Contemporary Trotskyism

Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain

John Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317368946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Almost 80 years after Leon Trotsky founded the Fourth International, there are now Trotskyist organizations in 57 countries, including most of Western Europe and Latin America. Yet no Trotskyist group has ever led a revolution or built an enduring mass, political party. Contemporary Trotskyism looks in detail at the influence, resilience and weaknesses of the British Trotskyist movement, from the 1970s to the present day.

The book argues that to understand and explain the development, resilience and influence of Trotskyist groups, we need to analyse them as bodies that comprise elements of three types of organization: the political party, the sect and the social movement. It is the properties of these three facets of organization and the interplay between them that gives rise to the most characteristic features of the Trotskyist movement: frenetic activity, rampant divisions, inter-organizational hostility, authoritarian and charismatic leadership, high membership turnover and ideological rigidity.

Trotskyist groups have been involved in a wide range of important social movements including trade unions, student unions, anti-war, anti-racist and anti-fascist groups. While their energy and activity in civil society have had some success, their influence has never been reflected in votes or seats at elections even after the financial crisis.

Drawing on extensive archival research, as well as interviews with many of the leading protagonists and activists within the Trotskyist milieu, this is essential reading for students, activists and researchers with an interest in the far left, social movements and contemporary British political history.

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1

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

Trotskyists often describe their own organizations as revolutionary vanguard parties built on the principles of ‘democratic centralism’ whose political aim is the destruction of the capitalist state and the capitalist mode of production. Does this self-description imply they can be analysed as political parties using the same frameworks that have been applied by political scientists to social democratic and Christian democratic parties? Or are Trotskyist organizations qualitatively distinct from mainstream parties because of their revolutionary goals and disdain for elections and perhaps more akin to communist parties? This chapter begins with political science accounts of parties in order to establish there are points of similarity between Trotskyist organizations and their mainstream rivals. What will also become clear, however, is that there are fundamental differences whose analysis requires the deployment of a distinct set of conceptual tools. In the first place many Trotskyist organizations can also be analysed as sects, groups of people who strongly adhere to a worldview or doctrine based around certain core texts and which they seek to defend against heterodox rivals. There is an additional layer of complexity to be considered because Trotskyist organizations also seek to mobilize people in civil society campaigns and protests around specific issues and they can therefore be examined through the lens of social movement theory. Some of their social movement activity has involved the creation of new organizations, such as the Anti-Nazi League, but Trotskyist groups have also operated inside existing social movements such as trade unions. Some of these features of Trotskyist organizations are shared with their far left rivals, the communist parties, and it is therefore important to review the sparse academic literature on the British Communist Party.

The chapter will discuss the attributes of parties, sects and social movements respectively before then considering some of the interactions between these different facets of organization. For example, effective work in trade unions is likely to require building alliances with people holding very diverse political views and it may also entail compromises on bargaining demands and on the language in which they are ‘framed’. In other words the logic of effective social movement action may clash with the logic of maintaining doctrinal orthodoxy. One consequence of this tension is factional disputes inside Trotskyist organizations which in turn can lead to organizational splits.

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Political parties

One of the most influential frameworks used to analyse political parties argues they are best understood as organizations that pursue three broad goals, votes, office and policy, but they ‘rarely have the opportunity to realize all of their goals simultaneously’ (Strøm and Müller 1999: 9).¹ Depending on the influence of party structures, electoral systems and governmental and legislative institutions, party leaders frequently face trade-offs between different goals: for example, some conference policies may be unpopular with the electorate and their promotion during election campaigns may hinder the acquisition of votes. The votes/office/policy seeking framework has been used extensively, and fruitfully, to analyse dilemmas faced by a variety of West European socialist and communist parties since the 1970s including the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, the Dutch Labour Party and the Italian Communist Party (Müller and Strøm 1999). Hildebrand and Irwin (1999) for example show how the Dutch Labour Party responded to a series of electoral defeats in the 1980s by shifting economic policy rightwards in order to facilitate office-seeking through coalition with their highly successful Christian democratic rival. The framework has also been used to examine the incidence of factional breakaways from political parties. Ceron’s (2015) research on Italy found that such splits were more likely in proportional electoral systems, because even low vote shares for small breakaway parties could still secure parliamentary seats. Under less proportional systems where small parties obtain very few seats, factional splits were far less common.

The votes/office/policy framework has also been expanded by several researchers to incorporate the importance of party membership and organization as key resources that can facilitate the acquisition of votes but can also act as potential constraints on the power of party leaders (Webb 2002). Trends in political party membership have been the subject of much research and some controversy. In the first place the absence of reliable public data has forced many researchers to use political parties’ own accounts as their principal source of data. Whilst it is easy to enumerate the problems of relying on such partisan and biased sources it has proved almost impossible to circumvent them. On the basis of available evidence it appears that mainstream party membership has been falling across Western Europe for at least three decades (Mair and van Biezen 2001; van Biezen et al. 2012). However the rising membership (and votes) in some countries of ‘challenger’ parties, such as far right and Green parties, appear to have bucked this trend, undermining the idea of a general alienation of citizens from parties and raising interesting questions about the trajectories and prospects of Trotskyist party membership (Häusermann and Kriesi 2015).

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The significance of elections for mainstream parties has also generated a literature on the factors that shape party responses to electoral setbacks. According to Mair et al. (2004) party leaders typically respond in at least one of five ways: changing policies, altering party organizational structures in order to enhance leadership power in relation to activists, campaigning to amend electoral institutions, altering their target electoral constituencies and shifting their relations with other parties, for example by accommodating to the policies of more successful rivals. This framework assumes that party leaderships will acknowledge electoral setbacks; attempt to engage in a rational process of decision-making; and will select appropriate responses to their electoral problems, notwithstanding the constraints on decision-makers, whether from party groups with opposing views or from a ‘traditional mode of thinking’ that inhibits rational appraisal of, and response to, evidence.

To what extent are these frameworks likely to prove useful in the analysis of Trotskyist organizations? In regard to electoral activity, the first point to note is that Trotskyist groups have contested every UK general election since February 1974. In the 2010 election no less than eight groups stood candidates and in 2015 there were six Trotskyist challengers (Kelly 2016). All Trotskyist groups have policies on a wide range of issues and seek political power, albeit by revolutionary rather than electoral means. Like mainstream parties, they debate major policies, occasionally undertake major shifts in direction and seek to recruit and build membership, yet there are also three ways in which they differ from mainstream parties. First, whereas mainstream parties often seek to pursue the policy preferences of the median voter and adapt to voter opinion, Trotskyist parties base themselves on the Leninist model of the vanguard party. The purpose of this type of party is the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, the ‘historic interests of the working class’ (Mandel 1995a: 87), a goal reflected in its composition and structure. The Leninist party is a centralized organization, focused on the destruction of the capitalist state and led by professional revolutionaries, drawn from the ranks of the most class-conscious workers (Harding 1983: 155 ff.). Because the working class is normally heterogeneous in composition and often influenced by reformist ideas, open, mass recruitment risks diluting the party’s revolutionary cohesion and intransigence and therefore the party membership is often described as the ‘vanguard’ of the class (Birchall 2011: 224–25).

Second, Trotskyist parties often operate as secret factions within other parties so in the 1970s for example, the International Marxist Group (IMG), Revolutionary Socialist League, Socialist Organiser (now the Alliance for Workers Liberty, AWL) and Workers Power all operated inside the Labour Party, aiming to recruit members to their respective groups. This approach was gradually abandoned in the late 1990s and 2000s when Labour was led by Tony Blair and his supporters but resumed by a number of groups (AWL and Workers Power) after Jeremy Corbyn’s accession to the leadership in 2015. Third, it could be argued that whilst some Trotskyist parties contest elections they do not, fundamentally, take them seriously as a means of achieving political power. In other words, they expect to obtain political power primarily through revolution and are therefore indifferent to votes and office (or at least, in the conventional route to office). Indeed they often deride parliament as nothing more than a branch of the state that is necessarily subordinate to capitalist class interests: ‘power does not lie in parliament [but with] . . . unelected bosses and bankers’ (Choonara and Kimber 2011: 39).

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However, there is a more nuanced view which suggests that Trotskyist parties do anticipate some increase in mass support when people ‘find the conditions under which they live and work intolerable’ (Choonara and Kimber 2011: 57–58). On this criterion, the period of prolonged and profound economic austerity that began in 2008 has generated discontent with government policies, as evidenced in very large protests and demonstrations against British government austerity policy (in March 2011 and October 2012) and against the 200 per cent rise in university tuition fees (November 2010). Consequently it would be reasonable to expect that voter hostility to austerity policies would translate into support for candidates of the far left, particularly amongst younger people, interested in politics but critical of mainstream parties (Henn et al. 2005). According to the SWP, ‘the number of votes . . . provides an expression of how large numbers of people feel, and this in turn affects their willingness to fight for a better society’ (Harman 2001). Consequently poor electoral performance may well be taken seriously, for as one senior party official observed, ‘Elections are cruel . . . if you get a really bad vote, it’s very crushing’ (Charlie Kimber interview). Overall therefore it can be argued that vote-seeking does comprise one element of the portfolio of Trotskyist party activity and it is therefore legitimate and useful to assess the electoral performance of Trotskyist parties. It also goes without saying that as the capacity of political parties to implement their policies is strongly influenced by their resources, principally membership and income, then we also need to examine these two aspects of Trotskyist parties.

Doctrine, sects and sectarianism

One of the limitations of the votes/office/policy seeking framework is that it is silent on the issue of party ideology. For Trotskyist organizations the promotion of the revolutionary ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky is essential because ‘without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement’ (AWL Constitution, Preamble). In the case of Trotskyist groups, doctrine is a more accurate term than theory because it denotes a body of incontrovertible propositions and associated texts. Its importance is underlined by the key role it has played in debates and conflict between Trotskyist groups. For example, in 1974–1975 the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) published six volumes of correspondence, resolutions and reports emerging out of disputes within the world Trotskyist movement under the tendentious title of Trotskyism versus Revisionism (Slaughter 1974, 1975). For the WRP leadership the purpose of these volumes was to denigrate a variety of organizations and individuals by ‘exposing’ their heretical departures from Trotskyist orthodoxy. If ‘revisionism’ was the WRP’s preferred term of abuse, ‘centrism’, vacillation between reformist and revolutionary politics, was the cardinal offence detected by Workers Power (Workers Power and Irish Workers Group 1983) in its hyper-critical history of international Trotskyism. These few examples – and many more will be presented in subsequent chapters – are sufficient to suggest that a deep attachment to doctrine, or ‘doctrinarism’, is a key attribute of Trotskyist organizations.

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Disputes over doctrine are most commonly associated with religious organizations and their study is the subject of a substantial literature on ‘sects’ and ‘sectarianism’ (for example Barrett 1996; Hunt 2003; Wilson 1970, 1990).² According to the eminent sociologist of religion Bryan Wilson, the sect can be defined in terms of the following six attributes: a voluntary organization with its own set of beliefs, or what Tourish (2011: 216) describes as a ‘compelling vision’, often rooted in key classical texts; a claim to possess either a ‘monopoly of the truth’ or ‘superior beliefs’ to those of non-members; membership comprising an elect group which is vetted and then ‘converted’ to the organization’s world view through internal education (Lofland 1977); an expectation that members will display high levels of commitment and participation; penalties for dissent including suspension and expulsion; and hostility towards rival organizations (Wilson 1990: 106; and see also Hunt 2003: 35). It is important to note that non-Trotskyist organizations also display some of these attributes: the Maoist left and the far right, for instance, are both highly fragmented (Barberis et al. 2000). Moreover, the Labour Party expelled several hundred supporters of the Militant Tendency in the 1980s because they belonged to its secret faction – the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) – and were therefore in breach of party rules (Crick 2016: 312). But in contrast to the sect, the Labour Party does not have a well-developed body of doctrine that is promoted through party education programmes and which members are expected fully to endorse.

There is some dispute in the literature as to whether a sect is necessarily controlled by a charismatic leader, understood as somebody who inspires and motivates followers with a group vision, builds personal relations with them and seeks to enhance their commitment to the organization (Bird 1993; Haslam et al. 2011). Lalich (2004) used her case studies of a religious cult and a Californian revolutionary socialist group to argue the affirmative whereas Wilson (1990: 109) offers the more persuasive claim that whilst charismatic leaders are common in religious sects they are not ubiquitous. Moreover such leaders are not unique to sects and the mainstream organizational literature provides many examples of charismatic leaders in business firms (Bryman 1992). There is also disagreement in the literature over the scale and significance of what Conger (1990) calls the ‘dark side’ of charismatic leadership, for instance the mutation of a strong vision into dysfunctional obsession or the conversion of dynamic and inspiring leadership into authoritarian command and control (see also Wilson 1970: 37–40).

Some of these attributes of sects also help explain the attractions of group membership. The existence of an over-arching doctrine supposedly capable of explaining a wide range of phenomena arguably appeals to the deep-seated human desire to construct meaning. Insofar as doctrines also provide guidance to members on desirable (and undesirable) forms of behaviour they may also help structure key elements of people’s daily lives, providing a degree of emotional security. The existence of a probation period during which members undergo various forms of testing and initiation may lead recruits to attribute a high value to such exclusive group membership. It also selects out those unwilling to provide the desired levels of commitment and participation, indirectly reinforcing group cohesion (Berman 2009; Iannaccone 1994). Cohesive groups built around a shared doctrine and high levels of member commitment also facilitate effective social control, both by leaders and through social networks. Control and commitment in turn are likely to induce high levels of participation in organizational life. Early studies of religious sects anticipated that high entry standards and rigorous selection methods would ensure that sects were typically small and exclusive organizations with rates of recruitment, turnover and growth well below those of their mainstream rivals. In fact more recent and more systematic evidence has shown that sects often display remarkably high growth rates although the reasons for this are unclear (Wilson 1990).

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The properties of sects that generate many positive outcomes, such as a clear doctrine and charismatic leadership, are simultaneously responsible for a series of well-documented problems, paramount among which is the proliferation of organizational splits. Many of these are rooted in disputes over the interpretation of doctrine and more specifically in challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy of the organization. Over time they give rise to a multiplicity of doctrinal ‘families’, differing from each other in one or more aspects of doctrine and each claiming to be the sole representative of ‘orthodoxy’ or ‘truth’ (Barrett 1996). Just as there are discrete families of Christian religion, such as Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism and Methodism, so too there are distinct families of Trotskyism that have gradually emerged over time (see Chapter 3). Splits in the religious world have been extensively studied and almost invariably turn on doctrinal disagreements. According to Wilson (1990) successful sects gradually shed some of their sectarian traits in order to accommodate new members holding less orthodox beliefs. Doctrinal relaxation or amendment often then triggers a reaction from more orthodox members and the call for a ‘return to orthodoxy’ can sometimes be the prelude to a fresh split. The sixteenth-century revolt by Martin Luther against the Roman Catholic Church, leading to the formation of Protestantism, is probably the most well-known example.

The death of a charismatic leader may also precipitate a split because such leaders typ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Contemporary Trotskyism
• Routledge Studies in Radical History and Politics
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Theoretical Perspectives
• 2 Trotsky and the Origins of Trotskyism
• 3 Development of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, Part 1: 1950–1985
• 4 Development of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, Part 2: 1985–2017
• 5 Doctrine, Orthodoxy and Sectarianism
• 6 Party Recruitment
• 7 Party Electoral Performance
• 8 Organizational Resources
• 9 Working in the Trade Unions
• 10 Social Movements and Front Organizations
• 11 The Proliferation of Trotskyist Internationals
• 12 The Achievements, Limitations and Weaknesses of Trotskyism
• Appendix 1 British Trotskyist Organizations 1950–2017
• Appendix 2 Sources for Trotskyist Organizational Membership Figures
• Appendix 3 Trotskyist organizations in Western Europe May 2017
• Appendix 4 Defunct Trotskyist Internationals 1965–2017
• Appendix 5 List of Interviewees
• Bibliography
• Index