Jack Gale examines the so-called 'Militant' group: Centrist treachery in 1973 (Part 2)

The reason given for the Communist Party's switch from preparing a new leadership to uncritical support of the TUC General Council of 1926 was the formation of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee on May 14, 1925. A TUC delegation, led by the 'left' A. A. Purcell, (TUC President), had visited the Soviet Union in 1924. The chairman of the Central Council of the Russian Trade Unions, Tomsky, paid a return visit in 1925 and attended the Hull Trades Union Congress.

The General Council, faced with the rising militancy of their members, welcomed the protective colouring of apparent militancy which association with the Russian Revolution provided.

The Russians, on their side, found the Committee useful for focusing the attention of the advanced workers in Britain onto the Soviet Union. That was entirely permissible. What was not permissible was to present the Committee as a genuine leadership of the working class and to subordinate the independent work of the Communist Party to it.

But that is precisely what the Stalinists, in full tide of their rightward pro-Kulak 'socialism in one country' policy, proceeded to do.

The Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee was put forward by Stalin and his supporters as a genuine left-wing movement in opposition to the out and out rights, Thomas and Clyne.

Maintained

Tomsky, then a colleague of Stalin's, wrote in 'Practical Questions of the Trade Union Movement': 'Those who have entered into the agreement with us are maintaining themselves staunchly against bourgeois lies and slanders and against the former leaders of the English movement, Thomas, Clynes and MacDonald. The leaders of the British trade unions, the section that is furthest to the left—one can say with assurance, the majority—are working harmoniously with us.'

In this way, Stalin used the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee to turn the British Communist Party into the main support of the very forces which it is the first duty of revolutionaries to expose. The leaders of the British Communist Party dutifully followed Stalin's line.

Even after the strike had been betrayed, Stalin rejected the call of Trotsky and the Left Opposition for a break from the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee.

In July—two months after the strike — Stalin told the Central Executive Committee of the Russian Communist Party that 'the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee is a bloc between our trade unions and the reactionary trade unions of England . . . for the purpose of struggle against imperialist war.' ('Materials of the Plenum, 1926' page 71.)

Revision

Only seven years after the formation of the Communist International, Stalin was revising Leninism on the inevitability of social democratic betrayal in imperialist war.

Yet Grant, who does not mention any of this, claims that Stalin's disciples in Britain were 'endeavouring to create a revolutionary party'!

After all his years in politics, Grant cannot possibly be unaware of this history.

He knows it very well, just as he knows that the British trade union leaders, including the 'lefts', remained silent when the Baldwin government bombed Nanking. He knows, too, that the TUC, 'left' and right, raised no protest when, in 1926, the Tory government launched the Arcos Raid—a police raid on the Russian trading mission in London.

No evidence of espionage was discovered, but the raid gave the Tories the flimsy excuse to break the diplomatic links with the Soviet Union which had been established by the Labour government of 1924. And the 'loyal' British TUC immediately fell into step behind their masters by walking out of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee!

Grant deliberately and lyingly distorts the role of Stalinism in 1926 for one very good reason—he wants to cover up the role of Stalinism in 1973.

For it is not enough to say today that the Communist Party does not criticize 'left' union leaders Jones and Scanlon because 'it has ceased to be Marxist'.

Nowhere does Grant name the Communist Party for what it is—Stalinist. That is, a counter-revolutionary organization which does not merely omit to criticize the 'lefts', but deliberately sets out to preserve their leadership.

Hold back

By lies and deception, by covering up for and helping to organize blatant class-collaboration, it seeks to hold the working class back from revolutionary leadership and bring it to defeat, as it has done in the past in Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Greece and throughout the world.

Stalinism is not just a movement which 'fails to criticize', nor even one which has stopped at the abandonment of Marxism. It is the most counter-revolutionary force in the workers' movement on a world scale.

This has to be explained and fought for, again and again. What is required is not 'criticism', but exposure. The working class is held back by the conservative organizational and ideological barriers within its own movement. We are dealing not with 'mistakes' or 'failure to understand', but with class-collaboration and treachery.

As Trotsky says: 'All the traditions, organizational habits and the ideas of all the already existing groupings in the labour movement in different forms and with different slogans predispose them either towards direct treachery or towards compromise or else towards temporizing and passivity in relation to the compromisers.'

The Socialist Labour League will never temporize nor be passive in relation to centrism or Stalinism. That, of course, is why Grant reserves his venom for us. The 'lefts' must have 'friendliness'. The Stalinists must never be called by their real names. But the Trotskyists are 'ultra-lefts' (as the Stalinists also claim) and they 'infest' the movement.

It is no accident that similar gutter-language was used against our youth when they were fighting the Transport House bureaucracy in 1964—by Grant's friends around 'Tribune'. 'Tribune' called the youth 'lice on the body politic'.

Grant's group at that time was active in voting along with the right wing for the expulsion of the revolutionary youth—just as Grant had earlier voted for the expulsion of SLL Central Committee member Bill Hunter.

More than that, the Grant group was instrumental in calling the police to turn the youth out of Labour Party meetings.

Honesty

What Grant calls 'crude and hysterical mud-slinging' is really revolutionary honesty and intransigence. Nearly 50 years ago, Trotsky wrote of a similar critic:

'Ruthlessness' is caused by the necessity to reveal the reality behind a deliberate falsehood. Nowhere in Europe does canonized hypocrisy — 'cant' — play such a role as in Great Britain. Different political groupings and even the most 'extreme' of them are, when fighting against each other, accustomed not to touch upon certain questions or to call certain things by their proper names. The reason is that from time immemorial the political struggle has been waged inside the ranks of the possessing classes who have never forgotten that a third party is listening in. > The system of conventions, implications and reservations has over the ages worked itself downwards and today finds its most reactionary expression in the liberal Labour Party including its radical opposition wing. Here it is not a question of literary style, but of politics. > Our polemic repels Brailsford because it lays the class contradictions absolutely bare. It is quite true that in those enlightened readers who have been brought up in the parliamentary tradition of political cant this polemic will produce not sympathy but annoyance. But Brailsford notwithstanding, this is just the effect that the author, rightly, intends. It is also quite true that politicians with such an education still form a dense stratum between the working class and the programme of communism. > Nevertheless, in Britain too, class realities are more powerful than traditional hypocrisy. Once aroused, British workers blazing themselves a trail through the thicket of inherited prejudices—both those of Baldwin and Brailsford—will find in our polemic a particle of their own struggle. And this again will be the effect that we intend.

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