The renowned English Marxist historian and activist, E.P. Thompson, was no fan of Trotskyism. That might be one explanation for the fact that there is hardly any mention of him on the website of the International Marxist Tendency (I am not sure about other Trotskyist sects). When I was in the cult, only Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Ted Grant, Alan Woods and their minions were paid any attention. After leaving the sect, I was desperate to explore other Marxist thinkers who I had derided as ‘academic’ when I was in the cult. One of them was E.P. Thompson. Indeed, reading Thompson’s 1956 essay ‘Socialist Humanism’ some weeks before my resignation is probably one of the things that helped plant a seed of doubt in my mind about the sect’s sclerotic interpretation of Marxism. Thompson was a fantastic literary stylist as well as being a master of rhetoric and political argumentation. He did not have the patronising attitude towards ‘utopian socialism’ that so many Marxists did, seeing in the pre-Marxist rebels of the left in the 18th and 19th centuries a source of inspiration and even enlightenment even for those Marxists who were convinced that the left had outgrown their naive outlook. Against orthodox Marxism, Thompson reaffirmed the centrality of a moral outlook to Marxist thinking. He rejected the stale, reductionist economism and party-liner attitude of the Stalinists and the Trotskyists, and was not afraid to make enemies, breaking heroically with the British Communist Party along with other Communist intellectuals in the wake of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. Like me, Thompson did not intend to wait for his expulsion – he could see that the party was degenerate beyond salvation.
That summer, one of the books I bought was an edited copy of Thompson’s essays during the 1950s and 60s, when he founded first The Reasoner/New Reasoner and then the New Left Review with Perry Anderson and other intellectuals of the revolutionary left. The book, entitled E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, was edited by Cal Winslow, a former leader of the ISO who was booted out after he fell foul of the main leadership in Britain (as so often happens in these splits). The book came out in 2014, and, interestingly enough, was published by what used to be the publishing house of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In several of the essays he gives Trotskyism the bashing it so rightfully deserves. Reading it, I was struck by how accurate his impressions of the Trotskyist movement were. It seems that Trotskyists haven’t changed a bit in decades. He did it all in his grimly ironic prose, mocking their cultish cliches and mannerisms with such obvious enjoyment that one would struggle to take any Trotskyist seriously again after reading it. Indeed, reading Thompson nearly helped salvage my dwindling Marxist faith, before I thought better of it and ditched the whole thing as an exercise in utopian delusion. For all that, Thompson remains my favourite Marxist. Enjoy E.P. Thompson rubbishing Trotskyism in these excerpts from three essays in this brilliant collection:
‘There might be some danger, in certain conditions and countries–and if the fall of the Soviet bureaucracy is longed delayed–of the Trotskyist ideology taking root and, if victorious, leading on to similar distortions and confusions. Trotskyism is also a self-consistent ideology, being at root an “anti-Stalinism” (just as there were once anti-Popes), arising from the same context as Stalinism, opposing the Stalinist bureaucracy but carrying over into opposition the same false conceptual framework and attitudes–the same economic behaviourism, cult of the elite, moral nihilism. Hence the same desperate expectation of economic crisis, denunciation of movements–in the colonies or in the West–which find expression through constitutional forms, attacks upon the worldwide movement for co-existence. The best, most fruitful ideas of Trotskyism–emphasis upon economic democracy and direct forms of political democracy–are expressed in fetishistic form: “worker’s councils” and “Soviets” must be imposed as the only orthodoxy.’-E.P. Thompson, Socialist Humanism‘I am not stating this case for political commitment in any narrow, organisationally limited way. I do not think that there is any one single organisational solution for socialists today. Nor am I asking people to “root themselves in the labour movement” by conducting parasitic factional activities within organisations which are ding through bureaucratic paralysis and lack of an influx of youth.’-Commitment in Politics’
‘1. Demonism. This consists in attributing the “apathy” of the labour movement exclusively to the machinations of the bureaucracy (Transport House or King Street, or both, according to preference), and to the treachery of the existing leaderships. This convenient excuse enables the Old Left to fall back upon the old repertoire of militant slogans, and to evade the labour of analysing the actual social forces which have contributed to the rise of bureaucracy and which enable the leadership to maintain its power. It also enables the Old Left to hypostatise and idealise a mythical militant working class, which is bound down by the oppression of its own false leaders but which is at any moment about to break out into revolutionary actions–a working-class which is far more a construct from passages of Lenin and/or Trotsky than a derivation from actual observation of the real tensions and conflicts of contemporary working-class life.’
…3. Parasitic Factionalism. Demonism and economism have led the Old Left to a common organisational solution. The conquest of socialist power is equated with the capture of the machinery of the established labour movement. The organised left faction, rooted in (or parasitic upon) the institutions of the labour movement will engage in mortal struggle with the established bureaucracy. When certain key positions of power are gained, the Slump will follow; and the faction, vanguard or elite will ride on the tide of militancy to power.’
…But we are more worried by the tactics and organizational forms (democratic centralism), adopted by the S.L.L. than by their objectives…These forms are those of vanguardism, in full Leninist purity; and after this quarter century it is difficult to look forward with elation to the seizure of State power by any vanguard, however dedicated its members…Such vanguard theories are only the extreme expression of factionalism. It is the tragedy of the Old Left that it has, for over a decade, allowed the energies of so many active socialists to be dispersed in inner-party factional struggles…So long as one is “rooted in the Labour Movement”, one can be certain to be on the winning, side in the long run. Hence it has become customary for left groupings to form organisations which are, in essence, parasitic upon the larger institutions of the movement. Such organisations are geared, not to the general public, but to the rhythms of electoral contests and of annual conferences; they address themselves to the ageing ward party and the emptying trade union meeting; they seek to change constitutions but not to change people; their master objective is the passing of certain resolutions, not the preparation of social revolution. Meanwhile, the Labour Movement has itself been losing its roots, not only in socialist theory, but also in the younger generation of working people. And the Old Left has become trapped inside the machinery. It has become enmeshed in factional struggles which acquire an intensity of hatred, directed not against the capitalist system or war preparations but against the immediate antagonists in Party or trade union. It has emerged from a decade of struggle to discover, not only that it has lost most of its battles, but that the battlefield itself in shrinking. It has emerged without any clear policy; without any fresh analysis of changing society; without any organised socialist base. The parasite is in danger of dying with the host.’-The New Left
‘But I am getting bored with some of the members of “Marxist” sects who pop up at Left Club meetings around the country to demand in a your-money-or-your-life tone of voice whether the speaker is a Marxist, whether “believes in” the class srtruggle, and whether he is willing to give instant adhesion to this or that version of the Creed. What I take issue with is not the earnestness with which the sectarians advocate their doctrines but the readiness which they display to denounce all those who disagree as traitors to the socialist cause. The passage from comradely criticism to wholesale anathema is alarmingly swift.…it is the delusion of all Marxist sectaries that their group or journal is the ark in which the true Marxist Covenant is preserved.
‘I cannot forget an appalling meeting of the London Club (to discuss Out of Apathy) at which half-a-dozen Covenanting sects were present, each reaching by means of their “Marxist science” diametrically opposed conclusions. The vibrant self-consuming hatred displayed by one sect for another can have left no emotional energy over for concern with the capitalist system or nuclear war; and the air was thick with the sniff-sniff-sniff of “theorists” who confused the search for clarity with the search for heresy. The word “comrade” was employed, in six-foot-high quotation marks, like deadly barbs on the polished shaft of Leninist irony–embellishing devastating witticisms of the order of “perhaps Comrade Thompson will tell us if he supposes the socialism will come at the behest of the Virgin Mary?”-Revolution Again! or Shut Your Ears and Run