06.03.2025

Operating on a hunch

The International Socialist tradition is nowadays characterised by an almost pathological fear of adopting a programme. Yet without a comprehensive, fully worked-out programme there is every chance of falling into opportunist incoherence, argues Jack Conrad

Though communists treat their programme with the utmost seriousness, talk to any SWP loyalist and I guarantee you that they will put on a completely dismissive, even an aggressively hostile, attitude - that is if you dare suggest that it would be a good idea for them to adopt a programme. If, that is, they actually understand what you are talking about in the first place. Even though they tend to be less aggressive, even friendly, you get the same essential response from most members of Counterfire and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century. Either there is rejection or there is dumb incomprehension. All three organisations share, of course, common origins in the ideas of Tony Cliff and his International Socialist tradition.

True, each has an aphoristic, largely banal, confession of faith. In the case of the SWP it is the ‘What we stand for’ column in Socialist Worker, while RS21 has its ‘About RS21’ and Counterfire an almost microscopic ‘Who we are’. But nothing that could remotely be called a programme: that is, a set of defining aims and principles, supported by a strategically realistic guide that can help navigate us from today’s pinched, unpromising conditions all the way to the conquest of state power by the working class.

Indeed, we are seriously told that programmes are rigid, inflexible and constricting. Chains, manacles, even straitjackets are routinely mentioned. Therefore, it supposedly follows, a programme is a horrible danger that must be avoided at all costs. To provide themselves with the sanction of ‘orthodoxy’, the well-versed usually invoke the ghost of Marx and, yes, his “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes” statement. An all too typical example of contextomy.

Before Cliff

So let us give some background.

Marx wrote the above sentence in a letter sent to Wilhelm Bracke - a friend and a social democratic publisher - on May 5 1875, where he warned that he and Engels would “disassociate” themselves from the “unity programme” of their Eisenach comrades in Germany and the state socialist followers of Ferdinand Lassalle.¹

Influenced by the Marx-Engels team, the Social Democratic Workers Party had been founded in the Thuringian town of Eisenach in 1869. The main leaders were August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. True, their programme had definite shortcomings: eg, it demanded a “free people’s state” and “universal” male suffrage. But there were also calls for the liberation of the working class, abolition of the standing army, establishing a “people’s militia” and the “separation of the church from the state.” It also constituted the SDWP as “a branch” of the First International - “to the extent that the associational laws permit”.² Bebel and Liebknecht, note, both served lengthy prison sentences due to activities associated with the International.

However, contemporaries widely regarded the SDWP as a Marxist party. So everything the SDWP said and did reflected on the reputation of the Marx-Engels team in London. A reputation they were determined to uphold. Eg, Mikhail Bakunin attacked what he called Marxism in his Statism and anarchy, in no small part by laying hold of the real and imagined failings of the “duumvirate of Bebel and Liebknecht” … and the “Jewish literati behind or under them”.³ A Slavophile, Bakunin hated Germans and Jews with a passion. Marx specifically referred to Bakunin in his letter to Bracke.

Anyhow, put together jointly by Bebel and Liebknecht, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the followers of Lassalle, the unity programme was to be presented to the fusion congress of the two groups meeting in Gotha. After much haggling Marx’s comrades agreed a series of compromises. Not only the “iron law of wages”, but other Lassallian drivel, such as “state”-financed industry and the claim that “all other classes are only a reactionary body”.⁴

Disobeying doctor’s orders, Marx took to his desk to compose a furious commentary on the draft (now known to us as the Critique of the Gotha programme). He also offered the advice that, unless his alternative formulations - or something very much like them - were adopted, then it would be better, far better, for the SDWP and the Lasallians to remain separate organisations and find issues where they could engage in common action.

However, the draft Gotha programme was voted through in May 1875 - albeit with some not insignificant amendments clearly originating with Marx. Undoubtedly, the immediate impact of the fusion congress was hugely positive: within the year a 50% growth in membership and a doubling of the circulation of their press.⁵ By 1890 the organisation, now renamed the Social Democratic Party, had become the largest party in Germany by total votes.

While Liebknecht later said that “what [Marx] said theoretically” against the unity of the Eisenachers and the Lasallians “was correct to the last letter”, he insisted that the theoretical concessions were worth making for the sake of uniting the socialist movement of Germany under one banner. In point of fact, he claimed that “Marx also perceived that his fears were ungrounded”.⁶

Certainly it is the case that the Marx-Engels team did not publicly denounce the Gotha programme. Indeed Marx can be found recommending it, albeit with a couple of caveats, as “the clearest and most concise expression of socialism that I had seen”. This was said during the course of an interview conducted with the intriguingly named ‘H’ for the Chicago Tribune.⁷ It should, however, be mentioned, that Engels continued to disagree with Liebknecht till the end of his days. He upheld Marx’s position both theoretically and organisationally: better disunity and maintaining principle than unprincipled unity. But that unity had taken place and there can be no hiding the pride that both Marx and Engels took in the growth of the SDP. But, understandably, Engels wanted a better programme, a programme purged of the Lassallian state socialist concepts and clichés. That is why he urged Karl Kautsky to publish Marx’s critical notes in Die Neue Zeit. Final vindication came when the Erfurt programme was adopted by the SDP in October 1891. It marked a huge improvement.⁸

Either way, the Marx-Engels team believed that a programmatically uncompromised SDWP would have quickly eclipsed an already declining and rapidly fragmenting Lassallian organisation and grown into a mass party by its own efforts. There are some good reasons to believe that this was a correct assessment. Of course, we may never know. History cannot be rerun (except as a counterfactual work of the imagination).

It is doubtless true that a party should be judged primarily by what it does, rather than what its programme says. But a new party will be judged by its programme. And the Gotha programme represented a retreat, compared with the Eisenach programme. That was the main thrust of Marx’s criticism.

And, at a guess, it should be added that what Marx was thinking about when he wrote to Bracke about “Every step of real movement” was probably more on the level of the founding of the Chartist movement in Britain, the formation of the First International, the US civil war against the slave-owning south and revolutions such as 1830, 1848 and 1871 - certainly not the essentially circular routine of economic strikes, street protests and even the occasional election of this or that politically muddled protest candidate.

But, frankly, any group that fields Marx’s 1875 words, or other similar such phrases - in these days of fragmentation, confusion and disorganisation - to dismiss, mock or play down the centrality of a comprehensive programme reveals a complacency that borders on the criminal, not least given that we are faced with a resurgent far right, a real danger of big-power war and a climate crisis that threatens civilisational collapse.

What is for sure though is that the whole Gotha programme episode shows beyond a shadow of doubt that Marx treated programmes as a matter of cardinal importance - he also authored a few himself: eg, the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany. Then there was the International Workingman’s Association, the First International. Marx was responsible for its rules and fundamental programmatic documents.

Marx was, in fact, a consummate writer of programmes. Take the role he played in drafting the Programme of the Parti Ouvrier. Marx dictated the maximum section (the preamble), while the two parts of the minimum section, the immediate political and economic demands, were formulated by himself and Jules Guesde, with help coming from Engels and Paul Lafargue. Their programme was adopted, with a few minor amendments, by the founding congress of the Parti Ouvrier meeting at Le Havre in November 1880.

Early Cliff

Neither the Marx-Engels team nor anyone else standing in the authentic Marxist tradition have ever denied the necessity of a programme. It was the revisionist, Eduard Bernstein, who scorned the maximum programme and tried to theoretically justify his treacherous approach by elevating the organisation of the party into a thing for itself.

Unconsciously this was echoed and turned into dogma by the SWP’s Machiavellian founder-leader, Tony Cliff. He routinely warned against adopting a programme. Gaining recruits and petty factional advantage was his sole guide.

Yes, a democratically agreed programme would have created intolerable difficulties for the SWP central committee with its many and sudden about-turns. True, in the early 1950s, when his Socialist Review Group was a mere bacillus worming away in the bowels of the Labour Party, Cliff agreed to a beggarly, 12-point set of “transitional demands”, which were meant to attract and recruit “individual” Labour and trade union activists.⁹

It was Duncan Hallas who wrote and submitted the original “transitional programme” to the SRG. Cliff, however, ensured that even this minimalist mouse was defanged of anything too radical: eg, the “overthrow of the Tory government by all the means available to the working class” and “defence of socialist Britain” against Washington and Moscow.

In terms of ‘method’ the SRG’s approach clearly derives from Leon Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional programme. Hence, no surprise, democracy both in the workers’ movement and society at large, goes completely ignored, along, of course, with any attempt to win over or neutralise the middle classes. The tasks of the workers’ movement are thereby reduced to trade union politics. As to the “final aim” of working class rule, socialism and the transition to communism, that is, predictably, left to spontaneity.

Hallas explains the duplicity involved. The “programme of demands” must be “made to appear both necessary and realisable to broad sections of the workers, given their present (reformist) level of understanding, but which in reality pass beyond the framework of bourgeois democracy. Naturally … [this is] only part (a fairly small part) of what we advocate.”¹⁰

With the Cliffite turn away from Labour Party deep entryism in the mid-1960s, economistic minimalism was abandoned for a heady brew of eclectic Luxemburgism and the International Socialists. Cliff sought distance from what then, in the aftermath of World War II, passed as Leninism and Trotskyism, because he was at least able to recognise both Stalin’s palpable success in creating an empire in eastern Europe and the palpable reality of the long economic boom in the west.

Events had, after all, beached Trotsky’s 1938 expectations. Stalinism did not collapse with the Nazi invasion. Nor was capitalism in its “death agony”.¹¹ In fact, it was the Trotskyites who were spiralling into crisis. As Cliff wittily put it, guided by the exact words of Trotsky’s Transitional programme, they were like people trying to navigate the Paris metro using a London tube map.

Cliff readily admitted how “excruciatingly painful” it was to face up to the reality that Trotsky’s prognosis had not come true.¹² But come true it had not. Cliff, therefore, reluctantly concluded that the Transitional programme had been “belied by life” and that reformism was enjoying a second spring.¹³ In the fourth volume of his Trotsky biography, Cliff argued, surely rightly, that its demands, such as a sliding scale of wages, were adopted in response to a “capitalism in deep slump” and therefore “did not fit a non-revolutionary situation”. He concluded:

The basic assumption behind Trotsky’s transitional demands was that the economic crisis was so deep that the struggle for even the smallest improvement in workers’ conditions would bring conflict with the capitalist system itself. When life disproved the assumption, the ground fell from beneath the programme.¹⁴

In the 1950s at least, Cliff was no fool.

Nonetheless, his blasé attitude towards programmes can be judged by what might appear to be the glaring exception: namely the International Socialists’ programme of the early 1970s. Tony Cliff, and industrial organiser Andreas Nagliatti, took the lead by writing an article with this self-explaining title: ‘Main features of the programme we need’.¹⁵ Drafts were discussed over several meetings of the IS national committee.

The main motivation behind the programme seems twofold. First, induct the growing body of recruits into the belief system. Second, draw lines of demarcation. The IS had just suffered two jarring faction fights. First with Sean Matgamna’s Workers Fight group (now the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), then the Right Opposition (now Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism and the far-right online journal Spiked). Both factions showed an unwelcome fondness for Trotsky’s Transitional programme.

As Ian Birchall recounts, the draft programme was mainly the work of Chris Harman and Duncan Hallas, though others made contributions. It ran to some 15,000 words. Submitted to the 1973 IS conference, the draft was remitted to the NC for further consideration. A job then given over to a sub-committee, consisting of comrades Cliff, Hallas and Birchall.

“However, Cliff, without consulting the sub-committee, let alone the NC”, passed it on to the (new) industrial organiser, Roger Rosewell, who “turned it into a pamphlet” (The struggle for workers power 1973). Incidentally, Rosewell, a rather pathetic figure, dropped out of the IS soon afterwards and quickly gravitated to the right. He joined the short-lived Social Democratic Party, serving on its industrial committee, then worked for the free-market Aims for Industry outfit and wrote occasional leaders for the Daily Mail.

Anyhow, showing the importance attached to programme, the September 1974 conference took just 30 minutes to debate and agree the whole thing … and then nothing more was heard of it! As a result Cliff was effectively free to do and say what he pleased without reference to any map (tube, road or anything else, for that matter). He navigated by hunch.

Imagining that the big breakthrough was within reach, Cliff launched the Socialist Workers Party in 1977. Though supposedly the “smallest mass party in the world”, naturally, Cliff’s retagged confessional sect was unencumbered by anything resembling a programme.¹⁶ But, of course, the SWP was no party. Cliff simply got carried away by what were - well, at least compared to present circumstances - exciting times.

The late 1960s to early 1970s period saw rapid forward movement. There was Vietnam, student revolts, women’s liberation, black power and a huge upsurge in trade union militancy. IS membership shot up from under a hundred to a few thousand. Most recruits were students and young workers. Cliff must have thought he was about to meet his destiny. Then came the April 1974 Portuguese revolution.

We appeared to be winning one thrilling victory after another. That bred courage, determination and a brimming sense of confidence. Obviously, overconfidence too.

With the advantage of hindsight, it is plain to see that Cliff was badly mistaken. But then so was this writer. I too thought that capitalism was facing its final crisis. Not because of the declining rate of profit, but because of the rising tide of working class combativity (well, that and what I called, as a teenager, the success of the socialist countries and the movements for national liberation). It is easy to scoff. By the late 1970s the capitalist offensive was already in full swing.

Yet the outcome was not predetermined. There were plenty of unrealised moments and strategic possibilities. Not proletarian revolutions in Germany, France or Italy, that has to be said - objective and subjective circumstances precluded any such outcome. But we could have done better. A lot better. However, my purpose in criticising past efforts - and I trust that this is clear - is to learn from them.

Late Cliff

Having spent years denying the need for a programme, towards the end of his life Cliff suddenly decided that the times were ripe to adopt … yes, a programme. With much fanfare, in September 1998 the SWP’s ‘Action programme’ appeared in Socialist Worker (like the 12-point transitional programme of the SRG and the 15,000 word programme of IS, now almost totally forgotten).¹⁷

A glossy brochure and attempts to garner support and finance from local branches of trade unions, trades councils, Labour Party wards, etc followed. Naturally, that belly-flopped. But - and this is important - there was no serious debate within the SWP’s ranks, culminating in a national conference vote, before the launch decision was made. In fact, Cliff pre-empted the annual conference by a good three months. Delegates were presented with a fait accompli. Cliff’s hunch overrode any pretence of democratic norms. Note the fundamental difference between German, French and Russian social democracy and the SWP in 1998. With them conferences and congress were sovereign.

The ‘Action programme’ consisted of little more than a trite list of left-reformist nostrums: stopping closures and the nationalisation of failed concerns; a 35-hour week with no loss of pay; a £4.61 hourly minimum wage; ending privatisation; repealing the anti-trade union laws; state control over international trade in order to curb speculation; an increase in welfare spending and slashing the arms bill; full employment, so as to boost aggregate economic demand. In other words, a late-1990s version of early-1950s SRG economism.

So still no Cliffite strategy for achieving working class hegemony by fighting for extreme democracy, breaking the hold of the trade union and labour bureaucracy, championing women’s and minority rights, winning over, or neutralising, the middle classes - above all, no strategic plan for putting a revolutionary government into power and overthrowing the rule of capital on a global scale.

Chris Harman, John Rees and Alex Callinicos were each tasked with providing ‘theoretical’ justification. In truth it amounted to intellectual prostitution. They backed the ‘Action programme’ with extraordinarily tedious stories about rapidly mounting levels of discontent, etc, etc. In any class-divided society, it should be noted, discontent is, of course, a permanent feature of society. And capitalism itself constantly creates new, unsatisfied, wants and therefore discontents, through the advertising industry, celebrity influencers and the life styles of the super rich.

Then there was the ‘inventive’ fielding of quotes culled from Comintern’s ‘Theses on tactics’ agreed at its 3rd Congress in June 1921 and Trotsky’s 1934 ‘A programme of action for France’.¹⁸ But the boldest claim of all was that the SWP’s ‘Action programme’ was premised on the same conditions which prompted Trotsky’s Transitional programme. A claim made by Tony Cliff himself.¹⁹

Cliff strongly implied that Britain and other core imperialist powers had entered a deep crisis, which made revolution imminent: “Capitalism in the advanced countries,” he wrote, “is no longer expanding and so the words of the 1938 Transitional programme that ‘there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and raising the masses’ living standards’ fits reality again.”²⁰

Despite working class organisation, confidence and self-activity being at an extraordinary low ebb and revolutionary consciousness barely existing at all, Cliff decreed that the pursuit of even the most minimal demands is all that is needed to at last bring capitalism crashing down.

Over a Cliff

The crass opportunism of Tony Cliff provided his chosen heir and successor, John Rees, with his springboard. With the mass movement against the Iraq war in 2002-03, he too thought he was about to meet his destiny. Out went the Socialist Alliance and in came Respect - the Unity Coalition.

The modus vivendi of Respect was to unite “secular socialists with Muslim activists” on the basis of whatever it took to get local and national candidates elected.²¹ Suffice to say, it ended in a train crash … especially for the SWP. Not only did the expected membership take-off fail to happen: the SWP lost members high and low … Eventually comrade Rees was removed as leader. Along with a tight-knit group of co-thinkers, he walked and soon after formed Counterfire.

Yet, much to the discredit of the post‑Rees SWP, it has steadfastly refused to conduct any kind of honest, open or serious autopsy into the Respect popular-front debacle. Yes, there is Joseph Choonara’s ‘Revolutionaries and elections’ International Socialism article, but it is apologetics of the worst kind. Nowhere does he question the profoundly unprincipled nature of the Respect lash-up. Though he admits the involvement of “Muslim notables”, such as “millionaire restaurateurs and building contractors”, he cannot bring himself to utter the damning phrase, ‘popular front’ (or words to that effect).

As for George Galloway, Respect’s leader and front man, today he is pictured as promoting “anti-woke”, “patriotic” class politics via his Workers Party of Britain. Back in 2004, however, when Respect was founded, he was “a firebrand MP, one of the most celebrated orators of the anti-war movement and the most prominent figure to be expelled by Labour for opposition to the Iraq War”.²²

In reality Galloway has been pretty consistent, when it comes to the reactionary side of his politics. What comrade Choonara is actually attempting to do with his two Galloways - and, as it happens, not very convincingly - is to cover up for the fact that within Respect the SWP voted down motions, moved by CPGB comrades, supporting abortion, gay rights, open borders, MPs taking only an average skilled workers’ wage, republicanism … even international socialism.

Interestingly, when discussing the future, Choonara says that, when standing in parliamentary elections in “non-revolutionary times”, revolutionaries “should be open with workers about their politics”. Presumably opaque criticism of the SWP’s role in Respect. However, he goes on to say that “this does not entail that those voting for them must accept the full revolutionary programme of the party”. Daft, especially given that the SWP eschews the very idea of a programme. Double daft, because people do little more than pick up a pencil to draw a cross on the ballot paper when they vote. They are not required to “accept” anything, when it comes to their chosen candidate ... even if they opt for an SWP comrade.

But what Choonara was actually doing is excusing SWP candidates standing, once again, on a what he calls a “minimum programme”: ie, advocating mass workers’ struggle to “achieve far-reaching reforms that begin to push against the logic of the capitalist system”. He further explains that, as the “struggle advances, so this programme would increase in radicalism”. However, such a programme “should clearly not include support for measures with which revolutionaries could not possibly agree, such as the imposition of immigration controls”.

So more aesopian criticism of the SWP’s role in Respect under the John Rees-Lindsey German leadership. Again, though, it begs a few obvious questions about the SWP’s “minimum programme”. Where was it debated? When was it agreed? Where can we read it? The short answer is, of course, that there are no answers, because it does not exist. In fact, comrade Choonara was pinning his flag to the thoroughly opportunist ‘transitional method’ that excuses ‘revolutionaries’ standing in parliamentary elections with the sort of famished, vacuous, tailist, politics which the “community activist and independent socialist”, Maxine Bowler, stood on in the July 2024 general election in Sheffield’s Brightside and Hillsborough constituency: renationalisation of public services, supporting strikes and Palestine, Palestine, Palestine.²³

By the by, standing as a “community activist and independent socialist” could well be excusable if the SWP was illegal. But it is not. As to her “minimum programme”, what leaps out is the complete absence of core democratic demands … along with Socialist Worker’s ‘What we stand for’ few maximum aims, such as “a socialist state” and “a workers’ state based upon councils of workers’ delegates and a workers’ militia”.²⁴

Where comrade Choonara’s “minimum programme” ends up can be seen over the other side of the Irish Sea with People Before Profit … its leader, Richard Boyd Barrett, a member of the Socialist Workers Network, desperately wants to serve as a junior minister in a Sinn Féin coalition government that would, of course, safeguard capitalism, all the while, perhaps, saying the opposite. Millerandism redux or rightwing communism as a senile disorder. Call it what you will.

Bottom of a Cliff

When it comes to Respect post-mortems, what goes for the SWP goes for Counterfire in extremis. My search of its website produced no results.²⁵ RS21 is better - but not by much.²⁶ While there is nothing collectively, nothing from an All-Members Assembly, there is an individual contribution written by David Renton, the barrister, historian and author of over 20 books … including Labour’s antisemitism crisis (2022).²⁷

A health warning, when it comes to ‘comrade’ Renton. He took for granted the presence of “tens of thousands” of anti-Semites in Corbyn’s Labour Party in his Labour’s antisemitism crisis.²⁸ He also fielded the ‘no smoke without fire’ argument. The national media could not go on and on about Labour’s supposed anti-Semitism if there was not a real problem. Really! Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker are attacked. Jon Lansman praised and Luciana Berger defended. No wonder his book received such a fulsome “welcome” from the AWL.²⁹

Both he and the AWL played the role of useful idiots in the establishment’s frighteningly successful ‘anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ big-lie campaign to oust Jeremy Corbyn and purge the Labour left.³⁰ Revealingly too, ‘comrade’ Renton appeared on the list of ‘left’ social-imperialist signatures supporting Sadiq Khan’s ‘London for Ukraine’ demonstration in 2022.³¹ In short, Renton is a scab!

Not surprisingly then, while Renton instances the unforced concessions in Respect by the Rees-German SWP leadership, he cannot locate the fundamental problem: its popular frontism.

So take it that Renton is on the hard right of RS21 … ie, someone RS21’s hard left ought to be openly combating through eviscerating criticisms and polemics. That would be an example of what we call ‘good political culture’. Keeping quiet, making excuses is ‘bad political culture’, that is for sure.

1. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p78. The letter to Wilhelm Bracke is always attached as a kind of foreword to Marx’s ‘Marginal notes on the programme of the German Workers’ Party’ - now commonly known to us as the Critique of the Gotha programme.↩︎

2. ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=688.↩︎

3. libcom.org/files/statismandanarchy.pdf.↩︎

4. archive.org/stream/GothaProgramme/726_socWrkrsParty_gothaProgram_231_djvu.txt.↩︎

5. See RH Dominick Wilhelm Liebknecht and the Founding of the German Social Democratic Party Chapel Hill NC 1982.↩︎

6. W Liebknecht, ‘Exposition of the Erfurt programme’, October 1891: marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-w/socialism/erfurt.html.↩︎

7. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, pp568-79. See www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/media/marx/79_01_05.htm.↩︎

8. For a “synoptic overview” of the various drafts of the Erfurt programme, see B Lewis (trans) Karl Kautsky on democracy and republicanism Leiden 2020, pp306-28.↩︎

9. Socialist Review Vol 1, No1, February-March 1953.↩︎

10. grimanddim.org/tony-cliff-biography/duncan-hallas-and-the-1952-programme-for-action.↩︎

11. L Trotsky The transitional programme New York NY 1997, p111.↩︎

12. T Cliff Trotskyism after Trotsky London 1999, p14.↩︎

13. T Cliff Neither Washington nor Moscow London 1982, p117.↩︎

14. T Cliff Trotsky Vol 4, London 1993, pp299-300.↩︎

15. Internal Bulletin, January 1973. In those far-off days this publication came out all year round. It was not confined to the two months prior to the annual conference. Incidentally, my information here comes from a short article authored by Ian Birchall - ‘The programme of the International Socialists 1972-1974’ (May 2013).↩︎

16. I Birchall The smallest mass party in the world London 1981.↩︎

17. Socialist Worker September 12 1998.↩︎

18. See A Callinicos International Socialism No81, winter 1998; and J Rees Socialist Review January 1999.↩︎

19. See T Cliff Trotskyism after Trotsky London 1999, p82.↩︎

20. Ibid pp81-82.↩︎

21. Socialist Worker November 20 2004.↩︎

22. J Choonara, ‘Revolutionaries and elections’ International Socialism No179, July 2023.↩︎

23. Socialist Worker May 31 2024.↩︎

24. The demand for a people’s militia featured in the minimum (ie, immediate) section of the programmes of classical social democracy (including the 1900 Labour Party). For the half-educated a workers’ militia appears more radical: however, it is worth noting that, for Lenin, in the summer of 1917, the Red Guards - ie, a workers’ militia - were a step in the direction towards realising the Bolshevik programmatic aim of introducing the “universal arming of the people” as a basic democratic measure. Still, the fact that the SWP even mentions the ‘militia’ word is a step forward - a step forward for which we can claim not a little credit.↩︎

25. If any reader knows otherwise, I would be grateful to be informed.↩︎

26. RS21 originates in the SWP’s 2013 ‘comrade Delta’ rape crisis which saw a whole series of ructions, splits and recriminations that stripped it of most of its students and most of its talents (China Miéville, Richard Seymor, Michael Rosen, Ian Birchall, Mark Steel, Neil Davidson, Mike Gonzalez, etc).↩︎

27. For his RS21 contribution see D Renton, ‘The Socialist Alliance, George Galloway and Respect: left electoralism the last time around’ (revsoc21.uk/2024/03/18/the-socialist-alliance-george-galloway-and-respect-left-electoralism-the-last-time-around).↩︎

28. D Renton Labour’s antisemitism crisis: what the left got wrong and how to learn from it Abingdon 2022, p9.↩︎

29. D Randell, ‘A welcome contribution to a necessary debate’ Solidarity January 19 2022.↩︎

30. For a useful take-down of Renton’s disgraceful Labour’s antisemitism crisis see Paul Field’s JVL review: www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/review-of-david-rentons-labours-antisemitism-crisis.↩︎

31. anticapitalistresistance.org/what-sort-of-antiwar-movement-do-we-need-today.↩︎