I have just read Tony Aitman’s obituary of Ted Grant from 2006. Aitman is a member of Peter Taaffe’s Socialist Party (which made off with the majority of the organisation after the split in Militant between Taaffe and Grant). In the obituary, Aitman is respectful but notes Grant’s many flaws, in particular a tendency to make sweeping, dogmatic predictions. Here is one example:
In the realm of theory, Ted Grant’s Will there be a Slump? was one of the Militant’s basic propaganda documents; it answered those who argued that capitalism had solved its problems, whether Keynesian or “permanent arms economy”. Yet, for Grant, every turn in capitalism was a sign of this devastating slump to come. The harshest effect of this was in October 1987. Rather than soberly analysing the various factors at play, and thus preparing the movement for the different possibilities of what might occur, Ted predicted that Black Monday would lead to a 1929-style slump. When this failed to manifest itself, it had a major effect on the membership and supporters of the paper. Why had it not happened? Would it ever happen? How could a leader of the movement be so wrong? It was clear that others in leading positions had disagreed sharply with Grant over this; more and more Militant supporters were becoming aware of Grant’s increasing dogmatism and his increasing separation from the reality of the movement’s work.
By contrast, Alan Woods insists that Grant’s predictions were not falsified at all – they were simply ‘delayed’:
Was Ted mistaken in predicting a slump in 1987? Let us see. The stock exchange crash did in fact lead to a recession in 1990, but it was a relatively mild recession, not a deep slump. The main reason for this was the emergence of new markets in China and elsewhere in Asia, which temporarily gave capitalism a breathing space. There was a boom, followed by another recession in the early 2000s, expressed as a decline in economic activity, mainly in developed countries. The recession affected the European Union during 2000 and 2001, and the United States in 2002 and 2003. Britain, Canada and Australia avoided the recession for the most part.
…What we have now is precisely what Ted predicted over 20 years ago: this is the worst slump in the entire history of capitalism. It has indeed “exceeded anything experienced by capitalism in the post-war period, possibly matching the great slump of the 1930s.” So what was Ted’s mistake? It was a mistake of fact, but not of method; it was a mistake of timing, but not of theory. That is all. Taaffe and his friends, who were incapable of predicting anything, make a big song and dance over this. Yet Ted Grant was not alone in making such “terrible mistakes”.
So even when he is off by a grand total of twenty years, Ted Grant is still right! One is reminded of a phrase the Italian Fascists used to use: ‘Il Duce ha sempre ragione’ – The Duce is always right. In this case, the Dear Leader Ted Grant is always right, even when his predictions fail to materialise. No amount of empirical evidence can falsify any claim made by Ted or his followers, for they are a priori correct, by virtue of the fact that they derive from the infallible ‘Marxist method’. Il Duce ha sempre ragione!