The International Marxist Tendency/Socialist Appeal was formed as a faction of the British Militant Tendency and was expelled from its host in 1990s. What ideas animated its founders? Was there anything intellectually positive in this formative period?
Oppositional factions begin with a critique of their political surroundings that is often an elaboration of a particular historical interpretation culled from the history of Bolshevism. While such factions have this critical side, that is mediated by an attempt to conserve previous tactical understandings or mythologies of a host group. Thus, successive generations of left-oppositional factions in the old ‘official’ CPGB consistently counterposed earlier bouts of revisionism from the 1930s and 1950s to the rightward-moving revisionism of the 1970s and 1980s. (Defeat today’s revisionism with yesterday’s revisionism, as it was dubbed.)
The IMT was no different to this general pattern. As is well known, it counterposed the entryist tactic that the Militant Tendency/CWI pursued inside the Labour Party for many years against the so-called ‘open turn’ of the early 1990s where Scottish Militant Labour was set up as an independent organisation in Scotland and a Real Labour candidate was stood against an official Labour nominee in the Walton, Liverpool by-election in 1991.
Trotsky on factions
This preservation of an old tactic by the IMT/SA was accompanied by some attempt to think beyond the inevitable fallacies of Trotskyism, using Leon Trotsky himself, who very often slips the ideological chains forged by latter-day followers. One of its foundational documents was published by Ted Grant as ‘The case against bureaucratic centralism/In defence of internal democracy’. It recounted: “When we formed a faction to combat the disastrous ‘British turn’ [see above], we were immediately accused of disloyalty. In a circular the [Militant executive committee] attempted to prejudice comrades’ attitudes by feeding the ‘suggestion’ that members were ‘shocked’ at this action. In doing this, the majority merely demonstrate their abysmal ignorance of the real traditions of Bolshevism and democratic centralism.”(p4)[i]
This hostile reception and a need to justify its existence led the fledgling IMT/SA to quote some fine passages from Trotsky in 1935: “In the Comintern, factions were forbidden, and this police ban was alleged to be in keeping with the Bolshevik tradition. It is difficult to imagine a worst slander on the history of Bolshevism. It is true that in March 1921 factions were banned by a special resolution of the 10th party congress. The very fact that this resolution was necessary shows that in the previous period – i.e. during the 17 years when Bolshevism arose, grew, gained strength and gained power – factions were a legitimate part of party life. And this was reflected in practice.”[ii] This was accompanied by other Trotsky quotes dealing with the same topic: “The worse kind of pusillanimity is to be afraid of an open and loyal clash of opinions in the party. The greater the problems to be solved are, the more passionate is the confrontation of ideas and tendencies. Let no one say that factions are a harmful thing.”[iii]
From this, one might imagine that the subsequent record of the IMT on factions and allowing an internal critical culture would have been radically better than that of the Militant Tendency (what became the Socialist Party in England and Wales or SPEW). In fact, the record of the IMT has been just as bad and a standing indictment of both Trotsky and Ted Grant’s initial critique of Militant’s deficient internal democracy.
After suffering the convulsions of losing a thousand-strong faction in Pakistan, and the majorities of flagship sections in Spain and Venezuela, along with minorities throughout its Latin American sections, in around 2011 the IMT had an oppositional faction that called itself Towards a New International Tendency (Tanit). One of its comrades explained what had happened in relation to this international bloodletting: “The interesting thing was that much of it was about organisational questions – about democracy inside the group. Basically the organisation was run on the principle that you must be ‘united’: you have the debate internally, but you must not explain your differences to anyone else.”[iv] The comrade added: “That is generally the experience of too many of the splits on the left and in the socialist movement. They end up reproducing the things that they were fighting against.”[v] In the IMT’s case this is obviously true. Essentially, Grant in 1992 and Tanit in 2011 made the same fundamental critique of their host organisation. The IMT has simply replicated the desperate internal culture of Militant that it originally critiqued. Trotsky’s writings on factions have thus been ignored.
In fact, one can see the seeds of this dire outcome in Grant’s 1992 documents. Grant identified tendencies within Militant towards organisational and political unanimity. This would always be suspect and the idea that the dialectic ended in 1970-90 and the organisation was suddenly free of immanent contradictions is a fantasy and a conservative one at that. Grant himself admitted in a number of places that the factional dispute ripping Militant apart at the time hadn’t simply dropped from the sky. More generally, large-scale factional disputes very often contain seeds, fragments and tendencies from earlier arguments.
In one place, Grant sounded more sceptical as to the value of this “politically homogenous tendency”: “Unity is, of course, a valuable asset to a revolutionary organisation, provided it is a genuine unity, based on the coincidence of ideas. But in this tendency, there was something more than just unity. There was uniformity, which at times came dangerously close to conformism.” He added: “We paid a very high price – far too high – for this ‘unanimity’. The tendency became unused to genuine discussion and debate.”(p4) In another place, Grant argued: “We have been fortunate over the past 20 years or more, in that there has been more or less unanimity over political and organisational issues. This is unique to the Marxist movement. Without doubt it has a very positive side but if the position turns into conformity, then there are very big dangers.”(p13)
Undialectical illusions
We’ve already mentioned the false undialectical illusion that Militant was uniquely free of heterogeneous trends, but Grant seems genuinely ambiguous as to whether unanimity is a healthy goal or not. And genuine unity would not be, as Grant alleged, based on coincidence of ideas but, rather, acceptance at least of a shared programme and strategy, and an immense diversity of ideas, theories and debate. The experience of far-left sects down the years tells us that the more firmly that homogeneity of ideas and strategy is proclaimed, the more bitter the splits that follow. With what we now know about the splitting trajectory of the IMT and its Militant/Socialist Party forebear, any positive hailing of pretend or forced unanimity appears entirely suspect.
How could this misleading idea of unanimity arise? Most probably through the structure of Militant external publications, which revolved around the public unanimity of the organisation’s line. This led to a ridiculous situation (recounted in the Grant documents from 1992, p37) where the disagreements inside Militant over its ‘open turn’ were actually leaked, reported and fought out in the pages of the bourgeois Guardian, which is the most damning indictment of the Tendency’s culture of debate and democracy.
It is noticeable that Grant’s “Programme for internal democracy” from 1992 (p30), in demanding the legalisation of his oppositional faction with full rights doesn’t make any call for the pages of Militant and other CWI publications to be opened up for debate in order that the working-class movement (the future ruling class, remember) could learn from a clash of opinions. Like most Trotskyist groups of this ilk, the comrades really believe that they can hermetically seal their ‘democracy’ away from public gaze and preserve it in aspic. In reality, the need for public unanimity consistently bleeds over into the ‘private’ world of the organisation and degenerates into a sordid game of ‘loyalty’ that Grant saw unfolding in the Militant Tendency. Socialist Appeal and the IMT’s other publications are similarly closed to genuine debate and hence internal democracy becomes drowned in a moronic practice of having sect members act like true believers when outside the company of other members.
Ironically, this puts dissident IMT members in a substantively worse situation than oppositionists in the old CPGB. This always had a leadership that was distinctly ‘managerial’ in its instincts and yet it did conduct an open debate in its publications, particularly around congresses, that might have been rigged in favour of the leaders but did at least spare the organisation from a constant round of splits. The IMT has no such safety valve, which means that when serious differences arise that will almost inevitably mean the gouging out of sections of the membership. Such are the travails of unanimity.
[i] Download the document and other IMT/SA materials here: https://splitsandfusions.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/are-you-or-have-you-ever-been/
[ii] https://archive.org/details/writingsofleontr0000trot/page/184/mode/2up An extended quote from the essay ‘Factions and the Fourth International’ is found on pp4-5 of ‘The case against bureaucratic centralism/In defence of internal democracy’.
[iii] L Trotsky Writings of Leon Trotsky: supplement (1934-40) New York 2011 p581. An extended quote from this passage is found in ‘The case against bureaucratic centralism/In defence of internal democracy’ p13.
[iv] https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/885/overcoming-sectarianism/
[v] Ibid. Original emphasis.
Lawrence Parker 