The end of the road of the sect
For quite a few years after Healy’s exposure I, and others, still carried on trying to build ‘the party’ which was really just a small group of self-appointed ‘revolutionaries’. I only finally shed this delusion during the Yugoslav war. I was sitting in the cab of a lorry driving supplies to the coal miners in Bosnia who were trying to defend their multi-ethic city of Tuzla from besieging ethnic cleansers. I was in a convoy of fifteen lorries, part of the Workers’ Aid Solidarity Campaign. There were about 60 people with me, people with all kinds of ideas and reasons for being there. I thought about this eclectic mix of people trying to support the right of everyone to live and work together in Tuzla and thought to myself, this is a far more useful and radical organisation than my ‘revolutionary’ party had ever been.
In the 60’s when I’d first joined the youth movement, I became annoyed with the way that members of the party (the Socialist Labour League, SLL) treated us. They clearly saw the various activities like political education, football matches, discos, day outings etc., as just an opportunity to fish for members for the party itself. I wanted the youth wing, which was predominantly teenagers off the council estates, to have a political life of its own. Then after a few months I got invited to join the SLL. I went to my first branch meeting with a prepared contribution about the need for the youth wing to have control of its own activities. The branch secretary kicked off the discussion and when it was opened to others, I had my say. Bloody hell! Everyone pounced on me. Why had I come with a prepared statement? Why hadn’t I responded to what the branch secretary had said? I put my bit of paper away and I never wrote another word till the party broke up twenty years later. Instead, I dutifully listened to the ‘reports’ that always took the same form. Cobble together an eclectic list of all the ‘revolutionary’ actions around the world and the ‘counter-revolutionary’ responses in order to show that we had to work harder, sell more newspapers, make more recruits. I got so bored my head hurt but this was revolution and had to be endured.
The day after our ‘great’ leader, Gerry Healy, was expelled from the WRP, I took a book into work. At the time I was at Rolls Royce Motors and, for a car factory, we had a pretty easy life. I could often read a lot at work. That day I took a book called ‘Essays in the early history of the British Communist Party’ ( CP). In it, I read a letter written in 1924 from the leader of the Welsh coal miners, a CP member. He wrote to the General Secretary of the CP and asked what was happening to their party. Why were all the votes at party conference unanimous? Where was the spirit of debate? Why did speakers from the floor simply try to repeat what the general secretary said in his opening report. In short where had the revolutionary spirit of debate and argument gone? Now over the previous years I must have read this book two or three times. It had confirmed my low opinion of the Communist Party. But now, reading this book again, I was amazed to realise that the miner’s description of his party could be applied 100% to mine. In all my years I never saw anything but a unanimous vote. Nobody ever argued against our own ‘great’ leader. (Actually, I found out later that some people had done so, in private, but they were always cajoled into silence in public). But why had I not previously seen this letter as an indictment of my own party? Only now, that I had begun to critically look at our past, could I read this book thoughtfully and look at all the evidence.
That began the process of reflection that leads all these years later to this essay.
Trotskyism, the antithesis of Stalinism?
The WRP, like all the Trotskyist parties around the world, based itself on Trotsky’s Transitional Programme written in 1938. Its opening sentence is ‘The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.’ Put bluntly this was wrong, in two ways. Firstly it implied that the working class itself was ready for revolution, just being mislead by its existent leadership – the Parties aligned with Moscow and the Social Democrats – Labour Parties. But while there had been a widespread revolutionary class consciousness amongst the masses in the early part of the century an endless series of defeats had left the workers fragmented and disillusioned. Above all in Russia itself the mass movement that had thrown itself against the old regime had been killed off in wars and famines and then imprisoned mentally and physically by Stalin’s terror. By 1938 the workers around the world had lost their earlier mass class consciousness. Militancy would certainly revive at the end of the 2nd World War and grow throughout the post-war period (as I described in my opening) but militancy and a conscious desire and organisation for complete social change are a very different thing.
Trotsky’s assertion was wrong in a second and maybe even more important way. It makes the question of the potential social change dependent on ‘leadership’ and, by leadership, Trotsky means the ‘revolutionaries’, Lenin’s vanguard party. It was these people who were to be key factor in the overthrow of capitalism. Marx’s correct understanding was that the transition from an oppressive class society to the ‘free association of the producers’ was the task of the producers themselves – they were the agents of their own liberation, not some self-appointed ‘leaders’. Trotsky may have been exiled by Stalin and murdered on his orders and the movement Trotsky founded may have opposed the activities of the Stalinist parties, but Trotsky had ‘parents’ in common with the very tyranny he opposed. Both of these ‘opposing’ movements were vying for control of the masses and in this way they both acted to inhibit the self-organisation of working people.
But at the time, for me, for my party and for hundreds of thousands of people in the post-war period, this founding document of Trotsky’s Fourth International was beyond criticism and never subjected to serious examination. Decades could roll by and its correctness and validity remained, miraculously, unquestioned. It was our ‘Ten Commandments’, our tablet of stone. In 1985, we were still perfectly comfortable with a document written in 1938 being our guide. And even in 1938 it had been wrong! A movement born with such an uncritical ethos was almost guaranteed to produce the weird sects it did. Suffice it to say that the WRP ended up as cheerleader for, among others, Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe and the Iranian Ayatollahs, all known for their love of freedom. I remember a party public meeting in London and on the stage was a large banner – ‘Long live the Cultural Revolution, Long live the Khmer Rouge’. Both were social movements led by murderous autocrats. One Trotskyist group came to believe that nuclear war was the prerequisite for revolution. Other left groups, with a different set of stone tablets picked other gods – Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, Chairman Mao, and the most widespread of all, Stalin and his descendants. I’ve even met people blowing the revolutionary trumpet for the Kim Jong Un. How I used to sneer at Monte Python’s film ‘Life of Brian’ when I was a loyal party follower. How I love it now. ‘Where’s the Popular Front for the Liberation of Judea?’ ‘He’s over there.’
Just as evolution in nature produces very odd branches of life with very negative attributes that eventually lead to extinction, so the evolution of the ‘revolutionary’ sects produces laughable results. When I was in South Africa in the days of apartheid, I came across one sect that had so turned the past into dogma that because the Bolsheviks had been an underground party then all revolutionaries had to be underground, at all times. I attended a comical meeting between this sect and some revolutionary trade unionists from the huge Durban Docks. The trade unionists asked the ‘undergroundists’ how they managed to make contact with the masses? ‘We slip leaflets into books in shops,’ they bravely replied. Now maybe apartheid South Africa had some similarities to Tsarist Russia in the earlier years, but this was now at the height of the ‘township revolt’. The trade unionists shrugged their shoulders and replied that they called township meetings and would speak to ten thousand people! Afterwards one of the dockers said to me ‘these people have lived so long underground they have become blind like moles!’ Sadly, they actually lived above ground in more or less the same world as the dockers. Their blindness came from their devotion to theology.
At its most gross, this fideism, this worship of the ‘revolutionary god of the past’ could be seen when millions of people revered Stalin and abhorred Hitler. Excuse me, but didn’t both men crush the workers’ movement in their territories with almost identical methods – the secret police, the show trials, the concentration camps, slave labour, nationalism, patriotism, patriarchy and anti-semitism. Both sent their armies to build their empires. Of course, this might have been understandable when not everyone outside Russia knew what was going on but once the truth was out there why this myopia? Why the adoration of one and the hatred of the other? Simply because one waived the bible of Marx and exhorted his thugs to kill in the name of the international working class. Many other dictators, wannabe despots or ‘national liberation’ leaders of the 20th century found how useful this Marx Bible could be to bind the oppressed to their own further oppression.
I’m sure psychologists can say a lot about the ‘party’ mentality, the need to belong. Victor Serge, one of the most thoughtful participants in the Russian Revolution, writes very well about the double-edged sword of party loyalty. The necessity for working class unity in the face of a very violent opponent may be obvious but the way this can be exploited, deliberately or otherwise, by ‘leaders’. I look back on my WRP years and can remember numerous occasions in which things happened in the world and I made my own assessment only to read a different analysis in the party paper the next day and I would instantly change my opinion. To give an example. When Ayatollah Khomeini and his mullahs seized control in the midst of the 1979 Iranian uprising, I saw this as a retrograde event, threatening the potential for real change. But the next day my party, fooled by the Mullahs’ anti-US rhetoric, told me the Ayatollahs were continuing the revolution. Overnight I changed my mind and became an ardent supporter of the Ayatollah. Imagine how I feel now when I remember arguing with a group of Iranian socialist refugees in the UK. They told me the Mullahs were crushing the revolution. I told them they were petty bourgeois and didn’t understand the real course of revolution. I really knew virtually nothing about the history of Iran or intimate details of what was going on there but, with my party card in my pocket, I knew everything about everywhere. I felt confident enough to remonstrate with these people who had actually participated in the uprising and then had to flee. If the bible says humankind began 5,000 years ago then it did. Forget the dinosaur fossils. Put there by god to trick the godless. I recently took particular pleasure in helping Iranian women in Manchester organise demonstrations in support of the ‘Women, life, freedom’ movement. A small atonement for past stupidity.
The producers certainly need to organise themselves to free production from capital’s control. They will certainly form political parties and these parties cannot be miraculously inoculated against dogmatism and sect mentalities. But these tendencies need to be openly called out and fought against.
Dogma is hard to avoid
The 1985 expulsion of Healy opened the door to critical thought but old habits die hard. Several years after his expulsion I was at a meeting of our movement, which despite the many splits and upheavals, had kept going. A member had submitted a letter to the meeting saying he wasn’t coming because people were still not willing to discuss fundamental issues. His letter said that we should stop fooling ourselves that we were the ‘revolutionary party’. Better to describe ourselves as a discussion group. This letter was met with protests–including by me. One man, who had been a leading member of the party for many years said ‘Next, he will be questioning Lenin!’ Amen! Heaven forbid a revolutionary party should question a founder. The earth is flat!
I’m not an academic. I know that it would make this narrative more thorough if I were to pepper my text with many quotations and examples but I just don’t have the training or temperament to do this. Plus, I’m not out to win any arguments here. The dogmatist will always believe that his half-picture is as based in reality as anyone else’s. There are so many ways to look at this history of the ‘left’ and this take of mine is only one strand. But at the heart of the many different roads people will take to try to transform future society, will be the need to take on board all our human history, all of our accumulated knowledge, including Marx’s insights into the evolution and mechanics of society, and a continual, collective discussion about where we are, where we want to go and how to get there. That discussion has to try to break free from the habits of religious type thinking. Dogma and catechisms won’t cut it as the task in front of us is to make human society rational again. By rational, I mean subordinating the provision of the means to life to collective, co-operative human control. Production and distribution for the sake of human welfare, not for the reproduction of capital. This kind of rationality stands in total opposition to a dogmatic world view just as much today as in Anaximander’s time.
When Galileo looked down the newly invented telescope, he saw previously hidden details of the universe. Building on his investigations and on the works of the Greeks and Copernicus he asserted the earth was not the centre of the universe. In 1615, the Roman inquisition concluded his opinions contradicted the Bible. Galileo stood up against the colossal edifice of the Church in his ‘Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems.’ He was tried for heresy and forced to retract his book and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. But here’s the tragedy. So many young people, like myself, become critical of the society they are living in and join this or that organisation but then voluntarily place themselves in almost the same ‘house arrest’ which Galileo was subjected to. The critical thinking process stops as far as their organisation goes. But there is a difference, not only did Galileo go on trying to critically look at the prevailing world view, his criticism of the world-centred universe escaped the church’s clutches; the earth was not the centre of the universe, and religious thinking took another battering.
To give an example of how dogmatism plays out in today’s world. During the US invasion of Iraq there emerged in the UK something called ‘Stop the war coalition’. It organised demonstrations that saw over a million people take to the streets of London. Its main narrative was ‘Down with US imperialism’ and made the US’s drive to control oil supplies its central analysis. But when Russia invaded Ukraine the ‘Stop the War coalition’ took to the streets with more or less the same narrative. This time only a few hundred people took part with not a single Ukrainian speaker at the demonstration. Most people were informed enough to know that it was Russia that had invaded Ukraine, not the US. The ‘Coalition’ updated their old recipe by saying that it was a US proxy war against Russia. No investigation at all of the realities on the ground, of Russia’s own imperial ambitions. No investigation of the way relations between the US and Russia had developed. No appreciation of the motivations of millions of Ukrainian workers who had escaped the clutches of the Russian empire and wanted to keep it that way. There is, of course much more that could be said about the actual situation. But for ‘Stop the War’ an old picture of the world can simply be pasted on every new situation. This is religious thinking, dogma. The problem with dogmatism is that a useful, collective debate about the realities is impossible. There is no meeting ground between the ‘religious’ outlook which starts off by ‘knowing’ and the method of trying to comprehend and understand the world through investigating and absorbing all of the available information. There is no difference in someone saying the world is how it is because God says so and this is how the world is because Marx, Lenin or the ‘party’ says it is. You can never change the mind of the true believer by the production of information. Go and have a meaningful debate about evolution with people in the US Bible Belt!
Can we organise differently?
The world changes every day, including the outlooks, motivations and activities of people. No knowledge of the past, no amount of references to past books and knowledge can automatically lead to an understanding of the new. Of course, all that knowledge of the past, of past theories and analyses can and does shape our understanding of the present but it is the new itself that must be investigated and thought about and it is that ’new’ that has to modify or even negate yesterday’s knowledge. Not squeezing the new into yesterday’s image. Marx is not God and his books are not the Bible. Read the lot and it does not somehow turn you into a priest who can know the future or pontificate about the present without actually giving critical thought to the latest events. And of course, just as Anaximander and Democritus were not just brilliant individuals working in isolation, the present can best be understood through collective accumulation of information and collective attempts to estimate their significance. Even in the world of quantum physics, the known ‘facts’ can give rise to different interpretations and their exponents will argue these out until some new research, some new information transforms the debate. Understanding the changes in our society is even more difficult. There are so many things at play and even if the present ‘realities’ are agreed upon different perspectives can be drawn by giving more emphasis to one factor over another and so on. But at least if people are proceeding free from dogma and the conviction that they know the ‘truth’ in advance, then there can be a useful debate about the different perspectives and different practical steps taken and then evaluated. Let people passionately advance their take on things. Let that view be put up for scrutiny but let everyone taking part have the humility to know they certainly will be only partially right and may be very wrong. But the dogmatists with their Marx Bible can play no useful part in such a discussion. In fact, as you can witness in many public meetings, when the Bible Marxist is present it just stifles debate. Not just because the bible Marxist knows all the answers, he also knows that the only useful thing anyone can do is join his church. Ahh Salvation! Just fill in this membership form and you are saved.
Collective attempts to understand the present? Ha! What we have on the ground is a multitude of little sects who champion their tablets of stone in fierce competition with all the other tablets. The ‘debate’ more resembles the archaic quarrelling between different schools of theology than anything that might usefully contribute to a real understanding of where we are.
It would be idealistic to imagine that people from a culture subjugated by a hierarchical society for many thousands of years, who have been ousted from any meaningful control over the most basic human activity will somehow emerge overnight as rational, co-operative beings, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. If we are somehow lucky enough to avoid the total destruction of humanity, it may take generations for truly co-operative people to develop. But humans lived as co-operative beings for hundreds of thousands of years and have experienced class divided oppression for only a few thousand. We are fundamentally a co-operative, social, caring species. Our brains, our language, our capabilities all became what they are today in co-operative relations. Class society briefly, hopefully, submerged this real human spirit into the selfish, inhuman world of slaves and slave owners, Kings and serfs, bosses and wage labour.
Yet if we are agreed that the route out of human extinction lies in the advancement of true, international co-operation and production rationally organised to meet human needs then even now in our political and social activities we need to try to begin to develop an ethos, a culture that points in the direction of that future. How in our modern times can we create the culture of the Greek City state but with the slaves and women now leading the debate? I admit I personally I find it very difficult. Old habits. I’m far too quick to lecture than listen, far too ready to argue over a minor difference and ignore the major agreement. Over and over, I fall into the trap of being convinced I know the answer and stop really trying to understand counter arguments. Hopefully new generations may emerge more able to engage in fruitful debate. But one thing I’m sure of is that any organisation that isn’t constantly trying to create the conditions for the newest member to be confident to criticise those who’ve been around years will ultimately be a barrier to progress. One of most heartening changes I’ve recently seen was the many young women from immigrant backgrounds, taking control of the microphones on the Black Lives Matter protests and the more recent Gaza demonstrations. Maybe, just maybe, the days of the old white male guru are crumbling. Let reaction have its Trump. Let us have the Palestinian teenager reading us her poetry.
On my sixtieth birthday, thanks to the waitresses in the restaurant where I was working as a chef, I discovered MDMA and electronic dance music. What communal joy. Now, on sunny days as I wander through my local park, I see groups of young people chatting, playing music and smoking spliffs. I think how I missed so much fun as a youngster. What a total waste of time in a stupid sect. But it’s done. There’s no point regretting it. If that totally negative experience can lead to something like this essay that might just help some other young person not take a lifetime to see things a bit clearer then, ok, it wasn’t a total waste. I’m not putting myself on his level but I think of the wonderful Russian writer Vassilly Grossman. He was a journalist loyal to the tyrannical Stalin regime. In WW2 he was in Stalingrad during the Nazi siege and wrote party approved reports from the front of the heroic efforts by Soviet soldiers to defend the motherland. After the war he turned these reports into the novel ‘Stalingrad’, again with regime approval, (some high up people disliked it because Grossman was a Jew.) Even though his wife was sent to the Gulags, he had faith in the party line. When Stalin whipped up an anti-Semitic hysteria, Grossman lent his name to it. Then Krushchev shed a light on the atrocities. Grossman began to review all his experiences. He completely rewrote ’Stalingrad’ as ‘Life and Fate’. It is the most amazing book, not of the heroic motherland with the guiding role of Stalin and the communist party but of heroic ordinary people betrayed, misled and sent to their deaths by fools, fanatics and bureaucratic ‘arselickers’ all cowed into obedience by the overall regime of terror. His book was seized by the KGB and banned but after his death it got smuggled out of Russia. In this novel and all his subsequent writings, it is as if all his sense of human solidarity, his undiminished dream of socialism, is freed and soars all the higher for having been so long used, abused and perverted in the cause of the great leader and the soul devouring ‘motherland’.
I hope that my little insight into years of loyal adherence to dogma can speed up someone else’s escape from this trap or even better, stop someone falling in the hole in the first place.
Note. All of Carlo Rovelli’s books are fascinating but if you have no background knowledge of physics, then read ‘Anaximander’.