Background
Socialist Appeal is the British section of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), founded in 1992 by Ted Grant and Alan Woods after their split with Peter Taaffe and their comrades in Militant (since renamed the Socialist Party). The actual circumstances of the split are shrouded in assertion, counter-assertion, slander, counter-slander and the elaborate falsification of the historical record by both sides. However, what seems to have occurred is that certain long-term problems within Militant – namely, its false political doctrine and corrupt organisational regime – came to a head when a split within the leadership became public for the first time. The opposition, led by Ted Grant and Alan Woods, alleged the existence of a clique at the top of the organisation. (Rob Sewell’s account is also instructive.) It emerged that there had in fact been disagreements on all sorts of issues for years, but these were hidden from the membership. This obsession with secrecy has since been carried over into both the Socialist Party/CWI and Socialist Appeal/IMT. Note that in the account of the split given in the IMT website, which includes documents written at the time by Grant and Woods, the blame for Militant’s difficulties is largely placed upon Taaffe as an individual – as if Grant and Woods, in their decades at the helm of the organisation, played no part in the corruption that resulted. Instead, we are meant to believe that everything was fine and dandy up until the ‘clique’ took control. This is a common theme within Trotskyism. A narrative is established whereby a political organisation or socialist state was doing ‘fine’ when the ‘right people’ (i.e. Trotskyists, or the right kind of Trotskyists) were at the helm, but that things went wrong immediately after. There is no consideration of the fact that maybe, there were long-term problems inherent in these entities. The account of the Taaffeites about the sordid affair can be found here. Taaffe points out the hypocritical way in which these Marxists place the blame for Militant’s decline on individuals – Taaffe and his cronies – instead of looking at the socio-economic conditions that led to the collapse of the far-left not just in Britain but the entire world, which is supposedly the Marxist method. Of course, Taaffe seeks to play down his own despicable role in the whole affair, which he has gone on to replicate recently in the split that has rocked the CWI. Aside from allegations of a clique, a bitter dispute broke out over whether to continue entrism in the Labour Party after the marked shift to the right that had seen the Labour left defeated after years of Bennite guerrilla warfare. After a debate which was shamelessly rigged by Taaffe, the majority of the organisation voted in favour of Taaffe’s proposal to ditch Labour and set up Militant as a separate political party. Soon after this, Grant, Woods and a handful of followers left to set up Socialist Appeal and the IMT as its new International.
It remains unclear whether Grant and Woods left (as Taaffe and his supporters say) or were expelled (as we were told when I was in the IMT). I agree with Dennis Tourish in his own account of the split in his book On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left with Tim Wohlforth, when he says that it is ultimately irrelevant. The fact is, Taaffe created such a hostile environment in the organisation – rigging votes, interfering with branches, subjecting members of the Minority (as the opposition were called) to harassment – that there is no way they could have stayed even if they had wanted to. But even if they had had the option to stay, there was no question of Ted Grant submitting to the will of the majority. After all, Grant believed he was right about everything, and if his own sect had voted against him, it was because Militant had degenerated and the purity of Trotskyist doctrine had been compromised. This alone would have been reason for him to leave the organisation in protest. Convinced that the influx of young members into the organisation had caused its political level to drop, neither Grant nor Woods were willing to accept the decision of what they regarded as an immature and politically untutored majority, manipulated from on high by Peter Taaffe. Whether they made preparations to leave whilst still in the organisation or not is unclear. The fact is, Trotskyist sects are obsessed with ideological homogeneity and purity of doctrine, and if splits are necessary to achieve this, then so be it. It is deeply ironic that whilst the doctrine of democratic centralism in Trotskyist sects demands full submission by the minority to the decisions of the majority, and no public criticism of the agreed line, there are plenty of examples of Trotskyist leaders choosing to split or walk out rather than obey their own organisation’s discipline. Militant’s split of 1991-92 is one such example. Rather than obey party discipline and suppress their differences, Ted Grant and Alan Woods chose to set up their own organisation, convinced that they were right and the majority wrong.
Entrism is central to the political strategy laid out by Ted Grant in the 1950s, when he was a rising figure in the Trotskyist movement. In short, Grant’s belief was that it was important for the scattered forces of Trotskyism to carry out ‘patient work’ in the ‘mass organisations’, instead of trying to build a revolutionary party outside the established left-wing political parties. The idea was that when the working-class radicalised, they would flood the established party of social democracy in Britain, the Labour Party, and find Trotskyists planted within its ranks, ready to win over these militant proletarians for Marxism and revolutionary socialism. Then the Trotskyists would be in a position to either take over the Labour Party outright, or split and create a new, pure party of genuine socialism. Grant explained the strategy in his boring document, Problems of Entrism, written in 1959. Following Trotsky, Grant argued that ‘events’ would transform consciousness and bring about the revolution of which he and other Marxists dreamed. Decade after decade, Grant and his followers predicted fresh crises for the ruling class, the radicalisation of the masses and the seizure of power by the vanguard. It didn’t happen. Contrary to Grant’s moronic catastrophism, the post-war boom was followed not by a glorious revolution, but Thatcherite counter-revolution and the crushing of the working-class. Nor did Grant anticipate the collapse of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism – in Militant, it was claimed that the restoration of capitalism had been ‘ruled out’. (So much for what we were told in the organisation about Marxism being the triumph of foresight over astonishment.) Taaffe explains Grant’s cluelessness on this issue in his own account of Militant’s history:
Woods and Grant clung to their outmoded position until the late 1990s. In Ted Grant’s book, Russia: from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, Alan Woods, in his introduction, writes: “It is worth recalling that twenty-five years ago Ted Grant had correctly analysed the reasons for the crisis of Stalinism, and predicted its collapse. Moreover, he was the only one to do so.”
This is a breathtaking re-writing of history as all Militant supporters, including the leadership, which included ourselves, had this position, based upon our readings of the works of Trotsky. Moreover, Ted Grant was not the only one to analyse the reasons why we expected the collapse of Stalinism to take place. But then Woods writes: “The only correction that has to be introduced concerns the perspective for a return to capitalism in Russia. For a long time, the author considered that such a development was ruled out. That has been shown to be incorrect.”
We in common with Ted Grant also expected that Russia would not return to capitalism, for the reasons that we have explained more fully elsewhere (see The Rise of Militant pp321-414). But when faced with the reality of what was taking place in Poland and elsewhere in the Stalinist world we did alter our perspective, anticipating a return back to capitalism beginning in Poland and, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in Eastern Europe and in Russia itself.
Ted Grant, unfortunately, stubbornly resisted drawing this conclusion, refusing to face up to facts and believing that the attempts to return back to capitalism were of purely a temporary character. He persisted with this method right up to 1997 and beyond, as Woods admits: “It is the contention of the author [Grant] that the movement towards capitalism in Russia has not yet been carried to a definitive conclusion, and may yet be reversed.”
Now, in their current Prospects for the World Revolution, they confess: “We have to admit that things have not turned out as we expected a few years ago. We did not expect that the crisis of world capitalism would be postponed for as long as it has been. This has given Russian capitalism sufficient time to establish itself. The movement towards capitalism has lasted for ten years. The new productive system and its property relations have had time to penetrate the consciousness of the masses. This process has lasted much longer than we expected. The main responsibility lies with the Stalinists who have capitulated on everything.”
Foresight over astonishment indeed!
Yet despite the manifest failure of Grant’s predictions, his followers in Socialist Appeal continue the outmoded entrism tactic all these decades later. We used to argue that the reason why Militant (and subsequently the Socialist Party) entered into long-term decline was not merely that the objective conditions were unfavourable, but because of the abandonment of entrism for disastrous ‘open work’ as a separate party. Yes, true, the Socialist Party regularly stands in elections against the major parties, and gets pathetic results. But the truth is that the entire British far-left has been in a state of terminal collapse since around the 1970s and the triumph of neoliberal economics. For years, the SP/CWI had a higher profile than SA, despite the Grantites clinging for dear life to the Labour Party like a drowning man clings to a heavy piece of driftwood. Until recently it could boast of more members, more of a presence in the trade unions and of actual achievements when it came to interventions in strikes and similar events, especially in Ireland, where they have a high profile. The truth is that regardless of whether Militant had remained in Labour or not, it was doomed. The hoped-for radicalisation of the working-class had failed to materialise. Instead, the working-class was defeated, the industrial working-class annihilated, the trade unions smashed and socialism discredited for generations.
The turn to student work
When I joined the organisation in the autumn of 2017, the organisation had recently made a turn to student work. For some years it had been setting up ‘Marxist Societies’ on university campuses in order to recruit members. This was quite a departure from its usual emphasis on the Labour Party and the trade unions. Indeed, it was an admission that their ‘entrism’ shtick had failed miserably and needed to be abandoned, at least temporarily. Other Trotskyist groups had already been dong work in UK universities, and reaping dividends. One problem though was ‘revolving door syndrome’. This is a phenomenon whereby the Trotskyist sects lose a whole bunch of young people that they recruit each year. Often they come to realise the cultish nature of these loathsome groups, and drop out after a year or two. These departures are often ugly – several members resigned from the IMT in 2015 over claims that there had been a cover-up of sexual harassment by leading members of the organisation, including Alan Woods. Type in ‘Socialist Appeal’ on Google Images, and you will find pictures from years back of members of the organisation who have since left, including people who were once ‘leading comrades’. I have seen several such images and recognised practically no one in them. Inevitably, some new members will succumb to burn-out at the endless routine of meetings and paper sales they are compelled to organise, chafe at the narrow reading list they are given and the arrogance of ‘leading comrades’, and realise how little democracy actually exists in this supposedly democratic organisation. Such a high turnover is unheard of in healthy organisations.
As I explain in an article I wrote on Medium, these ‘Marxist Societies’ were nothing more than propaganda enterprises for our sect. Our job was to promote our organisation, recruit people and annoy all the other left groups on campus. Every week, we would hold society meetings at which a comrade would give a ‘lead-off’, lasting about half an hour or longer, followed by an hour or so of questions and contributions from the audience. The ‘lead-off’ would always reflect the party line on whatever was being discussed. The rest of us would sit in the room primed to make ‘interventions’, again, affirming the party line. It was made clear to us internally that the purpose of these meetings was recruitment and the promotion of our party line, not genuine discussion and debate. Officially, this was for the ‘internal’ branch meetings. In practice, even in branch, conformity was preferred to anyone who would ‘rock the boat’ and bring up unpleasant ideas.
It just so happens that the beginning of student work kicked up a fuss within the organisation. The older members, those grizzled veterans of the split, who had stuck with Ted Grant and Alan Woods over the years, were unhappy at what they saw as the abandonment of the working-class and labour movement for ‘petty-bourgeois’ students. As with all struggles in the Trotskyist movement, the response the leadership was the defamation of older members, accusations of a ‘conservative’ mindset and ‘Labour Party fetishism’, and the hounding out of dissidents. The result was that almost all the older members left, making the demographics of the organisation skew towards the younger side. This was a badge of pride when I was in the organisation – the youth were the future! Ironically, this mirrors the very same tactics Taaffe used in his struggle with the Minority around Ted Grant – utilising young, naive, impatient new members against the more independent-minded old-timers who were giving the leadership a hard time.
This ugly episode was rarely mentioned when I was in the organisation, and when it was, those who left were talked of in overwhelmingly negative terms. As is always the case with cults, ex-members are slandered and their dedication and hard work written out of the records. Long-time activist and Socialist Appeal member Mick Brooks, who at one point was the editor of Socialist Appeal, died recently, but his passing has gone unmentioned on the IMT and Socialist Appeal websites. Even a simple obituary is too much for these people. I was actually told by a former member of the organisation (a friend of Brooks) at a meeting of one of our front groups back in December 2018 that Brooks had resigned after a period of shunning by others in the organisation due to political disagreements. In protest, his friend had resigned with him. When I raised the issue with a senior member, Brooks was dismissed as an unserious and a disruptive member who wanted to spend every waking minute discussing obscure topics like the falling rate of profit rather than building the organisation. In hindsight, this was hardly a convincing explanation for his deciding to abandon an organisation he had dedicated years to. As always, the actual affair was sanitised and the truth omitted by the leadership.
The driving out of old, talented and experienced activists is a terminal disease of Trotskyist sects. The guru at the helm (in our case, Alan Woods) cannot have any challengers or rivals. Better to have an organisation of inexperienced youth, who can be moulded, than to have people smart enough to out-argue the leadership whenever it wants to do something. Socialist Appeal, like so many of these sects, subsists on the recruitment and contribution of fresh, young members, the most promising of which are plucked out and groomed to become ‘leading comrades’. These people are made ‘full-timers’, often with no real life experience (having never even had a proper job in many cases) and told that they will one day lead the working-class. They model themselves on other ‘leading comrades’ and are looked up to by the rank-and-file as a fountain of experience.
Abandoning the Labour Party?
As if this bullying out of dissidents wasn’t bad enough, Socialist Appeal was on the verge of abandoning Labour altogether on the verge of the Corbyn hurricane. After the 2015 general election, the Labour Party was apparently written off by much of the leadership, and the organisation seriously considered other avenues, such as more open work in the student movement. At least one former member mentioned this in his resignation statement. Even though Marxism is supposed to be the victory of foresight over astonishment, these ‘dialecticians’ could not even predict the sharp shift of the Labour Party to the left. I guess they were no better than the ‘bourgeois empiricists’ they affected to disdain. At one point, the sect even abandoned Scottish Labour for the Scottish Socialist Party, which used to be part of the CWI but split with Taaffe. Ironically, Grant wrote a lengthy polemic back in 1992 condemning the Taaffeites for seeking shortcuts for organisational growth by ‘tailing’ Scottish nationalism, only for his followers to now do the very same thing. Officially, our position was to support an independent Scotland, with the caveat that this would be on a ‘socialist basis’. It is unclear how this is even possible – any independent Scotland, whether capitalist or socialist, will be an economic catastrophe for Scottish workers and further encourage a race to the bottom between English and Scottish workers in terms of deregulation of workers’ rights etc. The idea was that if Scotland became independent and pursued a socialist policy, this would inspire’ the workers in the rest of Britain to also opt for socialism. Yet it is unlikely that the workers in the rest of Britain will be enthused at the prospect of following Scotland down the path of economic ruin once it has scared off all foreign investment by nationalising all its factories and putting up a border between Scotland and its largest market, the rest of the UK.
Right when Corbyn came onto the scene, the organisation scrambled to reorient itself. It now had to do two things simultaneously – maintain the student work, which was still the main emphasis, whilst also trying to do more in the Labour Party. This was the case when I joined the organisation.
Going nowhere
Upon my departure in 2020, we had about 400 members. A full-timer told me shortly before my departure that we hoped to double the organisation in a year. This patently has not happened. Recently, a member of the organisation boasted on this blog that they now have 600 members. This is supposed to be a great achievement, despite thirty years of activity, in which seismic events like 9/11, the wars in the Middle East and the 2008 financial meltdown have utterly failed to shake the working-class out of their stupor. When I was in the organisation, we were always told that sharp shifts were on the horizon, that consciousness took time to catch up to events etc. Yet it is unclear how thirty years of war, economic crisis and neoliberal malaise can have failed so spectacularly to bring about the revolution long-desired by my ex-comrades. How much longer do we have to wait? Can we not judge Trotskyism a failure after eighty years of non-achievement? Imagine if someone said to a Trot, ‘Eight years in Iraq is too soon to judge the war a failure – we need to go back in and wait it out a little longer.’ Or, ‘You are too pessimistic. Capitalism has only lasted a few hundred years. We need to be patient and give the bourgeoisie more time to iron out the problems with their system.’
The Corbyn movement has come and gone. If ever Socialist Appeal had an opportunity to make a wave, that was it, and it has now been crushed. The terminal decline of the far-left in Britain, Socialist Appeal among them, continues. For the organisation to be in the same position as the Bolsheviks were prior to seizing power in 1917, they require a membership of at least 65,000 in Britain alone. The day this happens is the day pigs fly. Naturally, I do not expect to hear of the seizure of power by Comrade Woods and his goons any time soon.