Robert J Alexander, International Trotskyism 1929-1985 A Documented Analysis of the Movement, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1991, pp1125, $165.00

This massive tome is the result of an astonishing amount of labour. It begins with a clear and surprisingly objective historical introduction to Trotskyism, and then goes through its various international alignments and the histories of the movement in different countries. A picture emerges of a movement that assumes protean forms depending on its national settings, casting considerable doubts on its being a unitary international movement at all. An honest and in many ways a valuable attempt is made to summarise key political statements, and to sketch out a few of the main forms of activity of their supporters. That makes it a considerable advance upon Pierre Frank’s book The Fourth International, once parodied by Ken Coates as ‘resolutionary Socialism’, eliciting the comment that if Frank’s description was anything to go by, most of ‘the Long March of the Trotskyists’ had been spent on their backsides in some conference or other. So this reviewer can only repeat Joseph Hansen’s verdict on Alexander’s previous book, that ‘for a Social Democrat, he’s done a pretty good job’. But in the end, Trotskyism’s complex history can only be understood from inside, for only in this way can obvious mistakes be avoided (even if bias can create others). Examples of this appear when he talks about the criticism of the USFI by ‘the Morenoist tendency’ without being aware that the ‘Darioush Karim’ whose book he quotes at such length is Nahuel Moreno himself (ppl9-20), or about the ‘Icelandic section’ (p514), a longstanding joke in the movement.

That does not mean that some parts of the book are not of considerable value. As was to be expected, the section on the movement in the USA is one of the best. From it we learn officially for the first time on the authority of Emmanuel Geltman that despite the repeated disclaimers of Burnham and Shachtman, ‘the SWP leaders were aware’ of Bruno Rizzi’s ‘new class’ views on the Soviet Union (p795; cf Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no 2, Summer 1989, p37; Volume 4, no 3, Summer 1992, pp90-2). On the lighter side, the long piece on Lynn Marcus (pp944-52) makes up in entertainment value what it lacks in relevancy. The Vietnamese section is considerably more honest than anything produced by the ‘official’ Trotskyists, and the British and French entries are worthwhile attempts, given the complexity of the material involved. If the book is less successful than it deserves to be, this is probably because writing the history of international Trotskyism is beyond the powers of any single man.

For the sheer hard work of bringing together and making a synthesis of so much material has meant inevitable errors. Apart from incidental slips (such as Mussolini’s invasion of Albania in ‘1938’, or Bert Cochran’s expulsion from the SWP in ‘1963’) and the uneven quality of the name spelling, the author also had to depend on correspondents in each country to read through his chapters. Where there have been a number of them, such as in Britain or the USA, it has been possible to check their statements against each other and arrive at an approximation to reality. But where he has only one or two in a given country this is a dangerous method to use, given the faction-ridden world of the Trotskyist movement. Many of the obvious economies with the truth are due to his informants, and should not be laid to Alexander’s charge at all. In this category we might place Mandel’s statement that his group in Bolivia is at present ‘a force in the political life of the country’ (p23), John Archer’s opinion that in Britain the intervention of ‘the Club’ into the fight between the ‘Blue’ and ‘White’ unions was ‘a success’ (p473), and John Callaghan’s remark that ‘from its origin in the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s no factions were expelled from the IMG’ (p490).

Quite the worst examples of all occur in the Irish chapter, where the narrative is largely dependent upon O’Connor Lysaght. First we are told that Bob Armstrong went to Ireland with the 1939 WIL delegation, and that Johnny Byrne stayed in Ireland after the delegation had recruited him (p568). Then follows a sanitised account of modern Irish Trotskyism which does not even mention that Peter Graham, one of the IMG’s major activists, was horribly murdered by one of the extreme terrorist factions at the time his group was supporting nationalist terrorism as a method of struggle, apart from the fact that an account that does not even mention Matty Merrigan and Liam Daltun hardly qualifies as a description of Trotskyism in Ireland at all.

Remarks such as ‘what remained of the Revolutionary Communist Group seems to have disappeared’ (p498) can probably be put down to wish fulfilment rather than any intent to mislead, but other errors must be ascribed to factional bias, or to the paucity of information. In this category belong such remarks as that the British Militant in the 1980s ‘had no international affiliation’ (p21), that Pablo thought that ‘entrism might be a matter of centuries-long duration’ (p28), that José Aguirre Gainsborg was killed in ‘an auto accident’ (p118), or that the Bolivian POR regarded Paz Estenssoro as ‘the Bolivian Kerensky’ (pl20) (would that they had!). Alexander’s informants did not tell him that Bracegirdle (p164) was probably operating in Ceylon for the Comintern to pull into line the LSSP’s leaders, whose orthodoxy was already under suspicion, that the minutes of the founding conference of the Fourth International have been tampered with to exclude the Austrian delegation, which opposed its formation along with the Poles and Craipeau (pp27l-2), that Haston and Goffe attended the 1946 Paris pre-conference (pp305-6), that Charlie Van Gelderen had never been in the WIL, nor had John Lawrence supported the RCP majority in 1945 (p470). Similarly, Ajit Roy could hardly have gone to Britain ‘to maintain liaison with the FI’ during the war (p518), since he was in the WIL for the whole of that time.

There is less excuse, however, for Alexander’s failure to make a closer inspection of the Greek movement, where at least five separate groups exist today (p509), or for the poor quality of his sections on Turkey (p739) and Japan (pp599-60l), especially when we remember that Larry Moyes’ account of the Japanese movement came out in California as long ago as 1971. He does not even appear to know that Trotskyist groups existed in Egypt in the 1940s and in Yugoslavia since the early 1970s. And I can only account for his extraordinary remark that Indalecio Prieto was the leader of the ‘centre’ of Spanish Socialism (p680) by the relatively far right position occupied by American Social Democracy itself in the political spectrum.

Some of these types of mistakes could easily have been avoided if Alexander had checked his material for internal consistency. Here I will restrict myself to two examples. On page 496 Alexander quotes Callaghan’s British Trotskyism (a very bad book) about the IMG having ‘no expulsions’, that its ‘political culture is genuinely democratic’, and then tells us only three pages later that this reviewer ‘broke away’ from it ‘over the issue of its abandonment of entrism in the Labour Party’ (p499). By what criteria of ‘democracy’ an opposition amounting to a third of the group, and a majority of its London membership, can be expelled from a Trotskyist organisation for suggesting its members join trades unions (!) and working class parties, where conference votes are fiddled when they don’t turn out the way they should, and purge trials are held in snowbound conditions, remains a mystery to me. A similar conflict of evidence involves the International Communist League, which is described on page 496 as having been ‘expelled’ from the International Socialists, an event that had already been covered 11 pages earlier with the polite euphemism of ‘each went its own way’. (p485).

Other infelicities probably stem from a lack of understanding of the thought world the writer is trying to interpret. Over and over again Trotskyism is discussed as if it were a religious, not a political, phenomenon, and different factions within it are measured against some supposed ‘orthodoxy’, often with ludicrous results. After five pages describing Healy’s antics in the 1970s and 1980s, Callaghan is quoted as saying that ‘the WRP really does defend orthodox Trotskyism’ (p480). The United Secretariat is defined as ‘orthodox’ (p21), yet less than a hundred pages later its Senegalese leader is quoted as rejecting ‘a certain scholastic understanding of Marxism or of a Trotskyism centred primarily on the proletariat’ (pp115-6). As an introduction to a period in which the USFI deliberately turned its back on the working class and advocated ‘Red Bases in the Universities’ and foquismo in Latin America, we are solemnly informed that ‘in the realm of ideas it tended to stick closer to the basic notions put forward by Trotsky than did most of its rivals’ (p755). The inability to apply class criteria to a supposedly Marxist movement becomes quite exasperating, at times seriously affecting the focus of the entries. Thus eight pages (pp53-60) cover the prewar period when Australian Trotskyism gained a vital following within the working class, and 18 pages the history of the middle class sectlets since the mid-1960s (pp62-79), an imbalance that also affects the British and other entries, but not to the same glaring extent.

This absence of Marxist philosophical methodology is also reflected in the sources and structure of the book. The heavy use of secondary material, the concentration upon official statements, and the scant attention to what the rank and file were actually doing, gives this history a top-heavy aspect, apart from the fact that Trotskyist internal documents have always been a lot more revealing about what was really going on than official literature. Added to that there is the arrangement of the book, which is most confusing, listing its subjects mechanically by alphabetic progression. Grandizo Munis ‘FOR’ appears before the Fourth International of which it was an offshoot, the OCRFI between Norway and Panama, and Posadas between Portugal and Puerto Rico. It would have been far better if all the general material dealing with the various ‘Fourth Internationals’ had been grouped in some sort of chronological order at the beginning, leaving the countries to follow in their alphabetical order. As it is, both text and index are very difficult to follow.

But the main reason that this book fails in its brave endeavour is surely that it is premature, attempting a task that is still impossible. The plain fact of the matter is that sufficient material does not yet exist of the quality required to write it. A few examples that have lately come to light are sufficient to establish this. Although the book bears the publisher’s imprint of 1991, it left the writer’s hand as long ago as 1986, and work that has been done since has already rendered large parts of it obsolete. Apart from the Irish chapter, the most unsatisfactory section of all is that on Greece (pp500-9), where the entire period of 1946 to 1967 is missed. It would have been so much better if Stinas’ memoirs and the multi-volume history of Loukas Karliaftis (whose name appears reversed on page 504) had been consulted (cf Revolutionary History, Volume 3, no 3, Spring 1991). At least Alexander would then have been spared such remarks as that Bartzotas’ boast that he had killed ‘600’ Trotskyists is ‘manifestly exaggerated’ (p506), for we know that the KKE regarded Archeio-marxists and any other dissidents as ‘Trotskyists’, making the figure a very plausible one indeed. A perusal of the newly published history of Swiss Trotskyism, David Vogelsanger’s Trotskismus in der Schweiz, a very serious work, would have similarly transformed his Swiss section out of all recognition. None of Lora’s full-length historical works on the Bolivian crisis of 1952 appear to have been consulted, the books of Craipeau and Roussell were not used in the French chapters, nor Leslie Goonewardene’s The History of the LSSP in Perspective in the Sri Lankan. Sam Bornstein’s and my Against the Stream is listed in the bibliography on page 1057, but has evidently not been used in the text, and Alexander appears not to know of the following War and the International at all. The work of this magazine has rendered outmoded several other sections, such as those on Albania (pp32-3), where he is evidently dependent on Rene Dazy’s book alone (cf Revolutionary History , Volume 3, no 1, Summer 1990, pp2l-6; Volume 3, no 4, Autumn 1991, pp37-9), and on Spain, where the oft-quoted Pravda declaration about the intention to murder Trotskyists and Anarchists (p700) would now seem to be apocryphal (Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no 1, Spring, 1989, p47). Worse still, Vereeken’s suspicion that ‘the new Spanish Trotskyist group during the Civil War had in all likelihood been heavily infiltrated by the GPU’, dismissed by Alexander on page 104 as having ‘little basis’, now seems all too true with the evidence at our disposal (Revolutionary History , Volume 4, nos 1-2).

So much that is inferior that is written on the history of Trotskyism obviously intends to be inferior, so it is a cause for real disappointment that a scholarly work that sets out in all honesty to attempt such a mammoth task should fail so disastrously. All we can do is to shrug our shoulders, recalling Cervantes’ remark that ‘heaven favours good intentions’, while reminding ourselves that the road to Hell is paved with them.

Al Richardson

Baruch Hirson adds

When Professor RJ Alexander directed questions tome in May 1984 about the Trotskyist movement in South Africa, I answered reluctantly. Although I had written essays on aspects of the movement, spoken with former members, and read what was available, the information I had collected was unverifiable and sparse. Also, as I was to learn later, some of the information obtained from interviews was totally incorrect. Nonetheless, I replied, trying to present as accurate an account as was available.

At the outset I stated my reservations, indicating my disapproval of authors who wrote on South Africa with minimal knowledge of the country’s history or economy.

It need hardly he added that Alexander’s writing appears against a blank background. The history he presents has no indication of conditions in the country, no discussion of the events against which the groups were formed, no indication of the nature of the economy of the country or the nature of the working class. The essay could have been referring to anywhere or nowhere—much in the way in which histories of religious sects are written, with no reference to events in the country in which they took place.

It is necessary that this be stated if there is to be any appraisal of the chapter on South Africa, particularly as Alexander relies on the memory and/or tentative essays of four persons. Each had something to contribute—both by way of fact and of error—and none could speak with certainty as long as documents were unavailable. Professor Alexander was apparently content to quote from the replies he received, mixing the ingredients, and producing a story and some interpretations that bear only the vaguest of resemblances to what had happened in the Trotskyist groups in South Africa. In his account he gets the organisations, the affiliations of members and the arguments on issues wrong on many occasions. In this he was following one or other of his informants—but that is no excuse. The muddle is so profound that the casual reader can never be certain of what is correct and what is muddle.

Alexander’s major fault is, as he says, he had none of the basic documents. He even claims in his book that they cannot be found. Yet, strangely, he never asked me for them. Furthermore, he was so ignorant of what had occurred that he said that he knew very little about Max Gordon or of his activities. Indeed, his essay indicated that he knew little about events in Johannesburg throughout the 1930s. He quoted from a letter by Charlie van Gelderen, who got it completely wrong. But van Gelderen had left South Africa before Gordon went to Johannesburg and was not in the country, as Alexander claimed, in 1939. Unfortunately, van Gelderen was the source of many errors, and he gave generously of his time to those who questioned him, and some of his gaffs appear in this potted history.

The documents that Alexander had available were Trotsky’s letter in response to the Workers Party thesis, and Ruth Fischer’s criticism of the Native Question. He quotes from these, and was not aware that Fischer had misquoted the original thesis. That is, without checking, he compounded Fischer’s errors. In this Alexander quoted from Tony Southall, who was equally at fault in not having checked his sources, although he had in his possession copies of the thesis. A listing of the errors in this 10 page essay would serve little purpose. However, it must be said (pace Alexander) that the Cape Town groups did not differ on the trade union question, and the split was, according to Burlak, on the war question, and not on entryism. Also, Alexander obviously had no information on the dissolution of the Communist League and its disappearance into the Socialist Party. An essay that is written in ignorance of the facts and of basic documents, even those available at the time, and with obvious lacunae in the history, can have little value.

The reading of documents is not proof against false conclusions—but the historian must at least have these available before a coherent account can to be written. More than this, there must be some insight into the period in the country’s history, the members and their actions. In the absence of such evidence and insights, what is written can only misinform.

Ted Crawford adds

Alexander’s entry on New Zealand is often inaccurate, as he has been led astray by his informants, who clearly originate around the American Socialist Workers Party, and who, therefore, only provide information which relates to their own followers in the South Seas. Without exactly lying, others are, as far as possible, read out of the movement, and those who behave in this way think that their deceit, of the suppressio veri and suggestio falsi variety, will not be discovered. However, in this age of cheap air fares, fibre optics and fax machines, the pretensions of the various internationals are more easily exposed than they were 40 years ago, though the obverse of this salutary consequence of technological development is that pretentious ‘Internationals’ of two or three individuals on each continent can exchange long, windy and worthless disquisitions with great facility.

Most of the following material and some of the political judgements in this piece come either from Hector MacNeill, who can claim to be New Zealand’s longest serving Trotskyist, or from Bill Logan, whilst Rick Hill has also helped by checking much of the information in this section. The responsibility for interpreting and selecting their comments is, however, entirely mine. I met some of the leaders of the Socialist Action League in 1977, and Jesson and Owen Gager in 1982.

Alexander claims that Trotskyism started in New Zealand with student militancy during the 1960s. This is true only in the sense that two organisations claiming to he Trotskyist appeared at that time, but neither fell out of a clear blue sky, and there is a prehistory of the movement which goes back to the late 1930s. On some occasions before the Second World War, the New Zealand Maori, Charles White, addressed meetings organised by Australian Trotskyists at the Sydney Domain, but, as far as we know, he did not carry out any such political activity in New Zealand itself. It has been stated that the Canadian Trotskyist, Tom MacDonald, spent part of the war in New Zealand, but there is no record of any activity by him. Of course, there were a number of left wing critics of Stalinism who were denounced by the Communist Party of New Zealand as ‘Trotskyist’, though they themselves would not have accepted the label.

However, the most important name in Trotskyist oral tradition was Noel (WN) Pharazyn, a senior official of the Clerical Workers Union. His prolific writings in Tomorrow, a journal of the Popular Frontist intelligentsia, may show minor differences with the official Stalinist line in the direction of Trotskyism, his works certainly ceased to be published by the Stalinists after a difference with them in 1937 over the Moscow Trials, and he also owned a copy of Revolution Betrayed (see Barrowman, The Arts and the Left in New Zealand 1930-1950, Wellington, 1991, and the comment by Denis Glover on the split on the Editorial Board of Tomorrow in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p572). For much of the 1930s he worked with the trade union leader and writer Fintan Patrick Walsh, whose original name was Touhy. (He was nicknamed ‘Toughy’ for his behaviour. He was reputed to have thrown scabs overboard or even into a furnace. The story that he was in Butte, Montana, when the militant worker Frank Little was lynched is probably to confuse Walsh with K Baxter of the Federation of Labour who used to claim that he had been there.) Walsh resigned from the Communist Party over a personal issue in 1924, though he remained friendly with them until 1931, and he played a most positive part in the 1925 seamen’s strike (cf Baruch Hirson and Lorraine Vivian, Strike Across the Empire, 1992, London, pp44ff). As early as 28 July 1934 there is a letter replying to him from the (Trotskyist) Workers Party of Australia and a report in their paper, The Militant, November 1935, of a resolution carried at a New Zealand Seamen’s Union meeting which closely followed the Trotskyist line on the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Walsh was, among his other roles, both President of the Seamen’s Union from 1927 until his death in 1963, and President of the Wellington Clerical Workers Union in 1939. He wrote a letter to Trotsky on 3 January 1940 at the outbreak of war enclosing a resolution from a ‘stopwork meeting of New Zealand seamen’ which denounced Stalin’s aggression against Finland and took a Shachtmanite position (Trotsky archives at Harvard, T2 5827), whilst the text of the resolution can be found in the Wellington Evening Post, 7 December 1939. To this Trotsky replied with a cordial if guarded reply on 19 February 1940. (See Rick Hill on the ‘The Myth of FP Walsh as a Trotskyist’, Partisan , journal of the Marxist Labour Group, Spring 1971 [the only issue].) This is the only letter from Walsh that could be traced in the archives by Pierre Broué. Walsh was eclectic in his reading habits, and got material from a wide variety of sources, including the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Though he played a very nasty role both in the 1940s, when, as part of the bureaucracy, he was responsible, with Pharazyn, for the expulsion of John A Lee from the Labour Party on 27 March 1940 (cf The John A Lee Diaries, Christchurch, 1981, p209, and Erik Olssen, John A Lee, University of Otago Press, 1977, p151), whilst his role in the waterfront dispute of 1951 was positively McCarthyite, it is possible that at an earlier period, or even then, he thought of himself as a Trotskyist. At a minimum, it would be necessary to examine the Walsh papers in the Turnbull Library in Wellington, and to go through the copies of the Australian Militant for references to New Zealand, as well as following up any leads that might arise from this, both to resolve this question and the broader one of Trotskyist influences in the country before the war. Max Riske, now aged 87, who was a leading member of the Friends of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, and who later worked with Walsh and Pharazyn (see his entry in the current New Zealand Who’s Who for details of his importance as an educationalist), was interviewed by Bill Logan in January 1993 to provide information for this review. He says that Walsh and Pharazyn were close friends, were best described as ‘radical liberals’, came out of the Wobbly tradition, read and informally discussed some of Trotsky’s writings, and agreed with many Trotskyist positions, but never constituted a Trotskyist organisation.

It must be remembered that the CPNZ was admitted to the Third International only in 1927, and they had little contact with Moscow until after 1928. New Zealand was very isolated, far more so then than today, and it may well be that in the 1930s some trade union bureaucrats played with some Trotskyist ideas for their own purposes. A connecting link between them and later times may be Conrad Bollinger, who, at a later period, in conversation admitted that he may have over-emphasised the Trotskyism of Walsh (cf Against the Wind, New Zealand Seamen’s Union , Wellington, 1968, p167), but who researched Walsh, and who defended the dissemination of Trotskyist views in a sometimes hostile atmosphere in the 1960s. It was Bollinger and his CPNZ friends who denounced Walsh in an anonymous, bitter little pamphlet, produced under illegal conditions, where it is stated that Walsh’s name was really Touhy, when the latter attacked the left in the great New Zealand waterfront lockout of 1951 (for some reason this event is called a strike by the right, but a lockout by the left). So bitter in tone was the Wellington pamphlet that the Auckland CPNZ branch refused to distribute it, saying it was far too personal. Yet in 1958, when Walsh came under attack from a group of Catholic reactionaries in the union led by Butler, he swung back to the left again, even if he did end his life owning an extremely large and very well-appointed farm. (He was always rumoured to have had large sums at his disposal from some mysterious source.) He was a most complex and fascinating character, and a biography is long overdue.

A more important date for the genesis of New Zealand Trotskyism was in 1955, when Hector MacNeill, at that time a teacher working in Wellington, returned from a visit to Britain and Eastern Europe, and broke with the CPNZ, believing that the ‘World Communist Movement’ was Stalinist and anti-Marxist. At about the same time, Owen Gager, who became a provisional member of the CPNZ whilst in his first year at Auckland University in 1956, was deeply affected by events in Hungary, immediately and rapidly read every book by or on Trotsky in the library, and left the Party. Gager, who was, and is, a most talented if sometimes eccentric individual, saw himself as a Trotskyist, and defended Trotskyist positions on a number of issues. From September 1964 he put out a journal called Dispute, which did not present itself as Trotskyist, but rather as a journal of the broad left, but, in its 19 issues, published a quantity of explicitly Trotskyist material, ranging from Tony Cliff’s positions (British SWP) to those of James Robertson (US Spartacist League), and polemicised against the economic-nationalist protectionism of the New Zealand left. Logan says that Gager was a brilliant, articulate, widely read man of broad interests and a prolific writer—something completely out of place in New Zealand. Despite a frail, bird-like appearance he was enormously energetic. But he was an organiser’s nightmare, and an extraordinarily difficult person with whom to work, and he had a way of leaving behind him distraught printers and a string of enemies as he moved through the New Zealand archipelago. To illustrate his wit and ability both to impress and antagonise, Jonathan Hunt, a leading member of the right wing Large Labour government, said in 1987 that Gager ‘was one of the most intelligent men I have ever met’ (cf ‘How Auckland's Intellectual Left of ‘Sixties Took Over the Country’ in the June 1987 issue of the upmarket glossy magazine Metro), whilst Gager, after introducing Hunt to Logan in 1967, said of Hunt afterwards: ‘He’ll make a good Labour politician—he has a mind of monumental complacency and microscopic imagination.’ Whether this got back to Hunt or not, in the nature of things, similar shrewd and wounding judgements on others often did. This whole period of fascinating intellectual debate, when Trotskyist ideas were influencing quite broad sections of New Zealand’s intelligentsia, some of whom later became the right wing Labour ideologues of the present day, but before any real Trotskyist organisations had crystallised out, was recalled in the October 1992 issue of Metro by Bruce Jesson, a prominent leader of the New Labour Party, who remembers Owen Gager calling for an end to the protected and regulated market in the 1960s in his magazine Dispute. By implication, Gager, whilst attacking the narrow insularity of the Labour Party, was a forerunner of Lange, and thus a partisan of international capitalism. Jesson, who considers himself a Marxist, was never a Trotskyist, but was influenced by Maoism, has consistently called for a republic and both an economic and cultural nationalist orientation, seeing New Zealand ‘independence’ as a rallying cry, and so has his own peculiar Popular Front political fish to fry. He is now a leading member of, and the brains behind, the New Labour Party in Auckland. But this entire epoch, which, when the roots of the present era come to be examined, needs a far deeper and more general account than the one sketched out here, was entirely missed by Alexander’s informants, if indeed they were ever aware of its existence and significance.

From 1956 Gager and MacNeill were both active in the New Zealand Labour Party, and first met in 1957 at the New Zealand University Summer Student Congress (a festival rather than a conference). For the remainder of the 1950s Gager continued to disseminate general Trotskyist ideas among a sizeable number of individuals, and influenced far more people than could MacNeill, whose contact with the student milieu was limited, though, in MacNeill’s view, Gager’s behaviour detracted from his often successful work, and sometimes more harm than good resulted. Gager travelled to Australia from time to time, and there met people from the Australian section of the Fourth International, including both those who supported Pablo and those who had split from him. Without telling MacNeill, Gager arranged for the ‘New Zealand Trotskyists’ (sic) to become part of the Australian ‘Section’ of the latter group. At this time, MacNeill was quite unclear as to the real issues involved in the split, and was unwilling to take sides on another individual’s unilateral initiative. In any case it was hardly practicable for two people living 1300 miles apart to make any contribution to the so-called ‘Section’, though in Quatrième Inteniationale, Volume 18, no 1, October-November 1960, p94, a New Zealand link-up with the Australian section is reported. Nothing else resulted from this, and, as far as MacNeill is aware, Gager and the Australian section forgot about their link with New Zealand as soon as it was announced.

Shortly after this, MacNeill broke off political relations with Gager, and the latter, coming later on under the influence of the American Spartacists in the mid-1960s, himself broke from the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and, after coming back to New Zealand, participated in the Socialist Labour Movement (1966-67) centred on Christchurch, an entrist organisation which was influenced by Trotskyism, and which contained in addition to him Paul Piesse, Keith Locke and Nevil Gibson. After Gager declared his solidarity with the Spartacist League on 8 January 1967, he then created a New Zealand Spartacist Group comprised of people from the university. In 1970 it recruited Bill Logan, who was until 1968 Chairman of the University National Party (the New Zealand Tories), and later editor of Salient, the weekly student newspaper in Wellington. MacNeill states that Logan, though not formally an Spartacist League member, was with the Spartacist League politically from 1967 whilst still a member of the National Party, although this is denied by Logan. MacNeill is very critical of Gager for allowing this. Alexander correctly points out that the New Zealand Spartacists emigrated en masse to Australia in the 1970s—it was in fact January 1973—although Gager had left them or been pushed out previously—actually on 16 March 1972.

Meanwhile, by the late 1960s, MacNeill had built round him a small group of students from Victoria University, and was involved with them in anti-Vietnam war and anti-racist activity relating to sporting links with South Africa. They revived the University Socialist Club, in 1969 started to produce the Red Spark magazine (mentioned by Alexander), and had some influence. With the intensification of the Vietnam War and New Zealand’s participation in it, there was a considerable student youth mobilisation, and for the first time there was an opportunity to spread Trotskyist ideas widely.

In early 1969 MacNeill learnt through his international contacts that Barry Sheppard, a prominent member of the American SWP, proposed to visit Vietnam and Australia later that year. He accordingly invited Sheppard to stay with him at his home in Wellington, and, in June 1969, discussions took place there with MacNeill and other members of the Socialist Club over a period of 10 days. The inaugural meeting of the Socialist Action League took place in August 1969 (not 1959 as misprinted in Alexander’s book) and speakers from the USA visited New Zealand under the aegis of the SAL. The SAL’s newspaper, Socialist Action , had a readership of several hundred, and membership of the League grew quite rapidly.

However, in 1970 Keith Locke, a New Zealander who had been living in Canada since late 1967, and who had been active in the Canadian section of the Fourth International, returned to New Zealand, and fundamental differences swiftly arose in the SAL. In Canada Ross Dowson had the position that foreign capital in Canada had to be singled out as the main enemy, rather than local capital. The same line was proposed by Locke in New Zealand. MacNeill argued that this was the case for a Stalinist Popular Front of workers and ‘progressive’ local capitalists, and that New Zealand’s position in relation to Britain and the United States was similar to the relationship of Norway and Sweden to Britain before First World War as interpreted by Lenin. New Zealand was not like Brazil or the Philippines. The majority of the SAL followed the Dowson line and opted for chauvinism, whilst there were also important differences on the anti-war agitation, which, in MacNeill’s view, followed the American SWP far too closely. Logan’s distinct view of the flavour of this whole period from 1967 onwards can be found in the autobiographical ‘Never Exactly One of The Lads’ in Michael King (ed), One of the Boys? Changing Views of Masculinity in New Zealand, Auckland, 1988, although, alas, much of the politics in this account have been edited out.

In MacNeill’s opinion, though the SWP correctly formulated the United Front slogan ‘Bring the Troops Home’, it totally submerged its party position on colonialism and the war itself in its own papers, and its journal appeared unblemished by anything so extreme as Marxism. Thus many radicalised US students and workers regarded it as far too tame, and moved on to Maoist and sometimes Spartacist positions. MacNeill believed that the Spartacists, who called for ‘Victory to the National Liberation Front’, were equally mistaken, as they entirely ignored the United Front tactic, and preferred sectarian purity. Again, the majority of the SAL followed the SWP line with such fidelity that on one occasion in April 1972 at a Victoria University general meeting of the Student Association with perhaps 1,000 present, when a motion was proposed that a large donation from student funds be donated for medical aid to assist the Vietnamese victims of America military action, the SAL argued and voted against the motion with the ultra-Right, Tories, neo-Fascists and assorted warmongers (cf Salient , 11 April 1972). Nothing in the League’s publications had prepared them to deal with such a complex political question.

On a number of occasions MacNeill wrote to the USFI, pointing out the aid such behaviour gave to the Stalinists, but he never received a reply, or even an acknowledgment. In March 1971, together with about a fifth of the membership, MacNeill left the SAL and helped to create the Marxist Labour Group, which produced a number of publications, and which sought to link itself to the USFI as a sympathising organisation. Most of those who had left with him lapsed swiftly into inactivity, and by April 1973 there were very few of them, whilst the SAL continued to grow throughout the 1970s. At the 1972 World Congress MLG letters were ignored by the Secretariat, and when a supporter in Britain tried to find out where the World Congress was to be held so that he could attend and support the application for membership in person, he was always fobbed off and only learnt of the details after the congress was over. On another occasion a comrade living in the Netherlands rang Ernest Mandel’s home for 28 consecutive days before the great man deigned to answer him personally. No satisfactory explanation was ever forthcoming as to why the MLG was unworthy of sympathising status, and the SAL became the official section of the USFI. Thus in this very different and much narrower political milieu, the small MLG more or less disappeared by 1974, though MacNeill and Hill published Albanians Rubbish Mao’s Three Worlds Theory under its imprint as late as March 1978. It is important to note that the great political activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was almost exclusively focused on single issue campaigns, and that, despite the growth of the little Trotskyist groups mentioned above, Stalinism, in its various guises, was still the dominant ideological tendency on the left then, above all in the working class.

Alexander’s reference to the industrial activity of the SAL glosses over the fact that for its first eight years of existence all the young workers encountered were simply involved in student political issues on war, abortion and race, and not at all on class issues. Thus most of them were rapidly alienated and lost. In around 1977 or 1978 the SAL started to implant its students in industry, but, in a bizarre twist, when SAL members were nominated for any union office they always turned it down, and their inexplicable behaviour bewildered and sometimes angered the rank and file. Alexander quotes Russell Johnson, the SAL National Secretary, as saying that ‘the axis of our work has not been to build up a layer of SAL Meat Union officials’, but he does not note that whilst the quest for bureaucratic positions has harmed workers’ parties, so has dogmatic rank and fileism like this. A further comical aspect was that Socialist Action often used American trade union terms quite unknown to New Zealand workers, which suggested that its readers in the New York head office were thought to be more important than those in the New Zealand meat plants.

Whilst Alexander points to the work on Maori rights that the SAL has undertaken, the correctness of such an orientation depends on how it is implemented in practice, and it is obligatory for Marxists to distinguish themselves from national chauvinists. But nothing was ever said by the SAL to make it clear that the interests of Maori workers must take precedence over the Maori bourgeois nationalism which sought to cut off Maori workers from unity in action with workers of European descent. When the struggle for national rights was falsely counterposed to the rights of the working class as a whole, Socialist Action kept silent, and so left the field open to class enemies of both national categories of workers.

Finally, there is a passage in Alexander’s work which is very puzzling, and which suggests that he has misunderstood the material given to him by friends of the SAL in the USA. This states that ‘speakers were particularly critical of the popular enthusiasm raised over the Lange government’s refusal to allow nuclear powered warships to dock in New Zealand’. It has been the position of every left group in New Zealand, including the SAL, that such visits by American ships strengthened imperialism in the world and the region, and hence they all called for an end to them. When Lange’s ultra-right wing Labour government came to power, he astutely implemented this anti-nuclear policy whilst carrying through a vicious anti-working class economic strategy. So the left feared that, if Lange were attacked too strongly, they might lose their influence on his foreign and defence policy. Perhaps the material given to Alexander made this clear, but he has misread it.

The strengths of the SAL—and despite the tone of this review these did exist—were a serious attitude to organisation and its paper, and a most business-like attitude to administration, all characteristics of the American SWP, and it would be fair to say that it is the only organisation in New Zealand openly claiming to be Trotskyist which has had in the past a real national presence in the three main population centres. However, Socialist Action ceased publication in 1988, and the SAL changed its name to the Communist League. At the last report it was making efforts to persuade New Zealanders to go to Nicaragua and Cuba on ‘brigade’ type activities. It has never done anything on the issue of unemployment, though this is now an enormous problem in New Zealand. It won only 14 votes in a recent Wellington by-election, and is now three very small groups in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington. In the last city Logan claims that they are smaller than his PRG group. The decent and self-sacrificing members of the SAL deserved a better and less bankrupt political home. The only other tendency mentioned by Alexander is the Socialist Labour League that was influenced by the late Gerry Healy. All that needs to be said of the Healy group is that it came into existence after a visit to the country by Corin Redgrave. A paper was produced, but both it and the organisation, which numbered half a dozen at most, did not last long. Its polities and activity were similar to those of its British sponsors.

Other groups not mentioned to Alexander by his informants are more recent. In 1986 a national organisation called the Socialist Alliance was formed (now moribund), which was a bloc between the Communist Left group in Auckland around Dave Bedgood and the Christchurch-based Revolutionary Communist League around Geoff Pearce. The former had some relationship with the British Revolutionary Communist Party, whilst the latter was associated with Ernest Mandel’s USFI. A grouplet in Wellington around Logan, which had split from the Spartacists, but which kept many of their positions, also joined the Alliance and formed the Permanent Revolution Group within it. All were small. By 1993 the Revolutionary Communist League seems to have disappeared, whilst the PRG, after being expelled from the New Labour Party in April 1990, has grown slightly and has joined the International Bolshevik Tendency. The Communist Left has also grown, has changed its name to Workers Power, and is now linked internationally to the League for a Revolutionary Communist International.

At present, Hector MacNeill is in retirement in Northland, and, sadly, his state of health has forced him to withdraw from all activity, although he stood as the New Labour candidate in the far north in the last elections. Owen Gager lives in Melbourne, and, according to some reports, has evolved to some sort of pre-Leninist Trotskyist position. Logan is active in Wellington with the PRG. The author, whilst thanking Bill Logan, Hector MacNeill and Rick Hill again for their material, which is in the Socialist Platform archive, hopes that this extended review, together with the article by Alexander, provides at least the outline for a history of New Zealand Trotskyism, and would welcome any amendments or corrections.

To be continued. The above constitutes the first part of our review of this extensive work. The second part, covering the section on Latin America, will appear in the next issue of this journal.