A Trotskyist’s Tale

Trotskyism has rarely achieved significant influence in labour movements: Bolivia, France, Sri Lanka, Vietnam are limited but typically ephemeral exceptions. Since it emerged from the Communist Party (CPGB) in 1932 Trotskyism has remained marginal to British politics. In the 1930s tiny, persecuted, mutually hostile groups of Trotskyists provided compelling critiques of Stalinism. Centred on revolutionary opposition to the ideology and practice of ‘socialism in one country’ and the consolidation of a ruling elite in Russia, such critiques were accessible to few and palatable to fewer on the British left, given the CPGB’s resources, its monopoly of Soviet Communism and its patent on ‘anti-fascism’. At the end of World War Two the unified Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) promised greater influence. By 1949 it had collapsed.

It was only from the 1960s that British Trotskyism re-emerged in the context of the youth radicalization, trade-union militancy and, later, Labour Party entrism. Its brief florescence was facilitated by the weakness of Maoism and of autonomism, the belief that workers could force change through direct action without resorting to trade unions or political parties, which blossomed in other countries. Trotskyism became a small but visible and voluble aspect of the left in the shape of the Socialist Labour League/Workers Revolutionary Party; (SLL/WRP); the International Socialists/Socialist Workers’ Party (IS/SWP); the Revolutionary Socialist League/Militant; and more briefly, the International Marxist Group. The leaders of the biggest groups, Gerry Healy, Tony Cliff and Ted Grant, were veterans of the RCP and irreconcilably antagonistic. At their zenith none of these organizations enrolled more than 5,000 active members, and the numerous splinter groups considerably less. Prominence was purchased by hyperactivism; influence in the labour movement has always been restricted.

Trotskyism hinges on the necessity and possibility of international revolution and global political co-ordination of preparation for this revolution. But it is a heterogeneous political category whose adherents embrace a kaleidoscope of conflicting ideas and practices.¹ Allowing for necessary adaptations to national politics, they have disagreed over most major developments in world affairs since the 1940s. Even opponents of Trotskyism have sometimes commended ‘its tradition of veridical scholarship ... its scepticism, its acceptance of the principle of critical thought’.² It has been conventionally characterized as a leftism which refuses realistic appraisal of the limits on revolutionary politics in non-revolutionary times, combines impossibilism with an outdated model of revolution and embraces rigid belief systems, authoritarian forms of organization and cultures of discipline which promote dogmatism, disillusion and fissure.³ Along with the Social Democratic Federation and its successors and, after 1920, the CPGB, British Trotskyism has provided rites of passage for thousands. For example, Terry Eagleton, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Alisdair McIntyre, Sheila Rowbotham, Laurie Taylor cut their political teeth in groups led by Tony Cliff, as well as a clutch of Labour MPs from Sid Bidwell and Stan Newens to Bob Clay, Ian Gibson and Kate Hoey.

The quotidian strivings of Trotskyists and recovery of their lives has been neglected even by advocates of ‘history from below’ who, walking in the footsteps of Edward Thompson, validate aspiration in terms of personal experience and seek to rescue the obscure and marginal from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.⁴ Unlike the CPGB which enjoyed a small explosion of largely sympathetic – sometimes celebratory – interest from scholars after its collapse in 1991, and in contrast with Trotsky himself, Britain’s Trotskyists have attracted few historians.⁵ The single book published by an academic runs from 1944 to the 1970s and is handicapped by variable documentation and dearth of personal testimony.⁶ The richest texts, which draw extensively on archival research and interviews covering the period 1924–50, were written by committed historians from outside the academy.⁷ There have been a number of memoirs of varying orientation, range and quality but scholars have neglected extended biography.⁸ The latter genre has been taken forward elsewhere, most recently by the Dutch scholar Jan Willem Stutje’s evocative study of the Belgian economist and leader of the Fourth International...