The year is 1991. The socialist revolution in Britain has begun, led by the Militant Tendency. After months of protests against the hated poll tax, Ted Grant and his followers succeed in winning over the working-class to the idea of overthrowing the hated capitalist order once and for all. The police and armed forces sent … Read more
The 1991-2 split in the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) brought about the demise of Militant, the CWI’s British section, and gave birth to the two main organisations that came out of it – the Socialist Party under Peter Taaffe, and Socialist Appeal under Ted Grant, Alan Woods and Rob Sewell. When I was … Read more
Jock Haston was one of Ted Grant’s supporters during the struggle to build a Trotskyist organisation in Britain during the 1940s. Exhausted, he dropped out of the movement around 1950, his shot-gun merger with the Healyites having backfired. Alan Woods touches on Haston’s desertion in his book about Ted Grant, but sanitises it – the … Read more
Last August, the IMT came out with a couple of stinging articles condemning Paul Mason as a ‘renegade’ and apostate from Marxism. The dispute is too boring to go into detail about, but anyone who is interested can go here and here. Mason foolishly gave the cult more publicity than it deserved by linking to … Read more
When I was in the IMT, we boasted endlessly of our democratic credentials. We compared ourselves favourably with Peter Taaffe’s organisation, which hounded out dissidents mercilessly. We replayed the trauma of the 1991-2 split over and over again. We convinced ourselves that we had much higher standards for our organisation. Little did I know that … Read more
I touched on this in my very first post on diamat, but at least two aspects of dialectical materialism which boggle the mind to no end, are the ideas that (a) one’s social class background is necessarily connected to one’s thought and (b) that human thought exists as part of an organic, homogeneous, dialectical whole, … Read more
Like everyone else in Britain, I heard the sad news of the death of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. His passing has been marked by a reflection on his life, legacy and the institution of monarchy that he did so much to uphold. Likewise, it has also been an opportunity for the worst far-left cranks … Read more
Just a few months ago, I would have denied that the IMT was anti-Semitic. I would have said that, for all my problems with them, I did not see anti-Semitism as one of them. I even convinced myself, for a time, that our position on Israel was ‘moderate’ compared to those of other left-wing sects … Read more
I had my criticisms of Ted Grant and Socialist Appeal, but I considered it free of the taint of anti-Semitism – until now. You see, our position on Israel-Palestine was obviously absurd, but was distinct from the overtly racist position of the SWP, which has no problem with the ‘reactionary’ Israeli working-class being driven into … Read more
Introduction A central feature of Marxism (and indeed, Trotskyism) is dialectical materialism. Marx developed his theory of dialectical materialism from his re-interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel borrowed the concept from Heraclitus, an ancient Greek thinker, who famously argued that the world was in flux and contained contradictions. On this basis, he stated that ‘No one … Read more