Where does AWL come from?

We started as Workers’ Fight, a group that emerged in 1966-7 as a response to the crisis of the British and international Trotskyist movement. In Britain then there were four main revolutionary left groupings.

• The Socialist Labour League was far and away the biggest and most active. (It would later rename itself WRP, degenerate hugely, and collapse altogether in 1985).

• The RSL (Militant; today the Socialist Party and Socialist Appeal) was much smaller, and a great deal less active and less ambitious than the SLL.

• IS (today SWP) was growing, but in terms of activity and “presence” was not much “bigger” than Militant, and very much less than the SLL. Like the SLL and RSL, it had come out of the 1940s “orthodox Trotskyist” current, WIL/RCP, which broke up in 1947-50.

• The fourth grouping was The Week, the future IMG (today ISG, a small group within George Galloway’s “Respect”). It had had a faltering existence of sorts since the end of the 1950s, initially as a sub-grouping with primary loyalty to the Pablo-Mandel International within Militant/ RSL, who were affiliated to that International from 1956 to 1965. There were a number of other very small groups.

What was wrong with those four groupings?

In order to understand the genesis of Workers’ Fight you have to know something about those four organisations which dominated revolutionary politics in Britain and whose organisational and political ancestors had done so for a quarter-century before Workers’ Fight was founded.

What had the four in common?

• Roots in the “orthodox” post-Trotsky Trotskyist movement of the 1940s.

• Theories and positions that were at variance with both common and dialectical sense, such as, for most of them, the idea that Russia was a “workers’ state”. Their theories therefore needed a certain amount of artificial help, organisational help, to remain in place. This was true of the odd one out, Tony Cliff’s IS, with its distinctive dogma of “bureaucratic state capitalism”, too.

• Until the SLL started to proclaim that it could quickly build a mass independent revolutionary movement, all four groups had been very much in the Labour Party. They had grounded their idea of the movement of the working class towards revolutionary socialism in notions of the future evolution of the Labour Party. They had all in the 1950s been very much crushed under the weight of post-1945 Labour hegemony. All the groups (until the SLL quit in 1964-5) were heavily involved in the Labour Party’s Young Socialists.

• All the groups, partially excepting the proto-IMG (The Week), were dominated overmuch by a central leadership. This was as true in IS as it was in the SLL with its “strong apparatus”, which IS then lacked. It worked differently in IS, but it “worked” there too, as an at that stage seemingly benign cult of Tony Cliff.

• With the exception of IS, they were were mono-factional cliquist-led organisations: certain political positions were enthroned, and changes or modification of position had to come, when they came, from certain people who brooked little or no opposition.

• All the groups — with the exception in part, perhaps, of the Pablo-Mandel people — were “economistic”. They looked to industrial action to bring with it political change. Again, this trait varied greatly in its weight and force from group to group and from time to time. By the mid-60s, IS had reached such a level of “economism” that functionally it was unable to distinguish between industrial militancy and political awareness.

• The groups had been heavily working-class in composition, though this had already changed and would change a great deal further by the mid-60s. IS was here the exception: its political ethos and leadership were upper “middle-class”.

• In terms of major political issues, the groups tended to move in a loose convoy, to operate a moving consensus.

All the groups of the 1960s originated from what had been a unified Trotskyist movement in the 1940s, called the WIL to 1944 and the RCP in 1944-9. What were the problems of the RCP, and how did it come to break up?

The political world after World War Two changed everything that had allowed the WIL/RCP to grow quite impressively during the war, when it was the militant revolutionary organisation, and the Russia-supporting Communist Party was to the right of the Labour Party leaders, fiercely denouncing strikes and strikers.

Labour was in power. It was carrying out serious reforms, and measures that were experienced by the workers involved as serious reforms, for example the nationalisation (state-capitalist, not socialist) of bankrupt and moribund industries such as coal and the railways.

In Europe a gigantic Russian Stalinist empire had been won during the war and consolidated after it, reaching as far as a hundred miles west of Berlin. Stalinism was winning victories in China and Vietnam. The Communist Party in Britain was now an oppositional force, and with prestige much enhanced by the Stalinist gains.

The RCP was no longer, so to speak, the only revolutionary game in town. Most important, though, was the theoretical and political disarming of the Trotskyists.

During World War Two the WIL/RCP had pretended, following the SWP-USA, that the raping and pillaging army of Stalin was “really” still the “Red Army of Leon Trotsky”. That might have been “smart” politics in the wartime world in which the “Red” Army, fighting the German-Nazi enemy, was immensely popular, and “Uncle Joe” (Stalin, the other Hitler or near-Hitler) was popular too. But the pretence was poisonous nonsense, and utterly disorienting.

The Trotskyists’ “perspectives” for what would occur during the war and follow from it had proved false. They expected Russian Stalinism to fall and, in the war, be replaced either by bourgeois counter-revolution or by a new working-class revolution (“political revolution”).

In fact, Stalinism had survived and spread. In terms of what seemed to be fundamental things — overthrowing capitalism — the Stalinists were revolutionaries. They had an enormous dominance in the affairs of the working class in Western Europe. In France and Italy they seemed on the verge of taking power: they were in coalition governments in those countries until 1947.

The Stalinists had created, in many countries, as much (nationalised property, etc.) as, according to the “degenerated workers’ state” theory of the “orthodox” Trotskyists, “remained of the Russian revolution” under the ice-cap of totalitarian Stalinism

The “degenerated and deformed workers’ state”, “orthodox”, Trotskyists would take refuge from the issues in denunciation of the French and Italian Communist Parties because, in deference to Russian wartime and immediate post-war policies, they had not taken power after World War Two. They found “evidence” that Mao had not “really wanted to take power”, and that in 1946 and after the Chinese Stalinists had merely defended themselves against the assaults of Chiang Kai Shek.

But fundamentally, as against the enormous facts of Stalinist gains here, the Trotskyists were marginalised critics. In many countries, during and after the war, they were people who could be casually murdered by the Stalinists as they advanced. At best the Trotskyists offered a democratic working-class criticism of the Stalinist states. The Stalinist had immense accomplished facts to build on.

The Trotskyists had expected that during the war bourgeois democracy would be quickly destroyed in Britain and the USA, and on the basis of that expectation dismissed the difference between the democratic imperialisms and the fascists as being of no serious-term significance or importance to the orientation of the Trotskyists.

Trotsky had begun to offset that schematism in the “proletarian military policy”, a programme of working-class measures focused on beating the Nazis, but only begun. (Trotsky initiated that policy, and Cannon developed it, often using arguments that were not very well thought-out. Shachtman demolished much of Cannon’s argument, without in my view thereby settling the question: that there was a difference between bourgeois democracy and fascism, and a difference involving life or death for the labour movement).

With their “proletarian military policy”, the WIL/ RCP criticised the British ruling class as being unable to beat the Nazis or “secretly”, some of them, unwilling to do that.

The difference between the “proletarian military policy” and “revolutionary defencism” is, to the writer’s eyes, very hard to find. I think they were broadly correct in their policy. But it helped disorient their politics after the war, when the British and US ruling classes had indeed defeated Nazism and established bourgeois democracy in Western Europe.

The SLL was the biggest group in the 1960s. Where did it come from?

The SLL had begun as a minority, led by Gerry Healy and John Lawrence, in the RCP. They operated in the RCP as the British supporters of the international leadership of the “Fourth International”, reorganised after World War Two as more or less a mono-tendency organisation. Essentially they were a British “branch dealership” of the international leadership’s politics. They had different from the majority of the RCP on a number of points.

They resisted the policy which the RCP leaders pioneered in the Fourth International in the mid and late 1940s of defining Russia’s new empire in Eastern Europe as “deformed workers’ states”. The “theorising” on Eastern Europe which the Healy group shaped with the Mandel-Pablo Fourth International and the SWP-USA was indeed lamentable, and it contained the seed of its own inversion after summer 1948. But the impulse to resist the conclusion that expanding Stalinist totalitarianism was a first stage in the working-class world revolution was healthy.

From 1945 the Healy group advocated the liquidation of the RCP as a public organisation and the full entry of the Trotskyists into the Labour Party. (The RCP leadership wanted to continue the WIL policy during World War Two, when, while still having a few people in the Labour Party and campaigning for a Labour government, the WIL built itself essentially from industrial militancy).

The Healy group denounced the “cliquism” of the RCP leadership — the shaping of political positions not according to the strict Marxist rule of political objectivity but by personal friendships and habits of mutual accommodation in the leading RCP group around Jock Haston, Ted Grant, and Millie Lee. Some such mutual accommodation and mutual valuing of each other is necessary to any team, but only within limits. The Healy group was to benefit greatly by the public exhibition of how far beyond legitimate necessity that trait existed in the RCP leadership when the RCP collapsed in 1949.

In 1947 the RCP divided in two, the Healy-Lawrence group and the others. The Healy Group went ahead with its project of working in the Labour Party, the RCP majority continued as an open organisation. This was an "amicabler" split organised by the leadership of the Fourth Internnational, with both British groups retaining their status as Sections of the Fourth International. The RCP continued to decline and fall apart. In mid-1949, the RCP formally dissolved, and its members joined the Labour Party and reunited with the Healy Group to form a single Section of the Fourth International.

Once all the Trotskyists were in the Labour Party (after 1949), a central difference between the others and the SLL (then called “The Club”) was whether the Trotskyists should confine themselves to general propaganda there, adapted to Labour Party conditions and Labour Party moods and with an eye to not getting banned from Labour Party membership; or also try to organise the broader Labour Party left on specific limited issues.

That difference in turn raised larger questions, because the broader left in the Labour Party was heavily infested with Stalinism of varying intensity and pervasiveness.

From the start the Healy-Lawrence group had advocated entry into the Labour Party as a way to link up with broader groups of leftists. They did that consistently and with some success, thereby preparing some of the ground for the qualitative breakthrough the organisation achieved when the Communist Party went into crisis in 1956-7. Some of the CPers then had some prior awareness of the “The Club” through its activity in calling conferences and so on; that helped “The Club”.

The other groups rejected the Healy-Lawrence perspective. They only joined the Labour Party when the RCP collapsed. They could still see no merit in the work the Healy group tried to do. They tried to continue inside the Labour Party as propagandists. The IS group (then called Socialist Review) would shift rather spectacularly on this, but not until 1953-4.

Isn’t the Healy group famous for having had a very harsh and brutal regime?

Yes. The weight of its “leadership” and of the character of the person at its centre, Gerry Healy, was offset up to a point by the resistance, weight, education, and accepted norms of the cadres of the organisation and of the organisation’s democratic process. At first, and into the 1960s, they exerted a restraining influence on Healy.

Elements of the notorious Healy regime can be found earlier than 1950, for instance in the group’s subordination of politics to existing organisational affiliations in its quick jumping into line with the Fourth International line when it changed on issues such as defining the new Stalinist states. But the regime took its real, characteristic shape when the elements of the RCP “reunified” in the Labour Party, from mid 1949.

What happened, specifically, in 1950, to divide the Trotskyists into three rival groups?

In 1949 the RCP majority decided to join the Labour Party, and the Trotskyists were “reunified” inside the Labour Party.

The internally-balancing, “Bonapartist” character of the leadership of the Healy group was perhaps rooted in the exigencies and problems of that “unification”.

There were still more members in the RCP segment than in the Healy segment of the organisation. Politically, none of the differences in the RCP had gone away — not even, in some all-shaping respects, the Labour Party questions. The RCP majority had collapsed into the Labour Party, most of them thinking it a misfortune that they were reduced to that; the “Club” had joined the Labour Party to do work there, and worked at organising a periphery around themselves on limited politics.

Under the terms of reorganisation for the first period after the 1949 reunification, up to the holding of the first “reunified” conference, the Healy group, the minority, would have a majority in the leading bodies of the “reunified” Trotskyists. It was their “tactic” — entry into the Labour Party to work there — that was being worked, and it followed that they should not relinquish control of that work to the RCP majority who had fought it for four or five years and were “refugees” in the Labour Party rather than infiltrated “soldiers” there to organise and fight the Establishment.

Odd though the “minority rule” provision was, the prime anomaly was not in that, but in the “reunification” of the segments of the RCP in conditions where the majority had not voluntarily come to agree with the perspective of organising in the Labour Party. The majority would have conducted the work of the organisation on a different approach, that of mere “internal” general propagandists in the Labour Party. That is how they conducted themselves after they separated from “The Club” — the proto-Militant/ Socialist Party/ Socialist Appeal, until well into the 1960s.

It was an untenable reunification that would not have occurred had not the RCP collapsed. Its central leaders, Jock Haston and his partner Millie Lee, deserted the movement. Having opposed Labour Party work for years, Haston now joined the Labour Party as a new-hatched reformist, and still rejecting organised Trotskyist work there. Others such as Roy Tearse, the RCP’s industrial organiser, did the same. The main remaining RCP organiser, Bill Hunter, went over politically to Healyism after the reunification.

The “minority rule” was the first stop-gap consequence of the untenability of the reunification. The second was that the Healyites rampaged through the group, expelling former RCP majorityites left, right, and centre.

In that way two distinct currents separated from “The Club” — the Cliff group (today’s SWP) and the Grant-Deane group (later Militant, Socialist Party, Socialist Appeal).

Couldn’t the Trotskyist unity have been maintained if Healy had been easier-going?

A fashion in the historiography of that forming period — the dominant school, I think — has been created by people who sympathise with Haston and his friends, or, most of them, loathe the Healy organisation because they know its subsequent degeneration. They say that the reunified Trotskyist group in 1949 was “undemocratic” in its minority-rule provision, and then in the deliberate breaking-up of the majority in the reunified organisation so as to ensure control for the leaders of “The Club”.

The problem with this “unity”-worshipping is that it is apolitical. The organisation existed for a political purpose. “Unity” was good or bad according to what the political consequences were. It was not some unconditional “good thing”, “outside of politics”.

The idea that the Healy group should have meekly returned to being the paralysed minority that they had been for the three years before the two RCP tendencies separated “amicably”, under the aegis of the international leadership, puts politics, and what the organisation would do, second to “unity” and formal majorities within an entity — the reunified Trotskyists in the Labour Party — whose political viability had already been denied in the 1947 separation.

Whether or not the leaders of “The Club” and their international co-thinkers and “managers” (the Fourth International, the SWP-USA) had had a prior intention of “carving up” the RCP majority, the logic of the situation decreed that either the Healy group would put the conduct of their Labour Party work in the hands of people who did not agree with them, or that the reunification would collapse one way or another.

The collapse took the form of often arbitrary expulsions of individuals from the numerical majority, and even the expulsion of those who voted against expelling others.

The “state of siege” regime of Healy emerged in that period, and for those political reasons. Elements who would otherwise been able to coexist in one party (even the “state-capitalists”) and coexist on the broad basis of ideas they had in common were scattered because the Healy group was — and, in the circumstances, necessarily so — defined by its tactic of Labour Party work. It was also an extension into Britain of the mono-factional nature of the Fourth International reorganised after the World War by the “Cannonite” “orthodox” Trotskyists.

These events shaped the left for decades.

What was the Healy group like in its politics?

The Healy group went through a number of distinct phases, which broadly coincided with the different names under which it was known: “The Club” from 1947 to 1957; the Newsletter group from 1957 to 1959; the Socialist Labour League from 1959 to November 1973; the Workers’ Revolutionary Party from 1973 to its implosion in 1985.

In the period of “The Club” it worked to organise a broad left around the paper Socialist Outlook, which it began in December 1948, at first as a Labour Party monthly, and then a weekly up until it was banned by the Labour Party in July 1954 and ceased publication after the Labour Party conference in October 1954 upheld the ban. Around Socialist Outlook it organised occasional broad conferences.

Its politics in this period went through three distinct phases.

From 1948 to June-July 1950 (the start of the Korean war) its politics did not differ from those of the RCP. It focused on workers’ control as a counter to Labour’s reformist nationalisations. It was very critical of the Stalinists.

At the start Healy was to the left of the Haston-Grant segment of the RCP, who were pioneers of the “deformed workers’ state” theory. In June 1948, Tito, the Yugoslav Stalinist leader, fell out with the Russian Stalinists, and the Yugoslav Communist Party began to criticise the Russian system. The Fourth International, within a few days, switched from defining Yugoslavia as a state-capitalist police state to increasingly uncritical adulation of it as a working-class or “socialist” state. It was the first of a series of such relationships with revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracies (Vietnam, Cuba).

The Healyites used the Tito-Stalin split to undercut the Communist Party. They organised work groups to go and help building roads in Yugoslavia. This was a sort of “critical support” that would become familiar, “critical support” whose real premise was the abandonment of all fundamental criticism, a form of political self-disarming. The Healyites would develop it all the way through to the same “support” for Gaddafi’s Libya, Saddam’s Iraq, and the PLO.

But at the start the Healyites were not different in general politics from the RCP majority, or if anything to their left.

The second period is the Korean war, June-July 1950 to late 1953. This period is usually what is talked of when people describe the politics of “The Club”.

Korea marked a culmination of the conflict after World War Two between the USA and Russia. North Korea invaded the South. The USA (and Britain, Australia, Turkey, and others), under the banner of the United Nations, landed troops to stop the invaders. A full-scale war of attrition developed. When the North Koreans were facing decisive defeat, Stalinist China sent in troops to back them (December 1950). The war of attrition went on for two and a half years, until after Stalin’s death his successors quickly negotiated peace.

On the Stalinist side, this was a “proxy war”, with Russia as financier and arms-supplier of the Stalinist forces in Korea. The outbreak of a full-scale world war was a serious possibility.

The Fourth International jumped to back North Korea and the Stalinist bloc. It took James P Cannon and the SWP-USA a number of weeks to decide on their line. They swung to back North Korea by way of banishing any acknowledgement of what Stalinism meant to those living under it, in Korea as elsewhere: they renamed Korean Stalinism as “the Korean Revolution”, part of the “Colonial Revolution”.

That impermissibly abstract approach turned the Fourth International into a close satellite, albeit sometimes a critical one, of the Russian-led bloc. Socialist Outlook lurched after the Fourth International, backing North Korea, China, and Russia. It turned itself into a de facto propaganda agency for the Stalinist bloc.

Socialist Outlook did criticise Stalinism, and differentiate from the Stalinists, for example on the East European purge trials of 1949-52 and the rampaging Stalinist anti-semitism (dressed as “anti-Zionism”) that went with them. But all in all it was not remotely adequate from a revolutionary-socialist working-class point of view, i.e. the dominant private view of the members of “The Club”.

The previous focus for Socialist Outlook’s “pro-Stalinist” leanings, Tito’s Yugoslavia, backed the United Nations in Korea. Indeed, in the early 1950s, the Yugoslav Stalinists would criticise the Trotskyist movement for being too pro-Russian!

Then Healy took one side in an international split among the Trotskyists, in 1953. What was that about?

The Pablo group controlled the “Fourth International” and, in the late 1940s and early 50s, began to work through and systematise the logic of their orientation to “progressive” Stalinism. For instant, it developed the view that the Trotskyist groups in France and Italy should liquidate themselves and go deep underground (there was no other way to go) into the big Communist Parties there. James P Cannon and the SWP-USA and others began to pull back, piecemeal and partially, from the logic of the positions which they had shared with Pablo at the Fourth International’s Third World Congress in August-September 1951.

In November 1953 Cannon issued a round condemnation, episcopal or papal style, of what he called “Pablo revisionism”, restating the basic Trotskyist view of Stalinism, and there was a split.

The problem was if Pablo was “revisionist”, then so also was the whole post-Trotsky “orthodox” Trotskyist current. The current rested on an incoherent amalgamation of Trotsky’s Trotskyism and ideas typical of the “Right Communist” oppositionists of the 1930s, people like Heinrich Brandler who were critical of Stalinism but did not take a revolutionary working-class position against it. The best-known exponent of the “Brandlerite” views was Isaac Deutscher, who had been a Trotskyist from 1932 to 1940.

The “orthodox” Trotskyists had Trotsky’s programme for Russia and the satellite states, advocating working-class overthrow of the bureaucrats; and the Brandler programme (reform, not anti-Stalinist revolution) for Yugoslavia, China, and in the future Vietnam, etc.

From the 1953 split two groups emerged: the “International Committee of the Fourth International”, led by Cannon and including groups in Britain, France, and Argentina; and the “International Secretariat of the Fourth International”, led by Pablo and Mandel.

Part 2

The Cannonites called themselves “orthodox Trotskyists” (as distinct from the “Pablo revisionists”). That was “orthodox Trotskyism Mark 2”, a subsection of the general post-Trotsky “orthodox Trotskyism”.

The “Orthodox Mark 2” side recoiled against the logic (or, anyway, a plausible logical development, made by Pablo) of the ideas they shared with the “Pabloites”. Logically, they should at that point have reviewed the issues of the 13 years since the emergence of two distinct strands within “Trotskyism”, the “orthodox” and the “heterodox” led by Max Shachtman and others. In fact they did not even repudiate the politics of the 1951 World Congress — the “founding conference” of all subsequent “orthodox Trotskyist” groups — on which Pablo tried to build. They repudiated only Pablo’s and Mandel’s development of those politics.

The “Orthodox Mark 2” accused the Pablo-Mandel group of not backing the East German workers’ rising of June-July 1953.

Their recoil led the SWP-USA to flirt for a while with the idea that Mao’s China was “state-capitalist”, publishing a couple of pieces on the role of “statification” in the modern world. (There was a small tendency in the SWP-USA which held that the USSR, too, was “state-capitalist”). But the SWP-USA stopped the “re-examination” very soon (less than a year) after the split, and cauterised their own impulses towards “revision” of the politics of the previous dozen years of their own history.

On both sides of the 1953 split, the “Orthodox Mark 2” and the Pabloites, there was an unacknowledged harking back to 1939-40. The Pabloites — or just Pablo — had toyed with the idea, extrapolated from the fact of anti-capitalist revolutionary Stalinism, that would or might be “centuries of deformed workers’ states”, a whole historic epoch of states on the USSR model after the Stalinists had taken over the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe. This was, in all but name, a variant of the approach of calling the Stalinist states “bureaucratic collectivism”, a new form of class society. Pablo himself would later, outside the Fourth International, in the late 60s and early 70s, evolve into a sort of “bureaucratic collectivist”.

The Pablo group saw historical progress in what the “heterodox” Trotskyists of the 1940s, the “Shachtmanite” “bureaucratic collectivists”, saw as barbarism. But the underlying themes, or, here, speculations, were of a new form of class society, neither capitalist nor socialist.

Trotsky, in 1939-40, wrote that Stalinism, if it became a world system replacing capitalism, would amount to a new form of slave society. Contemplating the same projection, Pablo was inclined to see it as historical progress.

Even without the extrapolation, “centuries of deformed workers’ states”, there was, underlying all the dialects of post-Trotskyst “degenerated and deformed workers’ states” theory of the Stalinist states, some variant of unacknowledged “bureaucratic collectivism”. Trotsky’s reasons for seeing Russia as a workers’ state — the system’s origins in a workers’ revolution and then a Stalinist counter-revolution; the idea that such a statified economy could have been created only by the workers’ revolution; the acute instability of the system — ceased to be plausible after the creation of new Stalinist states without a workers’ revolution. If the “orthodox” Trotskyists now called the Stalinist states “deformed workers’ states”, the “workers’” tag signalled only an appreciation of those states as “progressive”, not any real assertion that working-class action had shaped them.

All the main groups of “orthodox Trotskyism Mark 2” (the ICFI) — the SWP-USA, the Healy group in Britain, the Lambert group in France — arrested the logic of their own recoil from Pabloism, and would over the next decades, at varying speeds, turn into irrational sects, without coherent political logic. They continued to denounce “Pabloism” yet continued to share all of its basic theories on Stalinism. For a gruesome instance, the SWP-USA, the party of James P Cannon (who died in 1974), right now considers North Korea to be a “deformed workers’ state”.

Paradoxically, the Pablo-Mandel ISFI people (or some of them), who had tried to take their own ideas on Stalinism seriously — and who would begin to recoil from Stalinism, too, in the two or so years after the 1953 split — remained the more open and rational. They are the mainstream of post-Trotsky “orthodox Trotskyism”.

Workers’ Fight started with the “orthodox Trotskyist Mark 2” attitude to drawing any pro-Stalinist conclusions from defining the Stalinist states as degenerated and deformed workers’ states, but, as we’ll see, resolved the contradictions differently.

What happened to the Healy group after 1953?

The British group split in late 1953. A minority segment led by John Lawrence (and involving such people as the future left Labour MP Audrey Wise) supported Pablo and quickly became a satellite of the British Communist Party, eventually joining it. The majority of “The Club”, led by Healy, backed Cannon.

From 1954 the Healy group, working in the Labour Party, had their paper, Socialist Outlook, banned by the Labour Party. They published only a very tiny and very infrequent little magazine, Labour Review, and worked with the Bevanite left that was then very powerful in the Labour Party, selling and occasionally writing for its paper, Tribune. They remained far and away the main Trotskyist group.

The Healy group was now, though incoherently, very anti-Stalinist. When in 1956, at the “20th Congress” of the ruling party in the USSR, Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced a part of Stalin’s crimes and then at the end of the year did as Stalin had done by bloodily suppressing the Hungarian Revolution, the Communist Parties everywhere were thrown into a crisis of political conscience and consciousness.

Perhaps as many as seven or eight thousand of the 35,000 members then in the British CP abandoned the Party and reconsidered the whole history of Stalinism. Few of them remained the revolutionaries they had thought they were while in the CP; but two or three hundred of them joined “The Club”. Some of those had been very prominent in the CP. Peter Fryer had been the correspondent in Budapest for the CP’s paper the Daily Worker, and had had his honest reports of what was going on in Hungary suppressed. Brian Behan was a prominent building worker. There were also a number of well-educated intellectuals.

The Healy group recruited them because it had an organisation that functioned as a small party (unlike the olther Trotskyist-derived groups, who were much more desultory); and because their involvement in the Labour Party and in the Bevanite movement offered the CPers some prospect of work other than very small-scale general propaganda.

The Healyites were a significant wing of the Bevanite movement. For instance, in 1956, Gerry Healy had an article in Tribune on the developments on Stalinism side by side with an article on the same subject by Aneurin Bevan.

It is hostile mythology that the Healyites functioned only as bag-carriers for the Bevanites, sinking their own politics. The “letters” section of Tribune, usually covering two of the paper’s 12 pages, offered them much scope.

With the new recruits from the CP, they started a big and impressive bi-monthly Labour Review, in which the leading ex-CPers wrote, from January 1957, and a weekly edited by Peter Fryer, The Newsletter (at first “Peter Fryer’s Newsletter”) from May 1957. Labour Review focused heavily on the history of the Communist Parties and of Trotskyism.

Paradoxically, the Healyites’ contradictions on Stalinism helped them. They were fiercely anti-Stalinist, much more so than either the Grant-Deane group or the Cliff (Socialist Review) group. They were able to present Stalinism, to those reconsidering it, as a historical aberration, a bureaucratic usurpation, a monstrous malign growth on the “workers’ state”. The Cliff group tended to see Stalinist “state capitalism” as historically necessary and therefore, however much they deplored it, legitimate and inevitable in the circumstances.

The Healy group was now able to expand its work in industry. In February 1959 it established a public organisation, the Socialist Labour League. The Labour Party instantly banned The Newsletter and the SLL, and expelled half a dozen people, including Healy himself. But the Healyites combined the public SLL with continuing work in the Labour Party, though the Bevanite movement was now defunct.

The SLL grew quickly after the Labour Party re-established a national youth organisation in 1959-60. The group’s very bureaucratic regime, which had been relaxed for a while to attract the CPers, rigidified again. It gradually became more sectarian politically. It split from the Labour Party in late 1964, setting up “its own” youth movement. In 1966/7, when Workers’ Fight emerged, it was still by far the largest and most active group of the revolutionary left, but it was well set on a path of becoming an onanistic sect cut from the labour movement.

Forerunners of the SWP: What did Tony Cliff’s group, then called Socialist Review, do after 1950?

Tony Cliff shared the politics on Stalinism of the Grant-Haston RCP leadership in the mid 1940s. He held on to and developed a position which they had fleetingly toyed with around 1945-6, that Russia was “state-capitalist”. (The “heterodox” current of post-Trotsky Trotskyism also included a “state-capitalist” tendency, led by CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya).

Cliff published a small book on Russian “state capitalism” within the RCP in mid 1948. This would be edited into the publication Russia: A Marxist Analysis, put out in 1955 and a number of later editions. (Click here for more).

One of the reactions to Healy’s “dictatorship” in the “reunited RCP”, the “Club” of 1949-50, was that a small secret group of members in Birmingham decided to break from the organisation and did so by putting down a “Third Camp” motion on the Korean war at Birmingham Trades Council, one that contradicted the pro-North-Korea position of the “Club”.

They adopted Tony Cliff’s explanation of Stalinism, and the idea that “workers-statism” inevitably led to the Healy regime. At the end of 1950 they began to publish a duplicated paper, Socialist Review.

Korea had been their occasion for separation from “The Club”, but in their paper they had very little to say about Korea. For the first issue, Cliff wrote a general article about great-power rivalry, saying briefly that Korea had to be seen in that light; and they republished an article about the Korean war by a Ceylonese Fourth International supporter which had already been republished in the US “Shachtmanite” paper Labor Action. And then SR was silent on Korea for the next two years!

Myth, both friendly and hostile to the Cliff group, presents them as holding to a “Third Camp” position throughout the Korean war. In fact their changed their “line” on Korea in the December 1952 Socialist Review, by calling for “all foreign troops out of Korea”. That meant both the UN and the Chinese troops, but it would have left the North Korean army in possession of Korea. Right or wrong, that was a radical shift towards a positive siding with the Stalinist camp. If the Cliff group had taken that position in 1950, the politics of their break with “The Club” would not have included Korea.

The Socialist Review group initially exchanged articles with the Shachtmanite organisation in the USA, the ISL, but that soon stopped, and the evidence in both Socialist Review and Labor Action suggests that close relations were established only in late 1955.

The “Third Camp” group in Britain was at that point the Independent Labour Party, with its sizeable paper Socialist Leader. (Click here for more). Though it used the slogan “Neither Washington Nor Moscow, But International Socialism” — originating in the “Shachtmanites” in 1947 — SR did not stress “Third Camp-ism”. It tended to keep its head down.

In the mid-1960s, the “state-capitalist” SR, renamed IS, could hold its own with the other groups in “anti-imperialism”. They had more or less a consensus with them on Vietnam.

In the late 1950s, SR backed Mao’s China in what came very close to war over control of certain “offshore islands” and of Taiwan. IS denounced British imperialism for not handing Hong Kong back to China. The totalitarian reality of China, and what that meant for the people, the working class, and any labour movement there, played no part in their calculations: “anti-imperialism” ruled.

Surely the history of Socialist Review, and later IS, from 1950s to the mid 1960s is one of a group first elaborating its basic theory, then making propaganda to gain cadres, and then moving on to wider agitation?

That supposed pattern of logical stages of development does not fit. The first few duplicated issues of SR were “heavy” in content, but mainly in background articles of the “digest of the Financial Times” sort, heavy on economics and statistics. Beyond presenting evidence that Russia was not socialist, SR made no effort to push its “state-capitalist” theory, the chief thing that divided it from the “orthodox Trotskyist” organisations.

That is all the more surprising in that, at first, much of SR’s activity consisted of “intervening” in events organised by “The Club”. SR was in the Labour Party but not of it — propagandist visitors.

The group evidently went through a crisis in 1953, in which a number of key people dropped out, including Duncan Hallas (who would “revive” 15 years later in the political prosperity of 1968) and the joint secretaries of the group, Rhona and Ken Tarbuck.

From around that point, SR changed. It began to get its bearings in the Labour Party.

The paper, printed after the first few issues, appeared far less frequently than its normal monthly schedule, and in 1953 there were big gaps. From late 1953, the paper stabilised as a monthly eight-pager (small size, around A4, with sizeable print and thin contents).

Politically it was a rather nondescript Labour paper. Soon SR began to present their programme as a list of demands, printed in each issue, which they wanted the Labour Party to carry out.

When they reoriented in 1964-5, they rewrote history to assert that they were never really “of” the Labour Party. It had been just a place to find an “audience” for their propaganda. In fact the files of SR shows that they became very much acclimatised to the Labour Party.

Politically, their record defies schematic characterisation. Astonishingly, in the crisis year 1953, they never got around to saying anything about the June-July 1953 German workers’ uprising against Stalinism — the first such anti-Stalinist eruption visible in the West. In December 1953 they reprinted an article on it from another publication: that was the first and last comment.

As on Korea, they had surprisingly little to say.

On Russia, again, they were very strange. They published an article by a core member of the group, Jean Tait, insisting (i.e. rationalising from the given facts) that Stalinist slave labour, a system under which an expensively trained mecial doctor might be turned into a digger in the earth of Siberia, was both economically rational and a fixed feature of Stalinism. That was at the time of Stalin’s death — on the eve of radical changes in Russia in which Stalin’s successors would dismantle the labour-camp system.

There is clear evidence how SR saw itself as being seen by the anti-Stalinist left in the SR review of the second version of Cliff’s book Russia: A Marxist Analysis, in 1955. The reviewer, Peter Morgan, was at pains to argue that SR’s position did not make them “objectively” pro-Stalinist by way of accepting “state capitalism” as the only way to industrialise Russia. That “pro-Stalinism” was what the “degenerated-workers’-state-ists” accused them of, and it would be a very important issue when it came to explaining Stalinism to ex-CPers. (Click here for more).

The organisation did not have a theory of Stalinism — or, not one theory. In Cliff’s 1948 and 1955 books “Russian state capitalism” was defined as a product of a bureaucratic counter-revolution coming after a workers’ revolution, as something possible only after the workers had destroyed the bourgeoisie. (Here Cliff followed Trotsky’s reasoning). But that reasoning could not explain the Stalinist anti-capitalist revolutions, for the “state capitalists” any more than for the “degenerated and deformed workers’ state” people.

In a book on China, published in late 1957, Cliff nodded towards a theory that China fitted into the pattern of “Oriental Despotism” as described by Karl Wittfogel, a system in which the state was central in organising the economy.

The group would get an “integrated” theory of Stalinism only in 1963, with the notion of “deflected permanent revolution”, which adapted ideas about state economic activity in backward countries that had been commonplace in the “orthodox Trotskyist” press for quite a few years, for example in the articles on “state capitalism” in the SWP-USA’s magazine.

What may have been the most spectacular piece of SR’s journalistic bungling occurred in November 1956. As the Russian tanks fought Hungarian workers, SR came out with a front page on the (non-existent) fighting in... Poland! (It was touch and go for a while whether the Russians would invade Poland too, but they were reassured that the “reformist” Stalinists grouped around Wladyslaw Gomulka could keep control).

In December 1956 SR appeared for the first time in tabloid size and with more than double the space. The group started a new phase, stimulated by the crisis in the Communist Party and the emergence of the ferment among intellectuals that led eventually to the first version of the New Left Review.

How did the Socialist Review group do in 1956? Did they change after that?

The revamped SR group different from the Healyites in their courtship of dissident CPers in that they did not at all present themselves as Trotskyists, or deal with the history of the Bolshevik opposition to Stalinism. They remained in relation to the Newsletter group what they had been vis-a-vis “The Club” — political satellites and “intervening” fellow-travellers.

Now they also entered the intellectual ex-CP milieu. They presented SR as very much a paper of debate, tagging articles by such as Cliff as “discussion pieces”.

One episode lights up the reality of the SR group. They very briefly “fused” with a small ex-CP group (Pat Jordan, Ken Coates, etc.; people who would later start the Mandelite organisation), and in the process rewrote the “What We Stand For” programme that was in every issue of SR.

It had been a group of demands presented as proposals for a Labour Government. Now, on the request of the recent ex-CPers, it was revised to say that this could not be a purely parliamentary affair, but would also have to involve working-class mobilisation outside Parliament. A vast improvement — but in fact it was a variant of the formula the CP had adopted as the alternative to the revolutionary Marxist position on smashing the bourgeois state when it formally abandoned that in 1951.

The episode is a measure of the extent to which SR, more so even than the other groups, had been hegemonised by the Labour Party, once it “settled in”.

A big movement against nuclear weapons got going in 1957 and 58. One of its initiating points was the Norwood Labour Party resolution to Labour Party conference 1957, which originated with the Healy group and was moved by one of its members, Vivienne Mendelson.

The Healyites called on workers to refuse to on nuclear-weapon installations — to “black” such work, in the expression of the time. SR followed suit, and made “Black the Bases!” into one of its central fetishes for a number of years.

They used “workers’ control of the arms industry” as a main slogan (the workers would supervise the construction of hydrogen bombs?)

But there was a new verve in SR, which went fortnightly from January 1958. The group grew a little. It gained a few ex-CPers, though only after they had become disillusioned with the Healy group.

SR’s long period of “understudying” the Healy organisation politically, and involving itself in affairs the Healy group initiatied, led some SR people to decide to “fuse” SR with the then reasonably open, much bigger, and much more “successful” Healy group. In fact, a big majority of its 20 or so members voted to do that (against either two dissenters, Tony Cliff and his partner Chanie Rosenberg, or them and one other: accounts vary).

The Healyites did not want them, so it was easy for Cliff to evade the consequences of the vote. But the experience led to an important innovation in the politics of SR — its “Luxemburgist” phase.

In general the politics of the group became tinged, around 1957, with anarchism and loose phrasemongering. Around 1951 all the Fourth International groups had thought World War Three inevitable and imminent, but they had sobered up with the thaw in the Cold War after 1953. SR continued to regard World War Three as inevitable long after its former co-thinkers had moved on. This added a hysterical note to SR’s agitation on the H-Bomb. With almost no industrial workers in its ranks, it made front-page calls for "blackonh" amd strikes against the Bomb and the nuclear bases.

In 1959, so its press shows, the group went through another organisational crisis and semi-collapse. The paper became irregular again, and went back to a monthly schedule. A number of its old cadres bio-degraded into the Labour left (for instance, Stan Newens, the future left Labour MP).

The future SWP turned to “Luxemburgism” after 1959. What did that mean?

The turn to “Luxemburgism” was a turn to give the group “protection” from the supposedly Leninist Healy organisation, triggered by the vote to join that group. It was a simple and crude as that. As simple and crude as the decision a decade later, in 1968, that the group should now be not “Luxemburgist”, but “Leninist” again.

A spurious “Luxemburgism”, a concocted ideology claiming the authority of Rosa Luxemburg and supposedly justifying looser, lower-key organisation by revolutionaries, had existed since the 1920s — since the 1922 publication by Paul Levi, an expelled former German CP leader, of Luxemburg’s criticism of the Bolsheviks in the revolution, which she herself had chosen not to publish.

Cliff now went over to that position. The group published, as a duplicated pamphlet, Luxemburg’s criticism of the Bolsheviks. It reprinted the version put out in 1940 by the former Right-Communist Lovestone group in the USA as it dissolved, with the translation by the Lovestoneite Bertram Wolfe and Wolfe’s footnotes.

Cliff wrote an introduction identifying with Luxemburg, though vaguely enough. He also wrote a pamphlet on Luxemburg, in which he said that Luxemburg was more right than Lenin on party organisation. That was published in January 1960 (not, as is said, a year earlier, though it had been announced then).

It was all a matter of hints and half-thoughts, rather than a full-scale, serious revision of ideas; but the adoption of this pseudo-Luxemburgism was a sort of culmination of the loose “centrist” phrasemongering that dominated the group in the previous period.

And then what was the group like when it became “IS”, in the period up to the founding of Workers’ Fight in 1966-7?

After 1960 the group began again to build itself. There would be slow but sustained growth, mainly from youth recruited in the Labour Party youth movement, where SR competed with the Healy group.

In 1960 a journal named International Socialism was started as a common property of a very wide editorial board, in which recent ex-Healyites were heavily represented. It was a very broad coalition, including even the incipient Posadist group (so, though it had its political roots in the Fourth International’s politics of about 1951, the British Posadist group can be said to have been, organisationally, a small splinter from IS!)

Intellectually it was dominated by the SR core group, and edited by Michael Kidron, who had edited SR for the previous seven years. International Socialism gradually became a “group” journal, and in 1962 the group renamed itself “IS”.

Its main publication now was Young Guard. This was more like an anarchist paper than any other political trend — very incoherently anarchist, but wildly denouncing “leaders” and so on. Anomalously, it was also a Labour Party paper, and one that seemed “safe” enough not to be banned when the Labour Party banned the Healyite youth paper Keep Left in 1962.

The organisation focused on slogans like workers’ control, using them vaguely and often meaninglessly (as in the nonsense about workers’ control of the nuclear-arms industry). But it sounded good and non-bureaucratic.

The IS group grew in this phase and, because of its loose politics, seemed an attractive alternative to the bureaucratic Healyites. It began to change in the mid 1960s, as we shall see.

Militant/Socialist Party &  the third group in the 1960s, Militant, today’s Socialist Party and Socialist Appeal? What were they like?

The Grant-Deane group of 1950 was the rump of the RCP leadership, minus two of the three central people, Haston and Lee. It had emerged utterly discredited from the collapse of the RCP.

Wanting to shed his responsibilities, Jock Haston had suddenly changed his line on working in the Labour Party. He proposed to go into the Labour Party. Implicitly he accepted that Healy had been right. In fact he was proposing to liquidate the RCP, to collapse, and the decision was arrived at not for political but for personal reasons.

Grant and others had formed a personal clique around Haston-Lee. They had not changed their minds about the politics of going in to the Labour Party. Now, to keep in line with Haston, they also agreed that the RCP should dissolve into the Labour Party.

The Healyites had said for years that the leadership was more a clique of friends than a political formation. They could not have had a clearer or more decisive vindication than the behaviour of Grant faced with a variant of Healy’s “Labour Party” line coming from Haston.

The RCP majority that now fused, inside the Labour Party, with the Healy group, was politically disoriented and disheartened. One of the RCP leaders, Bill Hunter, concluded that the Healyites had been right about the clique, realised that he himself had been part of it, and changed sides.

The fact that so many of the ex-RCP leaders fundamentally believed that they really should not be in the Labour Party at all, and had consented to going in only out of demoralisation, added urgency to the Healyites’ desire to sort them out and not let them “run” the Labour Party work.

Grant and his close associates were expelled and formed a group called International Socialist, publishing a very tiny and very thin magazine of that name. They had a base in Liverpool — around the big family of the Deanes, the group often being called the “Deane group”, after Jimmy Deane — and in the Labour League of Youth, where they published a small paper called Rally.

They led a vegetative small-scale propaganda existence in and around the Labour Party.

In 1956 the Grant-Deane group became the British section of the Pablo-Mandel international network. Pablo’s old British section, the Lawrence group that broke from “The Club” in 1953, had become a group of CP-minded Labour Party “entryists”, with a strong based in the St Pancras Labour Party.

Lawrence would be expelled from the Labour Party in 1958 and join the CP. They were CP loyalists during the uproar over the 20th Congress and the slaughter in Hungary. So Pablo now had no British section.

Only a few individuals in Britain backed the Pablo-Mandel international. They published a duplicated magazine called Fourth International. In it, they started a series of articles by a leader of the “International Secretariat”, Pierre Frank, who had been in Britain during the World War, about the iniquities of the Haston-Grant RCP leadership. The series ended halfway through when the Grantites agreed to be the “British section”!

They had responded to an advertisement put in Tribune by the people publishing Fourth International, calling for interested people to join them to re-establish a group.

Out of this the Grantites got some subsidy and a much bigger magazine, Workers’ International Review. They founded a new organisation, the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), and soon they had a printed paper, Socialist Fight. They “regrouped” old Trotskyists, among them the founding secretaries of the Socialist Review group, Rhona and Ken Tarbuck, and some of the CPers who had briefly “fused” with SR in early 1957, like Pat Jordan.

Differences over Labour Party and economic “perspectives” led the group to fall apart. In a repetition of the RCP pattern, a group whose first loyalty was to the “International” wanted to try, like the earlier Healyites, to organise a broad left in the Labour Party. They would eventually hive off to launch The Week.

Soon Socialist Fight ceased to appear; then it reappeared as a very dull duplicated publication. For years the group was deep in the doldrums.

It picked up slowly in the early 1960s. Co-producing Young Guard with the Cliff group, it was overshadowed by them and gained little, but it began to attracted a trickle of young people in the Young Socialists.

The group started a monthly, Militant, in October 1964, managed to sustain it, and began to grow. It was demoted to “sympathising” status by the Fourth International in late 1965.

The politics of the group, by this time, amounted to a weird but internally coherent world view in which Stalinism was the inexorably advancing world revolution. Its advances were always to be welcomed, but also to be criticised: they were a matter of Stalinism answering the needs of the “autonomous movement of the productive forces”.

They described the Stalinist bureaucracies as effectively ruling classes (though they did not call them that), with a historic mission to carry through the anti-capitalist revolution. Later would come the working-class (“political”) revolution. They were capable simultaneously of defining Stalinism as totalitarian and welcoming its victories.

A strange “vulgar evolutionism” shaped their outlook on the British labour movement too. History was evolving towards the triumph in the Labour Party of first a mass “centrist” current and then by “the Marxists” — themselves. Their operational politics were govened by a commitment to that “perspective”, conceived as a scenario for the future.

Under the impact of outrage against the Labour government, there was a big exodus from the Labour Party in the late 1960s of leftists and of other Trotskyists. The RSL/ Militant inherited the remnant of the Labour Party youth movement, controlled it from 1969 for 17 years, and turned the YS into their recruiting ground. In the early 1980s, aided by a clumsy and miscarried first attempt by the Labour Party leadership to purge them, they became a very big organisation.

The “Mandelite” group (The Week, later IMG) around Pat Jordan and Ken Coates had split from the RSL around 1960. Some of them worked with SR/ IS on both the youth paper Young Guard and the International Socialism magazine (which was not solely the property of the Cliffites until 1963).

In the mid 1960s, following a decision of the International, they attempted to create their own broad left of the Labour Party, where in fact a broad left did not exist, by publishing a duplicated weekly called The Week — a “news digest for socialism” — which had the programme and policies that a Labour reformist left would have had if one existed.

That was the situation on the British left that led to the emergence of Workers’ Fight, forerunner of AWL, in 1966-7. Class struggle was beginning to rise, and heading towards the biggest battles in Britain for many decades, in conditions where there was no effective revolutionary organisation.

Sean Matgamna