30.04.2003
Could have been a contender: Socialist Party
Newspaper: The Socialist (weekly).
Other journals: Socialism Today (monthly).
Website: www.socialistparty.org.uk
Prominent members: Peter Taaffe (general secretary), Roger Bannister (leading member of Unison), Dave Nellist (ex-Labour MP and today a councillor in Coventry).
Size: Hard to tell, but probably in the region of 200 to 300 genuine members, with a small periphery, some of whom may be formal members, some not.
Comments: Today's Socialist Party is what is left over after the once (relatively) mighty Militant Tendency crashed and burned. Viewing the collapse of bureaucratic socialism in the USSR and eastern Europe in the early 1990s, Peter Taaffe, a leader of Militant and today the head of the Socialist Party, predicted the coming decade would be "the red 90s". Actually, it ran red with the blood of the Socialist Party/Militant, as important bits of it dropped off throughout that decade.
Militant originated in the primeval swamp of British Trotskyism in the 1930s, associated with the South African Marxist, Ted Grant. For 40 years, Militant and its forerunner, the Revolutionary Socialist League, existed inside the Labour Party as 'deep entryists' - Trotskyist moles burrowing away for influence inside the structures of the party.
Undoubtedly, Militant was eventually the most successful of the groups undertaking this sort of work. When the newspaper Militant was launched in 1964, it was an obscure four-page monthly. Largely by default - its rivals inside the party either left or split - Militant grew prodigiously.
By the early 1990s, it could plausibly refer to itself as the "largest organised force on the left". It claimed the allegiance of three Labour MPs, numerous Labour councillors and a layer of trade union officials; it ran the highly effective anti-poll tax campaign that was instrumental in the fall of Margaret Thatcher; in the 1980s it ran Liverpool city council which was a thorn in the side of the Tory government, and was dominant in the Labour Party's youth section.
The process of seeking influence through Labour promoted a political degeneration of the group, however. It progressively dropped its revolutionary politics and became Labourised. Thus, by 1990 it was rubbishing the idea that it stood for revolution. Socialism would come, one wet Wednesday afternoon perhaps, through "an enabling bill in parliament", which would nationalise "the top 200 monopolies" (Militant What we stand for 1990, p8).
All other groups were rubbished as "the sects". Political issues such as the fight for women's and gay rights or the national question in the UK were dismissed as "diversions" and a narrow 'workerist' approach to politics systematically cultivated. Yet even at the height of the organisation's success there were some big political time bombs ticking away inside it. Witch-hunted by Kinnock and tempted by what looked like richer pickings outside Labour in the early 1990s, the majority of the organisation broke organisationally from Labour (but still not from Labourism).
In the course of this change, of course, the organisation split from Ted Grant - its founder and political leader for decades. Instructively, this important political battle was actually fought out via leaked documents to The Guardian. In common with much of the left, Militant/SP ban honest and clean public debate of the differences in its ranks - members are bound by an oath of silence, a travesty of the type of genuine party democracy that Lenin, Marx and the founders of our movement practised.
The split complete, life outside the Labour Party proved a little tougher than anticipated. Throughout the "red 90s" the SP in its various manifestations suffered loss after loss - just about its whole Scottish section (which went on to form the core of today's Scottish Socialist Party), most of its organisation in Liverpool, its section in Pakistan, etc. There were numerous walkouts and expulsions. Membership plummeted. Yet no debate on this crisis was featured in the pages of The Socialist - only the Weekly Worker comprehensively covered the issues involved in the fragmentation of this once important working class organisation.
Today, the SP's leader - Peter Taaffe - is probably quite pleased with himself. For now, the haemorrhaging of members has been halted. The group managed to stage an organised withdrawal from the Socialist Alliance (a move precipitated by nothing other than sectarian resentment of the much bigger SWP) without leaving bits of itself behind. Yet it still has those time bombs ticking away.
Take the Labour Party. It never understood the true nature of Labour when it was deeply imbedded in the organisation, inventing a 'socialist' history for the party of Kinnock, Blair and Ramsay MacDonald and denouncing others as "sects" for not burying themselves beside them. Today, it justifies its organisational separation from Labour by telling us that the party is now a totally different beast - apparently it is now simply a "bourgeois party" with no working class content whatsoever.
Of course, such a self-serving lie may work for the time being; but any serious revival of the Labour left would thoroughly disorientate Taaffe's troops. A real merit of the Militant tradition has been its ability to nurture genuine working class leaders - comrades such as Tommy Sheridan, Dave Nellist and even Derek Hatton (leader of Liverpool council in his time).
Yet without a coherent Marxist programme this sect is constantly frayed by centrifugal tensions, strains and splits - as dramatically illustrated throughout Taaffe blood-soaked 90s. For the time being, the SP seems stable and content with the niche it has settled into. History has not finished taking its revenge, however, despite the comprehensive going-over dished out to it already.