument about terrorism would be irrelevant. Is there a civil war? Some elements of civil war certainly exist. The mass of the Catholic population is completely alienated from the state and gives passive, and in some cases active support to guerrilla actions. Nevertheless it falls well short of the situation where military considerations are of first importance. The situation is a complicated one in which guerrilla attacks and civil disobedience on a large scale occur, whilst the majority of the working class – the Protestants – oppose the national struggle. The question is what is a socialist perspective in those circumstances. The line of our organisation – which is the application of the theory of permanent revolution to Ireland – is that the overthrow of imperialism in Ireland – North or South) is impossible except on the basis of a mass movement with a revolutionary socialist leadership. Therefore the need is for the development of a revolutionary party which can struggle for the support of the working class on a thirty-two county basis.

Therefore the need is for the development of a revolutionary party which can struggle for the support of the working class on a thirty-two county basis. That is why we support the Socialist Workers Movement, In the six-counties the hold of the Orange-Tories on the majority of the workers cannot be broken until a sizeable working class organisation already exists on a thirty-two county basis, and is seen to be as hostile to the Green Tories as to the Orange ones. The activities of the two IRA’s have to be judged in the light of this perspective. It is interesting to note here that the NILP is wedded to the British LP and the imperial connexion, while the SDLP is tied to Lynch’s green tory coat-tails. For marxists the only present hope, small though it may be, is the SWM. The defense of the Catholic community against governmental terrorism helps this development by challenging the power of the state and thus raising the possibility of its destruction. Defence, of course, includes the necessary measures against informers and agents of the state. The bombing campaign hinders the development by strengthening the ties of the Orange workers to Stormont. And it deflects the Catholic working class militants by giving then a false perspective and activity. Of course there are those who have, in practise, written off the Protestants i.e., the majority of the working class. For them ‘Victory to the IRA’ is all that is left. It leads, logically enough, to a new partition of the six counties and an implicit acceptance of the ‘Two Nations’ theory. It also leads to the postponement of any successful struggle against imperialism, in the north and the South, to the indefinite future. It is the counsel of despair. Conclusion ‘Unconditional but critical support for all those, including both IRAs, fighting imperialism in Ireland. By unconditional we mean support regardless of our criticism of the leadership and tactics. By critical we mean opposing the sowing of illusions that the struggle can finally be won except by the victory of the working class fighting on a programme of social as well as national liberation’. (Socialist Worker editorial, 12th February). Duncan Hallas Jim Higgins Top of the page Last updated on 7.12.2004

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins A secular-democratic state (July 1996) From Workers Liberty, No.33, July 1996. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. It is always a pleasure to see Sean Matgamna in full spate and my enjoyment of his piece, Paul Foot philo-semite (WL 32) was abutted only by the fear that he might do himself an injury under the weight of all that heavy irony. What a spiffing wheeze, Sean must have thought, to belabour Footie with Hillaire Belloc, because one thing is sure, whatever Foot’s prejudices may happen to be, Belloc was a brass-bound and copper-bottomed anti-semite, the author of the lines: “How odd of God, to choose the Jews.” Now I have not read, and I hope I do not have to, the Paul Foot article that has so aroused Sean’s rage, but I assume that it is anti-Zionist and that it sees the state of Israel as the single greatest barrier to socialism and peace in the region. If that is the case then Paul Foot has adopted, in this case if no other, the only tenable position for a Marxist. There used to be a man, I do not know if he is still alive, called Pat Sloan. He was for many years the secretary of the British Soviet Friendship Society. If anyone suggested in the press that Joe Stalin had smelly feet or Molotov was “old stone bottom”, Pat would write in to say that he personally owned two pairs of Stalin’s socks, and they glowed in the dark, suffusing his bedroom with a perfumed aroma like Chanel No.5. As to Molotov, his bum was in fact made of the finest Ferrara marble, which like aeroplanes, cars, TV and the air-conditioned pogo-stick had been invented in Russia. Sean on Israel puts me very much in mind of Pat Sloan in full apologia mode. Let us take the question of the expulsion of a million Arabs from their homes. Sean says, “In fact Israel was proclaimed in May 1948, in territory allotted by the United Nations, without any Arabs being expelled. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs did flee – the great majority not expelled – after Arab states with the backing, naturally enough, of the Palestinian Arabs, invaded Israel.” In this case Sean is guilty of exactly that which he accuses Foot, distorting history. As a result of a plan conceived in January 1948, the Irgun Zvai Leumi bombarded Jaffa for three days, Haganah attacked the Arab community in Jerusalem, and on the 9th April the Irgun and the, fascist trained, Stern Gang attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin, killing in cold blood 254 men, women and children. It was news of these massacres which set the Arab refugees on the move and it was their land expropriation that enabled the Zionists to increase their share of the partitioned state by 45% before the UN resolution was even passed. In 1948 the Arab armies, apart from a few Egyptian troops, all fought on Arab land. In a sense, the detailing of who did what to whom is not very productive. What the Arabs did to Jews in 1929, and on several other occasions, or what Jews did to Arabs in 1948 and have done consistently ever since, suggests an equality between Arabs and Jews that does not exist. It suggests that they were acting as in a vacuum. It really was not like that. From the very beginning of the Zionist movement, its leaders attempted to get the support of powerful backers. Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, tried unsuccessfully to approach the German Kaiser and the Sultan of Turkey. After his death, Weitzman had a first meeting with Arthur Balfour in 1906, that bore fruit in 1917 in the Balfour Declaration for a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Balfour was not only giving away a land already occupied by Palestinians, but also was effectively disposing of the spoils of a war that had yet to be won. Weitzman, however, had chosen wisely, and a Jewish population that had stood at 130,000 in 1914 under the British increased by half a million by 1939. Naturally enough, this represented no great British sympathy for Jews – Balfour was in fact an anti-semite – it did represent a useful counter-balance to the Arabs and made it easier to control Palestine which was important strategically for its proximity to the Suez Canal and as a vital link for the sea route and air routes to India and the East. Oil from Iraq flowed through the pipeline to Haifa, which was known as the Singapore of the Middle East. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s British imperialism put on a virtuoso performance of divide and rule. They blew up Arab houses, they demolished villages to punish “collective guilt”, established concentration camps, which they justified on the basis of protecting Jews and Jewish property. On the other hand the British would turn off the immigration tap to punish Jews and reward Arabs. Any sign of Arab-Jewish rapprochement would be met by a solid alliance of Arab feudalists, Zionists and the British administration. At the beginning of the war in 1939, the Zionists recognised that Britain was in decline and that America was a much more powerful patron. America in its turn sought to replace Britain as the power in the Middle east; Zionism was a useful weapon in this project. The role that Israel has played in the Middle East was nicely summed up by the editor of the Israeli daily paper, Ha’aretz, when he explained in 1951: “Israel has been given a role not unlike a watchdog. One need not fear that it will exercise an aggressive policy toward the Arab states if their will contradicts the interests of the USA and Britain. But should the west prefer for one reason or another to close its eyes one can rely on Israel to punish severely those of the neighbouring states whose lack of manners towards the west has exceeded the proper limits.” Israel has certainly lived up to its promise to punish those failing to show proper respect and in the process has taken on more and more of its neighbours’ territory.

But should the west prefer for one reason or another to close its eyes one can rely on Israel to punish severely those of the neighbouring states whose lack of manners towards the west has exceeded the proper limits.” Israel has certainly lived up to its promise to punish those failing to show proper respect and in the process has taken on more and more of its neighbours’ territory. Of course, they have learnt, like other invaders before them, that it is not always easy to keep the natives quiet, even if you pursue a humanitarian Rabin policy and just break the arms of stone throwing children. Sean makes much of Tony Cliff’s 70th birthday statement; “I used to argue that poor Jewish refugees should be allowed to come to Palestine ... that was an unqualified compromise ...” To which Sean responds: “Think about it. What is he saying here but that, if countries like Britain and the US could not be persuaded to let Jews in, then it would have been better that they were left to the mercy of Hitler that that they should go to Palestine?” There is, however, a slight problem here, because at the Bermuda Committee in 1943 Roosevelt suggested that all barriers be lifted for the immigration of Jews from Nazi persecution. To avoid offending British sensibilities Palestine was excluded from consideration. Zionist reaction was immediate and hostile, alleviation of Jewish misery was to be in Palestine or not at all. As Dr Silver told the 22nd World Zionist Congress: “Zionism is not an immigration or refugee movement, but a movement to re-establish the Jewish state for a Jewish nation in the land of Israel. The classic textbook of Zionism is not how to find a home for the refugees. The classic textbook of our movement is the Jewish state.” You cannot get much clearer than that. Hal Draper, a Marxist with some prestige in Workers’ Liberty circles, records: “Morris Ernst, the famous civil rights lawyer, has told me the story about how the Zionist leaders exerted their influence to make sure that the US did not open up immigration (into the US) to these Jews – for the simple reason that they wanted to herd these Jews to Palestine.” Sean quite correctly it seems to me, says the answer is the unity of Arab and Jewish workers. He then goes on to spoil it by suggesting they then set up separate states. What kind of states are these? Is there a mini-Palestine on a bit of the West Bank, plus the Gaza Strip, or has Sean got some complicated scheme for population exchange? Surely, what is needed is a secular Arab-Jewish state based on socialism and democracy in all of Palestine. Paul Foot, of course, can speak for himself, it is his favourite subject, but there is nothing manifestly anti-semitic in the points Sean attributes to him. Indeed what is strange about Sean’s piece is the absence of any mention of the role of British and American imperialism in the Middle East. There is nothing Stalinist in a recognition of Israel’s client status to American imperialism. Nor is there anything anti-semitic in recognising that a Zionist state smack in the middle of the region is the greatest enemy of peace and socialism for all Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Communist congress Pale-pink Reds (November 1975) From the Spectator, 22 November 1975, p.661. Published here with kind permission of the Spectator. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The Communist Party of Great Britain has this week been holding its congress, an event which takes place every other year. In the sense that the content of the resolutions, not to mention the speeches, has a certain sameness from one meeting to another, it could be argued that two years is too frequent. But, like every other party with pretensions – and which of them has no pretensions – it is necessary at regular intervals to gather together the faithful, to enthuse them with a new understanding and vigour for the old line of policy. A few things have changed, however, over the last few years. In the early years of the party it was one of the most slavish, if most unsuccessful, adherents to anything emanating from the Kremlin. No twist and turn of Stalin’s policy was enunciated without being greeted by the CPGB, as a work of consummate genius. That is until 1956, when jolly old Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and “the cult of the individual”. The subsequent turmoil in the international Communist movement was nowhere more damaging than in Britain. Thousands left the party in disgust. Worse – the old attitude of unswerving loyalty to party directives was lost. The monolith cracked and it has proved impossible to mend. Nowadays, with a proper and slightly apologetic politeness, the British comrades will occasionally criticise the Russians. In 1968 they criticised the invasion of Czechoslovakia, this year they criticise the treatment of the Russian dissidents. “Anti-marxist ideas”, they say, “should be handled by political debate and not by administrative measures.” Translated from the jargon this means people who disagree should not be put in jail. Of course these genuflexions to the liberal conscience are not achieved unanimously. At each stage the residual Stalinists, led by Sid French of the Surrey District, attempt to remove all criticism of the Socialist motherland. They are always unsuccessful. But these few high points of marginal disagreement do not seriously alter the well-disciplined course of CP congresses. The comrade delegates are not as young as they used to be, and age brings with it the compensation of lowered expectations. Without too much hope they wish to halt the decline in the circulation of the Morning Star (1,600 down since 1973), to increase party membership and best of all, please, to have a Communist MP or two. A far cry from the revolutionary hopes of 1926. Of some interest this year, was to compare the performance of the new Gcneral Secretary, Gordon MacLennan, with that of his predecessor John Gollan. It can be said without fear of contradiction, that Mr MacLennan delivers his speeches much better than did Mr Gollan. In every other respect they are the same type of faceless bureaucrat. Those of us with memories of Harry Pollitt and Willie Gallacher can only conclude: they don’t make communists like that any more. But to see the party as a collection of aging hacks without hope or a future would be a mistake. Industrially the Communists are still the most powerful organised force on the left. With some difficulty and some creaking of joints they can, when the occasion demands it, bring out the cadre for the big set piece demonstration, or organise a significant presence in union elections. In his report to the Congress Mr McLennan set out the perspective of a developing mass movement around the questions of unemployment, social service cuts, higher wages and pensions. On wages though there is a certain softening. The £6 limit received little attention in the pre-congress material, and little more in MacLennan’s speech The problem here is the difficulty of taking on such powerful figures as Jack Jones who, on most other questions is considered a bit of a left-winger. Communist policy for years has been to snuggle up close to the more successful Labour left trade union leaders. In terms of reciprocal tolerance for communists within these unions, the policy has not been without benefits for individual party members. In many unions the leading official’s use of some socialist rhetoric has been sufficient to still the most turbulent Communist on the executive council. On the direct political questions the CP stands behind the Tribune group in Parliament. Import controls loom very large, further nationalisation, a prices and rents freeze. Interestingly enough in previous times the labour left used, in general, to take its political line from the Communist Party, today the situation is reversed. This political weakness is not accidental. Since 1951, when Joe Stalin approved the party programme. The Socialist Road for Britain, there has been a heavy emphasis on electoral politics. The notion of a Labour government, with a group of Communist MPs, has been the consummation they so devoutly wished for. Inevitably such a policy requires an element of tailing the left of the parliamentary Labour Party and a diminution of the industrial work where the main Communist strength lies. This contradiction is one that has never been resolved and the pre-occupation with elections has caused a fair amount of simmering discontent among the industrial members. That is a matter of some concern for the hierarchy. There exist revolutionary groups ready and willing to recruit the most militant CP workers. Mr MacLennan has to perform a balancing act that maintains the democratic electoral image that makes possible united front activity with the Tribunite and trade union left-wingers. At the same time he must keep the industrial party members satisfied and avoid being outflanked on the left. Whether he is capable of this is a matter of some doubt. Failure now, when according to the Marxist canon “the objective conditions are ripe for revolutionary advance” will consign both him and his party to that great dustbin of history. Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Morning Star (April 1969) From International Socialism (1st series), No. 36, April–May 1969, pp. 40–41. Transcribed by Mike Pearn. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Vol. 1 Formation and Early Years 1919–1924 James Klugman Lawrence and Wishart, 63s. The Communist Party is a strange organisation. In the face of all the evidence it maintained for years an image of super efficiency and political industrial militancy. Since the early 1920’s its consistency has only been shown in a dreadful succession of mistakes and unprincipled political manoeuvres. From its policy in the General Strike; through loyal adherence to Stalin’s “third period social fascism”, into the sickening phase of the Popular front, support for the Molotov-Hitler pact, rapidly succeeded by hysterical support for the Churchill coalition, on to the post-war quietism, a brief burst of cold-war induced militancy to end up, reduced in numbers irreparably damaged in spirit by Hungary, the Sino-Soviet dispute and now Czechoslovakia, in the present mad scramble for respectability and the appearance of independent thought. It was not always like this. The early CP was a small organisation but it contained most of the best elements of the British Marxist movement. It carried with it the reflected prestige of the October revolution and it was born into a period of large scale radicalisation of working-class people. That it bore the sectarian weaknesses, in some measure, of its constituent organisations, is true; but organisations do not grow out of thin air and will inevitably contain elements of past associations. The trick in any unification is to set the programmatic framework in which the sectarian weaknesses can be seen and overcome. The infant CP had the framework – the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism – and it had the nucleus of working class militants and intellectuals that would have enabled them to build a revolutionary party. That it did not happen is one of the tragedies of the British socialist movement. To grow and develop a revolutionary organisation must make its own mistakes and learn from the difficulties it experiences through the pursuit of its policies. The CPGB in compounding the errors of the Comintern Bureaucracy denied itself any possibility of meaningful interaction with the British working-class experience. The very real insight into the nature of the TU bureaucrats, both ‘left and right’ varieties, that the pre-war syndicalists had popularised was ignored in favour of the Russian directed policy of the Anglo-Russian Committee – a policy that had no relevance to British struggle but a great relevance to the supposed interests of Russian foreign policy. The net result was a quite un-Leninist handing over of the initiative to the general Council of the TUC. A revolutionary party will frequently make all sorts of agreements and accommodations with other working-class organisations but it cannot hold such agreements to be more important than interests of the working-class. The slogan of “All Power to the General Council” except as the practical application of Soviet diplomacy can never be correct for a serious Communist Party and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the trade union leadership. The fatuity of the Anglo Russian committee policy was to be multiplied one hundred-fold in the later shifts and turns dictated by the Russian apparatus but it is perhaps in this fundamental error that the seeds of the future destruction were sown. None of this, of course, comes out in James Klugman’s book on the early years of the CP. Official histories are usually dull and this is no exception. The problem writing about the youth of the party from the very heart of its senility is one that Klugman cannot overcome. The present day preoccupation with elections means that a quite unreal emphasis is given to a minor feature of the party’s activity in the early years. It is of course a matter of some pleasure to note that Philips Price increased his vote in 1923 by 3.25% over his vote in 1922 and it is even more intriguing to find in a footnote that Philips Price was, “not fully Communist in 1922”. I have a mental picture of the faceless 3.25% holding back until Philips Price takes the plunge and becomes “fully Communist”. It would be however unfair to say that Klugman maintains the standard of untruthfulness that makes his earlier work, From Trotsky to Tito, one of the outstandingly nauseating examples of Stalinist falsification. In so far as one can judge without looking up a load of obscure references , the story is told with reasonable respect for historical fact and this is perhaps because the years 1919 to 1924 contain less to cover up than any subsequent five years of party history. Indeed it is interesting to note that the fiction, maintained for years, that Willie Gallagher was the first Communist MP has now been abandoned for the simple truth that Walton Newbold beat Gallagher to this distinction by a good thirteen years and so became an unperson for thirty-five years while Gallagher grew old and feeble in strict time with the party until the day of his death. One of the more interesting and significant of Communist activity of the early years was the formation of the minority movement but in Klugman’s scale of historical value this merits only the sketchiest exposition of its programme and influence while the labour party merits page after page of fairly tedious detailing of its (The Labour Party) relations with the CP. Despite the strong impression that Klugman wrote the book with the blunt end of a bread pudding occasionally the real life of the movement breaks through. It has been a long time since any CP paper has printed anything like the Open letter to the Fighting Forces by J.R. Campbell: Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen ... the Communist Party calls on you to begin the task of not only organising passive resistance when war is declared, or when an industrial dispute involves you but to definitely and categorically let it be known that, neither in the class war, nor a military war will you turn your guns on your fellow workers, but instead will line up with your fellow workers in attack upon the exploiters and capitalists, and will use your arms on the side of your own class ... form Committees in every barracks, aerodrome and ship ... refuse to shoot down your fellow workers. Refuse to fight for profits. Turn your weapons on your oppressors. As a direct result of the Labour Government’s decision not to prosecute Campbell for this splendidly seditious piece the Liberals withdrew their support for labour and the Government fell. This was the first and – if present indications are any guide – the last Government the CPGB will bring down even by accident. The book contains several new pictures of the vintage years. I am particularly pleased to report that there is a picture of Albert Inkpin (General Secretary from the formation to 1929), a man I had despaired of ever seeing even in a photograph. There is also a very fine picture of the delegates to the Leeds conference of the party. All the comrades are gathered in their serried ranks, both male and female, in front of a butchers shop. In the window of the shop is a notice bearing the legend “These prime bullocks and heifers”. Could it be that the photographer was some kind of premature Trotsky-Fascist. Well there it is the pictures are good, there are no jokes at all, the election results are if out of date comprehensive and the price is three guineas. I know it’s a lot of money but where else would you get such a fine likeness of Albert Inkpin. Top of the page Last updated on 26 O ctober 2020

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins It’s time to give left-wing democracy the deodorant treatment (April 1976) Originally published in Workers News, No.3, April 1976. [1] Reprinted in Workers Action, Dec 2002. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. If there is one statement that will receive general assent among most gatherings of workers it is ‘politics stink’. When this generalised point of view is directed to the parliamentary parties most left-wing socialists would not dissent. But similar epithets and ripe descriptive utterances are applied to the Communist Party and to other left groups. It is an unpalatable fact but a fact nonetheless that the accelerating disenchantment with conventional British politics is not accompanied by noticeable enthusiasm for any left alternative. On the contrary, the left has declined both in influence and numbers in strict time with the growing crisis of parliamentary politics and capitalist economy. Now this is strange. It has always been assumed in the left movement that a decline in capitalism and the consequent difficulties of capitalist politics would be the opportunity for a major advance of the extra-parliamentary left. Of course, it is possible to point to a number of difficulties. Increasing unemployment reduces the combativity of the workers: the complete abdication of their defensive role by the trade union leadership: and the small forces of the revolutionary left – all can be brought forward as reasons for lack of growth. While these arguments are true, in general, they still beg more questions than they answer. Why is it, for example, that the left, which in the years up to 1974 had an unparalleled – in their terms – growth, has not been able to exert much greater pressure within the unions against the collaboration of the leadership with anti-working class policies. Why has it been unable to retain all of the workers who joined in the heady days of the Heath administration? The answers to these and other pointed questions will trip lightly and with great facility off the tongues of the spokesmen for any of the left groups. If there is one thing they have perfected it is the production of excuses. Some of them might even be true. That last sentence was not written in any spirit of cynicism but it was written deliberately. Too often the statements of various revolutionary groups are produced to obscure rather than to reveal the truth. This is done in several ways, the most common being the resort to a form of ‘marxese’ that only the initiated can understand. Meaning and reality are drowned in a clotted form that cannot be dignified by the word prose. More seriously, and in a way that is both deceptive and self-deceiving, each of the groups develops a theory of the world that sets its own organisation at the centre of the universe and then proceeds to rearrange the geography to take account of the shift. Most frequently this is accompanied by a species of hysterical party loyalty that would have been welcomed by the medieval Catholic church. Such a spectacle is both distasteful and incomprehensible to workers unfamiliar with the phenomenon. Even more distressing is the fact that many workers who are aware of the revolutionary left have a shrewd suspicion that the groups are manipulative, untruthful and undemocratic. All too frequently such critics are right. Militant workers may despise Labour’s truckling to capitalism, they may dislike the Communist Party’s reformist politics but they also distrust the revolutionary left. It would be pleasant to say that such fears are groundless but they are not. It is not true that the left never packed a meeting, nor is it true that the left never pushed through their resolutions at the fag-end of a small, unrepresentative trade union branch meeting. It is true that there is all too frequently a double standard applied by the left. What the left does is all right because it is in the interests of class struggle but what anyone else does is by definition reactionary because it does not accord with some preconceived notion of socialist advance. Nowhere does this double standard become more apparent than in the attitude to democracy within their own organisations. Basing themselves generally on some largely imagined organisational principles laid down by Lenin under conditions of Tsarist autocracy, they would deny their own minorities the rights they loudly demand in the wider movement. The argument that capitalism is nasty and we have to be hard and ultra-disciplined in fighting it leaves out of account the difficulty that potential recruits, radicalised by capitalist unpleasantness, are more likely to be repelled than attracted by similar characteristics in revolutionary groups. The truth is that the left has contributed mightily to its own difficulties. It has lived for too long in a wilderness without influence and membership. In the closed, over-heated revolutionary circles, a form of historical play-acting has replaced any connection with the real movement of the working class. When at last the opportunity was provided to break out of this isolation was largely fluffed. The time is long overdue to break the old outmoded mould. The left leaderships should stop pretending they are some reincarnation of Lenin in October 1917 and the membership should be educated in the traditions and the reality of the British working class. The old way has failed. A moment’s reflection will indicate that it was bound to fail. It is time that some fundamental rethinking was done. It is true, both in theory and practice in times of capitalist crisis the revolutionary left has its greatest opportunity. But it must be a left radically different from one we have today. Note 1. First appeared under the pseudonym Robert James in Workers News, No.3, April 1976, the paper of the short-lived Workers League. Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins The Fate of the Russian Revolution (1999) From Revolutionary History, Vol. 7 No. 2, 1999, pp. 275–79. Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Sean Matgamna (ed.), The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism, Volume 1 Phoenix Press, London 1998, pp603, £16.99 WHEN, in 1957, I became a Trotskyist, one of the great joys of this rather lonely allegiance was that a great treasure-house of quality political writing opened up for study. Although there was nothing like the sheer volume of material that appeared in the late 1960s and 1970s, there were, nevertheless, the key texts of Trotsky and the publications of American Trotskyism in both its Cannonite and Shachtmanite manifestations. One particularly valuable cache was the back issues of the American Trotskyists’ New International. From 1934 to 1958, this excellent journal appeared, setting a standard for its rivals to aspire to but seldom to achieve. Much of the credit for the quality of the New International was due to Max Shachtman, who for most of those years was the main guiding hand behind the magazine. Shachtman was a revolutionary man for all seasons, a fine orator, witty, eloquent, penetrating and very funny, sometimes savagely so; all qualities that were equally in evidence in his writing. In the 1930s, he was, after Trotsky, held in the highest esteem in the international movement, where he helped in developing the sections and preparing the way for the foundation of the Fourth International. Trotsky certainly thought very highly of him, appointing him his literary executor, and making strenuous efforts to avoid the split in the US Socialist Workers Party in 1940. There was, as one might assume, another side to all this, and, as Bob Pitt has observed in a recent issue of What Next?, Shachtman was, despite his manifest talents, a bit of a smart arse. In this, of course, his smart arsery was of the same character as your run-of-the-mill group gurus, where the leader’s stranglehold on the dialectic enables him to pontificate on all questions, even if it does sound like piffle. With Shachtman, the piffle always sounded plausible, and often the speed of the pen deceived the unwary. I met him only once, when, in pursuit of material for his never-written magnum opus on the Comintern, he visited these shores in the early 1960s. He was staying with Jock Haston, and several of us were invited to meet him. He was something of a patrician figure, given to making his statements as if in papal infallibility mode, and I gained the distinct impression that contact with the hem of his garment might prove efficacious for any troublesome skin conditions one might be enduring. He was, however, graciously pleased to relieve me of my incomplete file of Labour Monthly. This is the Max Shachtman whose writing on the Russian question forms the overwhelming bulk of the volume here under review. In a way, this is unfortunate, because whilst bureaucratic collectivism might have been a useful defining theory for the Workers Party/Independent Socialist League, it was one of the least attractive or interesting parts of that organisation’s life, and was certainly the main factor impelling, or allowing, Shachtman finally to make his peace with American imperialism. The theory had its first outing in America in the SWP in 1937, propounded by James Burnham and Joe Carter. C.L.R. James, whose opinion of bureaucratic collectivism was not high, referred to it as ‘Carter’s little liver pill’. There is some evidence to suggest that it was an adaptation of Bruno Rizzi’s theory, and, despite strenuous denials by the WP/ISL, the jury is still out on this question. Shachtman, who was a co-factionalist with Burnham and Carter, did not adopt the theory himself until late in 1940, after they had all been expelled from the SWP. This makes it seem rather unfair that all subscribers to bureaucratic collectivism are now called ‘Shachtmanites’ rather than ‘Burnham-Carterites’. This may be explained by the fact that Burnham defected to the right in 1940, whilst Shachtman spent nearly 20 years more or less attached to a revolutionary outlook before he, too, followed the well-worn path. Carter, probably the real originator, was not an easy read, and the few articles he did write have all the charm of a bare-faced fletton. So, Shachtmanism it is, and perhaps there is some justice in that, for they deserve one another. As a theory, bureaucratic centralism tells us that Russian Stalinism represented a new ruling class based on the super-exploitation of slaves. The birth and evolution of this class is not charted, and seems to be based on anecdotal evidence, a fine and justified moral outrage at the crimes of Stalinism, and a desire to produce something to replace the inadequate ‘workers’ state’ theory of Trotsky. It is also quite possibly the case that Shachtman’s late conversion represented a need to have a central defining theory to set him apart from Cannon’s SWP, which already had the franchise on Soviet defencism. Like all of these theories, it was a bit of a mix and match, and Shachtman spent years patching here and extending there, and gradually squeezing out any revolutionary content from the original. One of the more bizarre aspects of Shachtmanism is the rôle it ascribes to the Communist parties.

One of the more bizarre aspects of Shachtmanism is the rôle it ascribes to the Communist parties. It suggests that, as capitalism grew up within the interstices of the feudal system, so the Communist parties were a bureaucratic collective class-in-waiting. In pursuit of this particular thesis, Shachtman engaged in a strange debate with Theodore Draper in the pages of the New International in which he claimed that the American Socialist Party left of 1912 was quite different from the left of 1917. If this sounds dangerously like the debates of the mediaeval schoolmen on whether the late J.C. of Bethlehem was of the same stuff or similar stuff to God, there is definitely a whiff of that kind of incense in the air. That left of 1917 was, of course the main element that went into the foundation of the American Communist Party. Within that party, amongst others, were Max Shachtman and his mentor James P. Cannon, struggling manfully in one factional alignment or another to convince Zinoviev that they were the men to lead the American section of the Comintern. Between 1922 and 1928, in all his activity as a second-rank leader of the party, Shachtman managed to avoid turning into a new ruling class. We do not know, of course, what nocturnal anguish he endured in his struggles to resist this transformation, especially when the moon was full. From 1940 to 1948, the Workers Party thought of itself as a Trotskyist organisation, dedicated to the Fourth International, and, apart from the Russian question, broadly adhering to the ideas of the movement. It was more open and tolerant than most Trotskyist groups, but until 1948 it followed the debates within the Fourth International, and attempted to contribute to the discussion. Whatever their differences with the SWP, they were as concerned with creating an international leadership for the coming struggles. Perhaps it is the case that because they were unorthodox they were more aware of the way that postwar reality invalidated so many of Trotsky’s predictions. With the expansion of Stalinism into Eastern Europe, it was imperative, they thought, that the International rectify its mistaken line on Russia so that the workers could be given a clear and unequivocal lead. The condition of the Fourth International in the immediate post-1945 period, in the light of what it saw as its prospects, would have made a cat laugh, that is if the cat didn’t have more pressing matters in mind. Shachtman attended the 1948 congress of the Fourth International, he found the rhetoric of Michel Pablo empty and dispiriting, and the International, at whose founding in 1938 he had presided, a shell whose past had been based on hopes, and whose future was nostalgia for the past. Not only that, Shachtman’s own brand of Trotskyism made little impression on anyone. He returned to the US disappointed, and within a short time the Workers Party had not only broken with the Fourth International, but had changed its name to the Independent Socialist League, a recognition that a party of a couple of hundred people was a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, those first few years of the Workers Party were their best. In the 1940 split, they had taken slightly less than half the membership of the SWP, perhaps 400 people. They were, in the main, young and middle-class, but they were exceptionally dedicated. During the war, when engineering plants had many vacancies, they became factory workers, joining the union and fighting for leadership on the shop floor. Hal Draper, an archetypal intellectual, was one of those who became a factory worker. Unfortunately, when the war ended, the arms factories closed down and demobbed soldiers took the jobs that were available. Once again, they were commenting from the outside, and the slow but steady attrition of the members began. For Shachtman, the non-revolutionary character of the postwar working class and the strength of Stalinism internationally inevitability impelled him to the right. If Stalinism was the barbaric antithesis of Socialism, and revolutionary Socialists just could not be heard, then Socialists should support those structures within capitalism that enabled workers to organise and better their conditions. By 1949, he was floating the idea of supporting trade union candidates in the Democratic Party. By 1958, the ISL still had enough of its old spirit for there to be a faction fight when Hal Draper led the opposition to dissolving the ISL into the American Socialist Party. It was to no avail, the organisation had outlived its time, and having signed the humiliating dissolution statement demanded by the Socialist Party, Shachtman took his followers into the palsied embrace of Norman Thomas. One of the great paradoxes of all this is that the leaders of the Socialist Party were even more tired than the ISL, and within a short time Shachtman and his camarilla were in control of the organisation, and remorselessly driving it to the right. In the end, poor Shachtman was a caricature of his former self. Gradually he broke with his old comrades of many years’ standing. He supported the Bay of Pigs landing, he backed Johnson over Vietnam, backed Humphries for US President, and then refused to back McGovern against Nixon, and finally, in 1972, he died some years after his demise as a Socialist. The Fate of the Russian Revolution is subtitled Lost Texts of Critical Marxism, and, it has to be said, not all of it needed finding, but for those interested in the history of the Trotskyist movement, there is plenty to satisfy their appetite. Apart from the reprints from Labour Action and New International, there are Workers Party conference documents and internal bulletins, with contributions by such luminaries as C.L.R. James and Hal Draper.

James and Hal Draper. Sean Matgamna not only edited this volume, he also provides us with an introduction which aims to set the historical material in an overall context, both in relation to Trotsky and Trotskyism, and also to the Leninist tradition. The need for such an attempt rests in the fact that nobody in the ISL ever took the trouble to produce a coherent text on the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, not its origin, dynamic, political economy, or its laws of motion. Shachtman published a collection of his articles, under the title The Bureaucratic Revolution, in which he tinkered a little with the original texts to prove that from 1940 he had always been an opponent of the ‘evil empire’. Hal Draper put out another collection of articles, An Introduction to Independent Socialism, but all his major works were devoted to other more valuable tasks. I regret to say that Sean has not rectified the omissions of more talented Shachtmanites. I did, however, notice in Sean’s acknowledgements at the front of the volume, where he thanks Martin Thomas for help in editing the draft of part two of the Introduction to just a tenth of its original length. Now part two in the final text is 69 pages long, I counted them, and if you will just multiply that number by 10 you will realise that Martin deserves a heartfelt vote of thanks from all of us for his selfless endeavours. Now there’s a man I would be happy to go to the barricades with any day. The Russian question certainly has its place in any examination of the life of the WP/ISL, but it really was much more than that. For 20 years, against great odds, an organisation was maintained that vigorously preached the message that Socialism is an expansion of, not an alternative to, democracy. And from all the evidence, that idea also informed the practice of the organisation, which puts it one up on practically every other group extant today. If you asked Alan Thornett whether that spirit of fair play that characterised the ISL has somehow trickled down to the Alliance for Workers Liberty, I’ll bet a modest sum that the enamel would fall off his teeth and steam come out of his ears before he was able to reply. I believe that for young comrades coming into the movement, an altogether more valuable and entertaining book from the WP/ISL archive, a selection that would faithfully cover the whole of the Shachtmanite canon, would have yielded something of much greater interest. The point of this volume, I suspect, is not for the edification of the young, or indeed the not-so-young. Its purpose is to add a certain theoretical respectability to Sean’s own organisational needs. He has attached himself to a tradition that had some good ideas, but not on the Russian question, and some very good people. It really is no good reinventing the wheel if it was a small inadequate one that only moved to the right, and was, in any case, irreparably smashed with the fall of the Berlin wall. Top of the page Last updated on 12 May 2021

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Revolutionary Trade Unionism (February 1971) From International Socialism (1st series), No.46, February/March 1971, pp.27-31. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Workers are taught organisation not by their superior intelligence or by outside agitators but by the capitalists themselves. They are organised on the assembly lines, in the factory gangs, in shifts, in work teams, in the division of labour of capitalism itself. Capitalism cannot grow without organising its workers and teaching them the virtues of a form of ‘solidarity’ of working together. – Hal Draper: Why the Working Class is the Key to Progress. The development of capitalism in Britain was accompanied by massive movements of population, unparalleled in brutality until Stalin undertook a similar exercise 100 years later. The enclosures, the ending of outdoor relief and the growth of the segregated workhouse, the importation of thousands of Irish labourers and the virtual destruction of the skilled hand-craftsman all conspired together to drive the people into the grim barrack-factories of the industrial revolution. In short order, these uneducated workers, without the benefit of precedent or kindly middle-class tutelage, combined into trade unions. The first lesson learned in the hard workshop school of the factory masters was solidarity: solidarity within the factory and, in the Chartist experience, solidarity as a class. This is not to say that the early attempts at combination were all successful. Struggles were localised and communication bad. Poverty and frequent unemployment made the continuous existence of trade unions difficult almost to the point of impossibility. The Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (having at its best 30,000 members) was unable to survive a prolonged strike of tailors. But despite defeats, despite government repression, trade unions were formed and the struggle continued. Capitalism had decreed the factories, the division of labour and must needs live with and battle with the social and political consequences. The objective difficulties of trade union advance meant that the response was generalised into the struggle around the Charter. Taken in its historical context, the demands of the Charter and, in particular the movement that grew up around the programme, had profoundly revolutionary content. At its birth, capitalism could only view the simple demands for political democracy and human rights as completely subversive – and they were right. For Marxists, in their consideration of working-class organisation, the early trade unions and the Chartist movement provide, among other things, a lesson in the infinite capacity of the working class to give organisational form to their struggle for emancipation. The disparate elements that went into the making of the working class were able to construct organisations to challenge the whole ethic of capitalism. For decades the ruling class lived in fear of the activities of the ‘mob’. It is part of the complex of contradictions that run through the history of the working class that the trade unions that represented a threat to the very structure of capitalism at its inception should today be a bulwark of that system. The demise of Chartism, the greater economic power and concentration of capitalism and the consequent growth of stable employment for the skilled sections of workers gave rise to financially viable trade unions along craft lines. Unlike the early trade unions that saw their task as obtaining for the worker the full product of his labour, and unlike the Chartists who saw the extension of political democracy as the inevitable emancipation of the oppressed, the craft unions saw themselves as a pressure group maintaining the standards of the trade and the sectional interests of their members. The problems of the unorganised and unskilled were not the problems of craft unionism. The later movement among the unskilled labourers, epitomised in the great dock strike, came not as a result of the activities of the trade unions, but from the spontaneous struggle of the workers themselves and the agitation and propaganda of socialists like Eleanor Marx, Tom Mann and John Burns. The growing prosperity of the system was reflected in the growing prosperity of the trade union bureaucracy. Organisation of craftsmen, the extension of the franchise, all contributed to the importance to capitalism of the trade union bureaucracy. Wages for the skilled were as much as three times the wages of the unskilled, continuity of employment was much greater for craftsmen and their higher wages allowed for higher contributions to cater for unemployment and sick pay. The power that trade union stability conferred on the leadership was recognised by employers and politicians alike. Their views were sought, their social and financial desires, at least partially, satisfied. They were in no time at all transferred, in De Leon’s phrase, into ‘Labour Lieutenants of Capitalism’. In political and social terms the trade union bureaucracy was a conservative layer, enjoying special privileges and dedicated to maximising those privileges within the context of capitalism. The super profits of empire and exploitation of the unorganised and unskilled made all this possible. The further expansion of capitalism, the growing division of labour, made the work of the unskilled more important within the process of production. This coupled to the example of comparatively successful craft unionism led on to the organisation of whole new layers of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, less stable, with a heavy turnover of members and more prone to the effects of any economic downturn but making up in numbers what they lacked in other respects. (Between 1870 and 1900 the number of unions affiliated to the TUC grew from 47 to 184 and affiliated membership from 250,000 to 1,250,000.) The growth of trade unionism resulted in a growth in the real standard of British workers. (Taking 1900 as 100, the index of real wages rose from 63 in 1869 to 99 in 1895.) Trade unionism in Britain grew on the dynamic of British capitalism. As capitalism became more prosperous, so the chance of suborning wider sections of the trade union bureaucracy became possible.

From being a bar to the free expression of early capitalism the trade unions became a spur to greater capitalist rationalisation and concentration. The growth of political reformism developed in this period, the rise of Fabianism in Britain, the revisionism of Bernstein in Germany. What has developed is, for the reformist, the end point of analysis, not what the present has developed from and what it is developing towards. Capitalist democracy could afford not just reformist trade unions but also a reformist working class politics. After 1900 the situation for the trade unions and the working class began to decline rapidly. The downturn of the economic cycle had an immediate and disastrous effect on working class standards. Prices rose uninterruptedly during the following decade while wages remained static. Unemployment rose until, in 1907, it was higher than it had been at any time in the previous 25 years. [1] The Taff Vale judgement, which cost the railwaymen’s union some £200,000 in 1901, drove the trade union leadership into support for the political expression of reformism in the Labour Representation Committee and subsequently the Labour Party. But neither political or industrial reformism could answer the simple needs of the working class. In France the syndicalists built a trade union federation based on the skilled workers and dedicated to revolutionary direct action. (Sabotage derives from the word sabot – wooden shoe – that French railway strikers would place on the lines to derail blackleg trains.) In America in 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was formed to oppose the one big union against the combined might of the system and the ‘bread and butter unionism’ of the American Federation of Labour (AFL). The international experience of the class found its reflection in Britain through the growth of a tendency that saw the industrial union as the immediate response to working-class needs and as the instrument for taking power and also the instrument for the exercise of that power. The syndicalist-cum-industrial-unionist tendency were uncompromisingly opposed to craft unionism and its political expression in the Labour Party. Influenced by the French direct activists and the dual unionism of De Leon and the IWW they quickly discovered that, whatever the universal validity of the notion of independent revolutionary class action, the transposition of American and French theories to the British scene were doomed to failure. The Industrial Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) an attempt by the British Socialist Labour Party to implant the IWW into Britain was a brave but dismal failure. We will return to the IWGB later but first it is necessary to examine in some detail the origin of the movement in America. There are three figures who came together in 1905 to form the IWW: Daniel De Leon, Eugene Debs and Bill Heywood. There were, of course, many others who subsequently became as important if not more important than these three, but the past experience and personal prestige of Debs, De Leon and Haywood drew together the disparate strands they represented and gave the movement the impetus it required. Debs represented a particularly strange development as an individual within the working-class movement. In a way he reversed the popular path of a labour leader. Starting off as a railroad worker he became active in the ultra-conservative Railroad Brotherhoods and a protagonist of non-political craft unionism. He developed as the result of the manifest failure of the brotherhoods into a partisan of industrial unionism and formed the American Railway Union. The ARU’s defeat in the bloody Pullman strike of 1894 (in Chicago alone 13 people were killed and 53 injured [2]) and the assistance provided to the employers by state and federal government ended his lifelong attachment to the Democratic Party. The incapacity of the brotherhoods and the AFL turned him to dual unionism. In Cook County jail he learned the bare essentials of socialist theory. He became a socialist, a revolutionist, an internationalist – and a dual unionist. Haywood represented a different tradition, a native born American who started work as a youth in the metal mines of the West and then left to become a homesteader. The government, however, took his land for an Indian reservation (an unusual reversal of tradition) and Haywood was forced back into the mines. This experience confirmed Haywood in an already well-developed antipathy to the fetters of wage slavery. Together with others in the West he saw the end of the dream of individual liberty in the terrible conditions of the metal mines. Individual freedom was submerged in the freedom of the corporations and the power of corporate wealth was made apparent in the naked force with which they manipulated both people and government. Heywood and his like did not need, certainly felt they did not need, the abstract theories of marxism and socialism to teach them the need to struggle and the need to destroy capitalism. For them it was a fact of life, a necessary condition of working-class experience. In 1893 he helped to form the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Haywood’s philosophy is well summed up in his speech to the founding convention of the IWW: ‘between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organise as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production and abolish the wages system’. This splendid formulation is interesting. The emphasis on the abolition of the wages system in a way harks back to the early British trade union philosophy – the opposition of the independent producer to the tyranny of the wages system – the demand for the full product of his labour, by the man who hates the naked and direct exploitation of the capitalist. This feature of the WFM and other dissident American trade unions indicates one reason for the difficulty in implanting the forms of the IWW into the conditions of Europe. Only in Australia, which had a .similar internal frontier, was the IWW able to exert more than a transitory influence. Hayward was also a member of the American Socialist Party and, at least while he maintained membership avoided the worst non-political attitudes of the extreme Wobblies. Nevertheless he was at one with Debs and a significant group in the ASP that opposed Gomper’s AFL and was committed to dual unionism.

De Leon was a totally different personality from the other two, a doctrinaire marxist in that most doctrinaire of organisations the Socialist Labour Party. A former lecturer in law at Colombia University, he joined the SLP at a low point in its fortunes. The SLP, an organisation largely composed of immigrants, experienced in somewhat exaggerated form the controversies of the European movement. The Lassalleans and the marxists fought incessantly for theoretical control of the party in frequently unreal and dogmatic terms. For the Lassalleans the ‘iron law of wages’ made it futile to engage in the economic struggle of trade unions. De Leon managed formally to straddle the positions of the two tendencies in the SLP and evolve a theory to combine political and industrial activity. In practice the party adopted such an exclusive tactic that the advantages of certain rectitude (De Leon once wrote ‘The SLP has all the “tyranny” of truth’ [3]) and disciplined organisation were lost in the almost universal opposition they provoked. In 1893 he entered the Knights of Labour and by superior organisation and force of personality captured District 49 of the union. For 12 months the SLP exercised considerable influence in the organisation. Inevitably the extreme dogmatism of his position met with revulsion and the SLP adherents were expelled. In 1894, in concert with several small ‘socialist’ unions. De Leon managed to lead a battle for building in socialist objectives to the AFL constitution. In this they were unsuccessful but together with the Mineworkers they did manage to defeat Gompers for the presidency. Twelve months later Gompers was back and De Leon was out. For De Leon boring from within was now a dead letter and he set up, under SLP auspices, the Socialist Trades and Labour Alliance. The ST&LA never numbered more than 10,000 members and was solely based in New York among immigrant trades. The sectarianism of the SLP, the shrillness of its polemics and its virulent dual unionism eventually gave rise to a split within the SLP. In 1898 a sizeable section of the party, behind Morris Hillquit, bolted. Three years later the Hillquit group formed the basis for the American Socialist Party. By 1905 the ST&LA had reduced in membership to 1,500. There was no way for the organisation to exist unless it merged with the growing forces within the independent unions and, the left wing in the SP for an industrial unionist opposition to the AFL. De Leon’s errors were large ones and most commentators, especially those of the Communist Party – who made all of De Leon’s mistakes without any of his justification – concentrated on these errors. But despite his dogmatism, he made a genuine contribution to socialist thought and his work on the way the victorious working class would exercise their power through their own industrial organisation was a reasonably accurate forecast of the Soviets. These three personalities, with all their faults and strengths, came together in 1905 to form the IWW. The Knights of Labour had declined and then failed and the AFL was almost exclusively craft unionist and organised only 5 per cent of the workers. To charges of splitting the trade union front the Wobblies replied that the AFL was not a trade union at all. In another section of his speech to the inaugural convention of the IWW, Hay wood said: ‘It has been said that this convention was to form an organisation to rival the AF of L. This is a mistake. We are here for the purpose of forming a Labour organisation.’ Debs went even further. ‘To talk about reforming these rotten graft infested (AF of L) unions which are dominated absolutely by the labour boss, is as vain and wasteful of time as to spray a cesspool with attar of roses.’ [4] There is more than a little justification for these remarks. The exclusiveness of the AFL went further than mere craft. They were also lilywhite and their refusal to organise the unskilled meant that the migrant and immigrant workers were left entirely at the mercy of the employers. AFL policy was effectively: I will not organise them but neither must anyone else. Between 1896 and 1897 the WFM was affiliated to the AFL, This brief association ended with recrimination on both sides. The political and industrial quietism of the Gompers-led AFL, together with a failure to effectively support the miners in the Lead-ville strike, were the causes of the split. The WFM immediately started a rival Western Labour Union to ‘organise all labour west of the Mississippi irrespective of occupation, nationality, creed or colour’. In the next seven years the WFM fought a series of bitter, bloody, long-drawn-out disputes, generally around the issues of the eight-hour day, union recognition and wages. Sometimes they lost, more often they won and they maintained the union and spread the appeal of militant industrial unionism. In 1902 Debs persuaded the WFM to change the name of the Western Labour Union to the American Labour Union (ALU) and to extend their sphere of activity to the whole country. The dual unionist challenge was being made with a vengeance. In the summer of 1905 the founding conference of the IWW met in Chicago. Beside the WFM, the ALU and De Leon’s ST&LA there were delegates from a number of independent unions, some state federations of unions, some Canadian unions and the American branch of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers of Great Britain. All together some 200 delegates attended. It was a mixed bunch. The seeds of future difficulty already existed in the two main strands that were represented – the anarchist trend (Father Hagerty and Lucy Parsons – widow of the Haymarket martyr) and the orthodox marxists (the left of the SP, the SLP).

The seeds of future difficulty already existed in the two main strands that were represented – the anarchist trend (Father Hagerty and Lucy Parsons – widow of the Haymarket martyr) and the orthodox marxists (the left of the SP, the SLP). For the anarchists and syndicalists, ‘Political action leads to capitalism reformed. Direct action leads to socialism ... death to politics ...’ [5] As late as April 1904 De Leon still believed that American socialism could be ushered in by the ballot box, although he was later to concede that if the capitalists used fraud to deprive the workers of victory then direct action should be taken to redress the balance. De Leon however did not explain why workers with the ability to redress the balance should wait for the bosses to use fraud before exercising direct action. The keynote for the IWW founding convention in 1905 was given by Bill Hay wood: ‘This is the Continental Congress of the working class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism’. (Proceedings of the First Convention of the IWW) The proceedings were much taken up with debates around the question of politics. It is a measure of the strength of De Leon’s personality that politics were seen in his terms: the ballot box versus direct action, the IWW as the industrial appendage of the SLP or as the combination of revolutionary cadre and mass trade union. But De Leon’s apparent victory in securing the inclusion of political aims in the preamble to the IWW constitution was short lived. At the 1906 convention the first week was spent in a wrangle about whether De Leon was a bona fide worker who could be seated at all. The anti-political anti-De Leon forces were gaining strength. The most stable section of the IWW, the WFM, was especially hostile to De Leon’s particular brand of politics. (The editor of the Miner’s Magazine wrote that the second convention was ‘part of a conspiracy that contemplated the resurrection ... of a political corpse – the Socialist Labour Party’. [6]) In July 1908 the WFM withdrew from the IWW. De Leon was blamed for the alienation of this, the only stable union in the IWW, and at the September convention the annual attempt to deny De Leon a seat was successful. The SLP set up a rival IWW in Detroit, which lasted until 1925 (after De Leon’s death called the Worker’s International Industrial Union). De Leon had succeeded once more in driving the SLP into splendid isolation and intensified the anti-political reaction of the IWW. Despite its theoretical crudity, despite its anti-political Philistinism, the IWW involved literally thousands of militants in the organisation. The dedication of the Wobblies and their willingness to suffer beatings by company and state thugs, their readiness to go to jail and their fortitude and defiance at judicial frame-ups to the point, and beyond, judicial murder, made the name of the organisation and its militants known and respected throughout the labour movement. It also made them known and execrated in the press and legislatures. They fought a strike in Goldfield, Nevada, and organised virtually all workers in the town (with the exception of a few AFL skilled trades) they forced up wages and conditions from $1.75 for a ten-hour day to $4.50 for an eight-hour day. At Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, they turned wage cuts for some 30,000 workers into a wage increase. Between 1907 and 1916 they ran 13 major free speech campaigns against local ordinances specifically directed against IWW organising meetings. In these campaigns they drafted in literally hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Wobblies to defy the ordinances and to jam the jails and often they won. But none of these great struggles left the IWW with a continuing organisation in the towns of the East. The power of the corporations, the difficulty of organising workers divided into as many as 20 language groups (as at Paterson, New Jersey), the state and government repression and the IWW’s refusal to consider bargaining with the bosses, made stable organisation impossible. In Lawrence, at the end of the strike, the IWW had 14.000 members in the local. Twelve months later they were down to the pre-strike 400. In trade union terms, the IWW was not a success. In the sense that their intention was to build something much more than a trade union, there was a certain inevitability about lack of success. The natural ground for the Wobblies were the mass production industries of the East, the factory towns populated by a polyglot collection of immigrants working long hours in inhuman conditions for miserably low wages, at the beginning of the piece work and factory speed-up system. But the successes were confined to the migratory workers of the West and Middle West. They organised effectively among the transient harvest workers forming the Agricultural Workers Organisation (AWO) and in bloody battles forced up the wage rates and improved on the disgusting, bug-infested conditions of the farm camps. By a system of delegates actually organising on the job, by keeping non-members off the farms, they doubled wages and recruited 18,000 workers into the AWO in two years. The AWO Secretary, Walter Nef, claimed that they had established an 800-mile picket line from Kansas to South Dakota. Despite these successes among the truly dispossessed of the farms and logging camps, where the workers never stayed long enough to obtain the vote and the dubious privileges of settled citizenship, the defeat of Paterson and the failure of organisation among the Eastern working class doomed the organisation to inevitable decline. The tenuous financial security obtained through the AWO affiliation, and one or two other effective sections, were dissipated during the war by a massive government-directed attack on the IWW.

The leadership were by the war’s end either serving or preparing to serve long prison sentences. During the post-war Palmer persecutions, hundreds of foreign-born Wobblies were deported. As with every other revolutionary organisation the very fact of the Russian Revolution served to clarify the thinking of IWW members. The uneasy alliance between marxists, syndicalists, anarchists and industrial unionists that had coexisted in the IWW on the basis of a militant class war attitude, without working through a clear analysis for revolutionary change, could not survive the implications of October 1917. Many of the leading figures joined the Communist Party. The majority, however, did not. The IWW were invited to join the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) but withdrew when it became clear that the line of the International favoured working through existing trade unions and dual unionism was to be avoided. The IWW continued its decline, by 1925 it was taken over by an extreme anarchosyndicalist tendency that completely decentralised the organisation. The IWW was involved in one or two major disputes, both among coal miners – Colorado in 1927 and Harlan County in the 1930s – but the organisation was effectively dead. In 1948 they managed to form a picket line around the offices of the New Republic magazine, in whose pages had appeared an article – by Wallace Stegner – suggesting that Joe Hill had been guilty of the murder for which he was shot in Utah in 1915. At its 50th anniversary the IWW still existed, just. It did not organise a single factory or plant. The IWW, however, was not a failure. In James P Cannon’s phrase, it was ‘a Great Anticipation’. Without the IWW the massive outburst of industrial unionism in the 1930s would have been very different and certainly less effective. The sit-in strike tactics used to such great effect in the Congress of Industrial Organisations’ organising drives derived directly from the Wobblies. Much of the CIO cadre were old-time members of the IWW. The organisation of the mass production industries attempted with the immigrants in Lawrence, Paterson and Akron, in the brave days of the IWW, had to wait until the English-speaking second generation were ready for organisation. The great tragedy of the non-politicism of the IWW was repeated in the CIO. The greatest outburst of the American working class was not accompanied by the growth of a genuine revolutionary party. The Trotskyists spent the important period of the CIO in a faction fight over entry into the corpse of American Social Democracy, followed by a split and entry into Norman Thomas’s party. The Communist Party, after years of dedicated pursuit of each twist and turn of Stalinism, involving them in dual unionism, boring from within the AFL and independent red unions, provided much of the second line cadre for the CIO, from which position they were well able to assist Roosevelt and the trade union bureaucracy to impose the anti-strike pledge during the second world war. The American industrial unions made the giant step forward in the 1930s, but in a short period of time they were as bureaucratised as the despised AFL. The one-page contracts negotiated with the employers in the late 1930s that merely recognised the union are today the massive documents that regulate every moment of the worker’s life. The union has become the equal partner of the bosses with equal interest in the continuance of capitalism and the exclusion of the worker from effective control over his own life. The transformation of the brave notion of industrial unionism as the harbinger of the new society into its opposite was not considered, nor could it have been, by the men who formed the IWW in 1905. Nor was it a factor in the minds of the British partisans of the IWW. Part II Notes 1. W. Stewart, J. Keir Hardy, p.87, quoted in Kendal, Revolutionary Movement in Britain, p.24. 2. R. Ginger, Eugene Debs, p.170. 3. P. Renshaw, The Wobblies. 4. T. Draper, The Roots of American Communism, p.19. 5. E. Higgins, Direct Action versus Impossibilism, quoted in Renshaw, op. cit. 6.

6. Renshaw, op. cit., pp.176-78. Top of the page Last updated on 30.12.2007

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins A World To Win (2000) From Revolutionary History, Vol. 7 No. 4, 2000. Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Tony Cliff A World To Win: Life of a Revolutionary Bookmarks, London 2000, pp. 247, £11.99 READING Cliff’s autobiography has brought back to me a host of images and incidents, hardly any of which feature in the book. Its tone is serious, displaying little of his humour, and conferring on the author a quite unmerited gravitas. I remember once saying to Jock Haston how impressed I was by C.L.R. James’ book Black Jacobins. Jock, who did quite a nice line in patronising cynicism, replied: ‘I always find James impressive unless I know something about the subject he is writing about.’ I feel much the same about Cliff’s last book. I know a little about his life from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, and the virtually unsullied character presented here does not sit too well with the multiple-charactered personality I knew for years on an almost daily basis. For example, some time in the 1960s, Tony Cliff and his family moved house from Finsbury Park to more commodious premises in Stoke Newington. This larger property had been purchased from a Jewish family, and came not only with more room, a garden and the usual offices, but also with a mezuzah nailed to a door frame. Anxious that he should not have to walk about his home with a rope of garlic round his neck, I suggested to Cliff that he hand me a screwdriver, and I would have the offending religious item in the dustbin in a trice. To my surprise, he refused this handy offer. ‘No, no, you will spoil the paint’, he insisted. Now this mezuzah was a tinny little item fixed with panel pins, definitely at the Woolworths end of the religious artifacts market. For my part, I would sooner have a slightly damaged architrave than suffer this piece of pious persiflage. Cliff, however, was adamant, and the mezuzah stayed. It may be there to this day. Over the years I have occasionally wondered why the atheist Cliff, whose disregard for appearances was immediately apparent, should worry so about a few slivers of gloss paint. I believe that I can now shine a small light on this puzzle. In every mezuzah there is a tiny scroll with 20 lines from Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Bible, in which Moses sets down his last injunctions to the Israelites. It demands absolute adherence to his words, and that the message shall be taught during every waking hour. Such fidelity will be rewarded by a land flowing with milk and honey, fat cattle and tables groaning with comestibles and good wine. Cliff, it seems to me, steeped as he was in biblical lore, saw himself as just such a Moses figure, who would lead his people to the promised Socialist land. Even if he did not get there himself, he would set out his law for them to follow. Of course, his Moses days would have to fit in with this busy programme, so that it did not conflict with his Lenin days (very frequent these), or his Trotsky days, neglected for many years, but a bit bullish in recent times. There would, of course, be no problem with his Luxemburg days, because he forswore that rôle in 1968. Cliff’s last, posthumously-published work, A World to Win, sees him very much in a valedictory Moses mode. This is a book for Socialist Workers Party members, and one that will prove, despite the odd setback, that the organisation has over the years developed, under his wise tutelage, into a firmly-based expression of Bolshevism in the twenty-first century. If the comrades will pay careful attention to Cliff’s application of the Marxist method, as he learned it from Lenin, then they too can become instruments of history. Most of us who have spent some years in the revolutionary movement have found it all too easy to forget the generous impulses that drew us to it in the first place. The revulsion against discrimination, exploitation, poverty and war, usually through some heightened personal experience, provides the live evidence that makes Socialist ideas both relevant and inspiring. That high passion is too often lost sight of in the practice of everyday sectarian or factional organisation. What we fondly imagined was the means is all too often transformed into an end in itself. For most of Cliff’s life, it was the organisation and what he perceived to be its needs that formed the basis of his thought and deed. If those thoughts wandered beyond the immediate concerns of the party to the sunlit uplands of the Socialist commonwealth it was, more often than not, that species of May Day peroration calculated to enthuse the comrades to greater efforts on behalf of the Party. The turning point in Cliff’s life came very early when he witnessed the wretched conditions of Arab children in his native Palestine.

The turning point in Cliff’s life came very early when he witnessed the wretched conditions of Arab children in his native Palestine. An essay by the youthful Cliff on his sadness that there were no Arab children in his school was prophetically marked up by his teacher as ‘Communist’. Most of us have a teacher with a talent for prophecy like that in our past, mine with prescient accuracy wrote ‘abject failure’. This part of the autobiography dealing with Palestine is probably the most interesting. For some inexplicable reason, I find it quite pleasing that somewhere in the Gluckstein family album there may still exist a picture of Cliff’s uncle, Banker Gluckstein, leading a Jewish delegation to Tsar Nicholas II, bringing loyal blessings to that doomed and dim Romanov. Perhaps part of the charm of Cliff’s Palestine reflections is that one was not there to know what actually happened and what he actually did, nevertheless there is certainly an air of authenticity about his assertion that in a country where the tiny working class was divided by religion, language and tradition, the minuscule Trotskyist organisation had virtually no contact with organised workers. Cliff goes so far as to say that ‘the average branch of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain today has greater impact than we had in Palestine’. Those of us who knew the International Socialists when a good third of its members were manual workers, and saw what kind of a sorry fist Cliff made of that, might give him an argument on that one. In pursuit of a relationship with the working class, Cliff came to Britain in 1946. It is part of his and our tragedy that in the next 50 plus years that contact was never more than skin deep and oh so fleeting. En route to the UK, he stopped off in Paris to meet the leaders of the Fourth International, and discovered, as so many of us did later on, that this powerhouse of the ‘World Party of Bolshevism’ was in fact an empty shell just kept afloat by Michel Pablo’s and Ernest Mandel’s windy rhetoric. Nevertheless, he agreed to defend the workers’ state thesis against the state capitalist leanings of Jock Haston and Ted Grant when he got to the UK. You will not find any mention of this particular arrangement in Cliff’s book, although on page 51 you might read: ‘Jock did toy with the idea that perhaps Stalin’s Russia was not a workers’ state. But a few months later he dropped this idea completely.’ The entire text is littered with small evasions of this sort. In that confusing postwar time, the nature of the Stalinist regime exercised the minds of Trotskyists throughout the world. Trotsky’s predictions and promises after the Founding Congress of the Fourth International in 1938 looked particularly thin in the light of the war and its aftermath. If Trotsky predicted that the Stalinist bureaucracy could not survive the convulsions of a world war and it turned out that Stalin was not only still in charge in Russia but was presiding over half of Europe in addition, then James P. Cannon, in his self-appointed rôle of Trotsky’s successor, decreed that the war was not over. Mandel let it be known that news was expected by the next post that Stalinism had succumbed to a rejuvenated proletariat. If this suggests that Mandel’s mind was less brick-shaped than Cannon’s, nevertheless both had only the most tenuous grip on reality. Max Shachtman in the USA saw this as a chance to convert the Fourth International to his bureaucratic collectivist theory, and replace Cannon in the driving seat. Haston at least was attempting to come to terms with reality, even if his ideas were extremely tentative. It is now possible to say with some confidence that all the protagonists in this debate got it wrong, and they are still in error to this day. For all of them, the argument was cast within the old categories that had been found wanting. It was all form and no content, the working class, the proper study for Socialists, was not in it. It was rather like three blind men feeling their way around different parts of an elephant and, from their researches, attempting to describe the beast. There would certainly be elements of truth in their reports, but it would bear no relation to a living, breathing, complicated flesh-and-blood jumbo interacting with the real world. It is this inability to see beyond the boundaries of their own dubious certainties that ensured that the fall of Stalinism was unheralded in workers’ statist, state capitalist and Shachtmanite publications. As Al Richardson wrote in the introduction to his collection In Defence of the Russian Revolution: ‘It has to be said that the collapse of the Soviet Union caught them all napping. In spite of their claims to scientific Socialism, possession of this science gave them no predictive powers whateverb… you can scan their journals right up to the event in vain for any suggestion of what was coming. Nor has any coherent explanation emerged since.’ Al also makes a significant point, in the same introduction: ‘Those who hold to a state capitalist analysis came up with the illuminating suggestion that a state capitalist class had slimmed down its bankrupt concern into smaller private firms, oblivious of the observation that while many a small shopkeeper dreams of becoming a monopoly capitalist, few monopoly capitalists dream of becoming small shopkeepers.’ Similarly, when I consider the arguments for the idea that Russia was a workers’ state, I like to think that the Russian workers, having for all those years exerted pressure on the bureaucracy to retain state property, awoke one day with an overwhelming craving to put on a pair of 501 jeans and queue for a Big Mac, while they listened to their Sony Walkmen. What has state property and the monopoly of foreign trade to offer to match the seductive charms of these powerful symbols of personal freedom? After much heart-searching and sleepless nights, Cliff came to the conclusion that Jock Haston was right, Russia was state capitalist. At the same time, Jock decided that not only was Russia a workers’ state, but so were all the countries of the Eastern bloc. Which nifty piece of footwork not only put Jock at odds with Cliff, but also with Mandel and Pablo, who insisted that the Eastern bloc regimes were capitalist states with an ‘extreme form of police Bonapartism’.

It is true that they did not hold this view for long, because in 1948 Tito broke with the Cominform and, for the Fourth International, was transformed from a semi-fascist into an appropriate ally for Trotskyism. In later years, Mandel had the good grace to be embarrassed if you twitted him about his mental gymnastics in 1948. Into this maelstrom Cliff tossed his 150-page Revolutionary Communist Party internal bulletin on state capitalism. Right or wrong, it was the most coherent argument on the disputed questions around at the time. It formed the central core of all subsequent editions of Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis, except that Cliff removed the original material about ‘Soviet millionaires’, such as the odd collective farmer and Alexei Tolstoy, who were thought to be of great significance in the RCP just after the war. Reading this internal bulletin today, aside from its antique charm, one can appreciate that it had some persuasive power, even though, for me, it is no longer persuasive enough. Certainly it is more appealing than the tediously longer accretion of supporting evidence with which Cliff felt it necessary to burden later editions. This was Cliff’s attempt to reconcile Trotskyism with the postwar reality, to give the party a defensible theory. That this inevitably required that he contradict and replace large chunks of Trotsky’s pre-war politics ensured that the response to his ideas would be hostile. His personal base in the RCP was negligible, after just a few months in Britain and Haston’s rejection of state capitalism meant that there was no significant figure to pursue the argument internationally. From this point on, the idea was to form a distinct state capitalist group. Now theory would serve to build a new organisation, and he set about building a cadre. The pool from which these recruits would come was the RCP as it subsided into Labour Party entrism and Gerry Healy’s maw. In A World to Win, Cliff mentions only three of the original band: his wife Chanie Rosenberg, Duncan Hallas and Geoff Carlsson, which is less than generous to Jean Tait, Ray Challinor, Bill Ainsworth, Ken and Rhoda Tarbuck, Peter Morgan and Anil Munesinghe. This unwillingness to acknowledge that comrades other than Cliff and Chanie made some contribution to building the group runs throughout the volume. Suffice it to say that many others were involved in NCLC lecturing, speaking to YS branches, writing for Socialist Review, setting type for the pocket Adana editions of Rebel, and making contact with likely recruits. The difference between Cliff and the rest of us was that we worked for a living before we engaged in all these exciting pursuits. Cliff, for example, makes much of his heroic contact visiting trip to Glasgow on the back of a comrade’s motor-bike, no doubt a long and arduous ride. What he does not say is that the heroic rider of the machine was Stan Newens, who was pressed into this primitive chauffeuring activity on a regular basis. Stan, of course, lost his right to any credit when he left the group in the late 1950s, compounding this offence when he later became a Labour MP and later still an MEP. Cliff does not claim to be the only begetter of state capitalist theory, perhaps because too many people have heard of C.L.R. James. He does, however, let it be understood that the theory of the permanent arms economy was his very own brainchild and stands as the second of the three pillars holding up his political legacy. In fact, the theory made its first appearance in the American magazine Politics in February 1944 under the by-line of Walter J. Oakes. This was one of the many pen names of Ed Sard, a member of Shachtman’s Workers Party. Sard expanded on his original article in the New International in a six-part series starting in January 1951, this time under the pseudonym T.N. Vance. True Sard called his theory the Permanent War Economy, but so did Cliff for several years until Mike Kidron changed the middle word to ‘Arms’. On chronological evidence alone, Cliff could not claim originality on this one. It is possible to plough through this text and unearth many, many examples such as the Permanent Arms Economy where Cliff claims unwarranted primacy in thought, word and deed, but it would weary the reader almost as much as it would weary me. I believe there are those who find this kind of implacable self-aggrandisement strangely charming, I am not one of them. Perhaps Cliff thought that Ian Birchall (whose ‘phenomenal memory’ he rightly commends) would be the only one to remember the real facts, and, as the SWP’s premier apologist, he would keep mum. In every small revolutionary organisation, there is always a problem with the founding father (or mother, if you are talking about the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania). One feels a debt of gratitude for his founding efforts, he may well be older and more knowledgeable of revolutionary theory and practice, and, in any case, you can bet your bottom dollar he will fight like hell to get his own way. Ted Grant is like that, Gerry Healy was like that, and Cliff, although less boring than Grant and much more civilised than Healy, would go to considerable lengths to come out on top in any dispute. This trait was compounded by his absolute certainty that his current policy, because it was his, brooked no denial, and it was imperative that it be implemented by next Tuesday at the latest. From about the mid-1950s, Cliff drifted away from the organisational conceptions of Trotskyism, and maintained and developed a more libertarian approach to these questions until the mid-1960s. This largely corresponds to the period when Mike Kidron exercised the greatest influence within the Socialist Review Group. It was incidentally the period when CND and the Labour Party Young Socialists were the main area of recruitment.

It was incidentally the period when CND and the Labour Party Young Socialists were the main area of recruitment. For this work, Rosa Luxemburg was much more useful than Lenin. Cliff proclaimed in his short book on Luxemburg, published in 1959: ‘For Marxists in advanced industrial countries, Lenin’s original position can much less serve as a guide than Rosa Luxemburg’s.’ By 1968, the International Socialists had grown modestly but not unimpressively to about 800 members. That year also saw the abomination of London dockers marching in support of Enoch Powell. This event led Cliff to propose left unity under the urgent menace of fascism. Let us leave aside the fact that if there had been an urgent menace of fascism, then the unity of say 2,000 revolutionaries would not have been of much significance, it would have been far more sensible for all the revolutionaries to have joined the Labour Party if they wanted a real fight against fascism. Really, the object of the exercise, despite the fact that all the groups and the Communist Party were called on to unite, was the International Marxist Group, then the British section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. For such a unity to happen, let alone work, it would be necessary to adopt at least some of the forms of the Trotskyist tradition. For Cliff this was no great problem, and he assumed, his wish being father to the deed, that democratic centralism would be readily accepted by a grateful membership. In June 1968, he unleashed his Notes on Democratic Centralism on a less than appreciative group. This is a slipshod piece of work, more like a stream of consciousness than an internal bulletin, in which he seems to suggest that the First International had a democratic centralist constitution. It may surprise some current members of Cliff’s organisation that he once took it as the sine qua non of democratic centralism that factions could exist, and that they were entitled to representation on all the leading committees. This pathetic two sides of quarto paper produced a storm of controversy. Almost overnight, about a dozen factions formed and produced long documents ranging in politics from ultra-libertarian to king-sized Bolshevism. Having sown the dragon’s teeth and reaped a whirlwind, Cliff restricted his intervention to long telephone calls, leaving the rest of the leadership to carry on the argument, despite the fact that we had not been privy to his plans. In the hope of great joy in heaven, I repent and confess that the two lengthy documents put out by the Working Committee that attempted to make up for the inadequacies of Notes on Democratic Centralism and to answer the plethora of opposing documents, were written by me. I sincerely apologise to the comrades. In his autobiography Cliff, for some inexplicable reason, dates his Notes on Democratic Centralism after October 1968. Funnily enough, if Cliff had a hidden agenda so did several of us working closely with him at the time. We calculated, given a more formal structure and with a clearly understood decision-making process, that Cliff’s propensity to appoint himself a central committee of one would be reined in so that he might become part of a collective, where his ideas would be respected and discussed, but not venerated as revealed truth. Not only that, we also took the view that as we were recruiting a few but still significant number of workers, democratic centralism would enable their ideas to enlighten and inform the leading committee’s decision-making. Oh comrades, what vain hopes we entertained when we were a lot younger than we are today. Cliff, of course, continued to run things as a piece of private enterprise whenever the whim took him, rather like the proprietor of an inefficient corner shop. His veneration for the worker members was unabated and had only one reservation — that they agreed wholeheartedly with his immediate preoccupation. On page 118 of A World to Win, Cliff lets us into the secret of leadership in a Marxist organisation. Lenin, following an original idea of Napoleon’s, believed ‘On s’engage et puis on voit’. Cliff translates this as ‘get stuck in and see what happens’, or putting it another way, suck it and see. He first let us in on this particular aperçu in the draft of Volume One of his Lenin, it was, he explained, profoundly dialectical. Whatever the merits of this, and I think there are none, Cliff unintentionally gives us a good insight into how his mind worked. You think of something to do, then do it, and if it does not work think of something else and do that, and so on. Now that has not got a great deal to do with dialectics, and is a system that over the centuries has made bookmakers rich and silly punters broke. Cliff seems to recognise this when he goes on to says: ‘Of course this method must lead to mistakes being made, but at the same time it is essential if there are to be breakthroughs, forward jumps into new ways of doing things.’ All of this seems to me to be closer to a superstition than a Marxist analysis. Because there is something missing here, how do you decide what is a good thing to do in the first place? Do you spread your analytical net as wide as possible, drawing on the advice and experience of the worker members? Or, do you dredge up the idea from your subconscious, seek out buttressing quotes from Lenin, and then talk to Chris Harman? If you have answered yes to the second of these questions, then you are not just a pretty face, nor are you Chris Harman. Joe Stalin let it be known that, as a general principle, the closer the Soviet Union approached Socialism the greater would be the attacks of the counter-revolution abroad and the depredations of internal subversion. Thus the rising population of the isolators and labour camps marked not only the eternal vigilance of Comrade Stalin, but also the giant strides being made toward Socialism. In the early 1970s, as IS began to grow modestly but into the very low thousands, with a small, perhaps 30 per cent, working-class membership, Cliff seemed to operate on the general principle that the closer IS became to a serious and viable organisation, the more capricious and impatient he should be.

Increased membership was at the centre of his preoccupations. On the principle of ‘on s’engage et puis on voit’, he appointed himself membership secretary and set up league tables of local organisers recruiting efforts where the biggest liar won the most plaudits. Naturally enough, on this criteria, Roger Rosewell was the man of the hour. Cliff also produced his thesis on the leading areas. The most promising areas would be identified speakers, money and manpower would be dedicated to these places, and the less promising areas left to their own devices would benefit, according to Cliff, from a sort of Thatcherite trickle-down process. Then there was the risible ‘buyers into sellers’ campaign, where anyone who bought the paper was pressed to become a seller. This up-to-the-minute campaign was lifted direct from Lenin, spluttered briefly and died without regret, as did the leading areas and the league tables. Another dud was the Socialist Worker Supporter’s Cards, known to the cynical as ‘revolutionary beer mats’ because most of them were left soggily on public house tables. The cards idea, lifted from Lenin on the workers’ paper, were less for the money they might bring and more to get a commitment from the workers that might be the first step to full membership. Sad to say, this was another bummer, as I have never heard of anybody who graduated from Supporter’s Card to Membership Card. The strike rate for Napoleon and Lenin’s little aphorism was looking pretty poor, and those of us who thought it might be a good idea to consolidate some of our existing recruits, who were drizzling away almost as rapidly as we recruited them, were condemned as conservative elements, unable to grasp the great opportunities opening up before us. Cliff’s zeal now shifted, momentarily, to ridding the leadership of conservative elements (Cliffspeak for Duncan Hallas and Jim Higgins). Whatever merit this plan might have, the replacements were to be local full-timers from the provincial branches, who in the very nature of their work could not operate as a day-to-day leadership. Cliff would be back into his one-man central committee mode. Duncan, whose affection for Cliff had not survived, having knowing him for 30 years, felt that the course Cliff was embarked on would seriously endanger the advances we had made, and he proposed that we form a faction. I, who was actually quite fond of Cliff (but then I had only known him for 15 years), felt that he had gone too far, and that a short sharp faction fight might clear the air a bit. John Palmer and Roger Protz agreed with us, and we set about contacting people around the group. I was surprised at the favourable response we got when we approached others with our worries and discontents. Typically, the people who responded to our call were members of several years standing, and with some experience in the wider working-class movement. Among them were shop stewards and trade unionists from Manchester, Teesside, Glasgow, Harlow, Birmingham, Exeter, London and several other places. Cliff’s response, on the other hand, was most uncomradely. In short order a series of organisational manoeuvres were put in place, usually preceded by a thin veneer of political justification. Roger Protz and I were working on Socialist Worker, and this became the object of close analysis. A paper that Cliff had shortly before praised somewhat immoderately, became unreadable. With much quotation from Lenin on the workers’ paper, Cliff indicated that journalist were not really needed, just somebody to put in punctuation and correct the spelling of the workers’ reports. Naturally enough, there were no more workers’ reports than there had ever been, but Roger and I were fired. Far more serious than this piece of petty spite, however, was Cliff’s attempt to deal with the fact that our opposition contained a number of trade unionists, including a fair sprinkling of AUEW members. This was especially so in Birmingham, where we had 20 AUEW comrades, organised in two factory branches. Among them were 10 shop stewards, two convenors of big factories, six members of the AUEW district committee, and Arthur Harper, the president of that district committee, plus several trades council delegates. As Ted Crawford has written elsewhere, these people were the catalyst that brought the Saltley struggle to a victorious conclusion. This, if not the jewel in the crown, was of a similar character to the ENV branch of which Cliff had been so proud. Now he produced a novel thesis that shop stewards were rotted by years of reformism and routinism; many convenors, he discovered, worked full-time on their union work. Only the young were revolutionary, and we should be encouraging them to run for shop stewardships. Leave aside what serum Cliff would use to inoculate these eager thrusting youngsters against reformism in the unlikely event that they were elected, this bizarre novelty made nonsense of the declared policy of the group since its founding in 1950. Even more tragically, the policy that it sought to replace was having some success in integrating experienced trade unionists into the group. This ultra-left nonsense was compounded by a decision to run an IS member from Glasgow for National Organiser in the AUEW elections. This decision, taken without any discussion with the IS-AUEW national fraction, was nevertheless reaffirmed when the AUEW fraction rejected it by an overwhelming majority. All this was extremely embarrassing to the Birmingham AUEW comrades, which is just what it was intended to be. As they explained, they had, as directed by IS conference decisions, been working in the Broad Left grouping in the union, and, as always when working with Labour Lefts and the Communist Party, this involved a fair amount of work around union elections.

As they explained, they had, as directed by IS conference decisions, been working in the Broad Left grouping in the union, and, as always when working with Labour Lefts and the Communist Party, this involved a fair amount of work around union elections. Long before Cliff had a rush of blood to the head and decided to run an IS candidate, the IS members working the AUEW Broad Left had committed themselves to working for the election of a CPer called Ken Higgs. Cliff was completely unable, or unwilling, to understand that initiatives like the Saltley success are based on contact with people of different or no political affiliation who have some respect for the character and trust in the word of our comrades. That trust would be lost, and with it future joint activity, whether electoral or militant. With all the splendid disregard for cost of a man who knows that he has enough money to last him the rest of his life, so long as he dies at 6.30pm tomorrow, Cliff and his satraps began expelling the Birmingham AUEW members. A couple of them had to be suspended at the door to a meeting of the IS district committee, of which they were members, so that they might not vote against their own exclusion. It was this action that convinced me that Cliff, with all his brains and all his years in the movement, was not a serious person. Just to make sure that the Opposition should not get a fair crack of the whip, Cliff then arranged that the basis of delegation to the conference should be changed, as would the election of delegates, in a way that was specifically designed to minimise the Opposition’s representation. This was a neat trick, because according to the constitution the only way that its clauses could be changed was at a conference. No problem there, for a man with a stranglehold on the Leninist impulse. The delegates could vote to insert those provisions by which they had been improperly elected. It was not long before the Opposition was either expelled or forced out. Cliff describes this as follows: ‘One symptom of this situation [this refers to an alleged shift to the right in the unions in 1975 — JH] was a demoralisation among significant sections of our own members. They lost heart. Some left without any statement of disagreement (like Mike Kidron and Peter Sedgwick), but some, like the former national secretary Jim Higgins and former editor of Socialist Worker Roger Protz, led a split that included 150 members.’ It is difficult to imagine a statement with more misstatements in it than this one. ‘Demoralisation’ indeed, in our dispute Cliff was arguing that the workers would turn against the Labour government in three months, and I said it would be at least six months. Now you could say, with some justice, that both of us were talking nonsense, but hardly that my slightly longer-term perspective indicated demoralisation. We had not lost heart, just our patience with Cliff playing the fool. Mike Kidron and Peter Sedgwick certainly had a number of discontents that they expressed quite forcefully, and Kidron, in particular, blotted his copybook by rejecting the Permanent Arms Economy theory that he had done so much once to flesh out into some coherence. They left, together with a number of others, in 1977 when Cliff, still on his ultra-left binge, proclaimed the Socialist Workers Party. Finally, Roger and I did not lead a split, we were expelled. One last entertaining and revealing example from the pages of A World to Win, on page 133, is that Cliff, so it seems, is confessing his mistakes about perspectives in 1975. He writes: ‘In retrospect it is clear that we were radically wrong in our prognosis regarding the shape of the class struggle and hence our fate. I cannot think how we could have come to a more correct prognosis at the time … at all breaking points in the past we find that the best Marxists get things wrong.’ Cliff then goes on to show that Lenin — what a reliable buttress for a chap to lean on, no matter how heavily — got it wrong in 1906. Well there you have it comrades, when he is wrong it is the case that he is right to be wrong, and in any case in changing circumstances even the best Marxists get it wrong, like Lenin in 1906. Phew, for a nasty moment I thought he was going to bring himself to account, there is nothing like a session of self-criticism for an easy acquittal. This is a book that only Cliff could have written. It is clever but naive, cunning but transparently obvious, and a mine of misinformation with terminological inexactitude like a giant worm leaving a small deposit on every page. As with all his other works, it is not written to make the historical record, it would not pass any half-way rigorous test. It is intended that it will fill a rôle as an inspiration to the comrades in their task of building the Socialist Workers Party. That is a cause to which Cliff dedicated his life, and the ultimate sadness is that 60-odd years of thinking and scheming and plotting have built an organisation in his own image of a few thousand, whose influence in the working class is negligible. His background and training and the political milieu he chose in his formative years produced a particular mindset. His intelligence and his ego made him believe that the important thing was for him to lead. But his thinking was abstract, the secret recipe for the revolutionary cocktail could be found in Lenin, not in the working class. He did not generalise from working-class experience, but from Lenin’s tactics. With all due respect, that is a poor substitute. Nearly 80 years ago, the Communist Party of Great Britain had a few thousand members, probably not a great deal more than the SWP today. It did, however, exercise an influence in the working-class movement, in the Labour Party, the trade unions and the rank-and-file movement that was infinitely greater than the SWP has ever exercised — and when the latter did begin to build a periphery of some consequence, Cliff blew it. Of course, the Communist Party did not make the revolution, and it went out of business a few years ago. The SWP still has time to do either of these things, but I would not bet the mortgage on the revolution if I were you.

The SWP still has time to do either of these things, but I would not bet the mortgage on the revolution if I were you. Three individuals dominated British Trotskyism in the second half of the twentieth century: Gerry Healy, Ted Grant and Tony Cliff. Of the three, Cliff was the most accomplished, and, on a personal level, a man of great humour and charm. Gerry Healy also got the odd laugh, but that was generally from those who thought someone breaking a leg was funny. He had great energy, and Jock Haston commended his organising abilities, but for the rest he was a bully and a liar and a scoundrel. Ted Grant was, well Ted-like, what more can I say? If one were called to testify to any saving graces they might have shown, it would be quite in order to say that they kept alive a revolutionary Socialist tradition through some difficult times. After that it gets difficult, because they clung like limpets to the worst features of a framework that militated against them building anything more than a sect. In a way, perhaps, Cliff’s sin was the greater because for a brief time he started to look beyond the arid certainties of the tradition, before settling back into the easy embrace of a spurious Leninism. It is not easy to forgive him for that. Sheila Lahr adds: While appreciating much of this book, especially Cliff’s recounting of his political experience of Palestine before and during the Second World War, and also being reminded of the political and economic events of the 1970s, I am unhappy with his attitude to women and feminism. For instance, Cliff deplores the publication of Women’s Voice by the Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s because: ‘I was steadfast in following the Bolshevik tradition of insisting on the common interests of female and male workers.’ (p. 146) Cliff tells us that Lenin always insisted on the party leadership controlling women’s activities. He quotes Anne Bobroff’s criticism of Bolshevism on this point — ‘And although the editorial board [of Rabotnitsa — Woman Worker] was made up completely of women … Lenin had the deciding vote in the event of a tie.’ (p. 147) — only to reject her complaint. He adds with approval that women working under Lenin’s direction put through resolutions on his behalf. It’s worth quoting Cliff’s own reasoning for opposing feminism: ‘Imagine a male worker writing to his friend. “I have good news to tell you. My wife’s wages are lousy. To add to my joy there is no nursery for our children. And to fill my cup to the brim my wife is pregnant and we want to have an abortion, but she can’t get one.”’ From this Cliff concludes that ‘male workers do not benefit from women’s oppression’. This hypothetical example is hardly the stuff of Marxist analysis! Surely Cliff should have understood the gender game played by the state for over the generations by which, to take a fairly recent example, both men and women have been brainwashed into rôles to suit the perceived needs of capitalism. For instance, before the Second World War, at a time of high male unemployment, women were ‘educated’ into a belief that their place was in the home, practising the womanly arts of cooking, cleaning, childcare and submitting to their menfolk. This message was carried by the media, various pundits and even by the popular women’s magazines. The men, on the other hand, were told that as the breadwinners they were masters in their own homes (if nowhere else), and that the women should submit. Even George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier applauds the fact that the wives of unemployed men returned home after a day’s work (no doubt gruelling and low-paid) to cook, clean and wait on the man, so maintaining male dignity! As we know, the Second World War ended all this, because women were needed in the munitions factories, and following the war it proved impossible to return women to the home. Capitalism, of course, adapted, and now not only has the family wage disappeared, but women are being forced out to work in low paid jobs. However, the brainwashing of previous generations has been slow to erode, and women continue to receive 80 per cent of the male rate, and also retire on unequal pensions because of broken service from home and caring responsibilities. Additionally, in much of the Third World, women are under attack by governments supported by the West. While men in the Third World might not benefit in the long-term by women’s oppression, they obviously believe that they do so. If nothing else, the women’s movement has made us aware that women need to fight for greater equality both in the home and at work, just as an earlier generation of women had fought for the vote. In this way, the women’s movement has changed the way in which women think about themselves. For that I am grateful. Top of the page Last updated on 12 May 2021

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins [White-collar unions] (Spring 1966) From The Notebook, International Socialism (1st series), No.24, Spring 1966, p.6. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Throughout the traditional white-collar ranks there has, in recent years, been a considerable increase in militant activity and in the once despised trade-union organisation. NALGO, which a few years ago was frequently written off as irrevocably delivered up to middle-class morality has recently considered strike action, affiliated to the TUC and come out against Incomes Policy. The CAWU has also been brightening its image and between 1955 and 1965 membership has increased from 55,000 to 35,000. In the case of NALGO this excess of militancy clearly derives from their unfortunate experiences with Selwyn Lloyd’s pay pause and in CAWU with the introduction on a large scale of business machines. Most interesting however and probably most significant – from the point of view of long term effects – is the situation in the expanding technical field. DATA has the privilege of conducting more official strikes than any other TUC affiliate. ASSET has engaged in some serious actions resulting in quite significant advances in recent years. Membership has increased at a fantastic rate (albeit from a fairly low starting point) [1]: 1955 1965 ASSET 16,000 65,000 DATA 50,000 62,000 ASSET claim to be recruiting at a rate of 700 members per week. However, even though their rate of increase is high, at 700 new entrants per week it would seem that there is a fair amount of wastage. Quite clearly the impetus for this impressive advance is due to their close association with a fast-growing sector of industry. But also a number of intangible benefits which in the past have militated against white-collar unionism no longer have the same weight. Staff and salaried status, shorter hours and in particular a closer personal relationship with management count for less when compared wit the very real monetary advances made by manual workers in the growth industries since the war. The growing disenchantment with management is seldom compensated by a closer identification with manual workers. Jenkins of ASSET goes so far as to say “... push up wages and the differential between manual and skilled men and you will force managements to bring in more automated systems.” The natural follow-up from more automated systems is of course more potential members for ASSET and less members for the manual unions. It is perhaps not surprising that Mr Jenkins is not the most loved (or indeed the most lovable) official in the trade-union establishment. As a response to this challenge the ETU recently attempted (unsuccessfully) to change the name of the union to the ‘Electrical, Electronics and Communications Trade Association.’ The fact that this makes the organisation sound more like an employers’ association than a trade union is beside the point; the obvious intention was to present a more comprehensive and attractive image to technicians in industry. The AEU, flying in the face of its whole tradition, is making far-reaching constitutional changes to enable it to establish supervisors’ branches. Both unions are, as yet anyway, having small success in this field. The reason for technicians’ militancy and their leaderships’ willingness to initiate aggressive policies may well be based on a narrow sectional interest, but at the same time to indulge in traditional forms of struggle is to enter, like it nor not, the whole field of working-class action. To declare one’s interest in wider differentials is to agree that a basis for comparison exists and is also to call into being a powerful tendency from manual workers to close differentials. The trade-union pace-setters may change but the class struggle is indivisible. Note 1. The Statist, 14 January 1966. Top of the page Last updated on 19.10.2006

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Trotskyist Bears and Working Class Stars (2002) From What Next?, No.22, 2002. Copied with thanks from the What Next? Website. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. “Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out crude rhythms for bears to dance to, when we long to make music that will move the stars to tears.” Flaubert AL RICHARDSON and Cyril Smith in their articles on Trotskyism (Cyril Smith, On the Importance of Having Been a Trotskyist, and Al Richardson, The Place of Trotskyism in the Logic of Marxism, both in issue No.20) have started a useful and necessary discussion, and What Next? is to be commended for providing a forum for that discussion to take place. There is always something to be learned from Trotsky, even on those occasions when his arguments, eroded by time and experience, seem less convincing than once they did. Trotskyism at least is coherent and one can appreciate its quality without agreeing with every dot and comma or doing damage either to conscience or good sense. Stalinism, on the other hand, which, especially in Stalin’s own hand, reads like the pedestrian maunderings of an inattentive seminarist, is at one and the same time inconsistent and incoherent. Stalin’s most inspired wheeze, as Al Richardson points out in his article, was to invent a totally spurious Leninism as a weapon with which to beat Trotsky, which the unfortunate L.D.T. could only counter by seeming to put himself at odds with Lenin. For the rest, Stalinism could accommodate contradictions as a dog provides a home for fleas. Today it might be let’s go left with Zinoviev, tomorrow it could be let’s go right with the Bukharinites. For Stalin, the ultra-left Third Period could give way without a word of explanation to a Popular Front against fascism, which in its turn could arbitrarily change to sucking up to Hitler, and all as if these were items in a natural progression with a brain at work throughout the piece. Trotsky on substitutionism is brilliant and it is a pity that he did not subsequently call this to the attention of those in effective charge of the Fourth International in the 1930s. The theory of the Permanent Revolution is an astonishingly accurate preview of how the Russian Revolution actually took place. Less satisfactory were his later ideas on the ”Russian question”. To follow Trotsky through his self-constructed maze, running from Thermidor to Bonapartism, on to the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy that maintained state property only under the pressure of the masses, and finally in 1940 leaving the answer to the question in history’s safe hands, results in confusion rather than clarity. All this seems to have represented developments in Trotsky’s head, developments, unfortunately, cut short by Ramón Mercader’s ice-axe, rather than significant changes in the phenomenon he was describing. What we can say with some confidence is that the emphasis on the class nature of Russia and all the theories that failed to describe it or understand it illuminated nothing, and despite their alleged insight into the laws of motion of this new society none of them came within a mile of what actually happened. Paradoxically, one of the most practical and inspired ideas of Trotsky was the Transitional Programme that he worked up for the founding conference of the Fourth International. Here was a programme, beautifully tailored to its time, with which a communist party firmly based in the working class could make genuine advances. Alas, there was no such party adhering to the FI – indeed, the membership figures quoted for the organisations at the founding conference were exaggerated and even at that they were in the tens and a few hundreds. The truth is that there were not even enough Trotskyists to attempt to promote the Transitional Programme in a social democratic party, despite the fact that most of them were engaged in some sort of entry tactic. Regardless of that, however, in the real world the notion of transitional demands can be extended far beyond the original items set out in Trotsky’s 1938 programme. Within the trade unions, it is possible to develop a programme of transitional demands that can develop the struggle and set the stage for future political struggles. No Trotskyist organisation has made any serious attempt to develop such a programme, which is sad because the real dynamic of the 1938 founding conference was in the transitional method not in the construction of the first of a seemingly endless succession of Potemkin Internationals. Most of us would support the proposition that there is a crying need for a World Party of Socialist Revolution. Unfortunately, it was not called into being by a handful of delegates in Rosmer’s back garden, and it is even less likely that it will be called into being from one or the other of the fragments from the sundered Pabloite and Healyite Internationals. Today as in 1938 there is no justification for building, with not one hundredth part of its forces, a tiny copy of the Communist International, especially as the CI cannot be said to have been overburdened with revolutionary successes, even during the brave early days covered by the first four congresses. It is probably the case that Trotsky was loath to criticise the early CI in the same way as he failed to criticise not only the Lenin cult but also some of the organisational practices of Bolshevism, which come straight from Lenin as do some of the faults in the CI. This inability to come to terms with the legacy of the CI ensured that an international tendency with a total membership of a perhaps a couple of thousand acquired a centre staffed by Stalinist agents and recently ex-Zinovievites to direct the sections. Thus we find that Ruth Fischer, whose record of achievement in the KPD would have sent most people to a retreat for a long period of penitent silence and rigorous self-criticism, was telling the comrades in South Africa, a far away place of which she knew little, how to go about their revolutionary tasks. This did nothing to endear Ruth Fischer to the South African Trotskyists and did rather less than nothing for their revolutionary tasks.

One of the more instructive episodes in the history of the Fourth International, one that may justify the expenditure of a little space, concerns the British Trotskyists who, in 1938, had the temerity not to accept the fusion diktat of James P. Cannon, when he visited these shores to unite the British groups as part of the preparation for the FI’s founding conference. Unfortunately, the most recent split had taken place because some South African comrades were falsely accused of having misled African strikers and then decamped to England with the strike funds. Aided by rumour and gossip, this absurdity had managed to reach the International Executive Committee before being effectively scotched as a Stalinist canard originating in South Africa. All of this occurred in late 1937, and the passions aroused, that gave rise to the split, had hardly gone off the boil before Cannon arrived to unite to groups who were definitely not speaking to one another. He was not amused when the offended parties, Heaton and Ralph Lee, Millie Lee, Ted Grant and Jock Haston, refused the invitation. As a result they were branded as “a petit bourgeois group, with nationalist tendencies” at the Founding Congress and earned themselves the enduring hostility of James P. Cannon. (This unedifying episode is much more adequately dealt with in War and the International, by Al Richardson and Sam Bornstein.) With the coming of the war the group led by Ralph Lee and Jock Haston, the Workers International League, was more successful than the Revolutionary Socialist League, the official section, under the clever but uninspired leadership of Denzil Harber. The WIL recruited in mines and factories, particularly the Royal Ordnance Factories, and in the forces, and maintained a lively propaganda, while the RSL, whose main enthusiasm seems to have been faction fighting, fermented gently in the Labour Party where the electoral truce meant virtually no activity at all. By 1944 the WIL had some 400 members while the RSL had about 70. As the war moved to its conclusion, Trotsky’s promises for the post-war world, the demise of Stalinism and the deep crisis of capitalism, with the imminent prospect of workers’ power, seemed about to be realised. The only thing missing from this revolutionary equation was a united British section of the Fourth International. To rectify his failure of 1938, Cannon sent Sam Gordon over to assist the fusion. Gordon’s brief seems to have involved bringing together the malcontents from both organisations so that the new section, the Revolutionary Communist Party, could be presented with an augmented, virulent and internationally nurtured irritant from the very day of its foundation. The Healy-Lawrence faction was born. Having set his little time bomb in the RCP, Cannon set his mind to the FI, which during the war had been evacuated to the US. Obviously the FI should be based in Europe where the revolution was expected to start, but just to make sure that he was still in charge Cannon had his nominees Michel Raptis (Pablo) and Ernest Mandel (Germain) installed in the leadership. Pablo and Mandel became his “young men in Europe”. Naturally enough, part of Pablo’s responsibility was to oversee the work of Cannon’s acolytes in the UK, Healy and Lawrence. In the light of subsequent events and such seminal works as Against Pablo Revisionism, it is amazing to learn that Healy was the most dedicated Pabloite in the International. His political line was supplied from Paris and his faction was afforded most favourable status by the IEC. So it continued. Pablo was given free rein to eviscerate the French section, freeing it from its most experienced and consequential leadership. With splendid opportunism he could commit the FI to supporting Tito in his little unpleasantness with Stalin. This experiment with Stalinism with a Yugoslav face became the prelude to a general softening of the line on Stalinism. This change was reflected in Pablo’s own works on the War-Revolution, Centuries of Deformed Workers’ States and his theory that significant sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy would come over to the revolution, under the pressure of the masses in the developing economic and political crisis. Whatever your opinion on the validity of Pablo’s thought, it cannot be gainsaid that it was completely contrary to both the spirit and the word of Trotsky’s ideas. For Trotsky, the very notion of any kind of workers’ state which comes into being without the active intervention of the working class is an invention entirely alien to his politics. The War-Revolution, where the workers’ states defeat the capitalists and set up loads of deformed workers’ states lasting for the next few hundred years, was no less at odds with Trotsky’s thinking. He would have denied vigorously that the Stalinists were capable of any kind of revolutionary advance, or that large sections of the bureaucracy would come over to the revolution. On this point at least, history seems to be on Trotsky’s side of the vote. Pablo might act up in Europe and play fast and loose with Trotskyist theory with impunity, but an attempt to interfere in Cannon’s SWP was an adventure too far. In short order, there were two organisations, the new International Committee of the Fourth International, covering the British section, the SWP USA and a French section plus a few odds and sods, and Pablo’s remaindered International Secretariat of the Fourth International. The unedifying spectacle of the FI and the manner in which it rapidly became the tiny stage on which even smaller men have strutted and plotted while maintaining the pretence that they are organising the emancipation of humanity is a piece of theatre with diminishing credibility. In another part of the forest, we have the British SWP with its not really a Fourth International, more a sort of Two-and-Five-Sixteenths International in which Alex Callinicos is apparently licensed to extirpate dissenters, or invent some dissent if none actually exists.

In another part of the forest, we have the British SWP with its not really a Fourth International, more a sort of Two-and-Five-Sixteenths International in which Alex Callinicos is apparently licensed to extirpate dissenters, or invent some dissent if none actually exists. Thus the American affiliate, the ISO, has been cast into the outer darkness and Callinicos like Healy, Pablo, Cannon and Zinoviev before him is proving a dab hand with bell, book and candle. Trotsky had a word for all this: substitutionism, a word that in its accusatory form could be used again and again in the 60-odd years since the FI was founded with so many brave hopes and so few possibilities. Of course, the FI did not fail because Cannon, Pablo, Mandel and Healy were bad people, although come to think of it Healy was a bad person, but because the organisations in which they were pre-eminent had no connection with the working class, not at one, not even at two removes. The sections had virtually no workers and this inevitably led to a fatal disconnection between the real movement and the one where small meetings in pub rooms are lectured by gurus, with long standing subscriptions to the Economist and the Financial Times, about the class struggle. How such a section is to prepare the International with the meaningful information that would enable it to act as the General Staff of the revolution is not disclosed. Is it any wonder that in the strange amalgam of cloud cuckoo land and limbo there was a democracy of daft ideas that would set the faithful to bitter argument, faction fighting and splits that even today animates the most dedicated “Trotskyists”? The Fourth International really has no future because it has no past. No matter how much we pretend that a recitation of the bullet points in the Trotskyist canon can give it wings and a powerful engine, it will remain on the ground, immobile as a brick, invaded by weeds and suffering the corrosion of cruel reality. Alongside the fetish of the International, our heritage has also included a similarly pious attitude to the party. At its lowest level this means that a collection of no hopers, nutters and bug-eyed zealots, so long as they call themselves “Bolsheviks” and operate a command system called “democratic centralism”, somehow acquires a hammerlock on history and a mystical communion with the working class. This particular foible is essentially Lenin’s organisational prescription for work in conditions of Tsarist illegality, mediated through Stalinist adaptations the better to crush opposition. As Al Richardson points out in the introduction to the excellent Trotsky and the Origins of Trotskyism (Francis Boutle, 2002), the first international adherents of Trotsky’s opposition, Eastman, Ludwig Lore, Monatte, Rosmer and A.E. Reade, were sacrificed on the altar of the Russian party struggle. The second levy, James P. Cannon, Fischer, Maslow, Treint etc, were ex-Zinovievists, whose earlier experiments in Bolshevism, when they were in the leadership of their own Communist Parties, had been directed to expelling the first Trotskyists. It is from this unlikely group of “democrats” that Trotskyism acquired its close-mouthed, buttock-clenching style of democratic centralism. Anyone with any experience in the movement can tell some horror story, usually involving Gerry Healy, in which they were done wrong in some bizarre travesty of revolutionary justice. (In fact, although Gerry was an endlessly inventive disciplinarian, he was certainly not the first or the last man unwilling to give an opponent, real or imagined, an even break.) John Gollan used to tell a story about his father, a member of the De Leonite SLP in Glasgow before the First World War. Being a good party man, Gollan senior was proud when selected to stand for the council on the party ticket. In the event he failed to win election by a substantial margin, harvesting only 32 votes. In the party inquest following the contest he was taken severely to task, it being argued that within the ward there were only 28 members of the SLP and the four additional votes were obviously obtained by making concessions to alien political creeds. Apart from the fact that Gollan probably made this story up, it nevertheless illustrates the closed mindset of the dedicated party patriot and I can think of a few comrades from the Trotskyist movement who would have found nothing wrong with that reasoning. The patriot’s mind closes with the spring-loaded bang of a rat trap and it is wise to keep any delicate sensibilities clear of the jaws. To quote another example from even further afield, let us mull over the case of Felix Dzerzhinsky who, when a member of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, wrote to the Executive Committee telling them not to bother sending him the arguments in the debates that preceded EC decisions, just the decisions would do. Now that is the sort of chap, given the choice, you would put in charge of the Cheka. Closer still in time and space is the Communist Party of Great Britain, whose Weekly Worker I find compulsive reading. They seem to be an open and agreeable enough group, currently engaged in preliminary unity skirmishing with Sean Matgamna’s Alliance for Workers’ Liberty – I do advise they count their fingers before shaking on the deal. A regular feature in their journal, and one that worries me a bit, is the What We Fight For column. “Marxism-Leninism”, we are told, “is powerful because it is true.” What does this mean? That all of Marxism-Leninism is true? What, every single bit, all those bloody great volumes? Was this truth revealed to Jack Conrad on the road to Damascus, or the Cave at Hira? Or should we just take his word for it, because he has an honest face like Tony Blair? Or take the “central aim” of What We Fight For: “to reforge the Communist Party of Great Britain. Without this Party the working class is nothing;

Without this Party the working class is nothing; with it, it is everything.” Leave aside the question, why reforge a party that you already proudly proclaim above the masthead? But surely the second part of the point is arse about face. Is it not rather the case that without the working class the CPGB is nothing? Even were the fusion with the AWL to be consummated, the aggregation of nothings would not add materially to the revolutionary forces, because the working class would be somewhere else engaged in less taxing projects. I have used these examples from different traditions because we can see that the closed mind is not a peculiarly Trotskyist defence against a world that perversely disagrees with us most of the time. For the revolution, we may well need a revolutionary party, but that party will certainly have to be of an even newer kind. The Leninist model did well enough in 1917 but, in the 80-plus years since, it has not marked up any successes; indeed, the Stalinist variant used its command structure to ensure that there were no successes. A socialist organisation finds its justification in the fact that it provides the geographical spread, the publishing resources and a forum in which to discuss and learn from workers; within such a relationship there is a mutual growth and understanding. It is in this too that the possibility of developing transitional programmes can arise; the more successfully this policy is pursued the more the organisation grows in time with developing class awareness and struggle. In so far as such organic growth takes place, so will the new reality clarify all but the most heavily fortified of closed minds. The is not the realisation of that other Trotskyist unity fantasy, where our membership figures prove to all the other groups that we were right all the time and that the rest had best line up behind the new Lenin. Not at all – this is a movement for the self-emancipation of the working class in which socialists can play a constructive part, not acting the fool as some kind of entrist with a secret agenda for the greater glory of an antediluvian sect. This is important work because, as Cyril Smith says in his article: “Capitalism ... was and remains a danger to the future of humanity. Only the struggle of the working class movement can avert this danger.” It is now a rather more pressing danger since September 11-plus failure George W. Bush developed a taste for the nuclear-armed soundbite. It is, I think, with this in mind that Al Richardson commended Trotsky for his critique of popular frontism, and condemned cosy relationships with the Greens and the like (had his article been written a little earlier, he might have added with fundamentalist Islam). The business of socialists is socialism, and for a job like that you need the working class, not a campaign with some zero-growth Green, a species of Jonathon-Pol-Porritt. The world has moved on and, no matter how much we might like make-believe swashbuckling in a historical drama, it merely confirms our irrelevance in the same way that the chaps who hurtle about firing muskets in re-enactments of Civil War battles achieve nothing except looking like prats. The communist tradition has, over the decades, acquired such an accretion of dross that its founders would be hard pressed to recognise it as their creation, and where they reject the child, we should be most careful not to adopt the bastard. Top of the page Last updated on 9.10.2008

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins The Assassination of Trotsky (January 1973) From International Socialism (1st series), No. 54, January 1973, p. 25. Transcribed by Mike Pearn. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Leonard Mosley The Assassination of Trotsky Abacus 50p Those of you who liked Losey’s film should nip smartly out and buy 50p worth of Mosley’s book. Those of you who found the film tedious, inaccurate and generally a pain will find no redress in this volume. This should surprise nobody. Mosley wrote the screenplay for the film and then presumably, in a white heat of creativity, went on to write the book of the film. This has the advantage of making the most of limited inspiration and cashing in on the film’s publicity. A note of uncharacteristic restraint is shown in resisting a nude cover to attract the dirty raincoat brigade. Mosley has clearly not read widely either Trotsky’s work or that of any other Marxist writer. There are indications that he has read Their Morals and Ours and not understood a word of it. He has dipped unwarily into In Defense of Marxism and managed to make ridiculous and unrecognisable what was an argument of some intellectual power. There are signs (although not mentioned in the “note on sources”) that he has read and been impressed by Bernard Wolfe’s execrable The Great Prince Died. Once again we see the notion that Trotsky fatalistically accepted the ice axe in expiation for his role at Kronstadt. This perverse view is not only psychologically nonsensical but leaves aside the fact that Trotsky’s role at Kronstadt was, personally, a big round nothing, as any halfway competent researcher would know. He took responsibility in the sense that a member of the Bolshevik leadership was responsible as part of the collective. There is more of this sort of thing throughout the book, a book that has the appearance of being thrown together in a hurry. How else to explain the breathless style and crude metaphors. My favourite among this last appears on page 176: “He (Trotsky) is the other side of the coin from the blank tail of the assassin – the ineradicably recognisable lion’s head with his pince nez on his nose like balls.” Phew!! Leonard Mosley, despite all this, seems quite fond of Trotsky. If this is the case perhaps he will now keep his ill-informed fingers out of matters he is clearly incapable of understanding or explaining. His book, in his own immortal words is: “like balls”. Top of the page Last updated on 23.9.2013

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Trotskyism in the United States (1997) 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. George Breitman, Paul LeBlanc and Alan Wald Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1996, pp. 318 I FIRST came across the Trotskyist movement, and that in its Healyite manifestation, in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. That speech, such a well-kept secret that the full text was in the next issue of the Observer, showed beyond dispute that Stalin was not only fallible, but also a mass murderer in the tradition of, and easily surpassing, Ivan the Terrible. The shock of all these revelations was rather like the one you might experience on hearing the Virgin Mary ask the procurator to take her first born into care. In that splintered aftermath of Khrushchev’s speech, I, together with thousands of others, came to realise that yesterday’s political certainty was but the prelude to today’s disillusion. During that hand-wringing interregnum, where the most oft-heard phrase was ‘Oh God, where did it all go wrong?’, a few hundred of us were introduced to Trotskyism. The negative aspect was Gerry Healy, who on first, and all subsequent, sight looked as if he had recently been fulfilling an active rôle in the murkier recesses of an apocalyptic work by Hieronymus Bosch. The Healy factor was, however, heavily outweighed by the Trotsky effect, as expressed in his published works. The simple, not to say simple-minded, certainties of Stalinism were no match for the high tensile, armoured certainties of Trotskyism. This was not just any old suit of armour, it came fully equipped with hand-stitched lapels, waistcoat and two pairs of trousers. Not only could this theory answer all your questions, even those you had not the wit to ask, but it was also a complete defence against all the slings and arrows of any outrageous fortune that happened to be lurking about the place. Ill-favoured Healy might have been, but he had the tremendous advantage of possessing a number of key texts by Leon Trotsky, such as The Revolution Betrayed. There are better books by Trotsky, but there are none that could have been more appropriate to the times than The Revolution Betrayed in the years 1956–57. These gems from the pen of the master came to us via the good offices of the US Socialist Workers Party. Whatever my subsequent criticism of the SWP, I shall always be grateful for that introduction into a world of grown-up Marxist politics. Nowadays, I am told, the SWP not only eschews all generosity with Trotsky’s texts, they have also eschewed Trotskyism. Under their maximum leader Jack Barnes, the SWP declares itself to be a sister party of the Cuban Communist Party. Whether the Cubans’ own maximum leader entertains similar feelings of sisterhood toward Jack Barnes and his comrades is open to doubt. Holding such views, it is only proper that they should abandon Trotskyism, for even the most egregiously opportunist Trotskyist could not pretend that the working class had moved south, and was surreptitiously carrying through its revolutionary purposes in the disguise of an overweight, bearded Cuban petit-bourgeois. Whilst this is noted in the book here under review, it does not seem to excite much interest in the authors. This may be because Breitman is dead, and was in any case part of the leadership that first endorsed the assumption of Cuba into the pantheon of ‘workers’ states’, whilst LeBlanc and Wald joined the SWP after this great theoretical breakthrough had been made. Right at the beginning of this book Paul LeBlanc writes: ‘Neither my collaborator Alan Wald and I are satisfied with the modest cross section provided here ...’ Well, they can add my name to the list as well. For them, Trotskyism in the United States is the Socialist Workers Party, the 18 years of the Workers Party-Independent Socialist League merit only passing reference, and the International Socialists no mention at all. Wald and LeBlanc are American academics, and both of them write in that clotted style which was pioneered by Erlichman and Haldeman, and was not the least of their crimes against humanity. Wald, who has the more interesting thesis, was clearly pulling ahead of LeBlanc in the race for my approval, when he introduced that abomination the verb ‘to critique’ as in ‘he critiqued ...’ I subjected him to a great deal of ‘critiquing’ for that, I can tell you. Breitman, who was self-educated, produces an altogether nicer class of prose. What the authors do have in common is that they were all expelled from the SWP by Jack Barnes and his camarilla. For Breitman this must have been a particularly bitter experience, because he had been part of the Farrell Dobbs-Tom Kerry leadership that had selected Barnes in the first place. As LeBlanc explains: ‘The most serious errors by the SWP “old guard” were made after Cannon’s retirement from the central leadership. These were associated, in part, with the selection and grooming of Jack Barnes as the new central leader of the SWP. He was allowed to assemble his own leadership team, and the kind of authority that Cannon, Dobbs and Kerry enjoyed was conferred upon him.’ It is LeBlanc’s general thesis that, with one or two reservations, the SWP was essentially a sound organisation until Barnes was handed the franchise. Having acquired the job through a pose of ultra-Cannonism, it was not too long before he ‘undermined the party democracy that is essential to Leninism’.

Barnes, according to the convincing testimony of our authors, behaved in an undemocratic manner. What seems to have escaped their notice is that there is something amiss in a leadership approaching its sell-by date hand-picking its successor. James P. Cannon chose Farrell Dobbs to be his successor, as the man most likely to continue the traditions of Cannonism. To ensure that Dobbs kept to that tradition, Cannon set up a sort of parallel centre in California where he could, with no little embarrassment to Dobbs, correct any deviations from Cannonite rectitude. This is a style of selection that was popular in the Tory party, until it conferred leadership on Alec Douglas Home, which effectively discredited the whole procedure. Unfortunately, when Barnes, through a stunning display of devotion to the living thought of Cannon, acquired the franchise and then proceeded to divest himself of this heritage, there was no way of effectively calling him to order. It was now Jack Barnes’ party, and he could give it to Castro, or to anyone else his mean little heart desired. I have little doubt that Jack Barnes is not the man you would want in charge of your favourite revolutionary party. Frankly, I would advise against having him in for baby-sitting, but it has to be conceded that the constitutional niceties were observed when he got rid of troublesome opponents. He just utilised the draconian rules enacted by the Kerry-Dobbs leadership to rid themselves of Tim Wohlforth and James Robertson. Later, given a little practice, Barnes began to get a bit inventive with his expulsion technique. The Internationalist Tendency were declared to be a separate organisation, and were not allowed to re-register. This cunning ploy ensured that they were not allowed to utilise the appeals procedure. Lowering over the history of the SWP is the dominating presence of James P. Cannon. Of the three authors of the essays in this book, George Breitman is the most dedicated Cannonite. His view is encapsulated in the quote: ‘I am very satisfied with Marxism and Leninism and with the American version of that, which came to get the name of “Cannonism” in our movement.’ Alan Wald represents the opposite pole in the volume. He takes the view that Cannon, despite his manifest talents, inculcated a notion in the party that it represented the acme of revolutionary purity, an immaculate organisation, with muscles twangingly poised to lead the workers to power at a moment’s notice. This, which we might call self-deluding sectarianism, is beautifully summed up in Cannon’s Theses on the American Revolution of 1946: ‘The revolutionary vanguard party, destined to lead this tumultuous revolutionary movement in the US, does not have to be created. It already exists, and its name is the Socialist Workers Party... The fundamental core of the professional leadership has been assembled ... The task of the SWP consists simply in this: to remain true to its program and banner ...’ This was put even more sharply by Morris Stein (who was National Secretary whilst Cannon was in prison during the war) with the words: ‘We are monopolists in the field of politics. We cannot stand any competition. We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make the revolution, can do it only through one party and one program ... This is why we are out to destroy every single party in the field that makes any pretence of being a working class revolutionary party. Ours is the only correct program that can lead to the revolution. Everything else is deception, treachery.’ If, on reading this, you do not experience something of the cold chill of the Lubyanka cellars, you almost certainly have your central heating turned up expensively high. The middle ground in all this is occupied by Paul LeBlanc. His view is that the formative years of the SWP were the time when the opposing contenders for leadership in the working class were either Stalinism or Social Democracy. In the 1930s neither of these forces would accept work or discussion with Trotskyists, who were thus alone and must shout very loud to be heard. Really though, the explicit sectarian vainglory in Stein is implicit in Cannon, because for good or ill he set his stamp on the SWP. Cannon was a native American revolutionary, experienced in working class politics before the founding of the CPUSA, and an influential figure within that party. He learned well and participated freely in the faction fights that enlivened the early years of American Communism, but he was always the junior partner in the combinations he joined. Early in the proceedings he became aware that advancement in the sections of the Communist International depended on choosing the right patron in its leadership. He was less concerned at the fact that Zinoviev and Stalin could impose a minority leadership on the majority of the US party, than that it was not his minority that was chosen. When it came to the much smaller world of Trotskyism, Cannon made sure that he was 110 per cent on the right side of L.D.T., and, whenever given the chance, operated in the Fourth International like a cut-price Zinoviev. In the early years of the Left Opposition, if Cannon was the best known figure, he was, at least, associated with some other formidable personalities, the most outstanding being Max Shachtman. These two complemented each other very effectively in those formative years. Shachtman was the brilliant Socialist intellectual;

Shachtman was the brilliant Socialist intellectual; witty, stylish, a ruthless polemicist and debater, and at the same time very funny and highly approachable, especially for the young. Cannon, an altogether more dour character, was given to dark depression when things were not going well, and in those moods was liable to withdraw from the struggle to commune with vast quantities of the hard stuff. Nevertheless, he was an exceptionally talented propagandist, both in print and on the platform. If Cannon was not in the same street as Shachtman intellectually, neither was Shachtman a patch on Cannon in the popular agitation stakes. Later on, others of considerable calibre joined the movement: James Burnham, A.J. Muste, Hal Draper, Felix Morrow, C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, to name just a few. The movement has always been plagued by the proliferation of tiny groups, each with its founding guru, whose raison d’être is difficult to fathom, the quality of their cadre not discernible to the naked eye, and whose inevitable passing is unaccompanied by expressions of regret. The SWP, however, was not such an organisation. The people mentioned above would all have had some significant rôle to play in a movement that was infinitely more successful and with many more members than the SWP ever enjoyed. It was their tragedy, as it was for the rest of the Trotskyist movement, that they never connected with the working class in any but the most transitory and peripheral way. Perhaps, in general, it is true that the upper and nether millstones of Stalinism and Social Democracy ground the revolutionaries to dust, but in America Stalinism was never a mass party, and Social Democracy was even smaller. With the exception of the Teamsters, the SWP was hardly involved at all in the great upsurge of the CIO, and during the height of that union organising drive, the Trotskyists were engaged in two years of deep entry in the American Socialist Party. None of this is to suggest that if they had had an orientation to the CIO it would have been a runaway success, but it is to say that in any set of circumstances where the revolutionary movement has a chance to connect with the workers, it should take it. You will not find the proletarian vanguard in Norman Thomas’ back pocket, any more than you will find it in Fidel’s beard, although there is at least one large petit-bourgeois behind that. The irony of the Trotskyists’ entry into the American Socialist Party is that they came out with more than double their original membership, having taken the Socialist Party’s youth movement almost lock, stock and barrel. This splendid young cadre formed the majority of Shachtman’s faction – and accompanied him out of the SWP in 1940. The orientation to the working class is not just some fuddy-duddy old foible, it is the essence of revolutionary Marxism, but it is one of the easiest to forget in the over-heated enthusiasm for a new get-rich-quick theory. You can substitute the peasantry for the revolutionary class. You can witter on about ‘centuries of deformed workers’ states’, or Fabian-Stalinism, like Pablo; you might even see the revolution springing unchained from the junior common room; or you could hymn the praises of youth, and good luck to you mate; but none of that will have anything to do with Marxism. One of the besetting sins of our movement is what might be called ‘the Socialism of the peroration’. This is where we affirm our ‘undying faith in the working class’, and promise to ‘storm both heaven and earth’ in the very near future. Then we go home and try and think up some short cut that will save us from all the hard work, and frequent failure, of organising in the working class. It is this sort of thing that Trotsky called substitutionism, that is, a besetting sin. In 1973 the SWP had around 1,000 members, and LeBlanc quotes someone called Sheir who reported that at that time it had 120 persons, most of them paid, working at the party HQ, with room for many more. George Novack boasted that the SWP had ‘an infrastructure for a party of about 100,000’. During the period in question, SWP branches had local branch offices and full-time organisers, and paid for their own leaflets and propaganda. The subs range was from $5 to $50 per week (with the average much closer to $5 than $50, I should think), and the balance after paying local costs was sent to the party. How the party financed its 120 full-time head office staff and all the associated expenses on this income is difficult to understand. It is even more difficult to understand why the party members kept sending the money when it is recalled that this vast army of party functionaries managed in just 12 months to increase the membership by a pathetic 140. A year later still, Barnes’ imaginative expulsion tactics had reduced the membership once more to 1,000. You pays your money, and Jack Barnes makes his choice. Whilst we are discussing membership figures, it is quite interesting to note that the SWP never had a membership of more than 1,500, and that was the high point in 1938, as they exited from the Socialist Party. That was the time when they were claiming 2,500 at the founding congress of the Fourth International. In 1944 they had just 840 as they set out to arrange the future of the British section and control the Fourth International. The postwar SWP, whose membership was usually in the hundreds and never exceeded 1,250, threw its weight about internationally, and presumed to lecture the world on how to make the revolution. It is difficult to say who was the most deluded, the SWP for believing its own vainglory, or the rest of us for accepting it as good coin.

It is difficult to say who was the most deluded, the SWP for believing its own vainglory, or the rest of us for accepting it as good coin. When Trotsky was murdered, Cannon saw himself as the natural successor to lead the forces of the Fourth International. In 1940, of course, the Fourth International had been put into lukewarm storage for the duration, but in 1944 Cannon sent his man Sam Gordon to the UK to sort out the British Trotskyists. This, Cannon’s second attempt to unify the British section of the Fourth International, involved setting up Gerry Healy as the opposition to the Haston-Grant leadership of the Revolutionary Communist Party. This silly piece of politicking is alone enough to nullify the picture of the wise leader portrayed in LeBlanc’s essays, if the fault had not been further compounded by his selection of Michel Raptis (Pablo) as the man to run the Fourth International when it was returned to Europe. Neither of these interesting sidelights into Cannon’s legacy are mentioned in the book, although LeBlanc does treat us to examples of praise for Cannon and the SWP from ex-members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Now this is odd, because LeBlanc is co-editor, along with Scott McLemee, of C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism, which suggests that he is familiar with the texts of the Johnson-Forest Tendency including, presumably, The Balance Sheet Completed (subtitled Ten Years of American Trotskyism), the tendency’s final farewell to Trotskyism. Here is what Johnson-Forest had to say, amongst other things, about the SWP: ‘Finally there was forced upon us a shocking recognition of the callousness, the brutality, the lack of elementary human decency, far less revolutionary principle and vigilance to which substantial elements of the most highly placed leadership had sunk ... As we understood ourselves and where we were, the cry became unanimous: “Let us get out of here at once. It is a political gas chamber. We do not trust this political leadership to carry out its own political line. None of our comrades who is in any difficulty can trust himself to them. Even those who are not degenerate are ready to support those who are when their crimes are discovered. We do not want to discuss with them. Such a discussion can only besmirch us. Let us get out of here as quickly as we can.” We hesitated for a moment, but the final, the ultimate certainty came with the discovery that the one with the most brains, authority and experience who had come to the rescue of the politically unstable and fortified the turn to Stalinism, was also at the disposal of any degenerate who might need protection.’ Now all of that, which might put you in mind of the last days of the Roman Empire or of the Weimar Republic – or Gerry Healy – is saying that for Johnson-Forest the SWP was a moral swamp, and one would have expected that an admirer of both James P. Cannon and C.L.R. James would, if he must quote Johnson-Forest in this context, have something to say about the tendency’s final considered word on the SWP. Alan Wald, despite his addiction to the noun-verb, does cast a rather more critical eye on the SWP. He pays due homage to the high talents of some of the Trotskyist leaders, but points out that not only were they unsuccessful in their own terms, but were also failures by almost any comparison you like to make. Dogmatism was and is almost always confused with high principle, and this is nowhere more apparent than on the tortured question of the class nature of the Stalinist states. As Wald says in a footnote on page 285: ‘None of these theories [state capitalist, bureaucratic collectivism or workers’ state – JH] persuasively accounts for all aspects of these societies ... Unfortunately, for most Trotskyists, absolute fidelity to their particular interpretation of a specific theory of Soviet-type societies is their political touchstone.’ Wald, as you will see from this, has a definite grip on reality. He sums up his final essay: ‘Trotskyism!!! is dead. Long live Trotskyism.’ I do not mind seconding that particular proposition. For the rest, this is an inadequate book that will be all but incomprehensible to young would-be Marxists who do not have any great knowledge of Trotskyism in general, or the SWP in particular. This may be because some of the material was originally written by LeBlanc and Wald as internal bulletins in obscure faction fights in the SWP. Whatever the reason, this is a pity, because there is the beginning of a worthwhile critique that might help us all to greater clarity and effectiveness. Top of the page Last updated on 30.9.2011

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins The Asturian Uprising and the Warsaw Commune (2002) From Revolutionary History, Vol. 8 No. 2, 2002. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Manuel Grossi The Asturian Uprising: Fifteen Days of Socialist Revolution Socialist Platform, London, 2000, pp140, £5.00 Zygmunt Zaremba The Warsaw Commune: Betrayed by Stalin, Massacred by Hitler Socialist Platform, London, 1997, pp45, £3.00 TO have been a socialist through a large chunk of the twentieth century was not all unalloyed pleasure. Of course, there were high spots, although I was not around during the “ten days that shook the world” or the nine days of the General Strike, they were certainly times to stir men’s souls. Harry Wicks, who was alive during both of these seminal events, could recreate in words the events of those few golden days that would give renewed enthusiasm to the most jaded of socialists. In particular, Harry’s stories of the General Strike, in which he was a committed and enthusiastic participant, gave an intimation of the power and excitement when virtually an entire class is on the move. In their different styles, Manuel Grossi and Zygmunt Zaremba give equally graphic accounts by people who were there in the thick of it. Unfortunately, with all the inevitability of a sweep hand, nine days becomes ten and the high hopes of day one give way to regrets that last for years. The Asturian uprising was another of those episodes which testify to the courage, daring and inventiveness of the working class when it operates collectively in its own fundamental interest. Alas it is another of those events measured in days, just 15, brief maybe, but a fortnight to cherish. The working class of Asturias in 1933 was acknowledged to be the best organised in Spain. The close communities of the miners, who made up nearly half of the Asturian working class, gave a powerful boost to social, industrial and political solidarity. The main union organisation, the Sindicato de obreros mineres de Asturias (SMA), was closely linked to the Socialist Federation, highly bureaucratised in the social democratic manner, and despite its name recruited workers whether miners or not. In a rather inspired piece of opportunism in 1928, the SMA acquired a coal mine and, because the state guaranteed to buy the output, a useful source of income. In 1934, the money came in handy to purchase arms from Portuguese revolutionaries. This is a novel deviation from the social democratic norms as we know them in Britain, where it is usually the individual who starts out radical and ends up rich. Early in 1933, the Workers and Peasants Bloc of Joaquín Maurín, convened a meeting in Barcelona to set up a Workers Alliance against the growing menace of fascism both abroad and in Spain. At first, there were few takers, the Communist Left (Trotskyists) and some left anarchists, but when the Nazis took power in Germany the need for the Workers Alliance became much clearer to many others. All workers’ organisations, political and trade union, were entitled to join and to place a representative on the committee. For Maurín, this was, despite certain differences, the Spanish expression of the soviet, a pure example of a class organisation. The Catalan Socialist Union was forced to withdraw from the Alliance because of its support for the bourgeois Catalan Generalitat. This wise exclusion policy was one that Maurín would have done well to remember when a few short years later he joined the bourgeois parties in a Popular Front government during the Civil War. The immediate cause of the uprising was the inclusion of three members of the extreme right in the national government. This was seen as a first significant opening to fascism. On 4 October 1934, the Asturian Committee of the Workers Alliance took the decision for the uprising. Despite the cache of Portuguese weaponry, the workers were not well armed. Hunting guns, and farm implements were freely available, but the miners’ weapon of choice was sticks of dynamite. It was readily available in the mines, and the miners were highly skilled in its use. In the battle for Oviedo, the dynamiters induced panic in the defenders, and were decisive in winning the day. In Catalonia, the Generalitat presided over by Luis Companys, a Catalan nationalist, declared a Catalan state within the Spanish Federal Republic. The workers confidently expected that Companys would open the armouries and distribute the weapons them. Their confidence was misplaced, and the Generalitat put up no resistance to a force of 50 men and a general. Catalonia, the birthplace of the Workers Alliance, played no further part in the struggle. Despite its isolation, the uprising enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Asturian workers. Throughout the 15 days, the shortage of arms was a continuing problem. If they possessed the artillery, the shells had no fuses. They set about manufacturing what they could. Their home-made hand grenades were apparently of such high quality that not one failed to explode. They produced a device for lobbing their grenades into enemy trenches that proved wonderfully effective on several occasions. They developed a method of armour-plating trains, wagons and vehicles. As in all such workers’ struggles, there was also an element of less than inspired decision-making.

As in all such workers’ struggles, there was also an element of less than inspired decision-making. For example, they armoured an entire train with the exception of the engine, an oversight that proved fatal as soon as it came in range of enemy cannon. More importantly, having taken the radio station in Oviedo, they failed to broadcast any appeals for help and solidarity action to the Spanish or the world’s workers, on the spurious grounds that if they told the other Spanish workers of their struggle and successes, they would not send them help. This is just the sort of decision that a committee might well make in a demented moment of stress. In the end, of course, all the innovative weaponry and courage could not overcome the facts. Asturias was alone, they could not effectively arm themselves against the growing tide of the reactionary forces, in particular the air power of their adversaries. In Mieres the entire revolutionary committee decamped, with the exception of Manuel Grossi. Surprisingly, with the opposition advancing steadily, the workers’ spirit was not dampened, and at the end they could have had more men under arms if they only had the guns to give them. The victory of the reaction was accompanied by indiscriminate slaughter and jailing of thousands; indeed, one of the demands that secured victory for the Popular Front in 1936 was for the release of the Asturian workers. Until the end, apart from some typical Stalinist sectarianism, the Workers’ Alliance worked well, it owed nothing, and made no concessions to any bourgeois liberal allies, for it had none. It was a serious and courageous attempt to pre-empt the fascist menace with socialism, a policy decision that the Comintern, the German Communist Party and German Social Democracy had been unable to make in 1933, a failure for which we all subsequently paid, and are still paying, the price. In Poland, just a little less than 10 years after the Asturian uprising, in July 1944 things were not going well for the German army. The Russians were advancing on a broad front, and the Germans in Warsaw were frantically loading booty onto westward-moving transport, and building defences to face the oncoming Russians. By 29 July, the Russians were already on the left bank of the Vistula, just a few kilometres from Warsaw. Enthused by the closeness of the Russian forces, at about four o’clock in the afternoon of that day the Poles attacked the Germans. Surprise and the enthusiasm of the assault brought significant success, but as soon as they had overcome the initial shock, the Germans brought up men artillery and tanks to suppress the insurgency. Despite initial fears, the Poles developed a useful method for disabling Tiger tanks using petrol ignited by hand grenades. Interestingly enough, the Poles, like the Asturian workers before them, made their own hand grenades with explosive from captured shells. They also made a catapult device for firing their grenades at the Germans. The similarity, unfortunately, does not end there. Throughout the struggle the Poles were always short of armaments. There is no greater tragedy than to have far more ready fighters than there are guns to go around. That they should have been short of weapons while the Russian army was 20 kilometres from Warsaw is a disgrace and another of the crimes to be laid at Stalin’s door. British, Canadian and Polish pilots flew a number arms runs to the insurgents, but the attrition rate was heavy, and they were refused landing facilities behind the Russian lines that would have eased the situation. All of this was well known to Stalin, who was lobbied by Churchill and Mikołajczyk, the Polish premier-in-exile, among several others. It was all to no avail, Stalin lied, evaded and finally put it about that these were irresponsible elements and reactionaries. For Stalin, a successful uprising by native Poles would have put in jeopardy the spoils that he expected to enjoy after the defeat of Hitler. At the time many were convinced by Stalin’s accusations because they could not believe that “Uncle Joe” would be so calculating as to consign thousands of anti-fascist fighters to death at the hands of the Germans. We, of course, who now know that this same “Uncle Joe” would, in his tireless pursuit of the interests of the world’s workers, give up entire Sundays to sit with his chum Molotov signing death sentences; if this is not actually the ultimate sacrifice, it certainly shows what he was made of. After two months, the Warsaw commune surrendered. For two months it had held out despite the overwhelming force of the Germans and the treachery of Stalin. Its programme of nationalisation and workers’ control were as anathema to Stalin as they would be to any other counter-revolutionary. Neither of the events detailed in these two excellent pamphlets lasted for long, although you might well say that given the difficulties it is a wonder they lasted as long as they did. It is always a tragedy when the good ones lose, as Albert Camus wrote somewhere: “Men learnt that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward.” Nevertheless, to understand the difficulty is not to give up the desire for the same end that the Asturian miners and the Warsaw workers were struggling to achieve. Top of the page Last updated on 10.10.2011

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Zionism (1973) Background to the Middle East Crisis, Part One: Zionism, International Socialism (1st series), No.64, December 1973, pp.15-21. Transcribed by Mike Pearn. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Last month this journal said: “The fight of the Arab armies against Israel is a fight against western imperialism ... there is only one way to real peace in the Middle East and that is through the destruction of the Zionist state, with its preferential citizenship rights along racial lines, and its replacement by a Palestinian state, in which Jews and Arabs have equal rights.” This is a conclusion rejected by many people who consider themselves on the left. In recent weeks the official Labour party line – mouthed by such “left wingers” as Eric Heffer – has been even more rabidly pro-Israel than the Tory press. Others who would normally feel in close agreement with the revolutionary left find themselves confused as to why we take the position that we do. One of the truly great propaganda exercises of our time has sold the Zionists’ pretensions to legitimacy in the Middle East. Israel has presented itself as the tiny victim of Arab intransigence, explaining its aggression and expansionism as a life or death pre-emptive strike. Zionism is equated with Jewishness and justified as the sole bastion against anti-semitism. In almost every respect the propaganda pretensions of Zionism cannot stand even a cursory examination. The first pervasive myth is that of its continuity with historical Jewry. It is claimed that Palestine has been the historic home of the Jews, from which they have been forcibly excluded and which they have some intrinsic right to inhabit, even at the expense of those who have lived there since. But even the most ardent Zionists admit that the vast majority of the Jews have not lived in Palestine since the destruction of Jerusalem in 60 AD. And well before that most Jews lived not in Palestine, but throughout the Greek and Roman world. “The dispersal of the Jews does not date from the fall of Jerusalem. Several centuries before this event, the great majority of Jews were already spread over the four corners of the world. It is quite certain that well before the fall of Jerusalem, more than three-quarters of the Jews no longer lived in Palestine,” wrote Leon. [1] For more than 1800 years successive generations of Jews, moving from country to country, did not consider returning to the land now claimed to be their natural home. Not until the closing years of the nineteenth century did a few thousand Jews begin to argue that because there was no possibility of fighting anti-semitism in Europe, it was necessary for the Jews to establish a state of their own. And even then, so weak were the alleged links between the Jews and Palestine that Herzl, who wrote the founding Zionist document, The Jewish State, considered Palestine as only one of several possible sites – including Argentina, Uganda and – interestingly enough – parts of Sinai. As late as 1914, only 130,000 out of a world Jewish population of 13 million backed the Zionist programme of a return to Palestine. [2] In 1882 the Jewish population of Palestine numbered only 23,000 – most of whom had lived on friendly terms with the Christian and Muslim population for hundreds of years and were hardly distinguishable from them. However, the French Baron de Rothschild had already built some 20 villages in which he settled 5,000 east European Jews, aiming to begin colonising the land in the interests of French imperialism, in the same way that Algeria was colonised. But modern Zionism was not born until a congress held in Basle, Switzerland, in 1897. From the very beginning the movement and its leaders were clear that they must attach themselves to a leading power to achieve a Jewish state. They knew there was no other way to protect themselves from the wrath of the Arab population they aimed to displace. Zionism could only flourish by aligning itself with the forces that wanted to dominate and exploit the rest of the Middle East. As Herzl’s deputy, Max Nordau, formulated Zionist foreign policy: “Our aspirations point to Palestine as a compass points north, therefore we must orient ourselves towards those powers under whose influence Palestine happens to be.” [3] In this quest for client status, Herzl made unsuccessful approaches to the German Kaiser and the Turkish Sultan. In 1906, two years after Herzl’s death, Weitzman, his successor, had the first meeting with Balfour, a meeting that some 11 years later was to bear fruit in the Balfour declaration, which promised a “Jewish Homeland”. Balfour, incidentally, was head of the British Tory Government which pushed through in 1905 an Aliens Act deliberately designed to curtail the entry of East European Jewish refugees into Britain. From the beginning, Weitzman made clear to the British his willingness to act on behalf of British interests. In a letter to Lloyd George in November 1914 he wrote: “We can reasonably say that should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence and should Britain encourage Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we would have in 20 or 30 years a million Jews, perhaps more; they could develop the country, bring back civilisation and form a very effective guard for the Suez canal.” It must have been a matter of some satisfaction for Weitzman at the end of his life that all the predictions of this short paragraph eventually came true. The Balfour Declaration was published in 1917. Although hedged with reservations on the cultural and political rights of the Arab Palestinians, it made clear the British government’s approval of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, and went on to promise the government’s “best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” Britain, of course, was disposing of war gains not yet made at the expense of the unconsulted and unconsidered Palestinians. At the end of the First World War the British divided up the area with the French, giving the French the Lebanon and Syria, and taking Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan for themselves.

They already ran Egypt. The Zionists began to set up their shadow state protected by British power. The Zionist parties were subsidised by foreign funds funnelled through the Jewish Agency. The case of the Histadrut is an example of the massive aid that supported the Zionist presence. The Histadrut the General Confederation of Jewish Workers in the Land of Israel, started in 1920 with only 5,000 members, strictly limited to Jews. Within a year it had a large public works company and a bank. Today Histadrut companies account for 25 percent of net national product and employs a quarter of Israeli workers. It builds roads and military installations in Turkey and luxury hotels in emerging African countries. These developments were not financed by the subscriptions from the 5,000 Jewish workers but by money collected in Europe and America by the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organisation. As Pinhas Lavon, general secretary of Histadrut, said: “Our Histadrut is a general organisation to the core. It is not a workers’ trade union although it copes perfectly well with the real needs of the worker.” [4] Besides being true, this revealing statement would not be out of place in the mouth of a functionary of one of Franco’s fascist syndicates. On such a basis, the Zionist settlements were able to expand: by 1931 the percentage of Jews in the total population was nearly 18 percent and by 1939 it had risen to nearly one third. [5] The benefits the British gained from the Zionist colonisation were shown in 1936, when a general strike was declared against French rule in Syria. It proved effective and on the whole successful, taking Syria well along the road towards political independence. This made a great impression in Palestine, where the Arab population began an uprising against British rule, together with a long general strike of its own. The effects of the strike, however, were dampened by the Zionist presence. The institutions run by the Jewish settlers took no part in the strike and took over many of the functions previously performed by the Arabs. The armed rising tied down more than a third of the British Army’s total world wide strength, and the British authorities again looked to the Zionists for support. The mandatory government agreed to reinforce the Jewish police force in order to free British soldiers for guard duty, and it established the Jewish Settlement Police, which became the main camouflage of the Haganah, the Zionist secret army. In the spring of 1939 the combined Jewish auxiliary police forces numbered about 21,000 men. [6] In the wake of the rebellion, the British sent out a Royal Commission under Lord Peel to discover the causes of Arab unrest. Its conclusion was that the mandate was unworkable and recommended partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. This ominous prelude to 1948 was accepted by the Zionist leaders, Ben Gurion and Weitzman. At the 21st Zionist congress in 1939 they declared: “The Jewish people will not acquiesce in the reduction of its status in Palestine to that of a minority, nor in the subjection of a Jewish National Home to Arab rule.” Never mind the fact that they were a minority in an Arab country. By the beginning of the war, the Zionists recognised that Britain was in decline and that a more powerful star was in the ascendant, the United States. The Americans, who were trying to displace British influence in areas such as Saudi Arabia, were not slow to see the advantages of an alliance with the Zionists. When Britain, as a sop to the Arabs, put quotas on Jewish immigration for five years, Roosevelt commented: “... it (the Palestinian mandate) did intend to convert Palestine into a Jewish home which might very possibly become preponderantly Jewish within a comparatively short time ...” [7] There can be no doubt that liberal opinion was shocked at the restriction on Jewish immigration. At the time the Nazi extermination of the Jews was in full swing. Such shock would have been considerably tempered if it had been generally known that at the Bermuda Committee in 1943 Roosevelt suggested that all barriers be lifted for the immigration of Jews from persecution. To avoid offending British sensibilities, Palestine was excluded from consideration. Zionist reaction was immediate and hostile for the Zionists the alleviation of Jewish misery was to be via Palestine or not at all. Hal Draper records that “Morris Ernst, the famous civil liberties lawyer, has told the story about how the Zionist leaders exerted their influence to make sure that the US did not open up immigration (into the US) to these Jews – for the simple reason that they wanted to herd these Jews to Palestine.” [8] As Dr Silver told the 22nd World Zionist Congress: “Zionism is not an immigration or refugee movement, but a movement to re-establish the Jewish state for a Jewish nation in the land of Israel. The classic textbook of Zionism is not how to find a home for refugees. The classic textbook of our movement is the Jewish state.” The establishment of the Israeli state At the end of the war, the Zionists called for partition and were backed by America. Meanwhile, they began a terror campaign against the British troops – not designed to liberate Palestine from imperialist rule, but rather “to demonstrate to the British military authorities that without the goodwill of Palestine Jewry, the British troops in Palestine might be dangerously isolated.” [9] When at the end of 1947 Britain finally announced its imminent withdrawal from Palestine, there were 1,203, 000 Arabs in the country, accounting for two-thirds of the population. 94 percent of the land was owned or settled by Arabs. The remaining 6 percent was Jewish owned and 85 percent of these Jews had immigrated since 1922. [10] But the Zionists were determined to extend their area of control. In November 1947 Golda Meir met secretly with Abdullah, the British imposed ruler of Jordan, and they agreed to divide the territory of the Palestinians between them. [11] In 1942 Weitzman had written: “...

if any Arabs do not wish to remain in a Jewish state, every facility will be given to them to transfer to one of the many and vast Arab countries.” He had the good grace not to specify what facilities would be made available. Mehachem Beigin, commander of the more extreme Zionist armed force, Irgun Zwei Leumi, was clear that the facilities would include guns, bombs, murder and extermination. He later said: “Our hope lay in gaining control of territory. At the end of January 1948 ... we outlined four strategic objectives: 1. Jerusalem, 2. Jaffa, 3. The Lydda, Ramleh Plain, 4. The Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm triangle.” All these towns were part of the Arab territory under the United Nations partition plan sponsored by the Zionists. In April, the Irgun bombed the Arab town of Jaffa for three days. Haganah attacked the Arab community in Jerusalem. On 9 April the Irgun, in concert with the extreme Zionist Stern gang, which in the 1930s received training in Fascist Italy, attacked the Arab village of Dair Yassin and, in cold blood, murdered 254 women and children. Menachem Beigin and Avram Stern had learned well Hitler’s lesson in genocide. The news of the massacres and bombing set in motion the Palestinian refugees, some fleeing as far as the east bank of the river Jordan to escape the Zionists. By these tactics the Zionist forces were able to increase their share of the partitioned state by 25 per cent before the UN resolution had been passed. The first Arab-Israeli war of May 1948 was not, as Israeli propaganda would have us believe, an unprovoked Arab aggression. It was a response to the moving of Zionist forces into Arab Palestine. As the Zionists and Abdullah moved into areas inhabited by the Palestinians, Egypt and Saudi Arabia intervened – more out of fear of Abdullah than anything else. If further proof is required, it should be noted that the only Arab army actually to invade the Jewish part of Palestine was that of the Egyptians, who sent a small force from Sinai into the Negev. All the other armies fought on Arab soil. In the aftermath of the armistice the Zionists’ spoils of victory and additional territory were quickly recognised by all the great powers. The partition plan was dead and Israel was born on the corpses and the land of the Palestinians. Having expelled the Arabs by force, the Zionists went on to set a legal seal on the expropriation of Arab property. The expropriation of the Palestinians Even before the formal setting up of the state of Israel, the Jewish Agency appointed a Haganah officer to act as Custodian of Arab Property. Once it was set up, emergency legislation on 24 June 1948 set out the Abandoned Areas Ordinance. An abandoned areas was: “... any area or place conquered by or surrendered to armed forces or deserted by all or part of its inhabitants, and which has been declared by order to be an abandoned area.” This definition, which could have covered any land anywhere, Jewish or Arab owned, applied only to Arab land. A category of Arab known as “absentee” was invented. This included not only those who had left but those who had merely left their homes to avoid the fighting. As Don Peretz, a non-Zionist but pro-Israeli author, wrote in his book Israel and the Arab Refugees: Any Arab of Nazareth who might have visited the Old City of Jerusalem or Bethlehem on Christmas 1948, automatically became an “absentee” under the law. Nearly all the Arab refugees in Israel as well as the 30,000 inhabitants of the little Triangle, which become part of the state under the armistice with Jordan, were classified as absentees. Arabs, who during the battle of Acre, fled from their homes to the old city of Acre, lost their property ... All of the new city of Acre was turned over to the recent (Jewish) immigrants despite the fact that many of its Arab “absentee” home owners were living a few yards away ... Arabs were “absentees” unless they could prove they were not. In 1953 a new twist was added to the Land Acquisition law. The crux of this law was that land would become the property of the Development Authority if: 1. On 1 April 1952, it was not in the possession of its owners. 2. It was used or earmarked within the period 4 May 1948 to April 1952 for the purposes of essential development or security. 3. If it is still required for one of these purposes ... The outstanding gall of the first of these meant that those who had been illegally thrown off their land could not have been in possession at 1 April 1952. That was their complaint. Catch 22 is alive, and well, and living in Israel. An amendment was passed which made it possible for legal Arab residents to keep any property they might obtain in the future. As one commentator said: “They were not to be robbed of any property which they do not yet possess.” [12] In this way, the Israeli government acquired practically all the available Arab land for Jewish settlement. Over one million dunams (i.e. 250,000 acres) were taken from the Arabs who did not flee from Israel under the land acquisition law. [13] All told 4,574,000 dunams of cultivatable land were taken from the Arabs, out of a total area under cultivation of about six million dunams. [14] Since 1967, the expansion of the area of Zionist colonisation has continued. Kibbutzim – which are effectively military fortifications – have been established in the occupied areas. A document recently produced by the Israeli Labour Party “makes it clear that Israel will continue to establish and develop new settlements in the occupied territories ... The policy document makes it clear that the Israeli land Authority will acquire land in the occupied area by every effective means.” [15] Israel’s pose as a democratic beacon in the Middle East, a custodian of western liberal values, does not stand examination when the position of the Palestinians who remain inside Israel (let alone the millions and more who were driven out) is examined.

The policy document makes it clear that the Israeli land Authority will acquire land in the occupied area by every effective means.” [15] Israel’s pose as a democratic beacon in the Middle East, a custodian of western liberal values, does not stand examination when the position of the Palestinians who remain inside Israel (let alone the millions and more who were driven out) is examined. Under Israeli law, a Palestinian may be limited in his movements merely by the say so of a military officer. There are cases of individuals who have been refused permission to leave their villages for as long as 20 years. [16] but these are fortunate compared to those who are held in prison without trial. “The Israeli preventative detention law permits the imprisonment – without limit of time – of ‘any person’ whose confinement is deemed ‘necessary or expedient’.” [17] The situation for the inhabitants of the West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza strip is even worse. Although these areas have been effectively integrated into the Israeli economy, with 60,000 Arabs travelling to work inside Israel proper, the wages paid are 40 to 50 percent less than the wages paid to Israelis. [18] Since it was occupied in 1967, the Gaza Strip has been turned into one massive festering prison. The refugees are flung out and their huts razed to the ground to build roads the better to police the area. In 1970 the Gazans spent 3700 hours under curfew. [19] In 1971 the Israelis started a plan to move tens of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai, presumably intending to hand them over to Egypt at some future peace conference. The Israeli army moved into Jebalia, second largest camp in Gaza, (40,000 refugees) and it proceeded to bulldoze the huts and transport the inhabitants who had not fled to Al Arish in Sinai. Israel and imperialism The rulers of Israel faced two problems after 1948. The first was developing the country so as to make it an attractive proposition to the hundreds of thousands of European Jews it wanted to attract as immigrants – people who are used to a European rather than a Middle Eastern standard of living. The second problem was to persuade the neighbouring Arab states to accept the vastly expanded frontiers of Israel and the permanent expropriation of the previous Palestinian inhabitants. They sought to solve both problems by proving that they were imperialism’s best friend in the area. The talk of “making the desert bloom” is a bit less impressive when you look at the amount of aid Israel has received – particularly from America. Oscar Gass, an American economist who at one time acted as advisor to the Israeli government, has noted: What is unique ... about this development ... is the factor of capital inflow ...During the 17 years 1949-65 Israel received six billion dollars more of goods and services than she exported. For the 21 years 1948-68 the import surplus would be in excess of seven and a half billion dollars. This is in excess of 2650 dollars per person for every person who lived in Israel. And of this supply from abroad ... only about 30 per cent came to Israel under conditions which call for a return outflow of dividends, interest or capital. [20] It has been calculated that in 1968, Israel received more than 10 per cent of the total aid given to all underdeveloped countries. [21] Only through this inflow of funds was the development of the Israeli economy possible. Despite the talk of “hardworking pioneers”, between 1949 and 1965 the net saving if the Israeli economy equalled zero, sometimes being +1 per cent and sometimes -1 per cent. Yet the rate of investment over the same period could average 20 per cent. [22] In the light of such generosity from foreign sources it is hardly surprising that one or two parcels of the Negev have nurtured the odd rose. It is true that much of this inflow of funds has come from collections from world Jewry, rather than from Western governments (which accounted for about 40 per cent of capital transfers in the period 1949-65); but it is also true that the very rich Jewish families in the US who have contributed such a large chunk of these funds would not have done so unless Israel was following a policy favourable to the class to which they belong – the American capitalist class. A major plank of the governmental policy of the Israeli state has always been to secure recognition for the annexation of the Palestinian areas obtained in 1948. The first formal recognition came from the three western powers with imperialist interests in the area, Britain, France and the US, with the Tripartite Declaration of 1950. Since then the main Israeli aim has been to force the Arab states to concede similar recognition. In the early 1950s, the US and Britain wanted to create a military alliance of Middle Eastern countries, as part of the global policy of establishing a chain of bases and military pacts around Russia. The Israeli leaders exerted themselves to help force the Arabs into the alliance. Whenever the governments of Egypt, Syria or Jordan attacked the Anglo-American schemes, Israel was used as a threat against them. These threats often materialised in armed raids by Israeli forces. Jordan, particularly, was raided during the period when the el-Nabulsi government there conducted anti-Western policies. Usually after such a raid, the Arab government concerned would ask the West for arms. The reply was always “Join the Bagdad Pact and you will get the arms.” The policy was finally defeated when, after an Israeli raid on Gaza in April 1955 Nasser turned to the Russian bloc for arms. This development, followed by the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, drove Britain and France into desperation. Together with Israel they attacked Egypt in an attempt to seize back the canal for the Western shareholders and re-establish their own influence. [23] The third Arab-Israeli war of 1967 was preceded by a similar period of rising struggle against British rule in Aden;

the struggle against the Iman of Yemen represented a potential threat to the Saudi-Arabian monarchy; and the Syrian government was involved in a dispute with the US dominated Iraq Petroleum Company. In the aftermath of the Israeli victory, the Western presence in the area was considerably strengthened. As the Economist out it at the time: “It is not only Israel’s chestnuts which have been drawn out of the fire; it is those of Britain and America as well ...” [24] In recent years, the American government has been following a policy of guarding its interests in the Middle East by massively arming the most reactionary regimes. Israeli power on the Mediterranean coast has been matched by a massive military build-up in Iran (which now sends more than 2000 million dollars a year on arms) and a growing sale of arms to Saudi Arabia and the small states on the Persian Gulf. In this way, the US aim to have sufficient forces at its disposal to prevent the massively rich oil reserves in the Arabian peninsular – currently under the control of US oil companies – falling under the influence of the larger and more populous Arab states such as Iraq or Egypt, which might use some of the wealth for Arab ends. So for instance, when Iran agreed earlier this year t spend 2000 million dollars on the most modern US armaments, the US State Department observed that the deal would help reinforce “a point of stability” in the Gulf area. [25] The Shah of Iran has said quite openly that “he would not tolerate a radical or subversive presence in the Gulf”. [26] What stability means for the mass of the population in the Middle East is an accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few rulers, while the population of countries like Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan live in abject poverty. The Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia recently complained that for his country oil revenues which are expected to rise to 10,000 million dollars a year, “would constitute a serious problem”. [27] The arming of Israel and Iran is designed to ensure that this “problem” is not solved by a movement aiming to overthrow the reactionary monarchies and to use the oil to develop the whole Middle East for the benefit of the mass of the Arab population. The editor of the Israeli daily paper Ha’aretz summed up Israel’s role in all this quite succinctly in 1951: “Israel has been given a role not unlike a watchdog. One need not fear that it will exercise an aggressive policy towards the Arab states if this will contradict the interests of the USA and Britain. But should the West prefer for one reason or another to close its eyes one can rely on Israel to punish severely those of the neighbouring states whose lack of manners towards the West has exceeded the proper limits.” [28] The support of Israel for imperialism is not an accidental feature of the state, that could be overcome merely with a change of government. It follows necessarily from the attempt to establish an exclusively Jewish state in an area previously inhabited by non-Jews. To defend the settler state from the original inhabitants, an alliance with the imperialist exploiters of the Middle East has been, and remains, essential. There can be no question of socialists supporting Israel. There is no justification for saying a plague on both your houses. In face of Zionism and its paymaster, socialists must give unconditional, if critical support to the Arabs. Israel, the artificial creation of Zionism, has to be destroyed before the working masses of the Middle East, Muslims, Jews and Christians have a chance to live together in peace. The very existence of Israel is the denial of any peace. Top of the page Notes 1. A. Leon, The Jewish Question, p.30. 2. J.M.N. Jeffries, Palestine, The Reality, p.13. 3. Quoted by N. Israeli, Israel and Imperialism, IS 32. 4. Moed, published by the department of culture and education of the Histadrut, 1960, p.3. 5. M. Arakie, The Broken Sword of Justice, p.17. 6. Y. Bauer, in New Outlook, Tel Aviv, September 1966. 7. Arakie, op. cit., p.25. 8. New Politics, vol.6 no.1, p.16. 9. J. and D. Kimche , Both Sides of the Hill, p.53. 10. Arakie, op. cit., p.70. 11. For an account of the joint manoeuvrings of Abdullah and the Zionists see J.

For an account of the joint manoeuvrings of Abdullah and the Zionists see J. and D. Kimche, op cit. 12. Hal Draper in the New International, Winter 1957. 13. Ha’aretz, 7 January 1954. 14. Don Peretz, Israel and the Arab Refugees, p.233. 15. Economist Intelligence Unit, Quarterly Report, Israel, 1973 No.4. 16. Report of Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, distributed in August 1973. 17. A. Dershowitz, in I. Howe and Chersham (ed), Israel, the Arabs, and the Middle East, New York 1972, p.268. 18. Wage figures for Arabs given in Financial Times, 7 May 1973. 19. Guardian, 18 August 1971. 20. Journal of Economic Literature, December 1969. Quoted in H. Hanegbi, Machover and A. Orr, The Class Nature of Israeli Society, (published by Pluto Press, London). 21. Le Monde, 2 July 1969. 22. Figures from N. Halevi and R. Klinov-Malul, The Economic Development of Israel, quoted in N. Hangebi et al., op. cit. 23. The preceding two paragraphs are based on Theses submitted for discussion by the Israeli Socialist Organisation in August 1966, published as The Palestine Problem, Israel and Imperialism, New England Free Press, Boston. 24. The Economist, 10 June 1967. 25. Middle East Economic Digest, 3 March 1973. 26. Economist, 7 July 1973. 27. Middle East Economic Digest, 19 January 1973. 28. Quoted in H. Hanegbi et al., op. cit. Top of the page Last updated on 19.10.2006

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Max Shachtman and His Left (Spring 1995) From Revolutionary History, Vol. 5 No. 3, Spring 1995, pp. 209–213. Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website. Marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Peter Drucker Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist’s Odyssey Through the ‘American Century’ Humanities Press, New Jersey 1994, pp. 346 THE NEWS today is that Joe Slovo is dead. Given the state of his health, this is not surprising. What is surprising is that the current General Secretary of the South African Communist Party and the ex-Chief of Staff of the ANC’s armed wing should receive such gushing obituaries from all sides of the South African press. The most knuckle-abraded hairy back is apparently grief-stricken at the death of this sweet-natured, nay saintly, old Stalinist hack. Of course, one does not unnecessarily speak ill of the dead. At the same time, it is not necessary to suppress one’s criticisms because one’s political foes have the good grace to shuffle off this mortal coil before they can add to their crimes. These thoughts are occasioned by reading Peter Drucker’s book on Max Shachtman. First, it is necessary to say that Drucker is a member of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (that is the lot we used to blow raspberries at and call ‘Pabloite’; nowadays we cannot be bothered with them at all, and call them ‘Mandelistas’), and one would not expect such a partisan to take as his subject a man who came to the conclusion that the Fourth International was a farce, and that its leading cadres were actually beyond a joke. Despite this, Shachtman did make some seriously funny remarks about them. Here, for those unfamiliar with his distinctive style, is an example; his comments about Michel Pablo’s report of 10 years of the Fourth International at its Second World Congress in 1948: ‘The only claim to distinction the report could make is that it was one of the most lamentable performances in the history of the movement. For carefully scraped-out emptiness, it remained unexcelled by any of its rivals at other sessions. ‘To be sure, the reporter took care to refer to the reactionary character of the Stalinist and reformist parties; he noted with pride that the centrist organisations had not become mass movements, whereas the Fourth International, in the face of great difficulties, had not disappeared; he did not forget to dwell loudly on his unshattered faith in the working class, his confidence in Socialism, and his conviction that the Fourth International would overcome all obstacles — including, presumably, such reports as he was delivering. ‘It is debatable if the speech, sodden with cheerless commonplaces, would have been appropriate even at some anniversary celebration in a mountain village. Its suitability as a report of the Executive Committee to a congress was not debatable. Consequently, it was not debated — not at all, not by anyone, and not for a single moment ...’ This may give something of the flavour of Shachtman doing what came naturally, and what he was good at. In his debates and polemics, Shachtman took no prisoners. His enemies, one might even say victims, were pinned to the floor, and had the tops of the heads removed, the better to indicate the total absence of grey matter. At his best, he really took some beating. In the pre-war Trotskyist movement, he was, after Trotsky, probably the outstanding personality. Certainly, Trotsky thought highly of him, and at the height of the faction fight in the US Trotskyist movement in 1940, he made every effort to retain Shachtman, and even after the movement split, he kept him on as his literary executor. His magazine, the New International, was certainly the best of all the Trotskyist theoretical magazines, and is still well worth reading. As a debater, Shachtman was in the top rank, and like all good debaters, he was well prepared to the point where he was primed to produce a seemingly off-the-cuff bon mot of great appositeness and brilliance. His debate in March 1950 with Earl Browder, the ex-General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USA, is a case in point. Although expelled from the CPUSA, Browder still defended Stalinism and the Soviet Union. When it came to the final rebuttal, Shachtman said: ‘Suppose Browder’s Stalino-Socialists were successful in establishing their Socialism in this country ... who would be the first to go? Who would be the first to get the GPU bullet in the base of his skull? Who would be the first to be denounced in the obituary articles as a counter-revolutionary mad dog, a viper, a restorationist, a wrecker ...? ‘Rajk was the General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, and was shot, hanged or garrotted. Kostov was the General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party. And when I thought of them, I thought of the former Secretary of the American Communist Party, and I said to myself: There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse.’ At this point, Shachtman turned dramatically and pointed at the shaken and ashen-faced Browder. One almost, but not quite, feels sorry for Browder.

One almost, but not quite, feels sorry for Browder. The only man who could hold a candle to Shachtman in the US movement was James P. Cannon (this is not strictly accurate, as C.L.R. James was also a member of the Socialist Workers Party after 1938, and he was certainly Shachtman’s intellectual equal, although he did not dispute with him until much later). Indeed, throughout their troubled relationship, Cannon and Shachtman often held, or hurled, candles, clubs and brickbats at one another. Cannon was no theoretician, even if he did give the impression that a native worker, such as himself, embodied theory in a special proletarian sixth sense. He was, however, a good organiser, with a wide experience of the working class movement and a good agitational style both in speech and the written word, if prone to fits of depression, which caused him to take unsanctioned leave of absence to do some in-depth research into bottles of whiskey. Shachtman, on the other hand, took to theory and theorising like a duck to water. He spoke several languages, and was genuinely interested in the international struggle. Cannon’s dream of internationalism, one felt, would have been satisfied by a very big congress of the Communist International in which he won all the votes. Together, though, the Cannon-Shachtman alliance was a formidable combination, and whenever it was operating, the SWP did reasonably well. Reasonably well is, of course, a relative term; the only time that they made a small breakthrough past the thousand member barrier, naturally enough, they had a split. The 1940 split is the one that Cannon celebrated in his abysmal volume The Struggle for a Proletarian Party (incidentally, one of the better articles in it is James Burnham’s Science and Style, which, if you can bring yourself to forgive his grievous failure to believe in dialectics and his subsequent escapades, is quite refreshing after all that internal bulletin-type prose). With the benefit of 20–20 hindsight, a split on whether or not to support the Russian drive for the Karelian Isthmus seems pretty footling, particularly in the light of how recent events have proved all those years of self-indulgent prattling on the class nature of Russia to be as useful as origami or macramé. Shachtman took about 500 with him, mainly the youth and intellectuals, so having virtually no workers, he naturally called it the Workers Party. The theory of bureaucratic collectivism, which became Shachtman’s political compass, and which eventually led him so far from home, was developed at about this time by Joe Carter, a long time adherent of Shachtman in the New York SWP. C.L.R. James, who was not above the odd sly dig on occasion, characterised the theory as ‘Carter’s little liver pill’. In the beginning, Shachtman took the view that bureaucratic collectivism was more progressive than monopoly capitalism. As the years wore on, he changed his mind on this one, and who is to blame him for that? However, when he came to reprint this article in his collection The Bureaucratic Revolution, he edited this same text to suggest that he had always been of the view that Russia was the absolute pits. For that he was condemned by Tony Cliff, a man who knows a thing or two about text tampering (as the careful reader of the first and second editions of his Rosa Luxemburg will be able to attest). Whatever the sociological insights the theory of bureaucratic collectivism may have given, it was something of a poisoned chalice for Shachtman and his co-thinkers. The brave slogan ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism’ eventually gave way to Washington before Moscow at all times, and International Socialism nowhere. In the bitter dregs of his days, he ended up supporting the viciously right wing Democratic Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, a cold warrior of the nuclear persuasion. It was a long day’s journey into night: from opposing Walter Reuther in the UAW to supporting him; from principled opposition to Social Democracy to complete assimilation into its bosom; from unremitting struggle against the labour fakirs to collaboration with George Meany and Jay Lovestone. And so on to solidarity with the swine who mounted the Bay of Pigs invasion. The anti-Vietnam War movement found Shachtman on the other side, the only man who was able to see a nascent bureaucratic collectivist in the underfed form of a chap in a lampshade hat and a pair of pyjamas. Max Shachtman was larger than life, he was funny, he was witty, he was very intelligent, and, if he took the trouble, he could write exceptionally well and persuasively. He was boisterous and scandalous, and held court amongst his admiring followers. For hundreds of young people, he was the guru, the man who gave intellectual coherence to their lives, and enlisted them into his causes. It is part of the tragedy of his life that as his causes changed, his followers gradually fell away, and virtually nothing was left except the cold comfort of the labour fakirs, the machine politicians, and the sclerotic charms of the Socialist Party. Peter Drucker details all of the main events in Shachtman’s life, and, as I have indicated earlier, he seems to me to be overly concerned to justify the various twists and turns and the final betrayal. All I can say is that Max Shachtman at the height of his powers would have reduced his later, much diminished self to tatters, and we all would have felt the better for it. Top of the page Last updated on 9 May 2021

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins TUC leaders back Labour – at our expense (September 1976) From Workers News, no.11, September 1976. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. IT really is slightly ironic that the self styled, “Right to Work bootboys” who marched to Brighton to gain a little publicity for their cause should in fact provide a disproportionate amount of publicity for the TUC. This, unfortunately, was not from the power of their argument but because the TUC itself was such a foregone conclusion. Its debates were so prearranged that it was difficult to find any excitement, apart from the spectacle of ageing trade union leaders being hotly pursued up Brighton side-streets by orange-jerkined marchers. In a sense the Brighton Congress has been beside the point. Almost every union, including the Seamen, is committed to the social contract. The essential debate which did not take place is the one about what will follow the current TUC-Government agreement. The ominous phrase, “an orderly return to collective bargaining”, much on the tongues of Messrs Jack Jones and David Basnett, is no doubt an attempt to administer the same bitter medicine in a different coloured bottle. Mr Jones, rather after the style of a Roman Emperor giving the thumbs up sign to a defeated gladiator, suggests that – assuming inflation down to single figures by August – he would favour increases up to 10 per cent. The question that arises from a consideration of this latest piece of kite-flying, is: can Jones work the oracle for the third year running? The signs are that, this time he may have over-stretched himself. Mr Joe Gormley, responded angrily, indicating that the miners would not thank Mr Jones for more of this sage leadership. This clearly reflects the fact that Mr Gormley was only just able to fend off a call for the £100 a week miner at his own union’s conference this year. He obviously does not fancy his chances of getting away with the same thing next year. Of equal significance have been the disputes at British Leyland. Despite the horror stories, in the (press and management handouts, that Leyland will fall flat on its face unless the workers forego all strikes, the toolmakers and electricians have been on strike for a week for increased payments. Perhaps more significant is the action of the Cowley management, in attempting to remove credentials from four shop stewards. With all the resources of the press, who are always willing to bear the latest witch-hunting comment from Reg Parsons, the Cowley Senior Steward, the management have yet to turn the workers against their militant representatives. It is not unreasonable to suggest that Cowley workers are aware that a strong shop floor organisation will soon be needed. Yet another straw in the wing is the Seamen’s strike call. Although the actual case for the NUS is an argument within the context of the social contract, the strike majority vote would almost certainly not have been obtained a few months ago. If, as seems likely, the seamen do strike, then there is very little that the government or the TUC can do to force them back without at least some concessions. If that occurs then the door will be open for, others to follow suit. A victory for the seamen, no matter how hedged about with `special circumstances’ will encourage other workers to fight for what they can gain. In particular in a number of unions where there is only a small majority for the social contract, such a breakthrough could well throw the balance the other way. Of particular importance here is the AUEW, already in difficulty over the arbitrary application of the contract, and bedevilled by differential problems. It is against this background that the 1976 TUC should be viewed. The debates will take place, the overwhelming victories for the General Council will be counted, but the underlying trend in the real movement will not be reversed. The Government and the TUC will be in deep trouble; for every half successful policy that eventually fails, they must work all the harder to construct another. A task that will be made even more difficult by their declining credibility. The prospectus the TUC put forward early this year was that, with the social contract, there would be a decline in unemployment, a boost to the economy and a cut in the cost of living. Unemployment is now over 1½ million and rising, The economy is not recovering and the cost of living shows little sign of moderating. They would seem to have sold us a pig in a poke. The TUC has, more than ever before, put its trust in a Labour Government. That their trust was misplaced is of less interest than that we are paying the price. Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins James Higgins Dead Scrolls? (Spring 1961) James Higgins, Dead Scrolls?, International Socialism (1st series), No.4, Spring 1961. Transcribed by Mike Pearn. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. To the Finland Station Edmund Wilson. Fontana. 1960. 7s6d Mr Wilson is a man of many parts who has in the course of his literary career written plain journalism, literary criticism, a memorable volume of short stories and a commentary on the dead sea scrolls for which last task he is reported to have learned Hebrew. This at least shows a consistent effort of scholarship even if most authorities on the scrolls disagree with him. In 1940 Mr Wilson published his essay into the territory of socialist history, To the Finland Station, which Fontana Books have now republished as a paper-back at the not too modest price of seven and sixpence. He approaches his task in a slightly oblique literary manner by way of Vico and Michelet and their attempts to systematize the study of human history, and proceeds through the decay of French Socio-literary criticism by way of Renan, Taine and Anatole France at each stage explaining the economic and political climate giving rise to them. Then back to Babeuf with a fine chapter on the Conspiracy of Equals and the degeneration of the French Revolution. From here it is only a short trip to the meat of the book: a discussion of their work and theories of Engels and Marx. The criticism in this section has frequently been done more thoroughly and capably but never, I am sure, more entertainingly. Mr Wilson Considers the Dialectic to be a myth and that Marx in his adherence to the principles of thesis, antithesis and synthesis was looking for a substitute for the mystical trinity discarded in his youth. That this criticism can be made of many of the latter day saints of Stalinism is clearly true, but to suggest as Wilson does, that Marx’s theory of economic motivation is sound without giving due regard to the method by which he explained this theory is not playing the game. There are further examples of this form of reasoning and despite the cogency of his argument no prizes will be given to readers of IS who conclusively answer Mr Wilson to their own satisfaction. Lenin and Trotsky are also discussed as the title implies, the former as the Great Headmaster and the Latter as the Young Eagle. The headmaster rather more sympathetically than the eagle, presumably on the principle that its better to have a dead headmaster embalmed in the Kremlin than a live eagle close by in Mexico. Despite this Mr Wilson is obviously a ‘good’ intellectual whose sympathies are on the side of the angels and his book, written in a style unlike most of its kind, does not read as if translated direct from the Russian. It should be read by all those interested in social and historical criticism. Top of the page Last updated on 19.10.2006

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins More Years for the Locust The Origins of the SWP Cartoons by Phil Evans (1997) Originally published by IS Group, London, 1997. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. (Transcriber’s note) Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. This book is dedicated to the memory of Harry Wicks (1905 – 1989) revolutionary communist and a real working class hero Preface by Roger Protz Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Appendix 1 [Origins of IS] Appendix 2 [Cliff’s Rosa Luxemburg] Appendix 3 Notes on Democratic Centralism (by T Cliff 20/6/68) We Are Not Peasants: a note – and proposals – on IS organisation (Hull IS, 10/10/1968 – written by Michael Kidron) Appendix 4 Letter to IS Branches from National Secretary (10th April 1974) Duplicated letter to all IS Branches dated as postmark (circa 12th April 1974) Extracts from A Funny Way to Go by Roger Protz Appendix 5 The Way Ahead for IS by Tony Cliff (IS Internal Bulletin, May 1974) Who Is Our Audience by Ruth Nelson (IS Internal Bulletin, June 1974) Appendix 6 The Platform of the IS Opposition A Reply to Comrade Duncan Hallas by the IS Opposition Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Is Almond a Nut? (Spring 1967) From International Socialism (1st series), No.28, Spring 1967, p.30. Transcribed by Mike Pearn. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. G.A. Almond The Appeals of Communism Princeton/OUP, 22s 6d The Carnegie Corporation of New York is presumably some sort of charitable foundation. If not, without even trying it has got the NAB knocked into a cocked hat. For four years it provided the funds that enabled Professor Almond and his three assistants to ponder over and provide their answers to the questions: Why do people join the Communist Party? What happens after they join? Why do they leave?! The result is a fun riot from its soft front cover clear through its soggy pages to its soft conclusions. In part one they construct a picture of The Communist Militant. The novelty of their method is breath-taking in its intellectual audacity. Using what they describe as qualitative and quantitative analysis they took every page of Left Wing Communism and every other page of What is to be Done? and the History of the CPSU(B), checking their conclusions by comparison by examination of Foundations of Leninism and State and Revolution. This it seems to me goes one better than the Seventh Day Adventists who have to read every word of every book of the Bible to prove something daft. But if the Carnegie Foundation would like to expend a few extra shillings in keeping me in the academic style to which I would like to become accustomed I am prepared to sleep on the Collected Works of Lenin and get my searching conclusions by osmosis. Professor Almond and his team did not leave their research at the level of half-baked exegesis. One of the assistants (Herbert E. Krugman, author of The Interplay of Social and Psychological Factors in Political Deviance, and clearly not a man to be trifled with) earned his Carnegie handout by developing the interviewing schedules. The sociological and psychological interview guides are given in Appendix 2. Bedwetting, infant masturbation, pre-, post-, and extra-marital sex all feature in the guide. As one who always reads the back page first to see if there is a happy ending these items hit my eye as soon as I opened the book. My disappointment can be imagined when it turned out that there were no Kinsey-type tables by which I could measure my performance with those of the interviewees. There are however several case histories from all over Europe and America. Under the heading Neurotic Susceptibility they all seem for good reasons to have hated or despised their parents. The conclusion from all this is apparently that “the party makes it possible to dignify and ennoble these (anti-parent) hostile impulses ... and to direct them on other and safer targets ...” Now, big though my father is, I have never considered him to be in the same class for violence as a capitalist state (not even a small one) and for a soft option I will take on my old Dad any day. The book is full of this sort of material and for those ex-Communists like myself with a formidable record of bed-wetting, infant onanism and kinky ideas about sex this is a must. Just drop me a line and I’ll lend it to you. Top of the page Last updated on 3.1.2008

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Transport Art for BR’s sake (January 1976) From the Spectator, 24 January 1976, p.17. Published here with kind permission of the Spectator. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The transport campaign is heating up very nicely. Mr Crosland has resurrected the term “codswallop”, Mr Sid Weighell has called Mr Crosland a “bloody liar”, railway workers have converged on the House of Commons protesting against any further cuts and that formidable publicist Mr William Camp is now orchestrating the campaign. Let me say right away that I am with Mr Camp all the way. Just recently my undying support was confirmed as I left our local station, a grimy pile on the Euston-Watford suburban line, to be handed a leaflet. Having nothing to read I took one. Imagine my horror to discover the startling intelligence that as from January 1976 the trains on our line would run only half as frequently with half the number of carriages. So incensed was I that I almost rushed back into the station to assault the ticket clerk, a morose fellow, whose vocabulary completely omits the words “please” and “thank you”. I have had it in for him for some time. Second and wiser thoughts prevailed; he is squat but muscular and protected by an iron grille. Let us look, I thought, into the matter of alternative transport. Cars I dismissed immediately. To my mind they are despicable heaps of rust-infected danger, impossible to park in central London and requiring more care than a whole raft of relations. Such transport is vulgar, anti-social and quite beyond my means. Trains, a great love ever since my infant yearnings for footplate glory, are the most civilised means of transport but they are rapidly pricing themselves out of the market. Currently to travel the seven stops in to Euston I am required to pay 62p, the equivalent of 12s 6d in real money. One of the great certainties of my life is that in short order it will be even more expensive. How long, I wonder, before the British Rail slogan is: “A pound for the round trip”? Fortunately there is a bus route at the end of our road that runs by a circuitous route to London Bridge, stopping on its way in the Grays Inn Road hard by the Spectator Offices in Doughty Street. With a certain low cunning I ascertained that those travelling between 9.30am and 4pm could go as far as they liked for 16p. Armed with this information, warmed by thoughts of staggering economies and the chagrin of Richard Marsh when he discovered my ruse, I joined the bus queue a little after 9.30 am. My fellow travellers seemed to be entirely made up of old age pensioners, or senior citizens as the current cloying usage would have them. The day was decidedly brisk and as we waited, watching a steady procession of buses going in the opposite direction, I began to fear for the lives of the more bronchitic oldsters. Half an hour later a bus hove into sight, loaded to the gunwales with senescent passengers; although half a dozen got off nobody was permitted to board. A few minutes later another bus sailed past, en route, no doubt, to the garage, hot tea and bacon butties. Forty minutes of total waiting time and a bus arrived purporting to be going to London Bridge. The conductor, a jolly fellow, jokingly called out to his prospective passengers: “Cash customers only”. This, I discovered, was a slighting reference to the fact that the senior citizen can obtain a free bus pass. It was an ill-advised sally, giving rise to coarse words and cries of “You’ll be old yourself one day”. Indeed, if age and the numbing cold had not taken their toll, the lad was in danger of being lynched. At the time I would have helped tie the noose. Having mounted the bus, purchased my 16p ticket and exchanged a little light conversation with the charming old person sharing my seat, I settled down to enjoy the ride. Two stops later the bus crew alighted to be replaced by another who immediately changed the destination to Baker Street. The thought of another long draughty wait at Baker Street was too much to bear. I abused the blameless conductor, alighted and caught the train, 16p worse off and at least ten years older. Another experience like that and I too would qualify for a free bus pass. There for a time it rested. Within a week my temperature was down to normal and the dog had stopped hiding in the coal bunker. Then I purchased my copy of the Evening Standard and everything was set at odds again. On the front page, under the banner headline: “Big Chance London Should Grab”, was an article by Mr Anthony Sampson on our London underground. Its burden, lengthily and breathlessly extended to page 3, was that London stations are pretty slummy places, ill-kept and with outdated decor. The oil deficit, pollution and the well-being of the populace would all be improved if the stations were brightened up, thus attracting the customers off the roads and into the subway. In Mexico City, we were told, “the platforms are lined with reproductions of Mayan and Aztec sculptures”; various “daring colour schemes” decorate the stations of the Mexican metro. The design of the Fleet and Victoria lines was slightingly compared to the dazzling artistic glories of Paris, Milan and Munich and other daring foreign cities. Well, it is a point of view, but someone might tell the Standard that we catch trains not for cultural sustenance but to get somewhere. No amount of artistic trimming can compensate for high fares, infrequent trains and bone-crushing overcrowding. Fond though I am of the notion of public art for the masses it would please me not at all to know that some latter-day Diego Rivera was painting a tasteful mural at Tottenham Court Road station if I cannot afford to get there.

Indeed, reverting to suburban stations, I can testify to the rugged charms of decaying railway buildings. There was one such station on the North London Line called Kentish Town West. It was quite the grottiest station I ever experienced, Paint peeled from its rotting, Victorian frescoes and woodwork. The platform, made of tar-dressed baulks of timber, was uneven and sadly in need of prompt remedial action. Nevertheless British Rail had given it a second class award for station tidiness and appearance. This may have been an uncharacteristic British Rail policy to encourage the staff. Otherwise I dread to think what a third class station looked like. For all that, trains used to stop there and carried passengers away with reasonable speed from Prince of Wales Road, in itself a public service of no mean value. And then, several years ago, Kentish Town West burned down. Having seen the Sampson piece I now have the sneaking suspicion that some early adherent of the Sampson school, his aesthetic sensibilities offended beyond bearing at its extreme squalor, put it to the torch. My heart, and puny efforts, are at the service of Messrs Camp, Weighell and Buckton. When the combined brains of British Rail and London Transport cannot turn the trick then art will not suffice. I know that I am angry, frustrated and increasingly game for mayhem with each day that passes. Short of banning all cars (what a splendid thought) and making the trains run twice as often with double the carriages all for nothing, I have no immediate solution. In the meanwhile I have this small, modest economy wheeze. I shall continue to take the train and stop taking the Evening Standard. Laugh that one off, Sir Max. Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Breakthrough for the Trots? (November 1977) From the Spectator, 12 November 1977. Published here with kind permission of the Spectator. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The revolutionary Left in Britain, or elsewhere for that matter, is like other religions – secular or spiritual – supremely logical in its development once the basic assumptions have been accepted. Even so, it is not always easy to plot its course because that so often depends upon rather subjective exegetics on the holy texts. Nevertheless, once these reservations have been made, it is possible for those with that sort of mind to find some post facto rationality in what might otherwise seem to be a perverse shift of direction, even a departure from principle. Without such reservations one might be forced to the conclusion that the pious are at best demented or at worst more than a touch dishonest. So it is with the Socialist Workers’ Party, formerly the International Socialists. The SWP – following their spectacular piece of street theatre at Lewisham – have been gratified at the attention they have received from the press. If ambition were to be measured in column inches then the SWP has certainly attained one of its objectives, which is to outstrip the Communist Party. It was not always this way. In one or other of its several manifestations the SWP has been in existence for nearly thirty years; first as a faction within the official Trotskyist movement, later as a very small entryist group in the Labour Party, and finally, and most recently, as a more and more stridently self-proclaimed alternative to all other socialist organisations. For the first sixteen odd years of its existence the SWP remained small (a hundred or less), dependent for survival on its parasitic role within the Labour Party. It had few prospects and little influence outside the overheated atmosphere of the Young Socialists. Then, in 1968, two unconnected events led to a certain take-off; first, and most significant, the May 1968 disturbances in France, and secondly the dockers’ march in support of Enoch Powell’s views on immigration. Contradictory though these two happenings may be, and at the time they both seemed to have a certain elemental character, they had the effect of galvanising a section of the student body in our universities. Such organisations as the Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation were formed. The International Marxist Group developed a theory of the universities as “red bases” from which the revolution would spread to the working class. The SWP was less euphoric about the revolutionary catalyst within the dreaming spires. It was, however, gaining useful, intelligent and idealistic recruits who could be directed to more fruitful fields of endeavour. The student cadre was “turned toward the class”, a euphemism for propaganda outside factories and in a few cases directing graduates to factory jobs, where they could “struggle for leadership”. Although, at first sight it might seem an odd choice to thrust some pass degree sociology student into the maelstrom of Linwood, in many cases it worked. Ex-students did attain the eminence of shop stewards and, fortunately for them, the Tory government was elected on a union-bashing platform. The history of the escalating industrial strife that marked the Heath administration has been well documented, but less well noted was the growth in membership of the SWP during that period. That growth was, for the first time, at least half composed of industrial workers and white collar workers. By the time that the Tories were brought down by the miners the SWP had 4,000 members, a good sprinkling of whom occupied positions of some influence in trade union bodies. For the SWP the perspective was one of ever-increasing industrial militancy, accompanied by massive growth in their organisation. Unfortunately for them, the Labour government was returned to power in February 1971, and after a brief period, in which wage rates were let rip, the Jack Jones-inspired social contract held sway. The life went out of wages militancy and the comrades were left with an infant National Rank and File movement, which they paid for and sustained, without the industrial suite to breathe life into it. A new tactic was required, and as unemployment grew, the Rank and File movement was transformed, overnight, into the Right to Work campaign. In a rather slavish imitation of the pre-war hunger marches, contingents of young enthusiasts were conducted on foot from Manchester to London and then from London to Brighton. At the culmination of the Manchester march there was the fracas with the police at Hendon. The party was on the streets and engaging the agents of the class enemy. For all the spectacular mayhem, though, the campaign did not attract more than a few recruits. It was the rise of the National Front and the adoption of anti-fascist activity, that gave the SWP its chance for publicity and recruitment. The slogan was to change the colour of the SWP; it had to be darkened by the infusion of coloured youth and workers. It was successful, at least in this objective. The NF, a disparate collection of ex-Nazis and apoplectic racialists, cannot mobilise a force on the streets of any significant size, whereas the SWP, if it pulls out the stops, can mobilise two, three or even more times their number. Punch-up politics are not without some pay-off for those who engage in them. SWP membership increased – as did that of the NF. As part of “going public”, by-elections were fought and their ageing boy orator Paul Foot was trotted around the country on a well-organised speaking tours. It was all very exciting, but it was really marking time until the next breakthrough into the “real” working class. That is the stage that seems to have arrived. The power workers have takers unofficial action. The miners are intent upon a large increase untrammelled by productivity strings. The SWP calculation is that a rerun of 1973-74 is the order of the day. The question that remains is: will the recent recruitment constitute as firm a base as that of 1968? There will undoubtedly be some attrition of these who joined on a wave of anti-fascist euphoria and can find no place in an industrially oriented strategy. Again, it is a big question whether they now have sufficient numbers to maintain a certain public political presence while putting the main emphasis on industrial struggle. That is certainly their intention: a broad anti-fascist body is in process of formation which will include some forty Labour MPs among its sponsors. At the same time a reconvened National Rank and File conference will take place for shop stewards and trade union militants in December. Whatever their ability to balance the conflicting demands of agitation, the justification will be found in some text from the Leninist canon and the raison-d’etre in industrial militancy. Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Are Journalists Often Red? (May 1976) From the Spectator, 8 May 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. Buxton is a rather sad little town. It retains features of its former glory, but greyer and slightly frayed around the edges – a place where the pension queue is longer than the one for child allowances. It was to Buxton that the National Union of Journalists came for their Annual Delegate Meeting. A few years ago that might well have been appropriate – the “never was” visiting the “never will be again”. But time, and the NUJ have changed. With what some consider unseemly haste the NUJ is showing signs of becoming a trade union in the accepted sense of the word. The usual reason given for the transformation is that there has been an incursion of Trotskyists. The reds, it is suggested, have come out from under the beds, are ejecting the moderate occupants and playing havoc with the bedclothes in the process. It may come as a disappointment to some that it is not like that at all. There are, of course, some Trotskyists in NUJ, as there are in a number of white collar unions. In the post-1968 student vanguard there were some who, having graduated, turned to journalism in the same way as all manner of moderate and non-political graduates did. Journalism, along with teaching, the civil service and other liberal professions, took its due proportion. But, to get the thing into perspective, the NUJ proportion, if vocal, is very small. Out of 300 delegates assembled at Buxton, I should be very surprised if snore than twenty-five were Trotskyists of any recognisable affiliation. The mistake that many of our distinguished commentators make is assume that any increase in trade union militancy is a result of left-wing activity and victory for their side. Such a view does them altogether too much honour and leaves out of account the simple fact that the finest agitator in the world is completely impotent if there is no clear and present grievance to agitate around. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the anguished theme of press freedom. The story, designed like the fat boy in Dickens “to make yer flesh creep”, goes something like this: Mr Foot introduced the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act; by accident this raised the question of the closed shop in journalism. Coincidentally the left were in process of taking over the NUJ. In the final scene the reds would be censoring the news and filling the space left with class war propaganda. Now while I do know one or two reds who view such a situation with considerable relish, I know none who see it as any kind of possibility. For journalists, as for boilermakers, printers and a host of others, the closed shop is a tactic useful only in so far as it maximises their bargaining strength. As to the left taking over the union, a brief glance at the election results for the NUJ Industrial Councils will indicate that the left did badly. They did even worse in the recent elections to the National Executive. At Buxton a left-wing attempt to suspend any further implementation of new printing technology was soundly rejected. What did happen at the meeting was that the campaign for the closed shop received an added impetus. But that has very little to do with revolutionary influence. In Fleet Street there is a degree of over-manning, although this is rather overplayed, and rewards are comparatively high. In provincial newspaper, magazine and book publishing, staffing levels are low and the salaries are somewhat less than average industrial earnings. It is, perhaps, partly for these reasons that magazines and provincial newspapers are in general a great deal more profitable than national dailies. Of late this situation has given rise to a number of wage disputes, sometimes breaking out into full-scale strikes. Unfortunately for the NUJ members involved, even if a majority join the strike, a few strike-breakers, the editor and a director or so can usually bring out some kind of newspaper. It was this realisation, rather than the machinations of sinister agitators, that built up pressure for a drive to the closed slop. It is this sort of spirit that now informs the deliberations of NUJ meetings. In the great, and largely manufactured, panic at the threat to editorial freedom there have been a few notable misunderstandings. A prime example of this is the notorious “Barnsley case”. What was in fact a ludicrously small storm in a minuscule teacup has become a symbol to both sides in the controversy. The facts are that Barnsley NUJ has no reputation for militancy at all. In the past it was seldom active enough even to send a delegate to NUJ conferences. Until last December all the journalists in the town were members of the union, largely, one supposes, because the press card was a useful thing to have. Late in 1975 a check of the membership roll, not a long job as there were only thirty-five members, indicated that two of the number were over £25 in arrears. When this was called to their attention, the offending members noisily resigned and joined the Institute of Journalists. Somewhat incensed, the Barnsley NUJ wrote to local trade unions suggesting that only their members should be afforded press facilities by the local Labour movement. That letter is what caused all the furore, a quite unmerited response to a rather sordid little episode. For all this though, the Buxton ADM, despite tendentious reports of “Russian style ovations”, looked to me rather more like a normal trade union conference than any other such NUJ gatherings I have attended. Part of the credit for this must go to the extreme competence of the president, the formidable Miss Rosaline Kelly, but mostly it was because the issues raised were straight trade union questions. As at almost every other union conference, the left generally lost the vote, there were some silly decisions and some sensible ones, and the junketing was suitably lavish. It may be that there are those who view the idea of an effective NUJ with horror, but they are, no doubt, the same people who object to any effective trade unionism anywhere. What cannot be said, on the evidence of Buxton, is that the NUJ represents any threat to press freedom. Top of the page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins 1917: Lenin and the Working Class (Autumn 1967) From International Socialism (1st series), No.30, Autumn 1967, pp.16-20. Transcribed by Mike Pearn. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. “Theory, my friend is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.” Goethe (Quoted by Lenin, April 1917). The fiftieth anniversary of the October revolution is upon us and no doubt it will be celebrated in differing ways in different places. In the West we shall be treated to analyses of the fatal conjuncture of the Slavic mood and the evil genius of Lenin. Weighty, and even weightier tomes, will thud from the academic presses adding obscurity to ignorance. While in China the event may be celebrated by the explosion of yet another and larger bomb, inspired by the pure clean thought of the “great helmsman” and containing a lot of very dirty strontium 90. In Russia, the cradle of the revolution, we can expect to see bigger and better sputniks, some devastating weaponry and record-breaking crowds shuffling past the obscene mixture of skin, bone and formaldehyde that rests in the Lenin mausoleum. In all this trafficking in myths and inappropriate symbols, the real content of the revolution will be lost. For Lenin, as for any serious revolutionary, the real subject of 1917 was, and is, the Russian working class. In eight short months these workers move from Tsarist autocracy to the consummation of the Soviet power. Encapsulated in this process is the conclusive proof of the infinite possibilities for the working class. In this article I shall attempt to show how Lenin’s thought and development through 1917 closely followed and interacted with the development and capacities of the Russian workers. All this is in no way to suggest that Lenin proceeded by a kind of inspired opportunism. The bourgeois commentators who are unable to see a connection between Lenin, the enthusiastic participator in the pre-war factional struggles, and Lenin, the leader of the victorious Bolsheviks’ are reduced to analyses, in greater or lesser detail, of each episode without thought for the links. The execution of his brother Alexander in 1887 may have brought him into the movement against autocracy. The futility of Alexander’s death may or may not have turned him away from Narodnism and towards the notion of a disciplined revolutionary socialist party. This notion of the party leads inevitably to the struggles of 1903 and What is to be Done? The subsequent fight with the Menshevists, the Godseekers, the Otzovists etc. follows quite naturally from the need for theoretical clarity in such a revolutionary party. All this development has internal consistency and can be worked through as high points in the psychological development of one or two individuals if what is required is an instant gloss with the trappings of scholarship. But such an approach really answers nothing. It cannot answer the why of 1905 and 1917 because it leaves out of account the relationship of these struggles to the working class. The aim was the emancipation of the class and the agency the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. If this is not understood the result can be a degeneration into the petty-bourgeois ideology of Stalinism or the assumption of historical play acting, as in a number of Trotskyist groups, where, like characters in a Pirandello play, they dispute for the leading role of Lenin. To write polemics in the Lenin style is easy, to make a revolution requires talent of a much higher order. In the discussion that preceded 1917 perhaps none illustrates more clearly Lenin’s attitude to the class than his polemics on the question of the Imperialist war and the antics of the centrists. Martov in the bulletin of the Organising Committee of RSDLP (April 1916) had spoken of the need to maintain contact with the social patriots in the working class in the following vein: ... The cause of revolutionary Social Democracy would be in a sad, indeed hopeless plight, if those groups of workers who, in mental development, approach most closely to the “intelligentsia” and who are most highly skilled, fatally drifted away from it towards opportunism. To which Lenin replied: By means of the silly word “fatally” and a certain sleight of hand the fact is evaded that certain groups of workers have already drifted away to opportunism and to the imperialist bourgeois. And that is the very fact that the sophists of the OC (Organising Committee) want to evade. They confine themselves to the official optimism that Kautskyite Hilferding and the others now flaunt: the objective conditions guarantee the unity of the proletariat and the victory of the revolutionary trend! We forsooth are “optimists” with regard to the proletariat! But in reality all these Kautskyites – Hilferding, the OC supporters are optimists ... with regard to opportunism. That is the whole point. The proletariat is the child of capitalism – of world capitalism and not only European capitalism, or of imperialist capitalism. On a world scale, fifty years sooner or fifty years later ... the proletariat of course “will be” united, and the revolutionary Social Democracy will “inevitably” be victorious within it. But that is not the point Messrs Kautskyites. The point is that at the present time, in the imperialist countries of Europe, you are fawning on the opportunists, who are alien to the proletariat as a class ..., and unless the labour movement rids itself of them it will remain a bourgeois labour movement. By advocating unity with the opportunists .. you are , objectively, defending the enslavement of the workers by the imperialist bourgeoisie with the aid of its best agents in the Labour movement. [1] In this last paragraph there is none of the sentimental maundering that characterises many an intellectual’s attitude to the working class.

There is a clear differentiation between class interest and bourgeois tendencies within the labour movement. To see this vital difference is to go a long way to understanding Lenin’s success and Martov’s failure in the course of the revolution. Martov was, despite his intellectual realisation of revolutionary necessity, incapable of acting because of past friendly associations with his present opponents. This lesson is one that the present-day Communist Party has either forgotten or never learned. In their grotesque hunt for “unity of the Left” they are prepared for every rotten compromise which, particularly in the trade unions, makes them virtually indistinguishable from every other Labour faker. Before the revolution Lenin was living in Switzerland, where contrary to the myth of Lenin’s Russian exclusionism, he was an individual member of the Swiss Social Democratic party and worked assiduously for the Left of that organisation. The Swiss party was considered to be on the left of the Zimmerwald International but this and its own party programme adopted at the 1915 congress which called for “revolutionary mass action” were largely paper. In this situation Lenin produced a programme tailored to meet the needs of the Swiss problem but based on an intransigent internationalism. Its aim was to mobilise a campaign around the issue of the war, counterposing the overthrow of capitalism as the end of all war. He showed that the fact of Swiss neutrality was being imported into the internal affairs of labour and that while war profits mushroomed working-class standards diminished. He called for a heavy progressive taxation on wealth and property; and for large scale nationalisation together with a series of democratic demands: the emancipation of women, naturalisation of foreign workers – foreigners suffered specific economic disabilities in Switzerland – and the extension of the principle of the referendum to socialist objectives. It is of course true that such a programme would have received an affirmative response from most Social Democrats (at least from Kautsky leftwards); the significant difference is that Lenin insisted a programme is only a serious matter when it is put to the scrutiny of the working class. As a concomitant of the programme he called for mass leafleting and propaganda in the trade unions and the party, coupled with strikes, demonstrations and mass actions. Lenin, both before and after the revolution, attempted to test his theories in actual discussion with workers. In Krupskaya’s Memories of Lenin she shows one of his less successful attempts; unsuccessful but nevertheless significant. Lenin and Krupskaya were at a Swiss sanatorium for treatment for Krupskaya’s illness, she writes: Among the visitors to the “Milk” sanatorium was a soldier ... his lungs were not particularly strong, and he had been sent for treatment. He was quite a nice fellow. Vladimir Ilyich hovered about him like a cat after lard, tried several times to engage him in conversation about the predatory character of the war; the fellow would not contradict him but was clearly not interested. [2] In his Lecture on the 1905 Revolution Lenin develops this theme of the self-activity of the class and the tactics of the Social Democracy. He shows that under conditions of autocracy even a peaceful demonstration led by a Priest with simple demands for the easing of suffering, cannot succeed without going over to fight the autocracy. From humble petitions the people moved rapidly and inevitably to political strikes. Under the impetus of working-class action the peasants began to take over the large estates (2,000 estates burned and the produce distributed). The soldiers and sailors arrested many of their officers. In the first month of the 1905 revolution there were more strikers (440,0000 than in the previous ten years (430,000). “An eight hour day and arms” was the slogan of the Petrograd workers; it was these same workers who produced the “peculiar mass organisations” – the Soviets of Workers deputies. This development of the 1905 revolution led Lenin to say “The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic.” In this monumental upheaval Social Democracy developed from organisations numbered in hundreds to parties with tens of thousands of members. In Petrograd alone there were three Social Democratic papers with circulations ranging from 50,000 to 100,000. The limits set were the limits the workers themselves imposed. With the benefit of hindsight, Lenin was able to say the revolution of 1905 was “a bourgeois democratic revolution in its social content but a proletarian revolution in its methods of struggle.” [3] 1905 was the direct precursor of 1917. In 1905 the Tsarist regime suffered a blow to which it succumbed twelve years later. The Russian workers appeared on stage for the first time and immediately took the primary role with the peasantry following their lead. If many of the lessons of 1905 were only half way learned by some, and not at all by other, valuable experience had been gained by the workers and Social Democracy. The revolution of February 1917, when it actually broke, took most of the socialists by surprise (only a month before the revolution Lenin said “we of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution”). The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who formed the majority in the Soviet were unable to comprehend the dual power that the Soviet represented. The preconceptions created by generations of theorising blinded them to the new and complex reality. The autocracy had been smashed and, according to the blue-print, the era of capitalist democratic reform would be ushered in with the socialists acting as a loyal opposition. Socialism would only be on the order of the day when capitalism had fulfilled its classical role of developing the productive forces and creating a mass working class. Unfortunately reality was more complicated. The immediate problem of alleviating pressing misery was incapable of solution while the Provisional Government continued the war, but the soviet supported the Provisional Government. The solution of the agrarian problem was one of immense difficulty and without the arbitrariness of poor peasant seizure there was no clear cut distribution that would harmonise with the complicated class divisions on the land.

The solution of the agrarian problem was one of immense difficulty and without the arbitrariness of poor peasant seizure there was no clear cut distribution that would harmonise with the complicated class divisions on the land. The Provisional government refused to act and maintained the existing land tenure. At the same time the workers were in a state of turmoil, not immediately sure as to their objectives, but unconvinced that things must change and putting their trust in their own creation – the Soviet. In the first flush of the revolution they were prepared to take on trust the Mensheviks and SR leadership when they pointed to the “democratic regime” as the prime gain of the revolution and when they claimed that defence of the Provisional Government was defence of the revolution. But it was not only the Soviet majority that suffered from illusions; the Bolsheviks were, in the main, caught in the same trap. On 1 March the Executive Committee of the Soviet discussed the conditions for handing over power to the Provisional Government, and not a voice was raised against the Government despite the fact that there were 11 Bolsheviks on a Committee of 39 members. “In the Soviet the day after the Executive meeting, according to Shylapnikov himself, out of 400 deputies only 19 voted against the transfer of power to the bourgeoisie and this although there were already 40 in the Bolshevik faction.” [4] the Petrograd committee of the Bolsheviks announced that it would not oppose the power of the Provisional Government. With the return of Stalin and Kamenev to take over direction of the party in early March the line moved smartly to the right. In the Pravda of 15 March they said “... the Bolsheviks will decisively support the Provisional Government in so far as it fights reaction or counter-revolution... the Russian soldier must stand firm ly at his post answering bullet with bullet and shell with shell. Our slogan is not the meaningless ‘down with war.’ Our slogan is: pressure on the Provisional Government with the aim of compelling it ... to make an attempt to induce all the warring countries to open immediate negotiations... until then every man remains at his fighting post.” [5] for those who like to imagine that they see the degeneration of the revolution in direct line from Lenin’s policy it might be as well to examine the policies advocated by Lenin’s Bolshevik opponents in 1917, opponents who later took over the party not on the basis of Leninism but as a direct continuation of its opposite. The Pravda article of Stalin and Kamenev could well have been written at any time during Stalin’s “Peace” campaign; it reeks of opportunism, class collaboration and a complete ignorance of Marxism. In Switzerland Lenin was chafing at his inability to return to Russia and to influence events directly. His Letters from Afar although written on the basis of press reports contain brilliant insights into the character of the Provisional Government and its “social patriot” camp followers. Away from the actual struggle, his mind was still cast in some of the old categories, “The democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants,” but even then, at a time when the social democrats were handing over power to Milyukov and Kerensky, Lenin was calling for the arming of the people under the auspices of the soviet. The letters warned against an “epidemic of excitement,” leading to calls for unity with the Centre and right wing Social Democrats. In a letter to Kollontai on 17 March he says, “On no account with Kautsky. Definitely a more revolutionary programme and tactics.” for Lenin, 1914 had been the great watershed that divided the revolutionaries from the Kautskys of the Second International; the issue of the imperialist war had definitely sorted the reformist sheep from the revolutionary movement. More certainly than ever before he knew that the possibilities of the revolution could only be achieved by an uncompromising internationalism. The revolution was not the occasion for papering over differences but for new and more hopeful approaches to the working class. The Letters from Afar call on the workers to act with the rural wage labourers to forge a unity that would do more than rid the peasant of the feudal aristocracy and lead on to a social upheaval in the town and country. That Lenin still retained some of the limitations of the old programme is clear from his Farewell Letter to the Swiss Socialists in which he says: Socialism cannot triumph there (Russia) immediately and directly. But the peasant character of the country, the vast reserve of land in the hands of the nobility, may... give tremendous sweep to the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia and may make our revolution the prologue to the world socialist revolution. [6] Russia according to this formulation was merely the first incomplete break in international capitalism. The final solution to the problems in Russia would appear in the revolution in the West, particularly Germany. Whatever lack of precision there may be in this perspective for the revolution, he was quite clear that the attitude of the Bolsheviks in Petrograd was both wrong and unprincipled: On the 17th of March, through friends in Stockholm, he wrote a letter filled with alarm: “Our party would disgrace itself forever, kill itself politically, if it took part in such deceit (support for the Provisional Government’s war aims – JH) ...I would choose an immediate split with no matter who in our party, rather than surrender to social patriotism.” [7] Whatever had been Lenin’s attitude to the immediate limitations of the revolution and independent class activity, it underwent a rapid change on his return to Russia. He arrived on 3 April and next day he addressed a meeting of the Bolsheviks followed immediately by a delivery of the same address to the Mensheviks (April Theses). The theses, which shocked Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike, made a complete break with the old programme. All power to the soviets. No return to the Parliamentary Republic. Uncompromising opposition to the war. Abolition of the army, the police and the standing bureaucracy and its replacement by the armed people. Nationalisation of the land and the banks, the disposition of the land to be under the control of the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers.

Social production and distribution under control of the Soviets of Workers Deputies. From the Bolsheviks he demanded an immediate party congress to change the name of the party to the Communist Party, to alter the programme and to call for a new International. Lenin was accused of telescoping history, denying Marxism and of political hysteria. His Bolshevik critics argued that he was jumping over a stage when he dismissed the “democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants” as a necessary precondition for the fulfilment of bourgeois democracy. Lenin would have none of this ritualism: ... The revolutionary dictatorship of the workers and peasants has certainly become a reality, in a certain way and to a certain extent, in the Russian revolution, for this formula envisages only a relation of classes and not a concrete political institution ... The formula is now antiquated ... a new and different task faces us; to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements ... And the small proprietors and petty-bourgeois elements who are opposed to moving towards the commune and are in favour of the bourgeois government. To deal with the question of the completion of the bourgeois revolution in the old way is to sacrifice Marxism to the dead letter. [8] It is obvious that at this stage Lenin understands for the first time the significance of the Soviets. The working class that spontaneously produced the Soviets was capable of far more than the and plans of the “orthodox Marxists.” From this fundamental premise the need for a second revolution becomes clearer. The tactics within the Soviet must be to break with those elements whose real desire was to break the Soviet power and consolidate the bourgeois republic. To do this formally was not difficult but the success of the tactics and the programme depended on how closely they related to the workers’ own needs. It was to this that Lenin now addressed himself. He produced a stream of propaganda articles containing simple explanations of the Bolshevik policy. He described where the parties stood in relation to the war, the Provisional Government, internationalism, the land and workers power. Later in April, Lenin fought for his point of view at the Bolshevik conference and emerged victorious. A furious press campaign was started against him and the Bolsheviks. But they persisted in their propaganda. On May Day, Milyukov announced that the Provisional Government had promised the Allies war to the victory. Two days later there was an armed demonstration against the war. A reshuffle of the Government became necessary and the “socialists” joined the Ministry with Kerensky as Minister of War. Early in May the Kronstadt Soviet declared itself the sole governing body for Kronstadt. The Bolshevik propaganda was beginning to bite. To take some of the steam out of the situation the SR and Menshevik majority called for a demonstration “to show the enemy the unity and strength of democracy.” This took place on 18th June and half a million workers and soldiers answered the call, but the slogans in support of the “democracy” were in very short supply. Only the Bund, Plekhanovs tiny group and a Cossack regiment carried slogans in support of the Government. For the rest there was an abundance of Bolshevik slogans – “Down with the ten capitalist ministers,” “All power to the Soviets.” as Trotsky said “It was a great victory, and moreover it was won on the arena and with the weapons chosen by the enemy.” The real class issue was being joined. Lenin’s intransigence in refusing unity with the Mensheviks was being proved correct. With the benefit of the experience of successive Labour administrations, one can recognise the same hypocrisy in the “socialists” of the Soviet and provisional Government’ talk about socialism coupled to a profound respect for the status quo; the socialist objectives remain inscribed in the tablets but there is always some clear and present danger that makes there implementation a thing of the future. To defend democracy they smash democracy and anyone who calls for the real solution to present and future dangers is a wildcat, or whatever is the present cant abuse word. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the abuse worked out to be the unlikely combination of anarchists and spontaneous street demonstration which the Bolsheviks against their better judgement felt compelled to support, the Government took the opportunity to ban the Bolsheviks and arrest its leaders. Lenin went into hiding for one hundred and eleven days. It was during this time that he was able to write his book State and Revolution. This is a book that unfailingly mystifies the bourgeois commentators. For them Lenin was seized with some kind of mental aberration when, during a period of revolutionary tumult, he felt it necessary to discuss at length and in detail the Marxist theory of the state. But it is precisely the fact that Lenin was one of the few Marxists who was prepared to think through the implications of working-class power and activity that made him a great revolutionary. In observing the movement in life itself and them measuring the basic principles against what he saw, he was doing what he had always done before: in 1903 and the party controversy, through the giant leap forward of 1905, to the realisation in 1917 that dual power existed but could not go on for ever. One side had to triumph;: the Soviet and parliamentary democracy were mutually antagonistic forms. Given the past struggle it was but a short step to the call for “Soviet Power.” In State and Revolution Lenin gives form to the theory of the workers’ state, cutting through all the obscurity and falsification of the “popes of Marxism.” The bourgeois state must be smashed; its forms are not just inappropriate, they are impossible. Only the working class, organised as the ruling class, can start the long slow climb out of barbarism. For a Marxist, as opposed to the bourgeois commentator, perhaps the most appropriate time for theoretical works on the state is when the question of power is on the agenda. From 6 July to 25 October Lenin was virtually isolated from contact with the party and the workers, but he was writing a constant stream of articles and letters, refuting slanders, commenting on the developing situation and especially urging a more audacious course on the Bolsheviks.

From 6 July to 25 October Lenin was virtually isolated from contact with the party and the workers, but he was writing a constant stream of articles and letters, refuting slanders, commenting on the developing situation and especially urging a more audacious course on the Bolsheviks. During his period the economy was declining rapidly, peasant unrest was boiling over, and Kornilov, weary of Kerensky’s vacillation in dealing with the Soviet, attempted a coup. The constant worsening of the situation in town and country gave added relevance to the Bolshevik programme. On 12 September Lenin wrote to the Central Committee: The Bolsheviks, having gained a majority in the Soviets ... of both capitals (Petrograd and Moscow), can and must take power into their own hands. [9] The situation, he argued, was such that only the implementation of the Bolshevik programme could save any gains of the February revolution, let alone make an advance. The SRs and the Mensheviks were for the war and support of the Provisional Government but neither the Government nor the Soviet could fight a war. The peasants were agitating for land and the Government was putting them down. The revolution was foundering on the incapacity of the government and its supporters. The objective conditions for the second revolution were ripe; it was necessary now to agitate among the workers: ... we must dispatch our entire group to the factories and the barracks. Their place is there, the pulse of life is there, there is the source of salvation for our revolution. [10] In criticizing the Bolsheviks for their presence at the “Democratic Conference,” after it became clear that Kerensky was intent on a compromise with the army, Lenin said “Ten soldiers or ten workers from a backward factory who have become politically enlightened are worth a thousand times more than a hundred delegates hand picked by the Lieberdans.” (Lieberdan – Composite nickname from Lieber and Dan the Menshevik leaders – JH) In a front page article in the Bolshevik paper Rabochy Put, 29 September, entitled The Crisis Has Matured, Lenin put the case for the second revolution in the context of the international socialist movement. The crisis, he said, was maturing in Germany, Italy and France. In Russia under the slogan of democracy the coalition of bourgeoisie and social patriots were smashing the peasant revolts in the tradition of Stolypin and preparing the defeat of the Soviets in the interest of continuing the war. In an addendum to the article which was circulated only to the Central Committee and the Moscow and Petrograd committees of the Bolshevik party, he called for a decision on the seizure of power, through Moscow, Petrograd and the Baltic Fleet. In the discussions in the Central Committee, Lenin again won the day. The resolution called on “all organisations and on workers and soldiers to make all round energetic preparations for an armed uprising.” But the insurrection was not and could not be a putsch: Military conspiracy is Blanquism, if it is organised not by a party of a definite class, if its organisers have not analysed the political moment ..., if the party has not on its side the majority of the people ..., if the development of revolutionary events has not brought about a practical refutation of the conciliatory illusions of the petty bourgeoisie, if the majority of Soviet type organs ... have not been won over, if there is not a matured sentiment in the army against the government that protracts the war ..., if the slogans of the uprising have not become widely known and popular (All Power to the Soviets, etc.), if the country’s economic situation inspires hope for a favourable solution of the crisis by peaceable and parliamentary means. [11] In this Lenin illustrates the whole maturing revolutionary crisis. An insurrection is inevitably an event that is decided secretly, what distinguishes the Bolshevik seizure of power from putschism is that it is based on the development of the consciousness of the working class. On 25th October the Military Revolutionary Council led the insurrection which overthrew the Provisional Government. The same day power was handed over to the All Russian Congress of Workers and Soldiers Deputies. For the first time in history the workers gained power and kept it. Lenin now moved on to the next great period in his life. A few short weeks saw the decrees on Workers’ Control, the Land, Rules for Office Employees, a declaration of the rights of the peoples of Russia which proclaimed complete equality for nationalities. On behalf of the Government, Lenin ordered Dukhonin, the Commander in Chief, to make an immediate offer of a ceasefire to all the belligerent nations. The Bolsheviks had begun to deliver on the programme that took them to power. The importance of Lenin in 1917 cannot be overstated. It is literally true, as Trotsky said, that he “re-armed the Bolshevik party.” In the years of reaction and division, he maintained his position of socialist internationalism. He was prepared to reject old theories and old comrades in so far as they fell short of the ideal. The conventional portrait of Lenin misses his essence completely, his obsession was not with revolution for its own sake but with freedom and real democracy. The shifts and changes were not the dictates of a capricious mind but the result of a close analysis of the working class and its revolutionary possibilities. The development of Lenin’s thought from 1893 to 1917 mirrors at greater or lesser remove the development of the working class. The future of the revolutionary movement is not in fruitless attempts to force 1967 into the mould of Lenin’s fifty year old prescriptions, but in an attempt to see as clearly as he the immediate and future capacities of the class. Real human history began fitfully in October 1917; it is the task of the revolutionary movement to regain that impetus. Footnotes 1. Lenin, Works, Vol.23, p.110. 2. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin, Vol.2, p.187.

3. Lenin, Works, p.239. 4. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol.1, p.300. 5. Ibid., Vol.1, p.305. 6. Lenin, Works, Vol.23, p.371. 7. Trotsky, op. cit., Vol.1, p.308. 8. Lenin, Works, Vol.24, p.44. 9. Ibid., Vol.26, p.19. 10. Ibid., p.27. 11. Ibid., p.213. Top of the page Last updated on 1.1.2008

MIA > Archive > Higgins Robert James [1*] Why did you join the party? (July 1973) From International Socialism (1st series), No. 60, July 1973, p. 11. Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Years ago, a question much bandied about in the Communist Party was: ‘Why did you join the party?’. At this remove it is difficult to remember why this mild obsession took hold. Suffice it to say that the usual answer, in the immediate post-1945 period, had more to do with a feeling that ‘Joe Stalin would teach those bloody Germans a lesson’, than devotion to world revolution. One or two of us would conjure up visions of lamp-posts tastefully decorated with hanging plutocrats, more to outrage our mums than as a short-term perspective for action. Apart from bloodthirsty juveniles, middle-aged Germanophobes, premature anti-fascists from the Popular Front and a sprinkling who actually joined when the CP was a revolutionary party, way back in the 1920s, there were also some splendid eccentrics. One I recall with considerable affection. His name was Fred; he was short, spare, wore a cap, muffler and Wellingtons and was seldom seen without an unlit, hand-rolled fag between his lips. These fags he seldom smoked; his intention seemed to be to dissolve them after the manner of boiled sweets. In the process they acquired a rich, juicy, brown appearance that defied combustion. At this stage Fred would pop them into a small cough lozenge tin. What he did with them then is not known, although there was some speculation that he used the soggy wrecks as a lethal insecticide in his job: tending the municipal gardens. Fred seldom spoke at meetings, and despite the fact that he was obviously a poor man, kept a fully stamped card, paid all the party levies and his Daily Worker quota. Joining the party in 1929, he had lived, with complete unconcern, through the ‘Third Period’, the Popular Front, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the ‘imperialist’ and ‘anti-fascist’ phases of the war. A solid comrade, the backbone of the party, a dedicated street seller of the Daily Worker despite police harassment and the occasional arrest. He would never set the Thames alight – with his fags he would probably poison every fish in the lower reaches – but of such is the party built. The last time I saw Fred to speak to was just after Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform. A local meeting had been convened for a party luminary to expose to us Tito’s long history of ‘Trostky Fascism’. Not many turned up and among those missing was the speaker – a not unusual occurrence. The chairwoman, a comrade much addicted to East European dirndl and extirpating heresy, permitted desultory chat until it became obvious that our speaker was engaged elsewhere. Marjorie, for that was her name, called the meeting to order and, so that the evening was not a complete loss, suggested that we explain – in turn – ‘why we had joined the party’. It may be that her object was to discover some comrade foolhardy enough to confess joining on a wave of sympathy for the Yugoslav partisans’ gallant struggles against the Chetniks and fascist hordes. If so, she was disappointed. Most of us had played the game before and had thumbnail sketches that reflected credit on ourselves, the party and, above all, Comrade Stalin. That is, until we came to Fred. ‘Why did you join, Fred?’, he was asked. Crossing his legs, and in the process dislodging a fair-sized lump of council clay on the carpet, Fred took a long suck on his nauseating fag and explained: ‘I joined because I have been a life-long spiritualist. After considerable thought and communion with long-dead thinkers, I came to the conclusion that only under socialism could the genuine claims of spiritualism be scientifically tested and proved’. Our chairwoman was caught in a horrid dilemma. Here was a splendid opportunity to denounce an insidious attempt to import religious opium into the party ranks, an attempt so subtle that it took 20 years in the unmasking. At the same time the culprit was an ace Daily Worker salesman, a top levy payer, a class war prisoner and a worker to boot. Before she could resolve this problem, one of the young female comrades, noted for light-mindedness, had asked Fred if he could read palms and bumps on the head, with the obvious intention of requesting an immediate investigation of her own bumps (a trick that most of us had been unsuccessfully attempting for some time). Fred replied in the affirmative and proceeded with more enthusiasm than he had ever displayed before to disclose the secrets of life lines, mounds of Venus and other exotica. His dissertation was not without interest; it certainly beat Tito-bashing by a mile. It might well have gone on longer to our mutual edification and education, had it not been for one adolescent element, much given to tormenting his elders, who, removing his left shoe and sock, demanded to know if Fred could read feet. Apart from the objectively unwholesome character of the foot, Fred was clearly mortally wounded by such obvious lack of seriousness and the consequent hilarity among the younger and rowdier section of the branch. The meeting broke up if not in disorder, without the usual stirring injunction from Marjorie to go forth and multiply. Fred never appeared at meetings again, although I did see him once outside the town hall sneering at the flowers, still sucking a soggy brown fag. By now he must be dead; he was an old man when I knew him. Perhaps, though, after the revolution he may get in touch again from the other side. All he needs to do is indicate the impossibility of reading feet and his 20 years for the party will not have been wasted. Note 1*. Robert James is a pseudonym used occasionally by Jim Higgins. Top of the page Last updated on 23.9.2013

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Luxemburg and Lenin (Winter 1966/67) From International Socialism (1st series), No.27, Winter 1966/67. Transcribed by Mike Pearn. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Of late there has been a tendency among the writers of the weekend review fringe, to love up to safely dead revolutionaries – particularly those whose lives can be described as failures. One noted this first in the reviews of Deutscher’s trilogy on Trotsky. Deutscher’s work received deserved acclaim as a major work of biography. Trotsky was venerated as a great literary stylist, his superhuman struggles against personal and political adversity applauded. He was contrasted with Stalin, as a civilised and humane man. But his politics – received that amused contempt normally reserved for the enthusiasms of the very young. Cultured and civilised Trotsky might be, but he was clearly no match for the uncultured and uncivilised Stalin. The whole of Trotsky’s brilliant and penetrating analysis went for nothing. He was abstracted from the real situation in which his ideological struggles took place and, as a utopian dreamer, contrasted with the brutal but necessary Realpolitik of Stalinism. Again, in the case of Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, one detected the same nostalgia for a dead revolutionary hero in reviews which, apart from a notably illiterate attack in the Sunday Times, universally acclaimed the work. Now it is the turn of Rosa Luxemburg. Her life contains all the elements to titillate palates jaded by long draughts of corrosive fellow-travelling. She was personally courageous; her love life was intense but unsatisfactory; she was physically handicapped; she spent time in prison – a lot of time – and perhaps best of all she died in a particularly brutal way at the hands of Freikorps thugs. Add to this her slightly hysterical (for my taste) attachment to the beauties of nature and the result is the perfect ikon with which to salve the unquiet liberal conscience. At one point in his book [1], Mr Nettl comments on the strange position occupied by Rosa Luxemburg in the socialist pantheon. There is certainly a weird coalition of worshippers at her shrine. The Social Democrats claim her as their own on the basis of her polemics against the Bolsheviks, while the Stalinists revered her for her violent and cogently argued repudiation of the social democratic position. Nettl notes this phenomenon but suggests it is due to the timing of her death which occurred before she could have time to take sides in the controversies which rocked the Communist movement in the twenties and thirties. Later in the book, Nettl suggests that, had she lived, she would have had to fill her declining years by writing memoirs as a pensioner of some learned American foundation (à la Ruth Fischer) or to have lived out her days in what he (Nettl) imagines to have been the sterility of dispossessed revolutionary groups (à la Trotsky). This seems to assume a completely static view of history and the relationship between individuals and the revolutionary movement. It is true that except in very few instances one can point to an individual as the central factor in a revolutionary situation, and in the twentieth century probably only Lenin and Luxemburg have actually personified historical necessity. The conjunction of Lenin, the Bolshevik party and the Russian workers were the essential ingredients for the successful October revolution. On a number of occasions Trotsky wrote of the key role Lenin played in 1917. In the sense that nobody else among the Bolsheviks (certainly not Trotsky) had the prestige to alter the course of the party and set it firmly on the road to the seizure of power, then Trotsky is unquestionably right. The dialectical relationship between the three elements in the Russian revolution is demonstrated most clearly by Trotsky when he says: ... Lenin... did not fall from the skies. He personified the revolutionary traditions of the working class. For Lenin’s slogans to find their way to the masses there had to exist cadres even though numerically small at the beginning; there had to exist the confidence based on the entire experience of the past... The role and responsibility of the leadership in a revolutionary epoch is colossal. [2] In the case of Luxemburg, the picture is less clear, if only because the importance of her role has been muddied by the apologists of German Communism and Social Democracy. Nevertheless it is to my mind virtually certain that the failure of 1919 would have had a totally different aftermath had she lived. It is impossible to imagine a German Communist party with Rosa Luxemburg at its head bowing to the dictates of a Zinoviev-directed Comintern or accepting the Stalin policy of “Socialism in One Country.” with the accession of the Independent Social Democrats to the KPD in October 1920, the building of a mass revolutionary party became a possibility; a possibility that Rosa would not have missed. The tragedy of 1919 would not have been repeated in the farce of 1924. The idiocy of the ’third period’ is unthinkable in terms of a Luxemburgist party. To consider the possibility of a successful German revolution is to rewrite subsequent world history. No Nazis; no Stalinism;

no Stalinism; no world war and the real chance for the international socialism so dear to Luxemburg’s heart. The Social Democratic leaders who connived at the assassination of Liebknecht and Luxemburg have more to answer for than complicity in murder. It is inevitable that in any study of Luxemburg , her theoretical and political contribution will be contrasted with that of Lenin. Although perhaps less inevitable, it is unfortunately the case that most commentators come down squarely on the side of the super Marxist democrat, Luxemburg, against the wily Asiatic tyrant, Lenin, as if they represented separate incompatible poles. It cannot be denied that there were deep and passionately-argued differences between them. But were the differences of a fundamental character? Is it not true that the polemics concerned questions of revolutionary strategy and the potentialities for socialist activity, given the actual facts of capitalism at the time? In either case the argument was conducted from different vantage points based on dissimilar traditions and requirements. The debate was hard fought on a whole series of questions (imperialism, the nature of the party, the mass strike and later the form and content of the Russian revolution). At no time however was the argument conducted with the degree of intensity that characterised the debates with Bernstein and Kautsky. The debate with Lenin was conducted within the context of a shared revolutionary objective while the struggles against Revisionism and centrism resulted in a definite break. For example, in the polemic against What is to be done?, Luxemburg insists upon the free activity of the revolutionary class in the splendid formulation, ... Historically the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee. [3] In this she cannot be faulted if one starts – as she does – from the accomplished fact of the mass German party. For Lenin the situation was quite different. The need in Russia was to build an organisation capable of making the connection between revolutionary theory and the Russian workers, under conditions of Tsarist autocracy. In any case the concept of trade union consciousness as the limit above which workers could not rise was not Lenin’s formulation but an import from German Social Democracy. As Dunayevskaya points out ... there was an element in Lenin’s theory of organisation ... which was specifically Leninist, the conception of what constitutes membership in a Russian Marxist group. Indeed the definition did not only rest on a “phrase,” that he is only a member who puts himself “under the discipline of the local organisation.” The disciplining by the local was crucial to Lenin’s conception that it held primacy over verbal adherence to Marxist theory, propagandising Marxist views, and holding a membership card. Undoubtedly you have something in your head that is at sharp variance with the prevailing Social Democratic conception when you are that stubborn about a “phrase.” [4] With this in mind it becomes clear that Lenin’s conception not only involved traffic from the socialist intelligentsia to the workers but a two-way exchange which submitted the intellectuals to the discipline of work in concert with active proletarians. Further light is shed on this controversy when we recall the interesting fact that Luxemburg’s reply to What is to be Done? was originally published in Neue Zeit (the SPD theoretical journal) and only later translated into Russian for publication in Iskra. It would seem that Rosa was fighting here on two fronts. The bureaucratisation of the SPD was moving on apace. The victory over revisionist theory had not resulted in a victory over revisionist practice. In Luxemburg’s opinion the prescription for the German movement was not more direction from the centre but a releasing of revolutionary potential from the encumbrance of parliamentary manoeuvring and trade union economism. In many ways this argument between Lenin and Luxemburg is perhaps the most important for the socialist movement today. One of the tragedies of current revolutionary politics is the pathetic fervour with which many people cling to the particular organisational principles Lenin laid down in 1903. However appropriate they may have been in the Russia of the time there is no doubt that today they require drastic modification (as Lenin modified them in 1905 and again in 1917). In the British labour movement there is no shortage of leaderships and alternative leaderships all in search of a movement to lead. The problem is not to assume leadership of the working class (although I am prepared to offer a fine shade of odds against any of the current pretenders), but to put forward those ideas with analytical justification that will bring the existing movement into collision with the fabric of capitalist society. In this process the leadership and the revolutionary party will be formed. For the British labour movement in the mid-1960’s, Luxemburg is, on this question a better guide than the Lenin of What is to Be Done? If one pursues the investigation of the Lenin/Luxemburg controversies into the argument over the mass strike and the vexed question of spontaneity again one finds that those differences were rooted in the differences in objective conditions facing the two protagonists in their separate fields of activity. The dialectic of combined and uneven development in Russia meant the subordination of tens of thousands of first generation peasants to the inhuman discipline of large scale capitalist manufacture. The frequent resort to mass protest is, in some ways, an expression of the backwardness of Russian workers in terms of direct political consciousness and their ability, under the conditions, of Tsarism to give any meaning to a constitutional political protest. The Bolsheviks then did not need to emphasise the necessity for, nor the inevitability of, the mass strike – it was there on the ground. The problem in Russia was to canalise this spontaneous movement into socialist objectives. The German Left had quite the reverse problem. Their task was to set in motion the working class in conflict with society through the agency of the mass strike and the mass party. The German need was to revoke their parliamentary proxy while the Russians needed a revolutionary leadership. But the last words on the alleged irreconcilability between the ideas of Lenin and Luxemburg should come from two people who were opposed with equal fervour to both revolutionaries. The Menshevik Theodore Dan, in his history of the Russian movement said that Polish Social Democracy ...

The Menshevik Theodore Dan, in his history of the Russian movement said that Polish Social Democracy ... shared in its essentials the organisational principles of Lenin against which Rosa Luxemburg had polemicized at the birth of Bolshevism; it also applied these principles in the practice of its own party ... Kautsky her bitter enemy, wrote in 1922 It does not even occur to me today to deny that in the course of the war Rosa drew steadily closed to the communist world of thought, so that it is quite correct when Radek says that “with Rosa Luxemburg there died the greatest and most profound theoretical head of communism”. A problem that has bedevilled every genuine socialist tendency has been its relationship to the mass reformist party. Since 1914 the problem has been simplified in that the immutably reformist (in essence, reactionary) nature of Social Democracy has been abundantly and all too frequently displayed. But this realisation of the nature of Social Democracy has not been accompanied by the elucidation of a satisfactory tactic for work within, upon and about the mass parties. The solutions put forward are all, in their way, unsatisfactory in application if not in theory. They range from outright rejection, with the formation of a “pure” revolutionary party (RCP etc.); through open-ended organisations which nestle their roots in the compost of the reformist parties (SLL at various times); to those tendencies which are frequently indistinguishable from the mulch allowing themselves no more indulgence than the production of little journals. In all these examples, the inclination is to defend the tactic to the point where it becomes a principle, leaving no room for effective manoeuvre. Without giving way to mystical delusions about embryonic revolutionary parties, it should be possible for a small but flexible organisation to change the emphasis of its tactics to come into mutually fruitful contacts with workers. A combination of all three tactics can in no way be precluded if a changing situation demands a quick and audacious response. The reason for this last somewhat discursive paragraph is not just to make a fairly obvious point but also to consider the problem of the pre-1914 German Left and what chance for success it might have had if it had been more effectively organised into a disciplined faction. It is a commonplace that Lenin’s definitive break (in an organisational sense) with the Mensheviks enabled the Bolsheviks to forge an organisation capable of taking power. Again, the roots of Polish Communism were established when Luxemburg and Jogiches broke from the PPS to form the SDKP in 1893. The PPS, they decided, was hopelessly out of tune with socialist objectives, an estimation that Rosa repeated in 1911 (if not earlier in regard to the SPD. Far earlier than Lenin, she had weighed Kautsky and found him short in the balance. It is at least arguable that at this stage (1911/12) the formation of a disciplined Left Opposition was in order. As Nettl shows (p.459), Luxemburg made no such attempt. The argument in support of Luxemburg follows something along these lines. The relationship of forces as between the Left and the SPD machine was horribly weighted against the Left. It is further suggested, to move into sharp opposition would have cut the Marxists off from the organised SPD working class, in a party which made a fetish of unity. Ever since then (1875) Social Democracy had looked on any policy that might lead to a split not merely as a political error but as ultimate infamy – with the same moralistic fervour associated, say, with murder. [5] There is some weight to be accorded these arguments. But, is it necessarily true that a principled opposition with a clear programme will always cut itself off from the workers in an active mass party? Surely the reverse is frequently the case. A party with a verbally radical programme and an active membership obviously cannot be assaulted frontally through its entrenched machine but at the margins where its verbal radicalism is put to the test of rank-and-file scrutiny. The post-1917 experience of the French and German Communist parties with their massive gains from Social Democracy is a case in point and much less significant but closer to home is recent experience in the Young Socialists. An opposition can in this sense operate on the mass party from without and within. That difficulties exist, is really beside the point; it is precisely in the formulation of an organisational and programmatic opposition that the necessary interaction between the revolutionaries takes place. An organisation in pre-war Germany that proceeded on this basis would have been appealing to workers over the heads of the SPD leadership with a programme that was more in accord with the workers’ situation. To disseminate and popularise such a programme there would have been no immediate need for a large following, but insofar as the programme is fought for and accepted, the growth of the opposition is assured. Brandler estimated that in 1915 the Gruppe Internationale (later Spartacusbund) had 4,000 loosely organised adherents. If this organisation had been formed earlier it is reasonable to suppose that the 4,000 could have been much larger, the anti-war propaganda more effective and by 1918 there might have been a fully-fledged Communist Party on the ground in many ways more capable than the Bolsheviks in Russia. The question, like all such historical “ifs”, is an open one, but it illustrates that perhaps Rosa, like many Marxists before and too many since, displayed a tactical rigidity not entirely consonant with the revolutionary task she set herself. It is necessary to conclude a review of this kind with some evaluation of the job performed by the biographer. Mr Nettl has carried out a useful and long overdue service. The research involved has been monumental. Everything available that Luxemburg wrote, or that has been written about her, has been sifted and evaluated. People who knew her and are still living have been interviewed – particularly useful in this respect was the information obtained from Luise Kautsky’s friend, Blumenburg – and as a result a number of interesting and new insights into her life and character are displayed. One complaint that I have is that Jogiches never emerges as anything more than a rather shadowy figure: in a book of 984 pages, one would have hoped for a rather more rounded presentation.

As against this one can congratulate Nettl on his perceptive analysis of Kautsky. He shows clearly that this “Pope of Marxism” was in reality a sterile propagator of orthodoxy without reference to the changing world and the necessary practical consequences of a revolutionary ideology, in fact, a classical centrist. But there are some matters on which Mr Nettl not only goes against the facts but also against much that is implicit in his sown pages. One judgement in particular stands out like a sore thumb: The great difference between Lenin and Luxemburg was that the former could have taken himself off to the moon and produced exactly the same thought and action from there. Rosa Luxemburg on the other hand needed not only society and Social democracy as the humus for her thought but the specific society if Imperial Germany and particularly the German Social Democracy that had grown with it. This really is quite grotesque, the reverse of the real situation. In fact a Lenin divorced from the Russian Labour Movement just would not have existed before 1917. While Rosa, had she had the misfortune to be landed on the moon, would have settled down to educate and organise the green cheese against its maggot exploiters. Another cause of some irritation is Nettl’s use, on occasion, of intrusive sociological terms and categories, as in his characterisation of the SDKP leadership as a “peer group.” Nettl suggests: This Social Democracy of Poland and Lithuania was a group of intellectual peers long before it became a political party. It provided its members with all the attributes o a primary group, an association which all the emigrés lacked – a family, an ideology, a discipline, in short a constant and reliable source of strength ... – in some respects as conspiratorial as Lenin’s Bolsheviks, but outward and open looking in other. The discipline was largely voluntary and was confined to public action; for the rest it left large areas of freedom and choice to the participants, even room for profound intellectual disagreements ... Trotsky with all his friends, admirers and disciples, never had the benefit of a peer group; hence his difficulty in building a following before the revolution and the fragility of his support after 1923 (Nettl p.23). If by all this he means that the Polish Marxists were an exceptionally talented lot, one can agree – even after 1917 there was a common saying in the Comintern, “The Russian party is the biggest and the Polish party is the best.” But to suggest that the SDKP leadership was qualitatively different from all other revolutionary groups because of this nice accident of togetherness in a “primary group” seems to me to be an error. In fact all revolutionary groups – including the Bolsheviks under Lenin and especially the Left Opposition after 1923 – have similar relationships. Circumstances may vary the degree of conspiracy, but intellectual disagreements always abound both “outward and inward.” One assumes that Nettl has no close acquaintance with the revolutionary movement except as an interested observer. But an academic observer (no matter how well disposed) can scrutinise the collected works from laundry list to magnum opus and still miss the essential flavour of a revolutionary organisation. It would have been better perhaps if someone more in sympathy with Rosa Luxemburg’s politics had written this book (Mr Nettl in his introduction refuses to let his own philosophical cat out of the bag; whatever it is, that cat is no Marxist) but they have not, and probably will not, until the coming Russian, German and Polish revolutions finally frees all the sources for the final evaluation of Rosa Luxemburg. Of course the life and work of a revolutionary like Luxemburg will mean different things to different people. For the academic mind at its lowest level it will represent thesis fodder of a particularly rich variety. For the professional anti-Communist, careful selection can provide evidence for the impossibility of revolutionary success and if, by chance, the revolution does succeed prove that it’s awful anyway. For the religious Marxist it provides a useful additional banker in the permutation of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, when they make their genuflection. For the revolutionary Marxist, Luxemburg provides an object lesson in the application of the Marxist method to a particular time and place and of an uncompromising revolutionary position regardless of consequence. In this lies her heritage; a heritage of which she would have been justly proud. Notes 1. J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (two volumes), Oxford, £6 6s, 984pp. 2. The Class, the Party and the Leadership, Workers’ International Review Pamphlet No.2, London, n.d., p.7. 3. Leninism or Marxism?, p.84., quoted Nettl, p.287. 4. Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, Twayne Publishers, New York 1964, p.180. 5. Fischer, Stalin and German Communism. Top of the page Last updated on 19.10.2006

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Equity Lets Play Trade Unions (November 1975) From the Spectator, 15 November 1975, p.629. Published here with kind permission of the Spectator. Transcribed by Ted Crawford. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Equity is the trade union for actors. In the nature of the profession and character of the members it is rather different from most others. If its members are less prone to call one another brother or sister, it does not suggest a lack of fraternal feeling, merely that “darling” trips more readily off their tongues. I suppose that in a sense all trade union business is a specialised branch of show business. Bearing in mind this point it is a bit of a paradox that our thespians do not carry out their trade union role particularly well. Equity was formed in 1931 as a result of a clarion call from such leading and famous actors as Godfrey Tearle, Edith Evans and Sybil Thorndike. Largely based in the West End it had but a few hundred members and its rules were therefore designed to cater for a small, like-minded group of people who could meet easily. The main objective was to institute the closed shop and control the profession and improve the conditions of a grossly exploited profession. It was not thought necessary to have branches or a delegate conference. General meetings of Equity were, and still are, the levée en masse. To call a general meeting in Equity it is only necessary to get the signatures of 40 members in good standing on a requisition. To set in motion a referendum of all the members you need just 100 signatures. Having catered for this ultra-democratic procedure, those who drafted the rules then decided to confer on the executive council the right to ignore any general meeting decision they thought against the interest of the union. Now that seems final enough, but it is not. A decision of the council unpopular with 40 members will result in a special general meeting. If the decision of that meeting offends 100 other members the question can be put to a membership referendum. That decision is binding on the council but not on any collection of 40 members who can start the process going again with another general meeting, and so on ad infinitum. But, you may well ask, how does this come about? Surely it is the case that the rules served quite well for forty years without their use, or abuse, becoming a matter of public scandal? The answer is, of course, that unions like other human institutions change under the pressure of events and the society in which they operate. When the dreaded Industrial Relations Act was wending its useless course through Parliament, the trade union movement set its collective face firmly against the Bill’s provisions. Equity, along with the Seamen’s union, was caught in a hideous dilemma. If it did not register under the Act they would lose the closed shop agreements and probably the union as well. If they did register they would be out of the TUC, a connection that brought some benefit to the industrially weak Equity. Having dithered about de-registering and then registering the council finally came down for registration and were chucked out of the TUC. None of this was accomplished without considerable strain. A vociferous and not inconsiderable minority searched the rule book and found that there were endless possibilities for foiling almost anything. A succession of special meetings and referenda were held arriving at contradictory conclusions. When the raison d’etre for the original conflict hall passed away with Mr Heath’s administration and Equity were back in the TUC, the groups who had fought the fight remained, armed with their new understanding of the rule book. Largest of the groups was GROPE (Campaign for Restructuring and Progress for Equity) sustained by such figures as Miriam Karlin and Ian Milton, moderate but left inclined actors more concerned with issues than ideology. Much smaller but very noisy was the Workers’ Revolutionary Party following, whose strength in the union is almost certainly less than 100, which makes it difficult to get a referendum but easy to get a special meeting. Its notoriety rests more on the recruitment of Vanessa Redgrave than any on real attachment to Trotskyism in Equity. In addition there is Entertainment Unions’ Rank and File Group. This spurt of activity by politically motivated actors gave rise to the reaction led by Marius Goring, and more recently joined Nigel Davenport and Lord Olivier, united in detestation of politics in the union. If you are still with me we can now deal with the events of last Sunday. On that day, at the Coliseum, no less than three consecutive special meetings were held. The first requisitioned by the governing council was to attempt to break out of the vicious circle of non-decision-making. The rule change proposed was that no referendum vote could be overturned except by another referendum. Despite the general support for this within Equity, the council fell foul of two difficulties. The first was their own bad tactics – they called the meeting for 10 a.m. and as Peter Plouviez, the General Secretary, plaintively explained: ‘Some of our supporters were still in bed when the vote was taken’. The other problem was that to change the rules a two-thirds majority is required. By just twenty-five votes the council failed to reach the magic two-thirds. Having lost that vote the council then opposed the Davenport motion to insert in the rules that Equity is non-political and non-sectarian. While this may seem to be of little more than symbolic significance it might well handicap the union in its dealings with government and could even put in jeopardy the TUC affiliation. And so, although a simple majority of the 1,957 actors present voted for Mr Davenport’s motion it failed to get over the two-thirds hurdle. The final special meeting debated the question of a branch and delegate conference structure: a seemingly reasonable reform that would certainly overcome the current difficulties. It also fell, largely one feels because of the notion of ill-attended branch meetings falling under the sway of the Redgraves and other like elements. Thus, having laboured mightily, spent £6,000, and gathered a record number of actors together, they have not even given birth to a mouse, nothing at all is changed. It is a great pity because actors just as much as boilermakers need a trade union. To engage in these theatrical high jinks must be destructive of the essential purpose of Equity. It is surely not unreasonable that the TUC should be invited to lend their support and advice to rational changes in Equity structure. Unfortunately Equity have not asked for this service, and the TUC would not dream of offering it. One thing is clear, however: unless something is done very soon we will have another replay of the longest running flop in theatrical history. Top of the page Last updated on 16.6.2004

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Bristol 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 page Last updated on 2.11.2003

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 7.5p The 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. Note 1*. Robert James is a pseudonym used by Jim Higgins. Top of the page Last updated on 19.10.2006

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Trade unions Democracy 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. 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 page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Revolutionary 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 exclusiveness and 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. 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. 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 Period The 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. 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. 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. 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. Conclusions Where 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;

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. 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.

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] 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 Footnote 1*. 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 Notes 7. 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 page Last updated on 30.12.2007

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Amalgamating 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. 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 page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Setting 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. 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 page Last updated on 15.9.2012

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins The unions Out 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.

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. 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 page Last updated on 2.11.2003

MIA > Archive > Higgins Jim Higgins Lenin (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.