By Gerry Downing

Tasks

Comrades! The Communist is your new, sharpened tool. It is specially suited to the tasks at hand.Firstly, its bold profile is makes it a pole of attraction for young communists.Secondly, it gives workers and youth a means to express the real conditions of life under capitalism today.And thirdly, it immediately involves others in the building of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

However there are quite a few problems remaining, not least the history of the Ted Grant group, as our article and the Appendix from Left Voice points out.

Mike Macnair’s two pieces on the launch of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), New name, same old rubbish, 21st March, and Clause four Fabianism dropped for r-r-revolutionary posturing 28^th March amount to a declaration of revolutionary pessimism. As a former Workers Revolutionary Party member for ten years, 1976-86, I recognise some of the criticisms as correct and those I made myself after the expulsion of Gerry Healy in 1985.

But I have endeavoured not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, not to reject the revolutionary optimism of the Russian Revolution, of the Bolsheviks, of Lenin, Trotsky, and consistent Trotskyists up to today, despite the degeneration of many currents bearing the name.

Let us declare our continued allegiance to Trotsky’s Transitional Programme (TP) of 1938 and reject the pessimists who complained that history did not turn out as Trotsky predicted. As the opening lines of that document, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International say:

“The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat. The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism… Growing unemployment, in its turn, deepens the financial crisis of the state and undermines the unstable monetary systems. Democratic regimes, as well as fascist, stagger on from one bankruptcy to another.”

If Alan Woods and Rob Sewell have now rejected (reformist) Clause Four Fabianism and adopted more openly the perspectives of the TP, then that is an entirely progressive thing, and we must welcome it.

We should point out that Trotsky was not predicting the future as such in the TP but outlining a political programme that revolutionary socialists, genuine communists, must adopt to give a lead to the vanguard of the working class, the most militant defenders of the proletariat, to make the socialist revolution.

Stalinism’s Popular Fronts saw close cooperation alternately with Western Imperialism then with Hitler, until he betrayed him on 22 June 1941 in Operation Barbarossa (by invading the USSR), forcing him back to the West.

That Popular Front rejection of revolutionary perspectives to “defeat fascism” in alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, the clergy etc. betrayed revolutionary situations in Spain before the war and in Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Vietnam in the latter days of the war and the early post war period. Stalinist leaders who defended that counter-revolutionary orientation were not communists at all, despite the revolutionary motivation of many members in the ranks.

So, I welcome the left turn of The Communist/RCP, they are right about the revolutionary potential of the coming period when inequality within and between nations, between the billionaires and the working class and oppressed, was never greater. Fascism threatens in the US, Italy, and many other imperialist countries; Israel now had a fascist government, even if the state itself has not yet become fully fascist.

Welcoming the left turn to youth and college students in particular does not mean we have abandoned out historical criticisms of the Ted Grant tradition. Adopting a left version of the Stalinist British Road to Socialism via an enabling act through parliament was a rejection of the TP, now implicitly acknowledged in the turn.

Likewise, that acceptance of concessions from Thatcher to avoid a joint struggle with the miners in June 1984 was wrong as was the threat to “name names” of anarchists after the Trafalgar Square Poll Tax riot of 1990 by Steve Nally after Tommy Sheridan utterly condemned the rioters. The Socialist Workers Party, the WRP (both sides) and most others took the far more principled stance of defence of the rioters and the anger that produced that and other riots at the time.

The RCP need to acknowledge these mistakes if it is to become that new revolutionary force it claims and aspires to be. And to adopt a principles approach to all united front actions and campaigns which would reject the traditional bureaucratic centralist regimes of Gerry Healy, Ted Grant and Tony Cliff and adopt a democratic centralists regime like the ‘seething internal democracy’ Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed, said the Bolsheviks had. The CPGB/WW are correct in their criticism of that. ▲

Appendix

This is an extract from a Left Voice, an almost 3,000 word article by Nathaniel Flakin on 12/1/24, criticising the left turn of Alan Woods, Rob Sewell Socialist Appeal and their international, the IMT.

Decades of work inside the Labour Party was naturally incompatible with defending an openly Bolshevik program. Under Grant’s leadership, Militant defended a centrist program that attempted to split the difference between revolutionary and reformist positions — raising only those demands that would not “scare off” an “average” worker.

Militant, for example, claimed that socialism could be implemented peacefully if the Labour Party won a majority in parliament and carried out a bold socialist program. It claimed that police are “workers in uniform” and should be organized in trade unions. When Margaret Thatcher’s government launched an imperialist war against Argentina, Grant rejected any kind of anti-imperialist resistance because that would “put Marxists beyond the pale in the eyes of workers.” (their position on Ireland was also very bad– GD)

Woods and his IMT are taking the same turn that Taaffe and the CWI did three decades ago — yet Woods, who considers himself something of a theoretician, has provided not a word of justification for this, besides generalities about communism. If it was a sectarian adventure to leave the Labour Party and found a competing party in the 1990s, as well as just 15 years ago, so why is that the right policy in the 2020s? Is the Labour Party under Starmer that much different from what it was under Blair?

…This is clear when looking at the CWI’s record since leaving Labour: although it was no longer part of a reformist party, it continued to believe that some kind of reformist party is a necessary halfway house on the way to a revolutionary formation. This led the CWI to support “new” reformist parties in different parts of the world… Woods proclaims that the IMT is “the only organisation that has a responsibility for re-establishing communism.” Other organizations, simply by not being the IMT, are all “sects.” It seems that IMT leaders, while moving somewhat closer to other Trotskyist tendencies politically, are increasing their vitriol. Woods says that any proposals for collaboration between different socialists should go “straight in the wastepaper basket.”

For a counterexample, let’s look at the largest Trotskyist organizations in the world today. Trotskyists in Argentina form the Workers Left Front — Unity (FIT-U), of which the largest component is the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS), the sister group of Left Voice. The FIT-U has five seats in Argentina’s congress (four of whom belong to PTS members), having won over 700,000 votes. The Trotskyist Left can mobilize some 25,000 people in Buenos Aires, filling soccer stadiums. More importantly, Trotskyist workers are in hundreds of workplaces and have led many important struggles.

Just a decade ago, Woods was calling for Marxists in Argentina to join the progressive bourgeois coalition of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. This is completely in line with his support for Chávez, Morales, AMLO, and other pink tide governments. Fortunately, most Trotskyists in Argentina rejected Woods’s wisdom and instead founded a coalition based on class independence. They have shown that they can work together on the basis of a class-struggle program while openly debating their differences.

It is a shame that Woods was willing to form a front with Chávez, Morales, or any number of other bourgeois governments, while rejecting any collaboration between socialists.

We believe that especially in the context of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, it is imperative for socialists to work together as closely as possible, while making no secret of their differences. If Woods rejects this idea, we are convinced that IMT members are willing to consider it. ▲