From The Archives Of The American And International Left –From The International Bolshevik Tendency-The Police By The CWI

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Markin comment:

This archival issue of the International Bolshevik Tendency journal may be of some historical interest for old "new leftists,” perhaps, as well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social and political questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist and other periodicals from other leftist organizations, past and present, periodically throughout the year.
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1. Trade Union Rights! The Police and the Labour Movement

Workers taking industrial action— particularly when organising picketing, a vital trade union right— have time and again come into conflict with the police. With the Tones' new anti-trade union legislation, there are likely to be even bigger battles. Trade unionists defending jobs and living standards fact the threat of jail either through non-payment of fines or "contempt of court", or through collisions with police trying to enforce limits on picketing or alleging "obstruction" or "public order" offences.

Ironically, however, one of the last groups of potential strikers to be threatened with imprisonment were the police themselves. This was under the last, right-wing Labour government. The episode was only publicised much later. The Sunday Times (9 August 1981) revealed: "The chairman of the Police Federation, Jim Jardine, was threatened with imprisonment as recently as 1977 though the threat was kept a secret at the time. It happened when police, angry at low pay, howled down Merlyn Rees, the Home Secretary of the day, at a meeting in Westminster Hall. Jim Jardine (a serving police constable) was told by a senior officer that calls for strike action would have to be strongly resisted otherwise he would be taken to court and face imprisonment under the 1964 Police Act (under section 53 which prohibits 'causing disaffection')."

Strike action by the police was headed off with an immediate 10 per cent rise and the promise of an inquiry into their pay. When the Tory government returned in 1979, Whitelaw announced the big increases recommended by the inquiry with a big fanfare, clearly attempting to buy the police's loyalty for future confrontation with the labour movement. However, it is clear that in the period of police discontent before 1977 police were leaving at a rapid rate, not only because of pay and conditions but because of disquiet at the way they were being used against strikes and demonstrations.

The 1977 episode points to the contradictory character of the police. While an arm of the state—increasing one of the "armed bodies of men" who make up the capitalists' repressive apparatus—the police, like the armed forces, are composed of men and women drawn overwhelmingly from the working class, and they have their interests and demands as workers. The police pay disputes of 1970, 1975 and 1976-77 aroused growing demands for genuine trade union organisation and action. The demand for the right to strike was intensely debated. A majority of constables in a number of areas indicated in referenda that they wanted strike action. The inspectors were against striking, but the sergeants wavered in between. At the Police Federation conference in Scarborough in May 1977 an overwhelming majority voted for strike action. Federation leaders undoubtedly feared that some constables would take wild-cat action if the leadership failed to move.

Grievances about pay and conditions and frustration with the Federation had clearly produced the beginnings of trade union consciousness among many police men and women. Among a minority, moreover, industrial militancy had clearly begun to stimulate a more generalised class consciousness, with a questioning of their role and their relationship with the labour movement. At Scarborough a young Metropolitan constable said: "We're no different from other workers. We may wear funny clothes and do society's dirty work for them. But we come from the same stock as other workers. (Boos) We have only our labour power to sell, not capital." (Quoted in Robert Reiner, The Blue-Coated Worker) His speech was greeted with cat-calls and shouts of "Commie", etc. Clearly, while militant on pay, the majority of delegates still voiced backward, if not reactionary sentiments towards the labour movement and on social issues. But the very fact that this class-conscious attitude could be expressed by one delegate, even if he represented only a tiny minority at that stage, is very significant.

The ranks of the police were affected by workers' struggles from 1970-77, and many police looked to Labour for progress. But the police, like most other workers, were disappointed by the Labour government's failure to implement its programme. Labour's Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, summarily rejected their call for the right to strike, while trying to persuade them quietly to accept the government's wage-restraint policy. The record of the Labour government, to say the least, was hardly calculated to swing the police ranks towards the labour movement.

The 1977 episode, in itself, underlines the need for the labour movement to adopt a worked-out policy towards the police. While opposing the repressive use of the force, Labour must nevertheless appeal to the police ranks. While campaigning for democratic accountability of the police, the movement must also call for trade union rights for the police, with the replacement of the Police Federation by a genuinely independent union organisation. It is not only a question of defending the economic interests of the police, but of working to bring the ranks of the police into the orbit of the labour movement.

This has been opposed by some pseudo-Marxists as "Utopian". They want to write off the police as "one reactionary mass", as though they were a completely uniform, immutable instrument of repression. This is a completely one-sided, incorrect view which takes no account of the changes which can be produced by events.

It is undoubtedly true that there are reactionaries in the police. Clearly, there are racialists and some fascist sympathisers within the ranks, and democratic accountability would be used to make sure that these were weeded out. In recent years, moves from the top to shape the police into a more repressive force and the aggressive operational tactics increasingly adopted by local police chiefs has led many of the more reasonable types to leave the force. Recruiting and training is undoubtedly directed towards producing the kind of police the state requires under new conditions. But ultimately the mood and outlook of the police, the balance between their repressive role and the police ranks' own class demands, still depends on the balance of class and political forces in society.

The 1968 May events in France are an example of the way the police can move under conditions of crisis.

The mass strike movement, which involved ten million workers, was actually "detonated" by police repression of student demonstrations, particularly by the brutal actions of the riot police, the para-military CRS. However, as one writer on the police, Tom Bowden, comments: "...While the police were prepared to brutally subdue one of their natural opponents, middle-class students, they were most unwilling to batter those whom they felt to be their worker brothers into submission...Accordingly, they tacitly let it be known that operations against workers could not only cause a grave crisis of confidence within their ranks but also the possibility of what would in effect be a police mutiny." (Tom Bowden: Beyond the Limits of the Law.) In fact, leaders of one of the police unions stated publicly that they would not move against workers. The police were neutralised, or in the case of some sections, drawn behind the workers' movement, and De Gaulle's government was suspended in mid-air.

Another example was in Germany at the end of the First World War. In the crisis, the labour movement took over Berlin, appointing Emil Eichorn, a leader of the left-wing Independent Social Democrats, as police president. "Under his command," writes one of Rosa Luxemburg's biographers, "the police seemed to be turning into a revolutionary institution." (Peter Netti, Rosa Luxemburg). It was the move of the reactionary central government under the right-wing Social Democrats Ebert and Noske to depose Eichorn which precipitated the "Spartakist" uprising in January 1919.

In Britain, too, the mass struggles of the working class between 1913 and 1919 gave rise to a struggle within the police for an independent trade union. The illegal Police and Prison Officers Union gradually forged links with the labour movement, and its leaders called for the democratisation of the police. There had been strikes of the Metropolitan Police over pay in 1872 and 1890. But the most significant strikes were in 1918 and 1919 during the post-war crisis. In 1918, almost all of the Metropolitan force of 19,000 came out in sympathy with their leaders who had been victimised. However, in 1919 a second strike, which led to battles with the army in Merseyside, was broken by the authorities. The government made concessions on pay and conditions, but purged the militants and completely smashed the union. The Police Federation was then established as a tame substitute for a union. At the same time, moves were made to undermine the powers of local watch committees and establish firm central control over local forces.

These examples should be enough to show that the police are not one, unchanging reactionary mass. The police, too, are affected by the crisis in society—and can be influenced by the working class when it moves into action. A correct policy towards the police on the part of the labour movement, however, is a vital factor.
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2. Policy of Force – and the Need for Democratic Control

The riots which erupted in Brixton, Toxteth and other cities in the summer of 1981 once again focused attention on the role of the police. In particular, they highlighted the almost complete lack of accountability, and the need for the labour movement to campaign for the democratisation of the police.

The explosion of anger on the streets arose from the terrible conditions faced by workers in the inner-city areas, especially black workers and youth: mass unemployment, rotten housing, inadequate education, health and social facilities etc. But the street clashes also reflected widespread resentment and anger at the police which had built up over a period of years. The labour movement, while defending workers' rights to defend their areas from attack, cannot support looting, arson and petrol-bombing as forms of protest. However, it has to be recognised that in almost every case the riots were sparked off by provocative police action. In Brixton, as was soon revealed, there was the intensive Swamp '81 operation, and a number of brutal arrests and raids. Similarly, in Toxteth a number of arbitrary, heavy-handed arrests sparked off the conflict. These particular incidents, however, were only the tip of the iceberg.

In March 1979, Lambeth Labour council, completely dissatisfied with its lack of control over policing in the area, set up its own Working Party on Community/Police Relations. It concluded (in January 1980) that there was evidence of widespread racism by the police and that they were regarded, particularly by black people, as "an army of occupation". In London and other cities there has been growing anger at the racial bias of the police. The increasing number of "passport raids" has highlighted the police's role in enforcing racialist immigration laws. There is also anger over racial attacks. In the past five years 26 black people have been murdered, with only one or two arrests for these crimes. In the London area there were 2,426 violent attacks on Asians alone in 1980. Very few of these crimes were solved.

In Brixton and other areas of London there was also a strong reaction against the intervention of the Special Patrol Group. Few of the black youth or Labour activists could forget the SPG's responsibility for the killing of Blair Peach after the anti-NF demonstration in Southall (23 April 1979). Before the Brixton upheaval, the inquest on the Deptford fire had emphasised the inability and apparent reluctance of the police seriously to investigate this horrendous crime as a racialist attack. Protest from Labour MPs and civil rights groups had also drawn attention to the scandal of deaths of suspects in police custody. Between January 1970 and June 1979, 245 people died in police custody, with the rate rising from seven a year to forty-eight a year. It was the refusal of the Liverpool police chief, Kenneth Oxford, to reveal the contents of an internal inquiry into the death of Jimmy Kelly which brought about a head-on collision between the Labour councillors on the area police authority and the Chief Constable. Oxford arrogantly expressed the attitude of hard-line police chiefs towards elected police committees. He attacked some councillors for their "vituperative, misinformed comments", and reportedly told members of the police authority to "keep out of my force's business." Liverpool councillors decided to set up a working party to look into the "role and responsibility" of the police authority. After this reported in February 1980, Councillor Margaret Simey, a long-standing member of the authority, commented: "I realise now that there is no hope of running a big modern police force on rules that are no more than a gentleman's agreement" (Weekend World, ITV, 23 March 1980). "Mr Oxford does not seem to think the police committee is worth proper consideration, and the Tory majority do not seem to think that there is anything wrong with that" (Observer, 21 October 1979).

The clashes between Labour councillors and police chiefs in Lambeth (Brixton) and Liverpool (Toxteth) were early warnings of the explosions to come. The conflict over the role of the police authorities in these two key areas, as well as in West Yorkshire (where there was also a council enquiry in 1978) and Lewisham (where in 1980 the council threatened to withhold its contribution to the Metropolitan police), underlined the complete lack of democratic accountability as far as the police were concerned.

Yet the police were not always unaccountable to local authorities. When, after the formation of the Metropolitan police in 1829, police forces were gradually created in the boroughs, they were under the control of "watch committees" made up of council members, who appointed the constables, and their officers, and fixed their pay and controlled their work. When the county councils were reformed in the 1880s, "standing joint committees" were created, comprising of half county councillors and half local magistrates, with similar powers to the borough watch committees. "The control of the watch committees was absolute," writes one historian of the police (T A Crichley, History of the Police in England and Wales). "In its hands lay the sole power to appoint, promote and punish men of all ranks, and it had powers of suspension and dismissal. The watch committee prescribed the regulations for the force, and subject to the approval of the town council determined the rates of pay." In some boroughs the chief police officer was required to report weekly to the watch committee. There was, however, continuous pressure from the government to establish stronger central control of the police; but this was resisted by local interests. Throughout the 19th century the Home Secretary's main role was that of ensuring all areas recruited and maintained adequate police forces, which was carried out through the inspectors of constabulary.

This relationship was not just the product of administrative convenience. It reflected the balance of class forces, and the political relations flowing from them. The borough councils were dominated by the industrial and commercial capitalist class. They paid for the police through the rates, and therefore they insisted they controlled the police. The industrial middle class were suspicious of central government, which they associated with extravagant and unnecessary expenditure, and which they feared would interfere in their affairs on behalf of the aristocratic oligarchy which dominated central government. The propertied middle class which championed parliamentary government took it for granted that a body like the police, which potentially had enormous power, should be democratically controlled.

This, however, was in the era before the working class had become an independent political force. Even at the end of the 19th century only a small minority of workers had the vote. When the great majority of working class men gained the vote in 1918 (all women in 1928) the property owning classes changed their tune. They were no longer concerned about the aristocratic oligarchy, which had been eclipsed by industrial capitalists, but they certainly feared the growing strength of the labour movement. The end of the First World War in 1918 brought a massive radicalisation of the workers, with enormous struggles and strike battles. Labour councillors began to be elected in many towns and cities, with the emergence of a number of Labour-controlled councils. The .attempt of the state to take control of the police out of the hands of local government and concentrate it centrally was also made more urgent by the police strikes of 1918 and 1919.

After the strikes, the Desborough Committee was set up to overhaul the whole police structure, and many of its recommendations were adopted. One recommendation was that the power of appointment, promotion and discipline should be transferred from the watch committees to Chief Constables. This, however, was still resisted in Parliament, and the powers remained formally in the hands of watch committees until 1964. However, in one way and another the powers of Chief Constables were considerably strengthened. So too was the "informal" central influence exerted by the Home Office (and the Scottish Office), especially as central government now provided half the cost of maintaining local forces. The element of democratic control through the watch committees was slowly but surely strangled. The last vestiges of accountability, moreover, were allowed to disappear largely without opposition from the labour movement, controlled in that period by the right-wing leadership.

The 1960 Royal Commission on the Police concluded that the main problem of police accountability was controlling Chief Constables. They "should be subject to more effective supervision," said the report—but this was to be done by making Chief Constables more accountable to central government, not to local watch committees. The Royal Commission's recommendations were put into effect by the 1964 Police Act (and the Police (Scotland) Act, 1967). Borough watch committees and county standing joint committees were replaced by police authorities, made up of two thirds councillors and one third magistrates. Local authorities still paid for half of the cost of the forces, but their Chief Constables, backed up by the Home Office, quickly established the principle that "operational questions" were outside police committees' scope. In practice, the 1964 Act institutionalised and legalised the situation established after 1945. The new police committees are not even committees of the local councils, but independent statutory bodies. This effectively divorces them from council control. In some authorities, like Liverpool, the councillors are not even allowed to ask questions on the police authority.

In theory, the police authorities appoint the Chief Constable and can dismiss the Chief Constable "in the interests of police efficiency." But these powers are strictly subject to the Home Secretary's agreement. In theory, the police committees can question the Chief Constable on his annual reports, or ask him for special reports. In practice this is very difficult. Most Chief Constables' annual reports give very little information on policing methods, and they particularly avoid the most contentious areas of policing.

Most of the police chiefs strongly resist all proposals for increased democratic accountability on the grounds that it would subject the police to "political control". They try to perpetuate the myth, important for gaining public acceptance of their role in the past, that the police are an arm of a "neutral" state. They are, according to this view, "above" politics and sectional interests, and ultimately answerable to the equally "neutral" and "independent" judiciary. The recent changes in police policy themselves refute this liberal myth.

The Police Act and other legislation of the early 1960s for the most part merely institutionalised changes which had already taken place. But it was the stormy events which opened the 1970s, a new decade of crisis, which brought the really significant changes in police planning and training. The Tory government under Edward Heath came to office in 1970 with unemployment over 1 million for the first time in postwar Britain. The Tories set out to take on the working class, aiming to break the power of the trade unions through the 1971 Industrial Relations Act. But Heath's moves against the trade unions provoked massive opposition from the organised workers, which eventually defeated his attempt to use the law and special courts to shackle the unions. The most significant of the industrial battles which shook the Heath government was the 1972 miners' strike. The decisive battle took place at Saltley Gates where 30,000 miners' pickets and other industrial workers blockaded the Midlands coal depot. The police were defeated and forced to retreat. This was not only a crushing blow to the Tory government, but demonstrated to the capitalists the weakness of their state when faced with organised, mobilised workers.

In response, the government instigated an immediate review of its security policy, covering everything from policing the streets to dealing with an insurrection. The strategists of capital were preparing for the possibility of revolution. Raymond Carr, the Tory Home Secretary, set up a National Security Committee to review all aspects of main- taming public order and to produce new "contingency plans". The committee reported in 1975, after the return of the Labour government. Labour changed the name of the body to the vaguer "Civil Contingencies Committee", but adopted all its main recommendations. This major review led to a programme of equipping police forces with modern technology for surveillance and holding records and with new riot gear. New training meant the police were being prepared for riots and for confrontations with demonstrations, strike pickets, etc. More special units were set up to act as para-military squads as and when required. In 1977 riot shields appeared on the streets for the first time in Britain (apart from Northern Ireland) when the police moved against anti-fascist demonstrators protesting against a National Front march through Lewisham. At the same time, however, plans were made for the use of the army to back up the police in emergencies. Joint operations, as at London's Heathrow airport in 1974, were staged, supposedly to counter alleged terrorist threats, but clearly aimed at getting the public used to seeing the army operating with the police on the streets. Then, in 1977/78, the Labour government actually called out 20,000 troops to take over fire-fighting duties and break the strike of the firemen taking action against Labour's pay-restraint policy.

These developments make it clear that the "iron fist" thinking of the Andertons and McNees does not merely express the hardline outlook of a number of reactionary police chiefs, but reflects the new perspective of the strategists of the ruling class themselves. They have recognised that the relative social peace of the post-war period ended with the ebbing of the economic boom. They see that the coming period, with the continued catastrophic decline of British capitalism and the inevitable erosion of living standards, will be one of head-on conflict with the working class. They have therefore discarded the old 'liberal', 'democratic' face of the British ruling class and instead are presenting a brutal, repressive visage. These developments, particularly with the perspective of the Andertons, make it vitally important for the labour movement to campaign for the democratisation of the police.

If the working class is to preserve the economic gains and the democratic rights that it has wrested from the capitalists in the past, it must carry through the socialist transformation of society. Past gains cannot be preserved indefinitely within the rotten framework of a crisis-ridden capitalism. In transforming society, it is Utopian to think that the existing apparatus of the capitalist state can be taken over and adapted by the working class. In a fundamental change of society, all the existing institutions of the state will be shattered and replaced by new organs of power under the democratic control of the working class. While basing itself on the perspective of the socialist transformation of society, however, the labour movement must advance a programme which includes policies which come to grips with the immediate problems posed by the role of the police.

The movement must campaign along the following lines:
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The police must be returned to the authority of local government police committees, with powers like those of the original watch committees. The local police committees should have the power to appoint and dismiss Chief Constables and senior officers. They should be responsible not only for the police's physical resources but for "operational questions", i.e. day-to-day policing policies. The Metropolitan Police, which at present is only formally accountable to the Home Secretary, should also be made accountable to a democratic Greater London police committee

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The police committees should ensure a genuinely independent complaints procedure under the complaints board composed of democratically elected representatives. They should ensure that the appropriate disciplinary procedures are implemented.

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The police committees should ensure that any racist elements or fascist sympathisers within the police are weeded out of the force.


Through such police committees, the labour movement, in areas where Labour controlled the local councils, would be able to establish democratic checks and controls on the role of the police. In the past, before the working class had emerged as an independent political force, the spokesmen of big business and the middle class insisted that the police were democratically accountable. Now, the labour movement, which represents the overwhelming majority in society, must demand that democratic accountability is extended to cover this force which, it is claimed, exists to protect the interests of the public.

Labour must also demand:
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The abolition of the Special Patrol Group and other similar units.

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The abolition of the Special Branch and the destruction of political files and computer records not connected with criminal investigations.

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The right of the police to an independent, democratic trade union organisation to defend their interests as workers.


3. Fighting Crime?

"Law and order" has long been a favourite electioneering slogan of the Tories. They try to represent any criticism of the police as an attempt to undermine "the fight against crime". Calls for democratic accountability are portrayed as "politically motivated" moves to undermine the police's "neutral" and "impartial" role. At the 1977 Tory Party conference, for instance, Whitelaw claimed that it was "part of a left-wing mythology" that "there was something despicable, almost immoral, in discussing the prevention of crime at all." Contrary to Tory mythology, however, Marxists are not opposed to the police taking action to catch criminals and to protect people's safety and personal property. Working-class people are naturally concerned about crime, and especially alarmed about increasing violence. But the Tones, by elevating the "moral" issues and the abstractions of "law" and "legality", want to turn attention away from the social roots of crime.

What better answer to the Tories than the comments of the Boston Police Commissioner, Robert Di Grazia? "We are not letting the public in on our era's dirty little secret," he wrote: "that those who commit the crime that worries citizens the most—violent street crime—are, for the most part, the products of poverty, unemployment, broken homes, rotten education, drug addiction and alcoholism, and other social ills about which the police can do little, if anything." Di Grazia does not draw any radical conclusion about the problem of upholding "justice" in society divided by extremes of wealth and poverty—within a system based on the legalised expropriation of workers' surplus value by the capitalist class. Nevertheless, Di Grazia eloquently denounces the "politicians (who) get away with law and order rhetoric that reinforces the mistaken notion that the police—in ever greater numbers and with ever more gadgetry—can alone control crime."

His criticisms certainly apply to Thatcher's government. Unemployment, Mrs Thatcher said after Brixton erupted in April 1981, was not the cause. The real cause, she implied, was the breakdown of "respect for the law" and the erosion of "moral values". The Tories cannot accept that their economic policies which have had a shattering effect on the youth, have helped create the conditions for conflict on the streets. If there has been a breakdown of previously accepted social norms of behaviour and of traditional morality, they cannot see that the terrible alienation of young people created by the profit system is a powerful contributing factor. Like the politicians Di Grazia criticises, Thatcher and Whitelaw simply back the arming of the police with more powerful equipment: riot gear, water cannon, CS gas, plastic bullets, and, increasingly, firearms. They also support heavier sentences in the courts, and a tougher regime in prisons and juvenile detention centres.

The Tories' approach reflects the thinking of the professional police chiefs. Some, it is true, have spoken out against the crude, hard-line stance of the Andertons and Oxfords. John Alderson, Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall (who retired in April 1982) is a notable example. Alderson said after the riots: "One thing is certain, it is no answer to resort to brute force to control people." Alderson, whose liberal approach is in sharp contrast to that of most other police chiefs, advocates "community policing". In his view, the primary concern of the police should not be "law enforcement" but the welfare of the community and the amelioration of social conditions which foster crime. He recognises that unless the emphasis is on prevention and unless the police have the confidence and support of the people they are supposed to be protecting, there is no hope of effectively "fighting crime".

But the new breed of hard-line police chiefs, like Anderton (Manchester), McNee (Metropolitan), and Oxford (Merseyside), regard Alderson's views as quaintly old-fashioned. They consider that they are coming to grips, no bones about it, with the realities of a society which cannot afford to put the emphasis on social welfare. Unlike Alder- .son, they are not primarily concerned with fighting crime of the traditional sort. They are now preoccupied with the task of defending the status quo in an industrialised, capitalist society increasingly torn by economic crisis and class conflict. To base policing on support and co-operation from the public would, under these conditions, be unrealistic. Any form of democratic accountability is seen by these hard-liners as a potentially dangerous restraint on their ability to use brute force as and when they consider it necessary. They work on the assumption that the police is a force to be used to uphold a framework of authority, which they define as "law and order". From this perspective, "community policing" is seen as little more than a public relations exercise.

The statements of Anderton and the others make it clear what they really mean by upholding "law and order": not the protection of ordinary people from violent assaults, burglaries etc, but the defence of big business, property and the capitalist state from the growing threat of an increasingly radicalised and militant working class. Speaking on Question Time (BBC-1, 16 October 1979), Anderton said: "I think that from the police point of view that my task in the future—that basic crime as such—theft, burglary, even violent crime—will not be the predominant police feature. What will be the matter of greatest concern to me will be the covert and ultimately overt attempt to overthrow democracy, to subvert the authority of the state, and, in fact, to involve themselves in acts of sedition designed to destroy our parliamentary system and the democratic government in this country."

Fighting crime, for chief constables like Anderton, is not the same thing as catching criminals at all. Listening to this and other of Anderton's statements, what doubt can there be that by "democracy" he really means the capitalist system? In practice, "sedition" and "subversion" mean any attempt by workers to use their democratic and trade union rights to defend their interests. For example, the Association of Chief Police Officers complained to the parliamentary Home Affairs Committee (February 1980): "Today the right to demonstrate is widely exploited, and marching is the most chosen form of demonstration adopted by protestors. Irrespective of the peaceful nature of the procession the numbers involved bring town centres to a halt, business is disrupted and the public bus service thrown out of schedule. In short, a general annoyance is created to the normal process of daily life."

How readily have police chiefs resorted to blanket bans on marches under the 1936 Public Order Act, in reality to prevent anti-fascist demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. On a number of occasions, however, Anderton and McNee were prepared to muster an enormous number of police to escort a handful of fascists through the streets, supposedly to defend their democratic right to demonstrate! Police chiefs are also seeking through parliamentary Bills to extend their control of marches, requiring advance notice and seeking to impose their own "code of practice" for demonstrators which would virtually have the force of law.

The police chiefs have been cautious in supporting legislation which would inevitably mean head-on collision with mass trade union forces. They learned some lessons from Saltley Gates and Edward Heath's ill-fated Industrial Relations Act. However, the police have steadily stepped up their harassment of labour movement activists. In a "field manual" produced by a senior London officer in 1977, new recruits were advised to watch out for people who "although not dishonest in the ordinary sense, may, owing to extreme political views intend to harm the community you have sworn to protect." It goes on: "while there are subtle differences between these types of extremists and thieves, it is difficult to put one's finger on material distinctions."

This is the attitude which increasingly underlies routine policing. Clearly, the simple catching of criminals is much less important to the police chiefs, despite the Tones' law and order demagogy, than protecting the system against anyone who has the temerity to defend their interests or propagate their views. The labour movement does not condone crimes of violence (but it equally condemns the appalling cult of violence fostered by business interests through films, television and other media). Nor can the movement, while understanding the social causes of crime, support robbery as an "individual way out" of the problems facing workers. We have no sympathy with vicious criminal elements who are as much a menace to the workers as to big property owners, and whose activity provides the state with the excuse for strengthening repressive powers.

But the need to counter criminal activity does not give the "guardians of the law" the right to act as though they are a law unto themselves. Fighting crime does not justify the harassment and ill-treatment of suspects; or excuse denying suspects adequate legal defence or the twisting or fabrication of evidence. Fighting crime does not justify savage sentences or brutal, inhuman conditions in prisons; and it does not justify racial bias or arbitrary and oppressive policing. Overcoming crime for socialists, means fundamentally the eradication of the social conditions which produce crime. But within the present society, democratic accountability of the police, far from undermining the "fight against crime" would remove the obstacles created by an undemocratic, unaccountable and increasingly repressive police force.

From The Archives Of The American And International Left –From The International Bolshevik Tendency-Marxism vs. ‘Militant’ Reformism-The CWI’s Kautskyan Caricature of Trotskyism

Click on the headline to link to the International Bolshevik Tendency website.
Markin comment:

This archival issue of the International Bolshevik Tendency journal may be of some historical interest for old "new leftists,” perhaps, as well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social and political questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist and other periodicals from other leftist organizations, past and present, periodically throughout the year.
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Marxism vs. ‘Militant’ Reformism-The CWI’s Kautskyan Caricature of Trotskyism

‘That the state is an organ of the rule of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode (the class opposite to it) is something the petty-bourgeois democrats will never be able to understand. Their attitude to the state is one of the most striking manifestations of the fact that our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks are not socialists at all (a point that we Bolsheviks have always maintained), but petty-bourgeois democrats using near-socialist phraseology.’
(V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution)

Marxists are distinguished from petty-bourgeois left-liberals by the recognition that the capitalist state is not neutral, but rather a tool of class oppression that cannot be wielded as an instrument of liberation; it must be smashed and replaced by organs of working-class power. This insight, first elaborated by Karl Marx following the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, was confirmed positively by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and negatively by every subsequent attempt by reformists to find common ground between the oppressors and the oppressed.

The failure to see the capitalist state as a machine for oppression can only disorient and disarm the workers’ movement. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, who led the Bolshevik Revolution, rejected the reformist gradualism preached by Karl Kautsky and other leaders of the Second International for whom the idea of socialist revolution was an abstraction consigned to the distant future. The Bolsheviks replaced the social-democratic ‘minimum-maximum’ programme of reformist practice and occasional ceremonial references to socialism with a programme designed to link the immediate felt needs of working people with practical tasks pointing toward the necessity to struggle for state power. In 1938, Trotsky codified this method, and many of the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the Transitional Programme -- a document he intended as a guide to assist the cadres of the revolutionary Fourth International in mobilising working people for socialist revolution.

In 2006, Michael W., a youth leader of the Socialist Party of England and Wales (SP), British section of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), resigned from the group citing the contradiction between the CWI’s claim to uphold the teachings of the great Russian revolutionaries and its consistently reformist practice (see Appendix A1). Lynn Walsh, a leading member of the SP/CWI, responded to Michael with a lengthy document entitled ‘The State: A Marxist Programme and Transitional Demands’ (see Appendix A2):


‘There will be many struggles to recoup past gains that have been lost in the recent period. As we have always done, we will link our immediate and transitional demands to the need for the socialist transformation of society.

‘The formal or “logical” contradiction between, on the one side, demands for reforms and, on the other, spelling out the need for a socialist transformation of society reflects the very real contradiction between the objective need for socialism and the immaturity of the consciousness and organisation of the working class.’

Walsh complained that Michael:

‘…shows no recognition of the need for a flexible transitional programme that corresponds to different periods and different situations. If we were to adopt his approach, we would be doomed to political isolation -- in a period that is actually becoming more and more favourable to winning workers and young people to socialist ideas. Adherence to abstract formulas might allow individuals or small groups to comment on events -- and level doctrinaire criticisms of those who do engage in struggles. But the method to which Michael has now unfortunately turned will never provide a bridge between the programme of revolution and wide layers of workers and young people. If he follows this line, Michael will certainly be in no danger of becoming a populist -- but, more importantly, he will not be an effective Marxist either.’

But the record of the CWI reveals that its ‘flexible transitional programme’ has a lot in common with the reformist Second International’s minimum programme. Comrade Walsh cites a comment by Trotsky to justify the CWI’s practice:


‘Moreover, Trotsky pointed out that the Transitional Programme was incomplete:

‘“… the end of the programme is not complete, because we don’t speak here about the social revolution, about the seizure of power by insurrection, the transformation of capitalist society into the dictatorship [of the proletariat], the dictatorship into the socialist society. This brings the reader only to the doorstep. It is a programme for action from today until the beginning of the socialist revolution. And from the practical point of view what is now most important is how can we guide the different strata of the proletariat in the direction of the socialist revolution.”
(‘Discussions With Trotsky: On the Transitional Program’, Trotsky, 7 June 1938)

‘In other words, it stops short of what Michael advocates, a programme for smashing the bourgeois state and the establishment of a workers’ state, a programme for an uprising and seizure of power.’

Walsh is exactly wrong, as is clear enough from the passage he cites. Trotsky is explaining that his intent was to provide a guideline for mobilising the masses in ways that will lead them to struggle for state power -- i.e., ‘the beginning of the socialist revolution’. This is what is ‘transitional’ about the programme Trotsky put forward -- it is a programme for transforming the proletariat from a class in itself into a class for itself. Trotsky repeatedly emphasised that the role of revolutionaries is to help workers ‘understand the objective task,’ i.e., the necessity for social revolution, not to adapt to backwardness:

‘We have repeated many times that the scientific character of our activity consists in the fact that we adapt our program not to political conjunctures or the thought or mood of the masses as this mood is today, but we adapt our program to the objective situation as it is represented by the economic class structure of society. The mentality can be backward; then the political task of the party is to bring the mentality into harmony with the objective facts, to make the workers understand the objective task. But we cannot adapt the program to the backward mentality of the workers, the mentality, the mood is a secondary factor -- the prime factor is the objective situation. That is why we have heard these criticisms or these appreciations that some parts of the program do not conform to the situation.’
(‘Discussions With Trotsky: On the Transitional Program’, 7 June 1938)

Leninism vs. Labourism

Over the years a desire to avoid ‘isolation’ from the masses led the SP/CWI to revise practically every element of the Marxist programme. A good example is the question of bourgeois elections, which Lenin described as events that decide ‘once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament’ (The State and Revolution). Marxists participate in elections to explain that bourgeois ‘democracy’ is a rigged game, that parliament can never be an agency of fundamental change and that it is therefore necessary to smash the capitalist state (of which parliament is but one element) and replace it with a state based on organs of direct working-class power. The SP/CWI, by contrast, promotes the notion that a ‘popular socialist government’ using a parliamentary majority can carry out a social revolution. In his reply to Michael, Walsh defends this proposition:

‘A successful socialist transformation can be carried through only on the basis of the support of the overwhelming majority of the working class, with the support of other layers, through the most radical forms of democracy. On that basis, provided a socialist government takes decisive measures on the basis of mobilising the working class, it would be possible to carry through a peaceful change of society. Any threat of violence would come, not from a popular socialist government, but from forces seeking to restore their monopoly of wealth, power and privilege by mobilising a reaction against the democratic majority.’

Peter Taaffe, the central leader of the SP/CWI, offered the same pablum in a 2006 interview with BBC Radio 4’s Shaun Ley (Ley’s questions in bold):


‘You still think the revolution will come?

‘Well, what do you mean by revolution?

‘The overthrow of capitalism.

‘Well yes, a change in society, established through winning a majority in elections, backed up by a mass movement to prevent the capitalists from overthrowing a socialist government and fighting, not to take over every small shop, every betting shop or every street corner shop -- in any case, they are disappearing because of the rise of the supermarkets -- and so on, or every small factory, but to nationalise a handful of monopolies, transnationals now, that control 80 to 85% of the economy.’
(The Socialist, 29 June 2006, www.socialistparty.org.uk/2006/446/index.html?id=militant.html)

The SP/CWI tries to spin this as simply undercutting the violence-baiting of anti-socialist demagogues, but Taaffe’s promotion of pernicious Labourite fantasies about a parliamentary road to socialism only serves to politically disarm working people. Trotsky explicitly warned:

‘[H]eroic promises to hurl thunderbolts of resistance if the Conservatives should “dare,” etc., are not worth a single bad penny. It is futile to lull the masses to sleep from day to day with prattling about peaceful, painless, parliamentary, democratic transitions to socialism and then, at the first serious punch delivered at one’s nose, to call upon the masses for armed resistance. This is the best method for facilitating the destruction of the proletariat by the powers of reaction. In order to be capable of offering revolutionary resistance, the masses must be prepared for such action mentally, materially and by organization. They must understand the inevitability of a more and more savage class struggle, and its transformation, at a certain stage, into civil war.’
(Where Is Britain Going?, 1925)

The SP/CWI leadership’s attachment to the debilitating illusions of ‘peaceful, painless, parliamentary, democratic transitions to socialism’ originated in the decades they spent buried in the Labour Party awaiting the great day when the objective historical process would turn the party of the labour aristocracy into an insurgent mass movement. In order to implement this strategy, dubbed ‘deep entrism’ by Michel Pablo in the early 1950s, the cadres of the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL, the Socialist Party’s forerunner), were prepared to make any ideological concession to avoid expulsion. The sum total of the opportunistic formulations and defensive adaptations to the pro-imperialist Labour tops was the Kautskyan (i.e., pseudo-Marxist) caricature of Trotskyism which characterises the CWI to this day.

From 1964 the group was known publicly as the Militant Tendency, after the name of their paper, until their relaunch as the Socialist Party three decades later. Through all these years the Militant Tendency ‘demanded’ that the corrupt and cynical Labour bureaucrats undertake a fight for socialism:


‘A Labour government is always elected in times of crisis, when the desire for change is at its highest. Under these conditions the next Labour government will be a government of crisis, entirely different to any of the post-war Labour governments. It will be the sum of pressure and counter-pressure that will decide the path it follows. Instead of bowing the knee to capital and hoping to run capitalism better than the Tories, it should immediately push through an emergency “Enabling Act” through Parliament.

‘Such emergency legislation is not new -- it was used by the Tories in 1971 to nationalise Rolls Royce in less than 24 hours! Such measures used by Labour would make it possible for the House of Lords and Monarchy to be abolished and the top 200 monopolies, banks and insurance companies to be nationalised, under democratic workers’ control and management. Compensation should only be paid on the basis of proven need.’
(‘Socialist programme needed’, Militant, 27 September 1985)

The promotion of illusions in the possibility of a ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ was accompanied by salutes to Labour’s social-democratic past. In an article entitled, ‘Terry Fields and Dave Nellist -- Defenders of Labour’s Socialist Traditions’ (Militant, 20 September 1991), Richard Venton hailed Militant’s two members of parliament as ‘amongst the very few Labour MPs who can truly claim the mantle of Keir Hardie’, who had ‘moved a socialist resolution in Parliament in April 1901 with an uncanny resemblance to the policies which [Labour Party leader Neil] Kinnock denounces Terry Fields for today.’

Clement Attlee, who Trotsky referred to in 1939 as a representative of ‘the left flank of democratic imperialism’ shortly before Attlee’s entry into Winston Churchill’s wartime cabinet, was also embraced as a political ancestor of Militant and the original author of their ‘enabling act’ strategy:


‘By 1932 the Labour left were gaining ground again. Trevelyan demanded “great socialist measures empowering to nationalise the key industries of the country”.

‘Labour leader Clement Attlee (later prime minister) added:

‘“The events of last year have shown that no further progress can be made in seeking to get crumbs from the rich man’s table… Whenever we try to do anything we will be opposed by every vested interest, financial, political and social… Even if we are returned with a majority we shall have to fight all the way… to strike while the iron is hot.”

‘Pressure from the ranks led to one of Labour’s most radical-ever manifestos in 1934. For socialism and peace.

‘“On banking and credit, transport, water, coal, electricity, gas, agriculture, iron and steel, shipping, shipbuilding, engineering, textiles, chemicals and insurance, it said: ‘Nothing short of immediate public ownership and control will be effective… The employees in a socialised industry have the right to an effective share in control and direction of the industry.”

‘Attlee spoke of an “enabling act” through Parliament to give a Labour government sweeping powers to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy.’
(Militant, 20 September 1991)

Even after abandoning its entrist strategy in the early 1990s, Militant retained its deeply internalised Labourite reformism. This was evident in the stillborn ‘Campaign for a New Workers’ Party’, which aimed at creating a reformist milieu for the SP to operate within (see Appendix B2). The SP leadership motivated this proposal on the grounds that ‘the chance to reclaim the Labour Party has long passed’. In fact, Marxists could never have ‘reclaimed’ Labour because it was never revolutionary in the first place. Far from being a vehicle for a ‘peaceful’ transition to socialism, the Labour Party operated as an agency of the capitalists within the working class for many decades before the advent of Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Working-Class Independence vs. Popular Frontism

Militant’s calls for the Labour lieutenants of capital to act in a manner entirely alien to their makeup and social function are taken a step further with the policy of making similar demands on multi-class political alliances (i.e., ‘popular fronts’). Comrade Walsh recounts that in Chile in the early 1970s:


‘a revolutionary situation was opened up by the election of the popular front government under Allende (which included the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the bourgeois Radical Party). It had a radical programme, which included some nationalisation measures (of the copper industry, for instance), but fell far short of a programme of socialist transformation.… In such a situation, Marxists have to advance a programme that relates concretely to the role of a “socialist” (popular front) government and to the necessary tasks posed before the working class. In Chile between 1970-73, bald calls on the lines of “down with the Allende government”, “smash the state” and “for a workers’ government” would have been completely inadequate.

‘We advocated that Marxists in Chile should call on the Allende government to take decisive control of the economy through nationalisation of the copper mines and basic industries, while supporting the poor peasants in carrying through a radical land reform.’

Popular-front governments, as Trotsky explained, exist for the purpose of defusing workers’ militancy and stabilising capitalist rule. The idea of demanding that they carry out socialist measures is not only absurd -- it also represents a repudiation of the core of Marxist politics: the necessity for the complete political independence of the working class from all wings of the bourgeoisie. Salvador Allende’s popular front was a bloc of reformist workers’ parties and ‘left’ capitalist parties and, as such, was organically incapable of making any meaningful incursion on bourgeois property rights. The precondition for serious struggle against the system of exploitation and wage slavery in Chile was to split the popular front along class lines. This was the axis of the Bolshevik policy in Russia in 1917 that Lenin introduced with his ‘April Theses’, and which was subsequently popularised with the call for ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!’ of the Provisional Government. The inability of the Mensheviks and other ostensible socialists to break with their ‘left’ bourgeois partners ultimately discredited them and paved the way for the Bolsheviks to lead the workers to power.

Lenin’s policy of irreconcilable opposition to the popular-front government was not popular in April 1917, but in the following months the masses gradually came to understand that their interests could not be served by an alliance with any section of the capitalists. The Bolsheviks won mass support by telling the truth. As Trotsky observed:

‘The reformists have a good smell for what the audience wants…. But that is not serious revolutionary activity. We must have the courage to be unpopular, to say “you are fools,” “you are stupid,” “they betray you,” and every once in a while with a scandal launch our ideas with a passion.’
(‘Completing the Program and Putting It to Work’)

The SP/CWI leadership has a long record of tailoring their political positions to fit whatever illusions are currently popular, but lack the political courage to engage in ‘serious revolutionary activity’. Despite their claims to uphold the political legacy of Lenin and Trotsky, on the question of the popular front (the ‘main question of proletarian class strategy’), the SP/CWI has consistently followed the example of the Mensheviks, not the Bolsheviks.

In 2004, the SP voted for the Socialist Workers Party’s (not-so-popular) popular-frontist Respect coalition, and even launched its own (even less popular) cross-class bloc -- the ‘Socialist Green Unity Coalition’. This policy is not restricted to Britain. In 1996, Peter Taaffe visited India prior to a general election there, and wrote an article entitled, ‘Fight for workers’ unity: no to bosses’ coalition’ in which he reported:


‘there are two powerful Communist Parties, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the CPI(M) and the Communist Party of India (CPI).

‘The ranks of these organisations represent some of the best fighters amongst the working class and the poor peasantry. Yet for 50 years they have sought alliances with one capitalist party or coalition after another. In this election they are in a “Third Front”, an alliance with the capitalist Janata Dal and others in opposition to the Congress and BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party].’
(Militant, 26 April 1996)

Taaffe accurately predicted the result of this policy:

‘Their role on the coalition will be to act as a colossal brake, particularly to rein in an inevitable mass movement opposing privatisation. Participation of workers’ leaders in capitalist coalitions is inevitably a “strike-breaking conspiracy”.’
(Ibid.)

This is very true. But the CWI could not bring itself to risk ‘isolation’ by advising workers not to vote for the candidates of a ‘strike-breaking conspiracy’:

‘Dudiyora Horaata [the CWI’s Indian section] calls for a vote [to] CP candidates and other genuine left forces. Where there are no left or Communist Party candidate[s], we call on all workers and peasants to exercise their protest vote by fully crossing out the ballot paper.’
(Ibid.)

The CWI’s opportunism extends to joining openly bourgeois parties:

‘For a period our sections conducted work in and around the BNP [Bahejana Nidasa Pakhsaya (People’s Alliance)] in Sri Lanka, the PPP [Pakistan Peoples Party] in Pakistan and others. Because of the changed attitude of the masses towards these organisations and the swing to the right that has taken place in them, this tactic has not applied in recent years. However, the emergence of new radical bourgeois formations in some countries of the former colonial world will mean we should be prepared, where necessary, to work in and around them. If we had forces in Mexico it may have been correct for them to orientate in/around the radical bourgeois PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution] when it was launched at the end of the 1980’s.’
(Global Turmoil: Capitalist Crisis, a Socialist Alternative, 1999)

Within such bourgeois formations the ‘Marxist’ entrants of the CWI faithfully replicate the chameleon tactics practiced by their parent organisation in the Labour Party, and adopt much of the ideology of their host. In South Africa, Militant supporters who spent years buried in the African National Congress (ANC) claimed: ‘the ANC must be built as a mass force on a socialist programme. This is the priority facing workers and youth in the immediate future’ (Militant, 20 June 1986). Such propaganda provided left cover for the petty-bourgeois nationalism of the ANC leadership which, despite their sometimes leftist rhetoric and mass base among the desperately oppressed black masses, never posed a serious threat to capitalist rule in South Africa. That is why the white rulers ultimately entrusted the ANC with managing their state. Rather than combating illusions in the ANC, the CWI’s activity reinforced them.

The CWI’s policy of backing ‘radical bourgeois’ politicians is not confined to neo-colonial countries. In the last two American presidential elections, the CWI’s US section, Socialist Alternative, supported the ‘independent’ capitalist candidacy of Ralph Nader, a petty-bourgeois maverick and small-time entrepreneur who is infamous for sacking his employees at Multinational Monitor in 1984 when they tried to unionise (see ‘Tailgating Nader’, 1917 No. 23 and ‘No to “Lesser Evilism”’, 1917 No. 27). Recently, Socialist Alternative has taken to advising Dennis Kucinich, a congressman from Ohio, to ‘leave the corrupt Democratic Party and use his influence to support and build for an independent [presidential] campaign in 2008’ (Justice, January-February 2007). Kucinich, who functions as a ‘leftist’ ornament on the Democratic party of racism and imperialist war, has no intention of forsaking his political career to run as an ‘independent’. But even if he did, he would still be nothing more than a capitalist politician.

Bourgeois Cops: Armed Capitalist Thugs

One of the central criticisms raised by Michael W. concerned Militant’s solicitous attitude toward the police, as Lynn Walsh noted:

‘Michael focuses much of his criticism on our position on the police, referring in particular to several articles published in Militant in 1981. He considers that our position on the police is based on “reformist methodology” and reflects “congealed illusions” in the possibility of “establish[ing] a workers’ state through electoral activity”. Our mistake, according to Michael, was in not putting forward our full programme based on the idea that the capitalist state “must be broken up, smashed, and replaced by a new workers’ state”. Instead, our intervention in the events of 1981 was primarily based on immediate, democratic demands on the police put forward in a transitional way.’

In defending Militant’s policy, Walsh argued:

‘The key element of our demands was democratic control by local government police committees -- elected bodies involving the working class through representatives from trade unions, community organisations, etc. We demanded that elected police committees should have the power to appoint and dismiss chief constables and senior officers, and would be responsible for “operational questions”, that is, day-to-day policing policies. Police committees should ensure a genuinely independent complaints’ procedure, and should be responsible for weeding out any racist elements or fascist sympathisers within the police. We called for the abolition of the Special Patrol Group and other similar units, as well as the abolition of the Special Branch and destruction of police files and computer records not connected with criminal investigations.’

In responding to Michael’s observation that there is a profound contradiction between advocating ‘community control’ of the police and the SP’s formal recognition ‘that the police cannot be reformed into a worker-friendly institution’, Walsh drew a parallel between reforming the police and defending democratic rights:

‘But it [police reform] is no more contradictory than demanding any other reform under capitalism. Reforms can be won through struggle, but we warn that they will not be lasting gains under capitalism. In the field of democratic rights do we not defend the right to jury trial, legal aid, procedural safeguards for defendants, and so on? Clearly, such legal rights do not guarantee real “justice”, which is impossible on a juridical plane without a deeper social justice, which is impossible in capitalist society. But it would be absurd to argue that such legal and civil rights are of no consequence for the working class. Such rights have been won, clawed back by the bourgeoisie, re-established for a period, and so on. Demands for social reforms and democratic rights will always remain an important part of our transitional programme. Legal and civil rights, like the right to vote, freedom of political association, etc, create more favourable conditions for working-class struggle. Demands for democratic control of the police are no different, in principle, from demands for other democratic rights. Doesn’t the demand for universal suffrage, for instance, reinforce the illusion that an elected parliament can control the executive of the capitalist state?’

To call for universal suffrage is not at all the same as to campaign to transform the armed thugs of capital into the protectors of the downtrodden. Marxists support any extension of democratic rights and favour measures that limit the power wielded by the capitalist state. The problem with ‘community control of the police’ is that it promotes the illusion that the police are a class-neutral institution which can be made to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. The promotion of this deception is of a piece with Militant’s insistence that socialism can be achieved through parliamentary action, and flatly contradicts the bedrock Marxist proposition that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’ (Karl Marx, The Civil War in France).

The overtly reformist character of Militant’s position on the cops was spelled out in a 1988 book that asserted:

‘The necessity for a police force which can effectively detect and prevent crime is essential, and the democratic accountability of the police to elected representatives of the community is vital.’
(Liverpool: A City that Dared to Fight, Peter Taaffe and Tony Mulhearn)

This was paralleled by the 2006 election platform of the Berlin WASG (Electoral Alternative for Labour and Social Justice, led by the CWI’s German group, Sozialistiche Alternative Voran) which included a promise to hire more cops (see ‘The “New” German Reformism’, 1917 No. 29).

Marxists hold that organisations of police, prison guards, immigration cops, etc. have no place in the trade-union movement and should be expelled from it. The Socialist Party takes the opposite view and favours their inclusion:


‘The 1977 episode points to the contradictory character of the police. While an arm of the state -- increasingly one of the “armed bodies of men” who make up the capitalists’ repressive apparatus -- the police, like the armed forces, are composed of men and women drawn from the working class, with their own interests and demands as workers.

‘It is vital, therefore, that while campaigning for democratic accountability of the police, the labour movement must also call for trade union rights for the police, with the replacement of the Police Federation with a genuinely independent union organisation.

‘It is not only a question of defending the economic interests of the police, but of working to bring the ranks of the police into the orbit of the labour movement.

‘This has been opposed by some on the ultra-left as utopian. They want to write off the police as an homogenous, reactionary force for repression.’
(‘Trade union rights for police’, Militant, 3 October 1981)

Leon Trotsky was among the ‘ultra-lefts’ who rejected the idea that cops are merely ‘workers in uniform’:

‘The fact that the police was originally recruited in large numbers from among Social Democratic workers is absolutely meaningless. Consciousness is determined by environment even in this instance. The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker.’
(What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat, January 1932)

In his reply to Michael, Walsh tries another tack, and suggests that the demand for ‘community control of the police’ might help split the bourgeois state apparatus:

‘During the May events of 1968 [in France], the mood of the police (in contrast to the paramilitary riot police, the CRS) was affected by the mass general strike movement. Representatives of the police “tacitly let it be known that operations against workers could not only cause a grave crisis of confidence within their ranks but also the possibility of what would in effect be a police mutiny” (Beyond the Limits of the Law, Tom Bowden). The logic of Michael’s position is that the advanced workers should ignore such developments, and pass over the possibility of winning sections of the police over to the side of the workers, or at least neutralising a section of the forces of the state.’

Individual police officers may not be comfortable acting as ‘the first line of defence against anything which disturbs the public order of capitalism’ as the SP puts it in ‘What is Marxism?’ Advanced workers must certainly be attentive to any cracks that appear in the repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie, particularly during pre-revolutionary moments like May 1968 in France. But promoting the false notion that the police are part of the workers’ movement will only make it more difficult to take advantage of such developments. Police officers who want to change sides have to cross the class line and repudiate their role as enforcers for the capitalist rulers.

The 1984-85 miners’ strike demonstrated the role of the police as defenders of the exploiters:


‘Miners were unable to move from one to another part of the country or even from county to county. Ancient laws from the 1300’s were invoked. Pit villages were turned into mini police states.

‘Every resource of the police, courts and laws were and still are being used against the miners. Bail conditions and restrictions of movement are reminiscent of South Africa’s pass law, police operations more akin to Latin America, or the smashing of the Solidarity trade union organisations by the Polish bureaucrats, and yet there was not a whimper from the Tories about “democracy and freedom”. Only the freedom to scab mattered in Britain in 1984.

‘Even ex-chief constable, James Alderson, had to admit that the police force has been turned into a para military force.’
(‘The Year of the Miners’, Militant, 4 January 1985)

In replying to Michael, comrade Walsh agrees that the police were ‘assuming emergency powers and acting as a paramilitary force against the miners during their titanic strike of 1984-85, a strike that had many features of a civil war in the coalfields’. Yet, even in this situation, he regards as absurd the suggestion that revolutionaries should have advocated a mass, organised, working-class response:

‘Is Michael seriously suggesting that we should have been calling for workers’ militias and the arming of the proletariat in Britain in the 1980s -- or today, for that matter? Such demands do not correspond to the situation today in Britain or most other countries, and they do not correspond to the current consciousness of even the advanced layers of workers.’

The entire history of proletarian class struggle shows that large-scale capitalist strikebreaking can only be defeated by active, mass resistance. One of the key lessons in Trotsky’s Transitional Programme is that countering the violence of the capitalists’ hired thugs requires the working class to organise effective self-defence:


‘Strike pickets are the basic nuclei of the proletarian army. This is our point of departure. In connection with every strike and street demonstration, it is imperative to propagate the necessity of creating workers’ groups for self-defense. It is necessary to write this slogan into the program of the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is imperative everywhere possible, beginning with the youth groups, to organize groups for self-defense; to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms.

‘A new upsurge of the mass movement should serve not only to increase the number of these units but also to unite them according to neighborhoods, cities, regions. It is necessary to give organized expression to the valid hatred of the workers toward scabs and bands of gangsters and fascists. It is necessary to advance the slogan of a workers’ militia as the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings, and press.’
(Transitional Programme)

The CWI leadership, well aware that their overtly reformist attitude toward the capitalist state contradicts any claim to stand in the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition, brazen it out by ridiculing Trotsky’s ideas about dealing with scabs, strikebreakers, fascists, etc.:

‘Many small groups have rigidly tried to apply The Transitional Programme today by merely repeating demands from it which do not apply today. Workers on strike have been amused by strange people appearing on their picket lines demanding “workers’ defence guards” ripped out of the context of The Transitional Programme of 1938.’
(Introduction to SP’s edition of The Transitional Programme; originally published in The Socialist, 28 June 2002)

The ‘context’ of Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, like Lenin’s State and Revolution and many other fundamental texts of the Marxist movement, is that the exploiters and their victims have nothing in common. This is no less true today than it was in 1917 or 1938.

The housebroken social democrats leading the CWI, who view cops as ‘workers in uniform’, are also quite prepared to run to the bourgeois state to resolve disputes within the workers’ movement. When Neil Kinnock tried to expel the Militant Editorial Board from the Labour Party, they appealed (unsuccessfully) to the capitalists’ courts. In 2006, the CWI’s German section launched a similar appeal in that country to resolve a dispute in the WASG (see 1917 No. 29). Marxists seek to keep the bosses out of the internal affairs of the organisations of the workers’ movement as a matter of principle -- but for social democrats, whose fondest aspiration is to find ‘legitimacy’ in the eyes of the capitalists and their institutions, the bourgeois courts are impartial dispensers of justice.

Liverpool: ‘Socialism’ in One City

In the mid-1980s, Militant supporters within the Labour Party gained control of the Liverpool city council. This is officially regarded as a heroic chapter in CWI history by the group’s leadership, but in reality, it was a nearly unqualified disaster -- a tragicomedy that began with delusions and ended with betrayal.

It started with Militant supporters playing a key role in resisting the Liberal-controlled city council’s plans to close Croxteth Community School. The campaign, involving significant numbers of parents, students and teachers, contributed to Labour’s success in the subsequent May 1983 council elections. Derek Hatton, one of the many Militant supporters elected as Labour councillors, crowed: ‘We were not the loony left -- more concerned about black mayors and gay rights than we were about building new homes’, and defiantly declared:

‘“We’re going to show the bastards what we’re made of. We’re going to do all the things we said we would. You are going to build houses. I am going to create jobs. It’s going to be bloody marvellous.”’
(Inside Left, The Story So Far, 1988)

Militant claimed that its ‘Urban Regeneration Strategy’ created 6,000 new jobs and built 5,000 new houses in Liverpool while refusing to adhere to the Thatcher government’s budgetary restrictions. Eventually the district auditor charged the councillors with ‘misconduct’ for failing to balance their budget in accordance with central government regulations. Conviction could have meant disqualification from holding office for five years. Militant’s leadership responded by immediately issuing redundancy notices to all council employees, a bizarre manoeuvre that promptly blew up in their faces:


‘On September 6th, 1985 we announced the decision. How it backfired on us. The trade unions revolted, their national officials went for us, and at Labour Party headquarters the decision was seized upon as a stick with which to beat Militant.

‘We argued, that by issuing redundancy notices we could also hammer home the sharp reality of our arguments: that unless more money was available to Liverpool from the central funds, then jobs really were on the line. There was never ever any intention to implement a single one of those 31,000 redundancy notices.

‘So we went ahead and drew them up, and unleashed an animal reaction that we simply could not control. We had badly miscalculated.’
(Ibid.)

Even Militant’s own trade-union cadres refused to go along,
as Hatton recounted:
‘I found myself in a head to head battle with a fellow Militant, Ian Lowes, a senior shop steward of the powerful General, Municipal, Boilerworkers and Allied Trades Union. Ian had been a key figure ever since we were elected in 1983. He worked as a tree-feller, but as chairman of the Joint Shop Stewards was in fact occupied full time on trade union activities within the council. Now he went on record as saying: “We are not going to accept any redundancy notices. As soon as the first is issued there will be all out action.” What’s more I knew he had the power to stop us if he wanted.’
(Ibid.)

In hindsight, the CWI has tried to alibi its shameful record by painting the Liverpool council as a ‘socialist’ island surrounded by a sea of capitalism -- a sort of Paris Commune on the Mersey:

‘A local council restricted to one city, however is far from being in the position of a healthy, democratic workers’ state. Its actions are still dominated by the capitalist economy generally, and by constraints imposed by the government. It is still subject to the laws of capitalism. Even under the most radical leadership, therefore, the actions of the council can at best ameliorate the conditions of the working class.’
(Liverpool: A City that Dared to Fight, Peter Taaffe and Tony Mulhearn)

True enough, but massive redundancies hardly qualify as ‘ameliorating the conditions of the working class.’ Militant’s proposals went far beyond anything so far attempted by New Labourites or even the Tories. Yet in its introduction to the Transitional Programme, the SP bizarrely refers to its Liverpool debacle as an exemplary use of ‘transitional’ demands:

‘The Liverpool council struggle showed that transitional demands are not “impossible”, they can be fought for here and now by the working class, through mass struggle. But if gains made by struggle are to be held onto, society must be changed to put them beyond the grasp of capitalist counter-reforms.’

What Militant’s record in Liverpool actually demonstrates is that social-democratic reformists who tailor their politics to existing backward (i.e., bourgeois) consciousness tie their hands in advance.

The ‘tactic’ of mass redundancies, while hardly more anti-socialist than embracing cops, had far more immediate organisational consequences. It discredited Militant with much of their base, and thus set the stage for Neil Kinnock to begin expelling leading members of the group from the Labour Party in early 1986. Only a few ‘old lefts’ like Tony Benn, Eric Heffer and miners’ leader Arthur Scargill opposed the expulsions. Everyone else, including the ‘left-wing’ Tribune grouping that Militant once supported, went along with Kinnock. When Militant appealed their expulsions to the capitalists’ courts, their suits were tossed out.

British Imperialism & Revolutionary Defeatism

The CWI’s reformism is evident in its approach to practically any issue. While agreeing in the abstract that revolutionaries must categorically oppose the presence of imperialist troops in any dependent capitalist country, Militant never called for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland. To conceal this shameful position, the SP leadership has on occasion struck a hard anti-imperialist posture. For example, in ‘Beyond the Troubles’ (1994) Peter Hadden wrote:


‘There was almost universal support for the entry of the troops. People in the Catholic areas welcomed them as a relieving army. The NILP, the Irish Labour Party, and of course, the British Labour Party, whose government sent them, gave support. So did virtually all the civil rights leaders including those who later backed the Provisional IRA. Likewise most of the fringe socialist groups in Britain, such as the Socialist Worker Party (then the International Socialists), people who were soon to be cheering on the IRA, supported the government’s decision.

‘Militant, along with left wing members of the NILP in Derry, found itself virtually alone in opposing. Its September 1969 issue, under headline, “Withdraw the Troops” predicted;

‘“The call made for the entry of British troops will turn to vinegar in the mouths of some of the civil rights leaders. The troops have been sent to impose a solution in the interests of British and Ulster big business.”’

Hadden asked:

‘Would it not still have been justified to support the entry of the army as an emergency measure to prevent civil war? No, the duty of Marxists in a situation such as this is to point to ways in which the working class can rely on its own strength to solve its own problems, not rely on the forces of the capitalist state.’
(Ibid.)

Yet on another occasion, Hadden put forward exactly the opposite position:

‘But to have opposed the entry of the troops, or subsequently to demand their withdrawal, without at the same time posing an alternative which could safeguard the lives of both Catholic and Protestant workers, would have been light-minded in the extreme.’
(Richard Venton and Peter Hadden, ‘Labour and Northern Ireland 20 years on: Socialism -- Not Sectarianism’)

Revolutionaries advocate the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of British imperialist forces from Northern Ireland for exactly the same reasons that we do so in Afghanistan and Iraq. To make the existence of a non-sectarian workers’ militia a precondition for ending the imperialist presence, as Militant did in Northern Ireland, is, in effect, to endorse the occupation. This impression is reinforced by Militant’s reluctance to defend those blows struck by the Republican resistance to the British occupation forces and the social-pacifist flavour of its pronouncements:

‘Also, having suffered military defeats in the North at the hands of imperialism, the Provos have turned to a campaign in Britain and Europe against relatively “soft targets”. But bombings and shootings of soldiers provokes outrage from the British working class, diverting attention from the terror methods of the SAS and the criminal scandal of RUC and UDR collaboration with the Protestant paramilitary murder-gangs. The hand of the state repression is strengthened.’
(Ibid.)

The Militant/SP leadership generally refused to distinguish between the killing of civilians on the one hand and imperialist troops and their auxiliaries on the other. Marxists do not shrink from making this elementary distinction simply because it might ‘outrage’ backward layers of the working class.

While stopping short of explicitly attributing a progressive character to the presence of British troops in Northern Ireland, the SP/CWI in its propaganda floated the suggestion that they were standing in the way of a Bosnian-style intercommunal bloodbath:


‘A British declaration to withdraw would not lead Protestants to “accept the wisdom of negotiating” what would in effect be their surrender terms. It would provoke an armed revolt and civil war. If the British government were to cut them adrift and the choice was between a capitalist united Ireland and an independent state, established on the parts of Northern Ireland they could hold by force, the Protestants, en masse would choose the latter.’

…

‘While the unmistakeable direction of events has been towards deepening sectarian conflict and ultimately civil war this has had and is likely still to have a drawn out and protracted character. A common feature to what happened in Bosnia and the Lebanon was that the central state collapsed. In Bosnia the trigger was the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. In the Lebanon the power sharing arrangements between Christians and Muslims that had existed for decades, but which no longer reflected the population balance, came apart. ‘Ethnically based armed militias fighting for territory filled the vacuum of central authority in both cases. In Northern Ireland the state, especially since 1969, is the British state.’
(‘Towards Division Not Peace’, Peter Hadden, 2003)

The SP/CWI has assumed a more leftist posture on Iraq, where sectarian conflict has grown steadily under the ‘coalition’ occupation:

‘The Socialist Party is not pacifist. We are in favour of the right of an occupied and oppressed people, as in Iraq, to defend themselves arms in hand against US and British imperialism.’
(Socialism Today, September 2005)

The SP went so far as to draw an explicit parallel between the occupation of Iraq and that of Northern Ireland:

‘The arguments of those in favour of maintaining the troops [in Iraq] will now be that they are there, like they were in Northern Ireland, to “hold the ring” and prevent a sectarian slaughter of one side by the other. There is a big danger of an outright slide to civil war. But this will not be prevented by British or US troops remaining in Iraq. They should be immediately withdrawn and in their place joint militias of Shia, Sunni and Kurds should be formed on a class basis to defend all ethnic groups and communities against the sectarian butchers on either side of the divide.’
(Ibid.)

For three decades, Militant refused to call for ‘immediate withdrawal’ of British troops from Northern Ireland to avoid incurring the wrath of the pro-imperialist Labour Party tops. They made such a call conditional on the existence of anti-sectarian militias, of the sort they recommend ‘should be formed on a class basis’ today in Iraq. The critical question is what to do when no such anti-sectarian militias exist, as in Northern Ireland during the ‘troubles’ or today in Iraq. The Marxist position is unequivocal -- we stand for the immediate withdrawal of all imperialist forces with no preconditions. The CWI’s record on this, as on so many other issues, is one of adjusting its position in accordance with perceived organisational opportunities.

While the Socialist Party opposed the US/UK assault on Afghanistan in 2001, instead of taking a forthrightly revolutionary defeatist position, they characterised the imperialist invasion as ‘futile’:


‘Bush said that the Taliban would “pay the price” for 11 September attacks. But it’s ordinary Afghans who are the innocent victims of a futile war that will not end terrorism and will make the world a more unstable and dangerous place.

‘Opinion polls in the US and Britain have shown a majority in favour of air-strikes on Afghanistan. But many of those who feel that “something must be done” have grave reservations about any action which results in the deaths of innocent civilians.

‘On 13 October 50,000 marched on an anti-war demonstration in London -- bigger than any national protests during the Gulf War or the war in Kosovo. Significantly it included a large, organised Muslim contingent. At least a quarter of a million people protested against the war in Italy.

‘These demonstrations and anti-US protests around the world show that Bush and Blair do not have a blank cheque to wage war against the people of Afghanistan and that the “anti-terrorist” coalition is being built on shaky foundations.’
(The Socialist, 19 October 2001)

This sceptical semi-pacifism in the face of a brazen imperialist attack on a neo-colonial country falls far short of Trotsky’s position:

‘In Brazil there now reigns a semifascist regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of the conflict will the working class be? I will answer for myself personally -- in this case I will be on the side of “fascist” Brazil against “democratic” Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. The defeat of England will at the same time deliver a blow to British imperialism and give an impulse to the revolutionary movement of the British proletariat.’
(Leon Trotsky, ‘Anti-Imperialist Struggle Is Key to Liberation’, 23 September 1938)

In the run-up to the US/UK invasion of Afghanistan, the SP provided readers of its press with the following sketch of the background to the rise of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban:


‘…the Soviet Union launched a military intervention in December 1979 to prevent the collapse of the [left-nationalist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)] regime and installed Babrak Karmal as leader. A collapse would have weakened the Soviet Union in its Cold War with the US.

‘But the Soviet army found it no easier to suppress the opposition….

‘Najibullah replaced Karmal as president. He continued to spread the reforms but militarily his government fared no better. Finally, as part of Gorbachev’s capitulation to capitalism and following thousands of deaths, in 1989 the demoralised Soviet army was withdrawn.

‘This guaranteed the eventual collapse of the regime, which finally occurred in 1992, replaced by a coalition of the Mujahidin groups. But this coalition of warlords fell apart and civil war broke out.

‘In 1996 the Pakistan-armed and trained Taliban took power. Their rule has been based on extreme repression.’
(The Socialist, 28 September 2001)

Gorbachev’s ‘capitulation to capitalism’ did indeed involve a Soviet military withdrawal that paved the way for imperialist-backed Islamist reaction. In 1980, when the Soviet Army originally intervened, Militant characterised the opposition to the PDPA as ‘feudal-capitalist counter-revolution’:

‘The Russian bureaucracy intervened directly because they could not tolerate the overthrow, for the first time in the post-war period, of a regime based on the elimination of landlordism and capitalism, and the victory of a feudal-capitalist counter-revolution, especially in a state bordering on the Soviet Union.’
(Militant, 18 January 1980)

Yet rather than siding with the Soviet/PDPA forces in their battle with the mujahedin, Militant adjusted its position to accommodate backward sentiments promoted by the anti-Soviet imperialist propaganda machine and the Labour Party tops:

‘If we just considered the Russian intervention in isolation, we should have to give this move critical support. But because of the reactionary effect it has on the consciousness of the world working class, which is a thousand times more important than the developments in a small country like Afghanistan, then Marxists must oppose the Russian intervention.’
(Militant, 18 January 1980)

The CWI leaders did not explain how a modernising nationalist regime which was attempting to educate girls, reduce the bride price and introduce other modest social reforms was somehow exercising a ‘reactionary effect … on the consciousness of the world working class’. Militant stopped short of calling for an outright Soviet withdrawal:


‘Nevertheless, once the Russian forces had gone in, we argued that it would be a mistake to call for their withdrawal. This would have meant, in effect, to support the mujaheddin, whose programme was to re-establish medieval reaction.

‘This analysis has been confirmed by events.’
(Militant, 10 February 1989)

What has been ‘confirmed by events’ is that the leadership of Militant, which initially lacked the political courage to side militarily with the Soviet/PDPA against the CIA-funded Islamic reactionaries, responded to Gorbachev’s subsequent betrayal with the passive, fatalistic ‘optimism’ of the Second International: ‘In time, after a period of painful reaction, conditions will develop for a new movement to change society’ (Ibid.).

1981 & 1991: Militant Sides with Counter-revolution

While ostensibly upholding a position of unconditional defence of deformed and degenerated workers’ states against capitalist restoration, Militant consistently backed the counter-revolutionary forces in the former Soviet bloc, including Lech Walesa’s Solidarnosc in Poland. In the summer of 1980, a spontaneous strike erupted in the main shipyard of Gdansk that quickly spread to some 400 enterprises, including other shipyards, factories, steel works and coal mines. Workers demanded the right to strike, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and an end to government censorship. Within a year, this struggle against Stalinist political repression had evolved into an organisation with an overtly capitalist-restorationist programme (see our pamphlet Solidarnosc: Acid Test for Trotskyists).

The programme adopted at Solidarnosc’s September-October 1981 congress called for abolishing the monopoly of foreign trade and abandoning the planning principle in favour of the market:

‘It is necessary to sweep away the bureaucratic barriers which make it impossible for the market to operate. The central organs of economic administration should not limit enterprise activity or prescribe supplies and buyers for its output. Enterprises shall be able to operate freely on the internal market, except in fields where a license is compulsory. International trade must be accessible to all enterprises…. The relationship between supply and demand must determine price levels.’
(‘The Solidarity Program,’ Solidarity Sourcebook)

This amounted to a call for capitalist restoration, but the leaders of Militant (like the vast majority of other ostensible Trotskyists) blithely touted Solidarnosc as the embodiment of a workers’ political revolution:

‘The movement, largely as a result of the constantly renewed spontaneous initiative of the workers, has in practice raised all the main demands of the political revolution. These were formulated theoretically by Leon Trotsky in the struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy in the 1930’s. They have now been brilliantly confirmed by the spontaneous action of the Polish workers.’
(Militant, 18 December 1981)

While Militant was hailing Walesa as a socialist, the overtly pro-imperialist Solidarnosc leadership were working hand in hand with the forces of ‘democratic’ counter-revolution. This was hardly a secret -- long-time CIA labour operative Irving Brown was openly invited to attend the 1981 congress, and Walesa et al flaunted their connections to the Vatican.

In December 1981, the Polish Stalinists crushed Solidarnosc and arrested much of its cadre. Revolutionaries supported the suppression of the counter-revolutionary leadership of Solidarnosc as necessary to the defence of the Polish deformed workers’ state. At the same time, as we wrote:

‘We do not give the Stalinists a blank check to curtail the democratic rights of the workers to organize, to meet to discuss politics, and to recompose themselves politically. We know that capitalist-restorationist currents can only be decisively defeated by workers political revolution which smashes the rule of the Stalinist parasites. But we do not identify the defense of the political rights of the Polish workers with the defense of Solidarnosc.’
(Solidarnosc: Acid Test for Trotskyists, 1988)

Militant took exactly the opposite view and defended the Solidarnosc counter-revolutionaries:


‘The truth of the matter was that the world bourgeoisie was profoundly relieved by Jaruzelski’s coup. Moscow’s propaganda to the effect that the workers wanted to pull Poland out of the Warsaw Pact and repudiate the Yalta Agreement is a vulgar and transparent invention.

‘Decades ago, imperialism accepted the division of Europe into “spheres of influence”. They know that it is impossible to restore capitalism in the countries of Eastern Europe. They have carved up the world with the Russian bureaucracy, and both sides are only interested in maintaining the “status quo”.’
(‘Towards the Political Revolution: Perspectives for Poland of the Trotskyist Workers’ Tendency of Solidarnosc’, July 1986, emphasis in original)

Yet, contrary to this absurd claim, the imperialists and their agents (including Walesa) were not interested in preserving the status quo, and a few years later they proceeded to demonstrate that it was in fact not at all ‘impossible to restore capitalism’ in the Soviet bloc.

A decade after backing Walesa, Militant supported Boris Yeltsin, leader of the ‘democratic’ counter-revolution against the demoralised Stalinist apparatchiks of the ‘Emergency Committee’ in August 1991. We took the opposite position (see ‘Soviet Rubicon & the Left’, 1917 No. 11, 1992).

Militant reported that the Stalinist ‘hardliners’ had:


‘planned to tackle the plague of black marketers and criminal gangs that have seized advantage of the freer economic conditions. During the brief reign of their emergency committee 157 private businessmen were arrested for hoarding and racketeering.

‘This coup was deadly earnest. The conspirators had lists of people they wanted to deal with. Yeltsin and his close supporters were at the top. They ordered the telecommunications factory in Pskov to switch its production to manufacture 250,000 pairs of handcuffs. And they mobilised a military show of strength on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad and in the Baltic states.’
(Militant, 30 August 1991)

Militant sided with the Yeltsinites despite their openly counter-revolutionary character:

‘In that battle to stop the hardline bureaucrats and to defend democratic rights were elements of the political revolution. But the lack of a real socialist alternative for workers’ democracy has meant that for now they have been drowned by the process towards counter-revolution. The bureaucrats committed to a rapid move to capitalism were able to seize on the masses’ hatred of the old guard and their illusions in the market, to push ahead the counter-revolution. The new Soviet and Russian administrations are governments in the process of formation committed to dismantling state ownership.’
(Ibid.)

CWI cadres in Moscow not only cheered on those who were ‘pushing ahead the counter-revolution’ (i.e., the ‘democrats’), but actively intervened to support them:


‘From the declarations of the [Emergency Committee] it followed that they were acting against the so-called “democrats,” and that posed the danger of support to the putschists by workers organizations that did not share the principles of the “democrats” -- the rule of private property and capitalist power. And that is exactly what happened. Some of the workers organizations were getting ready to send greetings of welcome, and at several factories the workers even tried to organize defense detachments in support of the putschists.

‘From the morning on, all of our members explained to workers at their workplaces that the position of the Emergency Committee did not coincide with their interests. In addition to this, they connected up with worker activists of other organizations, in order to prevent hasty actions.’
(‘Where We Were’, cited in Workers Vanguard, No. 828, 11 June 2004)

The CWI does not pretend that the restoration of capitalism in the USSR has been anything but an immense social catastrophe for working people:

‘Because of this analysis it was the Trotskyists alone -- particularly the adherents to the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) -- who fully understood the consequences of the collapse of Stalinism, not only for the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, but for world relations as well. When the capitalists were projecting living standards for the masses of these countries comparable to Germany or the USA, we pointed out they would be lucky to enjoy Latin American living standards. In truth, even this perspective was proved to be optimistic as the living standards of the masses have plunged to that on a par with the worst parts of the neo-colonial world.’
(Socialism Today, No. 49, July/August 2000)

Serious people in the CWI might well wonder why, if their leaders had ‘fully understood the consequences of the collapse of Stalinism’, as they claim, they chose to support Yeltsin’s ‘democratic’ counter-revolution. Previously, the CWI had breezily dismissed the consequences of capitalist restoration in the former Soviet bloc as ‘primarily ideological’:

‘At the same time, we concluded that while this was a defeat for the world proletariat it was not the same kind of crushing social reverse and the change in world class relations that followed the triumphs of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. Its effects were primarily ideological in that it allowed the bourgeois[ie] to conduct an unbridled triumphalist campaign in favour of the “free market”, of capitalism, without having to look over their shoulder and for comparisons to be drawn with the economic achievements of the planned economies of the USSR, Eastern Europe, China and Cuba.’
(Global Turmoil, 1999)

The triumph of counter-revolution in the USSR and the deformed workers’ states of Eastern Europe is the single most devastating defeat ever suffered by the international working class. It had a huge political impact all around the world. The CWI’s support to the Yeltsinites’ drive to destroy what remained of the social conquests of October 1917 is undoubtedly the most shameful episode in its entire inglorious history.

‘Proletarian Bonapartism’ & Petty-Bourgeois Impressionism

The seizure of power by the Yeltsinites in August 1991, which ended the rule of the Stalinist nomenklatura, was a radical disjuncture that signalled a social counter-revolution. The old degenerated workers’ state was destroyed and a new bourgeois state apparatus began to operate. Yet the CWI’s writings on this enormous historic event fail to convey any sense that the outcome of the August 1991 confrontation resulted in a qualitative change in the way in which society was organised. While the CWI sometimes talks of revolutions and counter-revolutions, it has historically refused to recognise that the pivotal moment in such social transformations is the shattering of one state power and the creation of another.

The CWI poses the question of state power in an openly Kautskyist fashion as something that can be shifted incrementally and painlessly from one class to another. While conflicting sharply with the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, this reformist gradualism is the basis for the illusion that a Labour parliamentary majority can turn bourgeois Britain into a workers’ state with an ‘enabling act’.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Militant’s revisionism on the question of the state led to impressionistic declarations that various neo-colonies had seamlessly morphed into post-capitalist ‘proletarian bonapartist’ deformed workers’ states. The reactionary Syrian Ba’athists were credited with carrying out such a social revolution in 1966:


‘With every possible method of capitalist rule exhausted, the Ba’ath Socialist regime that took power in 1963 resorted to radical measures against the monopolies. The capitalists, landlords and merchants resisted. Following a further coup in 1966 by more left-wing junior officers, a full-scale revolutionary confrontation developed.

‘Faced with an imperialist-backed military counter-revolution, the regime appealed to the masses for support. In their hundreds of thousands, peasants and workers were armed. Capitalism and landlordism were crushed, with 85% of the land and 95% of industry being nationalized by the Ba’ath regime.

‘But power remained with the military leadership; the workers and peasants were disarmed again. The regime transformed the economic basis of the country into that of a workers’ state, resting on state ownership and central planning. But the regime itself was Bonapartist -- in Marxist terms, “proletarian Bonapartist” as opposed to the “bourgeois Bonapartist” regimes in the capitalist states like Egypt -- with a narrow, nationalist perspective, becoming increasingly privileged and remote from the people.’
(Daniel Hugo, ‘Crisis in the Middle East’, 1982)

Burma was supposed to have undergone a similar transformation, and in a 1978 article entitled ‘What is happening in Ethiopia’, Lynn Walsh claimed that it too had become a deformed workers’ state:


‘Meanwhile, we have to ask: what attitude should socialists take to the momentous changes in Ethiopia in the last four years?

‘First, it is necessary to recognise the fundamentally progressive character of the social changes that have taken place under the Dergue. Landlordism and capitalism have been abolished. The fact that the Dergue was forced to carry through the land reform and the nationalisation of industry is proof of the utter inability of capitalism to develop countries like Ethiopia, and these measures provide the only means by which the country can be pulled into the modern world.

‘At the same time, however, it is equally necessary to adopt an implacably critical attitude towards the dictatorial, bureaucratic regime that has arisen from the revolution. Its reactionary, nationalistic position on the national question (which we will come to later) is the counterpart of its repressive role internally.

‘Ethiopia cannot be regarded as a socialist state, only as a deformed workers’ state, in which new social relations corresponding to the interests of the working class have been established in a grotesquely distorted manner.’
(Militant, 3 March 1978, emphasis in original)

A week later, Walsh announced that Somalia too had undergone a social transformation:


‘Ethiopia and Somalia are at war: but the regime in Somalia has the same essential social characteristics as the regime in Ethiopia (analysed in last week’s article). While Ethiopia was being convulsed by dramatic and bloody events which attracted the attention of the whole world, Somalia was experiencing similar changes, carried through with little upheaval and almost unnoticed internationally.

‘In 1975, the military government of Siyad Barre, which had seized power in 1969, completed a radical land reform which eradicated landlordism and satisfied the peasants’ demand for land.’
(Militant, 10 March 1978)

In 1979, Militant was absurdly speculating that Iran’s arch-reactionary Ayatollah Khomeini might be forced to create an Islamic deformed workers’ state:


‘The situation in Iran is still fluid. In the crisis situation facing Iran and given the flight of the Iranian capitalist class and the weakness of imperialism to intervene, it is entirely possible that Khomeini’s Committee could, under pressure, carry out the expropriation of capitalism.’

…

‘… it would be in the image of the regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe, China etc. with the difference that in the place of Stalinist ideology of those regimes Khomeini would impose the ideas of Islam. Such a regime, a deformed workers’ state, would require a political revolution to overthrow the clerical-bureaucratic elite before there could be a movement towards workers’ democracy and socialism.’
(Militant, 6 July 1979)

By the early 1990s, as capitalist counter-revolution swept the actual deformed workers’ states of the Soviet bloc, the supposed ‘workers’ states’ in Syria, Burma, Ethiopia and Somalia disappeared from the pages of Militant without comment.

CWI: Trotskyoid Social Democrats

The SP/CWI’s engrained social-democratic worldview (a product of decades spent buried deep in the Labour Party) marks it as one of the most overtly reformist and consistently revisionist ‘Trotskyist’ tendencies in Britain today. And, as demonstrated by their benign attitude toward the crooked racket run by their Ukrainian ‘section’ that was finally exposed several years ago (see ‘No Innocent Explanation’, 1917 No. 26, 2004), they have no regard for the most fundamental elements of proletarian morality. For the cynics in the CWI leadership there are no principles -- everything is a matter of ‘clever’ tactics and immediate expediency. The results speak for themselves. Whether championing cops and prison warders, backing the forces of capitalist restoration in deformed workers’ states, supporting capitalist politicians, or spinning fantasies about the ‘peaceful’ transformation of the capitalist state into an agency for socialism, the record of the CWI leadership is one of abject capitulation.

Serious people in the CWI who study the history of their organisation can only conclude that its tradition is alien to Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International. Only through a political fight for authentic Bolshevik-Leninism can militants in the SP/CWI play a role in forging the mass international revolutionary workers’ party that is so desperately needed.


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Posted: 18 May 2008

From The Archives Of The American And International Left –From The International Bolshevik Tendency-A Brief Sketch of the Militant Tendency’s History

Click on the headline to link to the International Bolshevik Tendency website.
Markin comment:

This archival issue of the International Bolshevik Tendency journal may be of some historical interest for old "new leftists,” perhaps, as well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social and political questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist and other periodicals from other leftist organizations, past and present, periodically throughout the year.
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A Brief Sketch of the Militant Tendency’s History

Christoph Lichtenberg


The origins of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI, formerly known as the Militant Tendency) can be traced to a 1937 split in a small Trotskyist group known as Militant led by Denzil Dean Harber. Ted Grant, after moving to Britain from South Africa in 1934, joined Harber’s group which had entered in the Labour Party. In the summer of 1937, Charles Van Gelderen, Starkey Jackson and Harber helped spread a rumour that Ralph Lee, who had arrived a few months earlier from South Africa, had misled a strike there and ‘decamped’ with strike funds. Lee brought the matter to a London aggregate meeting which reprimanded Van Gelderen, Jackson and Harber and demoted them to probationary membership for their behaviour. Things might have ended there, but Harber appealed to the group’s Executive Committee on the grounds that the London membership did not have the authority to remove national officers. When the Executive Committee reversed the decision,Lee walked out with seven other members: Ted Grant, Betty Hamilton, Jock Haston, Gerry Healy, Heaton Lee, Millie Lee and Jessie Strachan.

The International Secretariat of the Movement for the Fourth International condemned both the slanders and the split, but after the dust had settled, four of Militant’s branches and a third of its membership backed the minority, which promptly set up shop as the Workers International League (WIL), another Trotskyist entrist group in the Labour Party. The following year, the Militant group fused with the Revolutionary Socialist League led by C.L.R. James and a small Scottish group around the paper Revolutionary Socialist at a unity conference sponsored by the international leadership. The WIL refused to participate in this regroupment on the grounds that there had been insufficient discussion to establish a solid basis of unity. It also remained outside the Fourth International when it was founded in September 1938, and instead asked for status as a sympathising section. This request was rejected, and the WIL was condemned for refusing to join the new Revolutionary Socialist League.

Despite this setback, the WIL energetically pursued the tasks it had set for itself. When the Labour Party joined a ‘National Unity’ government headed by Winston Churchill, an anti-working class reactionary well known for his admiration of Mussolini, its internal life dried up and opportunities for recruitment disappeared. The WIL responded by leaving the Labour Party and began to grow rapidly, largely because of the super-patriotic right turn of the Stalinist Communist Party which, after the Nazis invaded the USSR in June 1941, flatly opposed any and all strikes. The RSL, unable to make any progress in the Labour Party, turned inward and was soon paralysed by bitter factionalism.

By 1944, what was left of the RSL fused with the WIL, which had gained a militant reputation through its role in the Barrow shipyard strike and the Tyneside Apprentices’ strike. The fused organisation, known as the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), was recognized as the official section of the Fourth International in Britain. While it never had more than 500 members, the RCP was known for its intransigent revolutionary hostility to imperialism and its opposition to the class collaboration of the Stalinists. At the end of the war, when working-class disaffection with Churchill’s government resulted in a massive parliamentary majority for Labour, the RCP did not opt for entry because they saw no evidence of a serious left wing which could be regrouped. Instead, the RCP leadership attempted to compete directly with the Labour Party for the allegiance of the working class. This policy failed in part because of the vast disproportion of forces, but primarily because of the depth of illusions in the supposed socialist intentions of the new government. The failure of the RCP’s policy produced a wave of demoralisation that proved an important factor in the RCP’s subsequent disintegration.

Gerry Healy, who had become disgruntled with the Haston-Grant leadership, aligned himself closely with Michel Pablo, who had emerged as the leader of the Fourth International’s International Secretariat (IS) after the war. In 1947, when the British leadership rejected Healy’s proposal to enter the Labour Party, the IS split the British section in two, authorising Healy and his supporters to enter the Labour Party, while the majority continued as an open party.

Over the next two years the RCP declined in numbers and influence. By December 1948, Haston, who was moving away from Trotskyism, proposed that the group dissolve into the Labour Party. While his proposal was initially rejected, he managed, in the space of a few weeks, to win the support of every member of the political bureau except Ted Grant and Jimmy Deane. By February 1949, these two had organised an ‘Open Party Faction’ composed of roughly 100 rank and file members. They argued that entry made no sense as there was little political activity in the Labour Party and no discernible left wing to orient to. One faction member expressed his dissatisfaction with the majority leadership in the following terms:

‘We find a leadership that in the past year has issued not one single political document or directive, a leadership that has wangled out of facing up to the membership by delaying Conference from August to December to Easter to when? And when finally finding themselves trailing in the wake of the organisation say “Let’s drown ourselves in the most stagnant pool in British politics – the Labour Party”.’
(Bill Cleminson, ‘Criticisms of the Entry Statement of JH, HA, RT and VC’, internal document of the RCP; quoted in Sam Bornstein & Al Richardson, The War and the International: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937–1949, 1986)

The RCP was deeply divided: Haston and Grant had roughly equal support, but almost half the members remained undecided. At this point, however, Grant, Deane and George Hanson, the leaders of the ‘Open Party Faction’, did an about-face and proposed to go along with an entry, rather than continue to fight:

‘The discussion has not convinced us that in the present situation entry would constitute a superior tactic. However, faced with the fact that the overwhelming majority of the leadership and the trained cadres, and substantial sections of the rank and file are in favour of entering the Labour Party, and given that the objective situation will be a difficult one for the Party, we believe that a struggle would be sterile.’
(‘Letter to Members’, internal document of the RCP, quoted in The War and the International)

While many RCP members were disturbed by the idea of dissolving the group they had worked so hard to build, the acquiescence of the ‘Open Party’ leaders signalled that the course was set for dissolving the RCP and joining the Labour Party as individuals. Years later, Sam Levy recalled the frustration and anger felt by many members:

‘In a certain sense I was more annoyed at Grant rather than Haston, who was already on his way out – my illusions in Haston had been declining for some time. Tearse supported the idea of a long stabilisation period for capitalism, but was evasive when challenged on it. Grant, Hanson and Jimmy Deane acted as a bridge to Haston and were disliked more – especially when they all came out with an entry perspective. They were going in for the politics of liquidation, and even tried to disguise it when Pablo challenged them on it! Not a single leader of the old Majority was against entry then! Grant was hoping that Haston would not, in fact, leave and Grant was in effect papering over it. It was a question of leadership: many could not see any alternative to the old leadership and followed them into the Labour Party reluctantly.’
(Sam Levy, Interview with Al Richardson, 7 April 1974; quoted in The War and the International)

Within the Labour Party, Grant and his supporters were briefly re-united with Healy in his secret organisation ‘The Club’. The next year, in 1950, Tony Cliff, who had led a state-capitalist minority in the RCP, was expelled from ‘The Club’ for refusing to defend the North in the Korean War. Grant et al were purged when they refused to vote for the expulsion of the Cliff group. At the Third World Congress of the Fourth International in 1951, Ernest Mandel, Pablo’s chief lieutenant, put forward the motion that expelled Grant.

In the 1953 split of the Fourth International, Healy abandoned Pablo and sided with the International Committee led by the US Socialist Workers Party and the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste. The International Secretariat (IS), headed by Pablo/Mandel, set up a ‘Committee for the Regroupment of the British Section of the Fourth International’ and established contact with Grant and Deane who, with Sam Bornstein, produced a journal called International Socialist and set up the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), with branches in Liverpool and London. The RSL, which held its first national congress in 1957 and began to publish Socialist Fight the next year, was recognised by the IS as their official British section. The RSL’s activity focused on entry work in the Labour Party which they expected would soon be undergoing a profound radicalisation as workers began to feel the impact of an impending major capitalist economic crisis. A document adopted at the RSL’s founding conference projected that:

‘A really strong and organised Left Wing would come rapidly into existence: the possibility of a split in the event of the Right Wing retaining control of the Party apparatus would be present. It is however more likely that the Left would gain the majority and transform the Labour Party into a mass centrist organisation…. In either case the work of the revolutionary Marxists in the period ahead must be largely the preparation and training of a cadre with such a perspective in view. The intervention of a disciplined group of Marxists, politically educated in the Trotskyist method, steeled in struggle and imbued with a capacity to intervene in the mass movement without sectarian reservations will yield ready results in a broad movement ready as never before, to receive and assimilate the revolutionary programme.’
(‘The Present Situation and Our Tasks’, Deane Archive, Manchester Polytechnic, closed section C57 (1); quoted in: John Callaghan, The Far Left in British Politics, 1987)

The anticipation that objective factors would soon propel the mass reformist workers’ parties to the left, was central to the perspectives of the IS leadership at the time. They designated their policy as ‘deep entrism’ to differentiate it from the short-term entries of the 1930s that aimed at breaking leftist elements from centrist and reformist formations (see ‘The French Turn’, 1917 No. 9). ‘Deep entrism’ in the Labour Party was not a strategy for leading a left split from it, but rather for remaining indefinitely in order to pressure it to the left. This perspective made it necessary to try to avoid sharp political conflicts with the leadership.

While Grant’s RSL was recognised as their official section, the IS leadership also established connections in 1961 with the Internationalist Group. In 1964, the two groups were merged and a common entrist paper, Militant: for Labour and Youth, was launched, with Peter Taaffe as editor. This arrangement did not last long, as Taaffe later recalled:

‘We had been forced into a very unprincipled fusion with Mandel’s organisation in Britain, the Internationalist Group, later the International Marxist Group (IMG) in mid-1964. The old, rather self-mocking, slogan of the Trotskyists at that time was, ‘unhappy with fusions, happy with splits’. And sure enough within six months – towards the end of 1964 – because the amalgamation had taken place on an unprincipled basis, there was a split. In order to clarify the situation of a split organisation with two distinct groupings, Ted Grant and myself attended the Congress of the USFI [United Secretariat of the Fourth International which resulted from the 1963 reconciliation between the SWP/US and the IS] in 1965. Our arguments for continuing to be recognised as the only official British section of USFI were rejected. This decision was in the tradition, unfortunately, of the leaders of this organisation who preferred pliant followers able to carry out their line, rather than genuine collaborators, even with serious political differences.’
(Committee for a Workers International, A history of the CWI/CIO, 1998)

Grant and Mandel’s followers were at odds over a variety of issues, ranging from policy toward the European Common Market (forerunner of the European Union) to the assessment of the character of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Stalinist regime. Mandel et al proposed to sweep the differences under the rug and recognise both groups as sympathising sections of the United Secretariat. Grant and Taaffe decided instead to turn their backs ‘on this organisation and the squabbling sects who describe themselves as ‘Trotskyist’’ (ibid.).

By the late 1960s, after the departure of most of its ostensibly Trotskyist competitors, the influence of the Militant Tendency expanded considerably. In 1970, Militant supporters won a majority of the seats on the National Committee of the Labour Party Young Socialists, which they continued to control until 1987. While Militant took care in formulating its political line to avoid unduly antagonizing Transport House, the Labour tops tolerated the Militant Tendency, both because they were able to turn out disciplined foot soldiers at election time, and because their housebroken ‘Marxism’ appealed to elements of the party’s traditional base. In hindsight, the only thing that Peter Taaffe thinks could have been done differently would be to have used a somewhat lighter touch organisationally:

‘We won a majority in the LPYS in 1970, as we have explained elsewhere, later taking all the positions on the National Committee. This probably went a bit far but the LPYS NC members were actually elected at regional conferences. Experience had shown that unless the Marxists won the NC position in a region, the Labour Party bureaucracy would hamper, undermine and frustrate the attempts of the youth movement in that area to engage in any genuine mass work. In the future, however, where we are engaged in mass work, in general it would not be appropriate for us, even when we have an overwhelming majority, to take all the positions in the movement.’
(Ibid.)

The defeats suffered by the workers’ movement in the 1980s under the Thatcher government were reflected in a pronounced rightward shift in the Labour Party. When members of Militant’s editorial board were expelled from the party in 1983, they responded by running to the capitalist courts in an unprincipled (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to retain their memberships. Finally, in 1991, the Militant Tendency signalled that it was breaking from Labour when it supported Lesley Mahmood as a ‘Real Labour’ candidate against the official candidate in a by-election in Liverpool’s Walton constituency. The party leadership responded by expelling Militant’s two supporters among Labour’s members of parliament, Terry Fields and Dave Nellist. Ted Grant, who opposed the decision to break with Labour, led a rightist split in 1992 from the group he had founded some 45 years earlier.