All Trotskyist sects boast of their democratic credentials. But is this really true? Let us examine two case studies from two individuals within Militant who tried to register their differences. Let us look at Dennis Tourish’s experiences in Militant in 1983-5:
Most people who have disagreements with the CWI leadership walk away, figuring that the hassles of exercising their democratic rights to disagree render it not worth the effort. A courageous few, principally John Throne, took a different stand – with somewhat depressing results. It does not seem to occur to SP member that when so many people evidently disagree with the leadership but balk at openly discussing it, this could be indicative of a very serious problem in terms of how their party is organised. I can think of few other organisations where factions are ‘allowed’, but no one chooses to form one; where people are encouraged to openly critique the leadership, but so many decide not to; where debate is tolerated, but anyone who tries it gets expelled or slandered; where the leadership can be recalled and replaced, but a general secretary stays in post 40 years; and where if anyone leaves, whatever their record, it is entirely their fault and a blameless leadership can continue sailing blithely towards destruction.
For example, it is now raised that I did not openly raise criticisms of the CWI before leaving. This is supposed to demonstrate that I am in some way an evasive and nasty person, who does not discuss things openly – ergo my critique of the CWI now must be invalid. There isn’t even a shred of formal logic in this reasoning, never mind dialectics. Leave aside that it is my arguments about the CWI that count, not my personal history – such topic shifting distractions are normal for this organisation. It also seems to be raised here to suggest that the CWI has an impeccable democratic regime, but that countless numbers of fools inexplicably fail to avail of it. Funny, that.
The details of why I left are too boring to go into in much detail. I apologise for rehashing them here at all. They are only important insofar as they further illuminate what the internal life of the CWI is really like, and refute the distorted impression SP member is trying to create of its tolerant internal regime.
The idea that I did not try to raise my concerns within the organisation is ridiculous. To summarise: I was very concerned about the behaviour of the leadership in Northern Ireland, particularly the arrogant and authoritarian behaviour of Peter Hadden. These problems had been discussed frequently and informally by leading comrades in the area over a number of years – maybe SP member would regard this perfectly normal activity as some kind of impermissible manoeuvring (it wouldn’t surprise me). I went one step further, and frequently discussed these issues with the man himself. The pattern was always the same. He would initially deny there was a problem, then agree enthusiastically that I had a point, and to give him credit make some effort for a few days to be a normal human being – before reverting once more to type.
My mistake at this stage was to imagine that the problems of authoritarianism were his personal failings. I did not see that that they were actually systemic to the organisation and part of a flawed model of party building – in this, as in other things, Hadden is only a faithful echo for his guru, Peter Taaffe. I apologise for exaggerating his significance.
When I moved to Dublin, in 1983, I received several phone calls from very anxious and long-standing members still in Belfast complaining that the problems were getting worse. (Interestingly, they have all long since left.) So I raised the issue with Dermot Connolly and Joe Higgins, at that time the two other people who sat with Hadden on the then Political Committee (effectively, its top leadership). They were horrified at my suggestion that the problem was so bad it should be discussed openly and frankly on the central committee, and then possibly amongst the wider membership, although they also agreed that this gentleman did indeed have fundamental problems in terms of how he related to the membership. Their argument was that to discuss it would disorientate people! In other words, a party would only be built if everyone could be convinced that it was led by a monolithic, infallible and all seeing leadership, arriving at identical conclusions by a process of osmosis due to their alleged mastery of the Marxist method. They urged me to drop it, and said they would oppose any attempt to openly discuss this inside the organisation. (Remember: SP member argued that the SP leadership desperately wants all these kinds of problems to be openly discussed. I am reporting here on their actual horror when anyone tries to do so.) In this case, rather than encouraging any such thing I was told that I risked having my political reputation destroyed if I proceeded, and that such was Hadden’s political importance in Northern Ireland they would support him, even if they agreed that his leadership style was creating enormous problems.
In some despair, I then wrote a purely personal letter to John Throne, explaining what had happened and asking his advice on how to raise these questions openly in the Irish section, as was my intent. John was away at the time and I don’t think even got the letter until much later. But comrade Hadden did get his hands on it, and started a heresy hunt against me. He actually heard about it because, rather than conspiring, I openly told Dermot Connolly and Joe Higgins I had sent it. Remember: this was a personal letter to a friend, no different to the many letters Lenin wrote before 1917 to his friends in the Bolshevik party (and incidentally Lenin defended his right to a private correspondence with any member of the party he wished). But the argument against me was that I had somehow violated the norms of democratic centralism, had manoeuvred criminally against its leadership, was angling for Hadden’s post for myself (God forbid), and was in general a despicable person. If memory serves me, John himself was accused of being party to my completely non-existent conspiracy, and slandered within the wider international organisation for his alleged involvement. Others were told that John had started a conspiracy, and that I was one of his willing stooges in Ireland. Facts were neither here nor there. A subsequent meeting of the then EC passed a resolution condemning my alleged manoeuvring. I am sorry to say that in my own disorientation at that time (what the hell was going on here?) I voted for it myself.
I was much younger and more naive in those days, and had less idea of what it was about then than I do now. I wish I had gone forward with my case, though I know it would have ended in my expulsion. But the problem is clear -an internal regime completely intolerant of dissent, in which the leadership is paranoid about open discussion, in which no effort will be spared to destroy the reputations of anybody openly taking on those who support Peter Taaffe, in which formal guarantees mean nothing, in which every act of dissent is seen as disloyalty at best and the open face of a conspiracy at worst, and in which the leadership is actually petrified of open discussion in front of its own members never mind the working class.
Now, this case is not terribly significant initself. It is only important in that many, many ex-members could tell similar stories – moreover, the ex-members of innumerable Marxist-Leninist organisations could do the same. Please note the pattern. There is never is a right way to go about raising dissent in the CWI, or any similar organisation. You inquire about how to openly raise an issue, but the big guns of the leadership try to talk you out of it, and tell you that you risk the destruction of your political credibility if you carry it forward. You talk to people informally (a perfectly normal activity) – this is a conspiracy. You write to them instead – you are by-passing official structures. You raise it on a committee – you should have informally discussed it first, rather than risk disorientating the membership. You submit a critical article to the Internal Bulletin, but are denounced for not discussing it informally (at the risk of starting a conspiracy!), before committing your views to writing. But whatever you do, it will be wrong. The trick is to make your despicable behaviour in how you express your dissent the issue, rather than engage with the dissent itself. The full weight of the apparatus is then mobilised to destroy the person concerned. Unless you are Peter Taaffe, Hadden or some other Leader, in which case whatever you want to do goes. I am certain that Finn and Clem faced similar pressures, and as busy people with a real life and above all a sense of proportion figured they had better things to do. I personally just felt demoralised, and left for a breather which has thankfully turned into a long and more satisfying alternative life.
I would be not be at all surprised if SP member or someone tries to refute my account above. They might even now say that my antipathy to the organisation is inspired by hostility to Peter Hadden – more psychoanlaysis, which is no more valid when it comes from the CWI than it was when Freud practised it. In point of fact, I am very grateful to the man. If he hadn’t been what he is, I might have stayed longer, and wasted even more of my time. I publicly offer him my thanks. But the facts are as I outline them here, and I will be not be drawn into a detailed cut and thrust on it. It is in any event certainly the case that many members believe that if they try to raise these types of issues then something similar to what happened to me will happen to them. These fears are well founded. This is why so many people play such a critical role, and then seem to vanish into the ether, having decided not to utilise the CWI’s marvellous machinery for internal democracy. This is the real reason for the absence of factions, the absence of debate – and in a wider sense, why, rather than it being greater than ever before, the influence of the CWI is weaker than ever before.
My motivation in writing on the subject is the hope that activists other than the CWI leadership, those interested in genuine social change, can learn from the failures of the Trotskyist party building project and begin to explore better and more effective forms of organising. The CWI is no better and no worse than many other similar organisations that have sidetracked the energies of people struggling to create the social change that is so clearly needed. There is a need for a fundamental reappraisal. SP member is hung up on the shibboleths of the past, and seems congenitally incapable of imagining that there is a different way to behave. It is my own personal belief that the CWI as presently constituted will be little more than a footnote to mainly British political history. It is my personal hope that its many thousands of ex-members and even some of its present ones draw sound lessons from the whole experience, and in whatever struggles await us all in the future apply them to avoid creating such utterly dysfunctional forms of organisation again. Enough time has been wasted, the efforts of enough good people across the whole of the left have been squandered. Cultism in all its forms, and to whatever extent it is manifest, is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It is time for a new beginning.
This appears to have been the standard response to any raising of differences within Militant. Dennis Tourish was not the only person to have this unpleasant experience. Marc Mulholland, now a historian at the University of Oxford, speaks of his own experiences:
Peter Hadden had written a book in the early 1980s, of canonical status, called “Divide and Rule”. This dealt with the history of partition, more or less blaming it on British machinations to split an Irish working class otherwise coalescing around socialism.
Quite clearly to me, this was a travesty of history. I decided, in 1993 I think, to write an article, for circulation in the Organisation, attacking Hadden’s thesis. Partition happened, I thought, primarily because Ulster protestants were irreconcilably opposed to forced inclusion in an “Irish Ireland”.
I went on to argue that there was no “One Nation” in Ireland. Socialists had no obligation to jolly protestants into a united Ireland. I argued, as a response to the “National Question”, that we should propose a form of Joint Authority in Northern Ireland to reflect the two conflicting and equally legitimate identities. (I’m not altogether sure whether I developed all of these points in this draft, though they were certainly in my second draft mentioned below. I do not have copies anymore).
I handed the piece of work in to the Centre, where it was ignored. The document was not circulated. It was dismissed as unworthy of consideration. One did not wish to appear vain, and I accepted this.
Many months later, Peter Hadden produced a new pamphlet called Beyond the Troubles. I was astonished, on reading this, to find a hefty section clearly directed against my article (though it was not referred to directly). I was gob-smacked. My article had been buried and I had been effectively told to get off my pompous ego-trip and shut-up; in the meantime Hadden had busied himself moulding a counter-blast. This was typical of Peter’s tactic of dealing with opposition by only entering debates after he had controlled the run-up (preparatory discussion or, in this instance, suppression) and had readied an annihilating counter-blast for the final “open debate”.
I immediately re-fashioned my article, and this was circulated. A conference was held. The night before the debate I got pissed and had a huge argument with my girlfriend (the fault was all mine). I was in some state the next day! This did nothing to improve my already crappy debating technique. I was duly hammered.
Comrade after comrade got up to assault my thesis (I was most irked by one comrade who agreed with the standard “socialist united Ireland in federation with Britain” line, but then said that after the Revolution we would encourage citizens to identify with Britain or Ireland as they liked, with institutions to express these identities. This was close to my argument and not at all what the leadership were actually arguing, but he, of course, was not corrected on the point by the leadership. If incoherent, he was speaking against me, and that was all that mattered. The point was not to have a free-ranging debate; it was to stamp out opposition).
I think no one else voted with me. We had democratically approved not definite agreed aims or demands, but an entire pamphlet, complete with historical analysis. This was the point, I think, where, in open propaganda, Militant effectively abandoned “united Ireland” rhetoric. More than ever the solution was “workers’ unity” and “socialism”; largely meaningless but best calculated, in Labourist fashion, to avoid confronting the totalising claims of either nationalism or unionism.
(Rubber-stamping multi-thousand word theses as “the line” was standard in Militant — “Perspectives Documents” would be approved as an indivisible whole. It appears ridiculous to me now, to approve every word, dot and comma. And this is literally how it worked. In another document, for example, I disagreed with Peter’s characterisation of an anti-Red Hand Commando backlash in loyalist areas after they beat a protestant woman to death with snooker cues. He argued that this meant that loyalist communities were becoming less sectarian.
I believed it meant no such thing, sadly. A few months before snooker-cue wielding loyalists had beaten a catholic woman to death, and there had been no important negative reaction in the loyalist ghettoes. When I argued this in the pub, Peter worked up into a storm of righteous indignation. If the paragraph was amended in any way he would (Lenin style) resign from the CC and take his opposition to the rank and file. Little wonder that document was stamped with customary unanimous approval. It was now what we had to publicly defend).
To have a party line on “what happened in history” was a nonsense, inhibiting of normal intellectual freedom (imagine if Labour had a party line on, say, whether Harold Wilson had been a good or bad PM, that all members had to sign up to).
From here on in, I was regularly, and with varying foundation, opposed to the leadership. A later controversy had me arguing that an IRA ceasefire was most unlikely without a covert or overt British offer of Joint Authority at least. This, it seemed to me, was the watered down IRA price. I thought it would lead to a huge protestant backlash. Peter argued, on the contrary, that the IRA, in a cul de sac, were moving away from armed struggle even in the absence of very radical British concessions. There is no doubt that Peter was right in this controversy, and I was wrong.
On this and other issues, I was roundly defeated every time. I felt I was little more than a cipher, proof proffered by the leadership of healthy internal debate. I was the token loose cannon (in so far as I was noticed – I had not the authority or charisma to command any great amount of respect).
In fact, real debate was always met with a phalanx of leadership unanimity. The leading bodies would, in sequence, agree a line. If you then argued otherwise outside the meeting where the line was agreed, you “put yourself outside” that body. (There was one extraordinary occurrence when Peter Hadden heckled a dissident, Finn Geany perhaps, who had just lost a vote on the CC. He could either swear to keep his opinions to himself outside the CC, or he could resign immediately. He was forced to do the latter, in front of the slightly shocked meeting. It was a grotesque sight, open bullying, which, to my shame, I do not recall objecting to). The line was always agreed from above and transmitted with regimental efficiency downwards. As far as I can tell, Peter Hadden was the real originator of all important positions, unless they came from the “International Centre”.
This is how things went on in Militant, and a similar attitude to ‘internal debate’ was adopted in the IMT when I was a member. When I dared to raise criticisms of the Trotskyist position on the Russian Revolution, I was told that I had to keep my opinions to myself and not spread my heresy to other members – classic cult behaviour. I was further directed to write a document to be circulated to the membership discussing my differences. Of course, the document would in all likelihood have been ignored, as Mulholland’s was, in the hope that I would forget about it. The leadership bodies would, one after the other, agree on a ‘unanimous’ position, and then impose this position on the membership in a stage-managed ‘debate’ that would sway the majority of the members into agreement with the party line. The leadership therefore presented an image of complete unity and mastery of the ‘Marxist method’, awing the impressionable junior members.
When I was in the organisation, we were assured that the organisation conducted itself in a democratic manner. Yet a close look at the evidence suggests otherwise. The turn towards student work by Socialist Appeal in Britain was a decision of the leadership imposed upon the members, and meant throwing overboard old-timers from Militant days who were resistant to trying to recruit ‘petty-bourgeois’ university students. Even leading members who disagreed were forced to resign from the leadership and leave the organisation. When in 2010, some sections in the IMT tried to question the IMT’s rigid conception of ‘democratic centralism’, they were hounded out of the organisation. Over the years, entire sections have broken away and split. Those who challenge the mighty Woods can expect nothing less.
It is even worse in the case of Peter Taaffe’s CWI, whose organisation has recently undergone a horrific split as a result of Taaffe picking a fight with his most successful section in Ireland, along with their supporters in other sections. Over the years, Taaffe has successfully forced out anyone who dares to question him or the clique around him. He appears to be finally getting his comeuppance with the revolt of the majority of his organisation, leaving him with a rump in England and a few other places. The effrontery of the man knows no bounds – instead of accepting his defeat at the hands of the majority, he chose to expel them! The minority expelling the majority is truly unheard of in the world of Trotskyism. It appears that Taaffe has done a first.
The Socialist Equality Party, led by David North, is no better. Here is a description of its internal regime:
10. I noted that the internal regime of the SEP bears far more resemblance to a cult than to a serious party following in the traditions of democratic centralism. There is of course plenty of centralism in the SEP but democracy is unheard of. We are talking about an organization that has not had a single serious factional struggle in more than 30 years. This is not to say that factions are some kind of a virtue. If your organization is constantly consumed by factions, then that is an indication of serious problems. But an organization that has had no factions in decades, and is proud of that fact, is even worse. It means that differences are artificially suppressed. And we know from the testimony of many former members of the SEP, some of whom have contacted us over the years, exactly how this takes place. Comrades who expressed differences with the line of the party, or even who bring up questions about issues that are considered “unorthodox”, are viewed with suspicion. Their behavior and communications are closely monitored by a senior comrade and they are constantly harangued until the deviant ideas they expressed – or even inquired about – are withdrawn. Those monitoring the behavior of wayward comrades try to isolate them from other comrades, lest the “infection” spread. That is one reason factions never emerge in the SEP. In those cases where the unorthodox ideas are not withdrawn, life is made more and more uncomfortable for the holdout. Former associates and friends are informed that so and so has become influenced by “alien class forces”. More and more demands are made of the comrade to show his or her loyalty. There is indeed a reason why National Conferences feature resolution after resolution adopted unanimously and it is not because the truth of these resolutions is beyond discussion.
Should someone actually leave the organization or be expelled because of differences over party policy, or a fundamental challenge to the leadership, they are cut off from further contact with friends and associates remaining in the party and its periphery. It is well known that the SEP/ICFI practices this form of shunning and uses the threat of it to discourage anyone from leaving.
This is more or less what happened to me when I dared to raise differences in the IMT. I could go as far back as the 1930s and Trotsky’s talk of a ‘scratch to gangrene’ to demonstrate the hostility of Trotskyist cults to genuine democracy. Trotsky claimed that even a minority of people openly voicing their disagreements would cause the whole organisation to degenerate. He therefore backed James P. Cannon in imposing strict discipline on the Minority, with the demand that they subordinate themselves to the party leadership and make public displays of loyalty. They left the Socialist Workers’ Party so as not to be subject to this ‘discipline’.
It seems Trotskyist cults are nowhere near as democratic as they claim…