Jack Gale examines the so-called 'Militant' group: Centrist treachery in 1973

ONE OF the most opportunist groups in the Labour Party is a group which claims to be 'Trotskyist', but which in practice sets out consciously to provide a 'left' cover for the right wing. This is the self-styled 'Militant' group, led by Mr Ted Grant.

In the 1940s Grant was the 'theoretical' leader of Mr Jock Haston's Revolutionary Communist Party. When Haston deserted Trotskyism in 1950, and later joined the Labour Party, Grant—who at the time was a member of the Political Committee of the Trotskyist movement—refused to vote for his expulsion.

Haston subsequently became a right-hand man for Les Cannon, late president of the electricians' union.

In the early 1950s, Grant drifted further to the right. This culminated with his joining hands with the right wing and voting for the expulsion from the Labour Party of Bill Hunter, a Central Committee member of the Socialist Labour League.

By this act, Grant made a public break from Trotskyism to satisfy the right wing of the North Islington Labour Party.

The April 1973 issue of 'Militant' carries an article by Grant which purports to deal with the General Strike of 1926, but which is, in fact, a white-washing of the Communist Party and the 'lefts' and an attack on the Socialist Labour League.

Grant assures his readers that the attacks of the capitalists on working-class standards will be resisted and that therefore 'the possibility' of a General Strike still exists.

He says this does not require what he calls 'the crude and hysterical mud-slinging of the ultra-left sects which infect the movement', but instead 'a friendly but implacable criticism' of the 'left' leaders in the unions and the Labour Party.

According to Grant, this means 'a skilful criticism of the woolliness, the vagueness and inconsistency of the lefts and their failure to present the issues in sharp and clear class lines'.

This woolliness, etc. is caused, Grant says, by the fact that the 'lefts' 'do not see' that the Tory attacks flow from the objective position of British capitalism. The Communist Party cannot correct this because it has ceased to be Marxist.

Philistine

Grant's article is a reactionary centrist mish-mash from start to finish.

The real lessons of 1926 can only be grasped through a study of two important works by Leon Trotsky — 'Where is Britain Going?' and 'Problems of the British Revolution'.

The Philistine Grant nowhere refers to these books—because to do so would expose his opportunist role within the Labour Party.

First of all, to say merely that the possibility of a General Strike still exists because of the development of objective conditions is to disarm the working class.

A General Strike will not just 'happen'. It will occur because the development of the objective situation leads to the conditions under which one side or the other decides to create such a strike.

But if a General Strike occurs on Tory terms, under circumstances chosen by them, the working class will be in grave danger of being defeated.

Only a working class prepared organizationally and politically, launching such a struggle on terms favourable to itself, can be successful. But the events since the Trades Union Congress last September have shown that the union leaders will not make such preparations.

Objective developments left to themselves contain serious dangers for the working class. Only a conscious struggle against the opportunist leaders of the labour movement and those who protect them can create the conditions for working-class victory.

Trotsky had very harsh words for those who spoke of objective developments in the way that Grant does:

'It would be the utmost disgrace to brush aside the struggle against opportunism in the top leadership by alluding to the profound revolutionary processes taking place in the working class . . . It has always been centrism which has cloaked and continued to cloak the sins of opportunism with solemn references to the objective tendencies of development . . . Expressed in this alleged revolutionary objectivism is merely an effort to shirk revolutionary tasks by shifting them on to the shoulders of the so-called historical process.'

There is no lack of objective developments.

The Watergate scandal in the United States, the accelerating trade war, ferocious inflation, soaring prices. The danger is not that a revolutionary situation might not develop, but that the building of the revolutionary party might lag behind it.

The central question, therefore, is the construction of the revolutionary party. Without that, General Strikes and even revolutions can lead only to the most terrible defeats, as they did in the British 1926 strike and in the German revolutions of 1918-1919 and 1923.

What is the precondition for the construction of such a party in Britain? Trotsky spelled it out:

'The ideological and organizational formation of a genuinely revolutionary party on the basis of the movement of the masses is conceivable only under the conditions of a perpetual, systematic, inflexible, untiring and irreconcilable unmasking of the quasi-left leaders of every hue, of their confusion, of their compromises and of their reticence.'

The 'lefts' are not to be 'criticized' but unmasked. And Trotsky here uses many adjectives—but 'friendly' is not one of them!

What is involved here are two fundamentally opposed attitudes to the 'lefts'. To Grant, they are people who merely 'do not see' and who can be corrected by 'friendly' criticism.

Centrism

But in 1926 the 'lefts' handed over control of the strike to the right wing who betrayed it. In Germany, with an armed proletarian revolution behind them, they handed over power to Ebert and Scheidemann who called in the generals to murder the revolution.

What place was there then for 'friendly but implacable criticism'?

Where Grant sees misguided people, Trotsky saw a bureaucratic social stratum which at critical times capitulates to the ruling class and brings defeat and untold suffering to the working class:

'The left muddleheads are incapable of power; but if through the turn of events it fell into their hands they would hasten to pass it over to their elder brothers on the right. They would do the same in the state as they are doing in the party.'

And again: 'Centrism is incapable of an independent policy. Centrism cannot be the leading party in the working class. The essential thing about centrism is that it does not make a decision to decide except where events seize it firmly by the throat.'

At a 'Militant' meeting during a conference of the Labour Party Young Socialists, Grant declared: 'The election of Scanlon, Jones and Daly was an enormous step forward for the working class because it reflects a change in the working class.'

Of course, the election of lefts against rights to union positions is a limited gain and does reflect a change in the working class.

But the anti-Trotskyist Grant sees things always in his one-sided opportunist way.

The working class seeks a change from Toryism and the right wing. It turns, in the first instance, to the 'lefts'. In that sense, the 'lefts' reflect a movement in the class.

But they fight to hold that movement back. Scanlon and Jones have done all in their power to prevent a struggle to bring down the Tory government. They have conducted secret talks with Heath behind the backs of their own members.

Explaining this role of the lefts in relation to the working class, Trotsky said that they 'convert its as yet vaguely defined but profound and stubborn aspiration to free itself from Baldwin and MacDonald into left phrases of opposition which do not place any obligation upon them. They convert the political feebleness of the awakening masses into an ideological mish-mash. They represent the expression of a shift but also its brake.' (Emphasis added.)

It is their function—as it is that of Grant and all the centrists—to transmit the will and the ideas of the bourgeoisie into the ranks of the working class. Nowhere is this more so than in Britain, with its long tradition of 'liberal' politics, parliamentarism, compromise, national 'pride' and so on.

In conflict with the right wing, the lefts have always proved the weaker. This is not a matter of personalities but, as Trotsky explains: '. . . . the weakness of the lefts arises from their disorder and their disorder from their ideological formlessness.' (Emphasis added.)

Capitulate

Even with a strong movement behind them, and even when they have a majority (as they did in the Labour Party H-bomb row in 1960) the 'lefts' invariably capitulate to the right.

Trotsky explains why this is so. The rights win, he says, because 'a party cannot confine itself to isolated left campaigns but is compelled to have an overall system of policy. The lefts have no such system, nor by their very nature can they. But the rights do; with them stands tradition, experience and routine and, most important, with them stands bourgeois society as a whole which slips them ready-made solutions'.

Today the right and left come together. Jones and Scanlon join with Feather and Chapple in isolating workers' struggles and in capitulating to the corporatist plans of the Tory government.

This inflicts setbacks on the working class, for which the centrists blame the class itself.

It is, in fact, a crisis of leadership. All political shades in the Labour leadership today fear working-class action, not because they 'don't see' the acute nature of the crisis, but because they do. Class action today means that every problem of the labour movement, as Trotsky said of 1926, must be faced 'at point-blank range'.

It is this confrontation which Grant seeks to avoid in 1973 and which he glosses over in 1926. He says of the Communist Party, for example, that in 1926 'not only the rank and file, but also the leadership were endeavouring to create a revolutionary party'.

This is deliberate deception.

Between Red Friday in 1925 and the outbreak of the strike in 1926, the Communist Party—under the influence of Stalin—changed from warning the working class of the limits of even 'left' trade unionism to uncritical acceptance of Stalin's slogan 'All Power to the General Council'.

CONTINUED TOMORROW

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