26.07.2006

Ted Grant, 1913-2006 : Sect with class roots

Ted Grant died on July 20 at the age of 93, after more than 75 years as a Trotskyist activist. He was the effective founder and theoretical guru of the Militant Tendency, which at its height, recalls Mike Macnair, before the splits of the 1990s, was probably the largest and best-rooted of the Trotskyist organisations in Britain

Ted Grant began in his teens as a South African Trotskyist, but moved to Britain in 1934. Initially part of the Trotskyist group carrying on entry in the Independent Labour Party, he supported the turn to Labour Party entry proposed by Trotsky, and participated in the series of small-scale splits and short-lived regroupments which characterised the pre-war British Trotskyists.

WIL-RCP

Political shifts associated with the outbreak of the war led to a new process of regroupment/split among the Trotskyists, producing an entry organisation, the Revolutionary Socialist League and an open organisation, the Workers International League.

The German invasion of the USSR in 1941 carried the Communist Party into the camp of class peace and the national government. Under these conditions, there was space in the reviving shop-stewards' movement for a syndicalist version of Trotskyism which would actually support illegal strike action, and the line of the WIL was much more successful than that of the RSL. For the first time, the Trotskyists moved beyond tiny circles to a real, if small, organisation with significant roots in the workers' movement. At the end of the war, the RSL fused with the WIL, effectively on the WIL's terms, to create the Revolutionary Communist Party.

In 1960s and 1970s Britain, Trotskyism was to marginalise Maoism as an alternative to 'official communism', in contrast to many other countries: this was the heritage of the WIL-RCP. The major British Trotskyist organisations - Gerry Healy's Club/Socialist Labour League/Workers Revolutionary Party, Tony Cliff's Socialist Review/International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party and Ted Grant's Revolutionary Socialist League/Militant - were all led by leaders formed in the WIL and all came from fragments of the RCP.

However, the WIL-RCP's underlying perspective in the trade unions was falsified successively by the 1945 general election, the honeymoon period of the Labour government (1945-48) and from 1948 Marshall aid, etc (which revived the capitalist economy), the opening of the cold war and the accompanying beginnings of a left turn of the CP on the industrial front.

A factional struggle developed in the RCP on the issues of Labour Party entry and economic perspectives, in which Grant and Jock Haston for the majority believed that there would be an economic upturn, but opposed Labour Party entry, while Healy for the minority supported the view of the majority of the Trotskyist 'Fourth International' (refounded in 1946) that there would be continuing economic crisis, and argued for Labour Party entry on the expectation of a large left movement in the Labour Party. With the backing of the Fourth International leadership, the minority went into Labour; but the majority was by 1948 unable to maintain its open party perspective and drifted into entry. A good many of the RCP leaders and militants abandoned Trotskyism, and Grant and his immediate co-thinkers wound up a minority in the Healy Club, but were expelled in 1950.

The Grantites

The Grantites regrouped with 30-odd members, based in London and Liverpool, but were unable to publish a regular press. Rob Sewell in his postscript to Grant's History of British Trotskyism blames this on financial difficulties; Pat Jordan in his 1970 Notes on the history of the IMG thought it was a matter of disorganisation and unseriousness.

Militant supporters from the 1970s were, like Healyites and Cliffites, 'anti-Pabloite'. In this they retrospectively reinterpreted their own history. In the wake of the 1956 Hungarian events, the Grantites linked up with the 'Pabloite' International Secretariat of the Fourth International, and were recognised as the official British section of this organisation. They also engaged in an on-off relationship with the 'Nottingham group', which published Fourth International, the English-language magazine of the IS. They remained linked to the ISFI and its successor, the 'United' Secretariat, until the 1966 world congress, when both the Grant group and the Nottingham group (International Marxist Group) were recognised by the USFI as sympathising organisations: the Grantites took this as an expulsion and withdrew.

Given this context, it seems that the reality of the Grant group between the early 1950s and mid-1960s was one of disorganisation and demoralisation. In the early 1960s they endeavoured to collaborate with the Cliff tendency and Nottingham group in producing Young Guard, a youth paper, without success in sustaining collaborative work with the Cliffites. The Grantites were not to attain a regular press until the launch of Militant in 1964.

The Grantites were given their chance by two processes. The first was that the Labour Party relaunched a youth organisation, the Young Socialists, in 1959 at the beginning of the phase of youth radicalisation which was to culminate in the late 1960s. All the Trotskyist groups made gains in this milieu proportional to their size.

The second was that the majority of the Trotskyists successively withdrew from the Labour Party. The Healy tendency, which was largest, was the first to go, launching an open organisation, the Socialist Labour League, in 1959, and embarking on a policy of provoking splits, which culminated in the wholesale expulsion of the Healyite-controlled Young Socialists in 1965 and reorganisation of the youth as the Labour Party Young Socialists. Then the IMG and, following them, the Cliffites both turned to Vietnam solidarity work in competition/alliance with the 'official' CPGB, and in the late 1960s withdrew from the Labour Party.

Militant Tendency

The Grantites were left as the leading Trotskyist tendency in the Labour youth. They were purged in the early 1970s from the Labour student organisation, in an operation codenamed 'Operation Icepick' and run by CP fellow-travellers, but they retained effective control of the LPYS until the Taaffe wing's turn to open work and the closure of the LPYS in 1993. From this base by steady propaganda work and training up the youth they won, they gradually built up a strong position in the Labour left and some of the trade unions, and at the height of the tendency attaining a membership of 7,000-8,000.

Exactly when it happened is unclear, but by the early 1970s Grant and his co-thinkers had broken with the syndicalist interpretation of Trotskyism and moved to a peculiar variant form of Kautskyism. In this approach, the task of the 'Marxists' (Trotskyists) was to struggle for a majority in the Labour Party for their minimum programme. This was most prominently presented as nationalisation of the 'top monopolies', to be accomplished by a "Labour government committed to socialist policies": ie, a government of a Militant-led Labour Party, which would carry it out by passing an 'enabling act', giving the government dictatorial powers.

This was, at least, a strategy for 'socialism', and it was one a good deal more plausible than the 'general strike strategy' shared by the Healyites, Cliffites and IMG. But it was politically vulnerable to the charge that it was secret, conspiratorial and anti-democratic. The core of this vulnerability lay in the fact that the Grantites were proposing to make a revolution by pretending to be 'Marxist' loyalists of Labour, a constitutionalist party. Labour's policy of bans and proscriptions had the inevitable consequence that Militant's organisation inevitably was what the Labour right accused it of being: a secret, conspiratorial group.

Though Sewell insists that Militant under Grant was much more democratic than Taaffe made it at the time of the split, it was still Militant under Grant: the leadership was a permanent group and, whatever internal debates existed, they were not made public. Indeed, Militant members at the height of the tendency were notorious on the left for being more 'robotic', inflexible and speaking with a single, boring voice than even the Healyites.

The Grantite strategy also simply failed to address both the relationship between a British revolution and the capitalist international order, and the limits and problems both of 'British democracy' and of the 'democracy of the Labour movement'. Stalinism in Russia was explained as a product of Russia's backwardness, rather than Soviet Russia's isolation. Hence the 'democratic traditions of the British Labour movement' would preserve any British revolution from Stalinist degeneration. This view was not particularly plausible to anyone aware either of the practical role of the trade union and Labour bureaucracy or the secretive bureaucratic centralism of Militant itself.

Grant's Marxism, moreover, was peculiarly dogmatic. A striking example is his Reason in revolt (1995), co-authored with Alan Woods. Grant and Woods give a valuable survey of 20th century scientific developments in their relationship to the arguments of Marx and Engels. But they never once consider either that it might be necessary to correct some of the claims of Marx and Engels, made on the basis of the late 19th century 'state of the art', or that other Marxists have also addressed the questions with which they are concerned.

Militant decided in the late 1960s to 'go it alone', ploughing a (supposedly) lonely furrow in the Labour Party, and from 1974, in entry in other parties of the Second International and left nationalist parties. They presented themselves as the Marxist tendency in Labour, dismissing all the rest as "petty bourgeois". By this route, they could recruit newly radicalising youth in the LPYS and train them up before they met the rest of the left. The result of this denial of the existence of Marxism outside Militant was to sterilise their own Marxism.

Victims of success

The result of Grant's, or Militant's, policy was that by the 1980s they had a substantial organisation with significant working class roots. But in 1992 Grant and his supporters were expelled from Militant, as the organisation took a new turn to open work.

The background was that, on the one hand, from the early 1980s the Labour leadership had moved to a sharper witch-hunt against Militant (and other Trotskyist Labour entry groups, such as Sean Matgamna's Socialist Organiser). In particular, Militant took control of Liverpool city council; but they fumbled the problem of illegal action which this posed, failed to coordinate effectively with the 1984-85 miners' strike, and provided the opening for Labour leader Neil Kinnock to launch a sharp attack on them. On the other hand, Militant took the lead in the open struggle against the poll tax in 1990-92, most successfully in Scotland.

In both respects, Militant's strategic line was a victim of its success. In Liverpool they won a "council committed to socialist policies", but in doing so, showed the limits of a policy of legality within both the Labour Party and the state. In the poll tax struggle, in contrast, the fact that Militant had built up a working class cadre and some local bases gave them a far more immediate presence in the political struggle on the working class estates than the anarchists and other, mainly student-based, Trotskyists who attempted to parachute into the movement. But this was inevitably an illegal, direct-action struggle, in which Labour Party membership was more of a hindrance than a help.

This combination of events meant that Peter Taaffe and his co-thinkers - including in particular the Scots round Tommy Sheridan and Alan McCombes - were able to argue plausibly for a turn away from Labour entry and to open work. In the ensuing factional struggle, the Grantites ended having to leak their arguments to The Guardian to make them available to Militant supporters: a spectacular instance of the bankruptcy of Trotskyist bureaucratic centralism and secrecy.

In the split, the Grant group managed to retain what at first seemed a small minority in England and a larger minority among Militant's international co-thinkers. Since the split, the relationship of forces has shifted sharply against the Taaffe wing. It became apparent that, if the Taaffeites had taken the majority and the apparatus, the Grantites had retained Militant's distinctive political strategy, which was the real basis of its strength as an organisation. By 2002 Sewell could crow over the declining numbers of Militant's successors - first Militant Labour and then the Socialist Party in England and Wales (SPEW) - and the split of the ex-Militant International Socialist Movement in Scotland from the Taaffeite Committee for a Workers' International: the Scottish Socialist Party had become at best a Mandelite fluffy unity project, at worst a left nationalist party, while SPEW, starting larger and more influential than the SWP, had wound up smaller and weaker.

It is far from clear, however, that Socialist Appeal/Committee for a Marxist International in fact preserves the historical strategic line of Grantism. It has in the last years become increasingly focused on the promotion of Venezuelan Chavismo and the equivalent left populist movements elsewhere in Latin America.

Now that Grant is dead, the CMI's focus on solidarity with Latin American populism may well turn out to be their road to a markedly different politics.

75 wasted years?

No one can fail to be impressed by Ted Grant's lifelong commitment to the cause of the working class. In the period of the dominance of Stalinism between the 1940s and 1989, preserving Marxist ideas - even in the form of a dogma - was a virtue, and one on which Marxists today necessarily build, even if we are not fully aware of it.

Equally, no one should fail to be impressed by the persistence and stubbornly patient work which built up the Militant Tendency to its height in the 1980s as one of the strongest Trotskyist organisations in the world. The "Labour government committed to socialist policies" strategy was at least a partial break from the syndicalist mass-strike strategy, with all its faults, and Militant was a tendency with more roots in the workers' movement than the other Trotskyist groups in Britain.

However, a group of 8,000 is still on the real scale of things a sect. The inability of the tendency to get beyond this level, and the split of the 1990s, revealed that it was still within the frame of the bureaucratic centralism and frontism common to Trotskyist groups generally. The tendency trained working class militants in its ideas, but by and large it did not educate them as independent Marxist leaders. Grant cannot be said to have wasted his 75 years' service to his particular form of Trotskyism; but we have to remember the weaknesses of his work as well as the strengths, in order to move beyond a project which at the end of the day has failed.