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LEFT CAUCUS INTO 'BROAD LEFT'
The politics of the Broad Left was not an evolution of the politics of the Left Caucus, but a mutation of those politics.
The objective of the Left Caucus had been to defeat the 'Right' (the 'Right' being the Labour Party faction which had previously run the NUS) and ensconce the Left in power. As such, the Left Caucus was open to the Left as a whole. Although the CP was the guiding force, it did not seek to exclude the Trotskyists of the International Socialism (IS) grouping or the International Marxist Group (IMG) from the Caucus. The Trotskyists had not really figured in the Left Caucus in its early days, they had other fish to fry. But they had got involved in student unionism around 1971 and at this stage the CP did not seriously try to keep them out. A number of leading Trotskyists had been present at the Left Caucus meeting in December 1972, notably Terry Povey and Mike Hill, the IS bosses of the Polytechnic of North London, who had sat immediately in front of me throughout the meeting. On the contrary, the original purpose of the Left Caucus at least notionally implied mobilising all energies, with "no enemies on the Left", as the French Socialists used to say in the old days.
This purpose was realised between 1969 and 1971, but the Caucus outlived this purpose for some time. By late 1972 the Left was firmly ensconced in power and there was no 'Right' to speak of, still less to do battle with, at any rate for the time being. And so the external condition of the Left Caucus's cohesion had disappeared. This loss of cohesion was evident at the meeting I attended in December 1972. The decision of John Randall, a non-aligned 'Left', to run as an independent candidate for the NUS presidency when the Caucus, of which he had long been a member, chose to back Mike Terry instead, demonstrated that the moral authority on which the Caucus had once been able to base its collective self-discipline was a thing of the past.
And so, because it had found no new common purpose with which to replace the old one, it eventually fell prey to its internal divisions. And because the practical business of the Caucus had been to organise slates for the NUS elections, the divisions to which it succumbed were those between the main organising building-blocks of the Left's electoral coalition, namely the CPGB and its fellow-travellers (primarily the 'Clause Four' group on the Labour Left) on the one hand, and the IS and the IMG on the other.
This division developed into an explicit antagonism between December 1972 and Easter 1973. The opposition to the Left Caucus's slate came from a slate describing itself as 'Socialist Alternative'. The prime movers behind this were IS. With the emergence of the CP-IS rivalry into the arena of NUS electoral competition, the old Left-Right dichotomy was superseded by a new dichotomy, that between the 'Broad Left' and the 'Ultra-Left'.
In a sense, it was IS's decision to do battle in the open with the CP-led alliance in the NUS which precipitated the birth of the Broad Left. The 'Ultra-Left' had always existed, at any rate so far as the CPGB was concerned. It was Lenin who invented the term, after all. The electoral challenge from the Ultra-Left forced the CP to redefine the character of the alliance it led, and to counter-pose its 'broad' character to the narrowly 'sectarian' perspectives of the Trots.
The practical difference between the two was that the Trots were not interested in all students, but only in students capable of reaching a 'revolutionary socialist consciousness'. IS in particular looked on the student body as a reservoir of potential recruits, but it wanted to sort the wheat from the chaff, because it had use only for the 'revolutionary' minority. The CP, on the other hand, while mildly interested in recruiting left-wing students to the Party, was far more interested (as I have explained in Part II of this series in L&TUR No. 26), in preventing students from messing up its plans in the trade unions. It therefore pretended to be concerned with the broad mass of the student body, in order to counter-pose them to the Trotskyists' 'adventurism'. The CP used the broad mass to marginalise the Trots, and thereby preserve its own control over the student unions.
As part of this approach, the CP developed the doctrine of the "levels of struggle" and the imperative of "promoting policies with the objective of mobilising the largest possible numbers of students to collective action".[quote from Dave Cook, 'The Student Movement, Left Unity and the Communist Party', Marxism Today, October 1974, 295-6.] In other words, it consciously used the principle of the highest common factor, which in politics is rarely high at all: it relied on the apolitical mass of students to support its own essentially conservative attitude to what student unions should be used for. It also, of course, justified this on the grounds that, as Digby Jacks put it on the occasion of his election to the presidency in 1971, they were "student union officials first and CP members second" (Believe that if you will).
In other words, the Broad Left, far from being the proper expression of the practical element in left-wing student radicalism, was the political instrument by means of which the CP smothered left-wing student radicalism as a whole. It was based on a narrower, not broader, spectrum of left-wing opinion than the old Left Caucus had been based on and for this reason was inclined, in its battle to repulse the 'Ultra-Left' challenge, to enlist the support of elements of the student body which the Left Caucus in its heyday would have dismissed as hopelessly 'Right'. And, in this way, the Broad Left began to function as the way up for students on the make who six or seven years earlier would have been content to align themselves in the centre, or even on the Croslandite wing, of the Labour Party within their university Labour Clubs and would therefore have known what and where they were in relation to British society and politics at large, and would have continued to use plain English to express themselves.