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THE TROTSKYIST CHALLENGE

Its chief strategic problem lay in the fact that its position as the revolutionary exploiter of wage militancy was being challenged by Trotskyist or quasi-Trotskyist rivals, chief among them the International Socialists (IS).

Only IS posed a serious challenge on the industrial front. Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League (SLL) had some industrial strength, notably at the car factory at Cowley, but it was small and localised and, above all, showed no sign of growing. The IMG, with its links to NLR, its fixation on Third World revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, and its laughable concept of universities as 'red bases', was no threat at all. The RSL (i.e. 'Militant') was far more interested in infiltrating the Labour Party, especially the Young Socialists and the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS), than in setting up its own stall in the trade union movement.

IS had a highly developed position on wage militancy which concentrated on the question of 'productivity deals and how to fight them', as the title of one of Tony Cliff's books put it. It was therefore trespassing on CP territory in a serious way. And because it knew it was doing this, it sought to undermine the CP's own influence by counter-posing the trade union 'rank and file' to the trade union 'bureaucracy', the CP being compromised by its prominent involvement in the latter. Although the IS dichotomy was simplistic, it had plenty of mileage as an agitational line, since there was no shortage of cases where local circumstances had prompted CP trade union officials to dampen rather than inflame wage militancy. And, at the same time that IS was seriously beginning to get on the nerves of the CP's industrial wing, it was making impressive headway within the leftwing intelligentsia.

IS was the only theoretically innovative group within British Trotskyism, and as such the only theoretically innovative brand of Marxism that came to the attention of British students in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its abandonment of the orthodox Trotskyist view of the Soviet Union gave it two advantages over all its rivals in leftwing student politics.

First, the great drawback of the orthodox Trotskyists (IMG, SLL) was their view of the USSR as a 'degenerate workers' state'. The problem with this was that it left people not knowing where they were. Were they for or against the USSR? The IS line, that the USSR was 'state-capitalist' in the (wholly non-Leninist) sense that it was a class society run by a new exploiting class, the Soviet bureaucracy, while open to refutation from the classical Marxist standpoint, had real mileage among leftwing students, because it implied an unequivocal political attitude towards the USSR, and one which chimed with most leftwing students' instincts in the wake of Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968.

Second, the IS's theoretical departure on this question had a highly stimulating effect on the group's own intellectual life and literary output. For a few years, IS were by far the most interesting brand of Marxism on offer in British universities. The work of people such as Michael Kidron and Nigel Harris was thoughtful and interesting - in a word, lively – in a way that distinguished it from both the tortuous prose of Robin Blackburn and the devitalised, mind-numbing, output of the CPGB.

In short, IS posed, or at any rate threatened to pose, a major challenge to the CP. It was fashionable in the universities in a way the CP had long ceased to be and, unlike every other brand of academically fashionable Marxism, it was in earnest about implanting itself in the organised Labour movement and had made a vigorous and creditable start in this business. It threatened to disrupt or outflank the CP's industrial cadre at the very moment this cadre appeared, at long last, to be coming into its own. Something had to be done about it.

Moreover, the leftwing student radicalism of 1967-1969 had had a demoralising effect on Communist students. The CP was making no organised input into this radicalism; the initiative was held by other tendencies. And, just as many individual Communists in the late 1950s were drawn into CND by the sheer excitement of it all long before the Party reversed itself and came out publicly in support of unilateralism, so individual Communist students were getting drawn into things like the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation (RSSF) and drifting away from King's Street in the process. Something had to be done about that.

And so Digby Jacks and Jeff Staniforth & Co. were given their head by the CPGB's leadership, and student unionism was born, and the 'student movement' was launched, and the CP regained the initiative.

The function of the 'student movement', in the CP's strategy, was to head off the disruption of the 'labour movement' by student radicalism. The role of the student movement, under CP guidance, was to give leftwing students useful and above all harmless things to do and so prevent them from interfering with what the CP's industrial cadre was up to in its own neck of the woods.

In the process, leftwing student union activists were induced to develop an unprecedentedly complicated and convoluted attitude towards the working class and the trade union movement. This attitude was a morass of self-deception.

The CPGB and IS were both exploiting leftwing students. But IS had a comparatively straightforward attitude: "let's recruit students with working class backgrounds or at least stricken consciences and get them to sell the paper at Cowley or Longbridge or wherever." This attitude did not encourage students to attach much importance to student politics as such; what mattered was the class struggle, and industry was the locus of the class struggle.

The CP's attitude came across as quite different. Student politics was important in itself. It was a form of the class struggle. In fact, of course, it was a surrogate for the class struggle. What the CP was telling students, in effect, was this: "You don't need to waste your time standing around in the cold at Cowley trying to persuade bemused car workers to buy Socialist Worker. You can spend your time in the safety and comfort of the university or college you are more or less privileged to have got to, and do so with a clear conscience, because your proper job is to build student unionism and bring the student body as a whole into the broader labour movement as a whole, by getting student unions to imitate trade unions, by giving student union money to trade union strike funds, by passing resolutions condemning the Industrial Relations Act and by entertaining daydreams about the NUS affiliating to the TUC and student grants being replaced by student wages."

The CPGB taught a generation of student politicians that an imitation of trade unionism was virtually as good as the real thing. In doing so, the CP demonstrated a comprehensive contempt for the very trade unionism it affected to be extolling. And it taught a generation of leftwing students that talking and making token gestures about the working class from inside highly insulated political forums was as good as, or even better than, trying actually to have anything to do with real workers at the factory gates or anywhere else.

The great difference between the student debaters of the 1930s and 1940s and the student unionists of the 1970s is that the former, when making speeches about the working class, never for one moment supposed that they were doing anything more than making speeches. When the young Anthony Wedgwood Benn told his hearers in the debating chamber of the Oxford Union that "the wages of evil are death and wages of the miners a good deal worse", he knew that what went on in the Oxford Union and what went on in Penallta colliery in Glamorgan were two entirely separate things. But, twenty or thirty years on, the student unionists thought that they were doing something that was politically purposeful and important when they fought over the wording of motions about the Industrial Relations Act and the Miners' strike and the next NUS grants campaign. They invested these activities with a political significance which they did not possess, they deluded themselves completely, and consequently developed an entirely cock-eyed attitude to the world that existed outside, and to the trade union movement above all.

I have suggested that the CPGB had its own reasons for bringing about this state of affairs. Its attitude expressed above all its concern to preserve its own trade union cadre from interference and contamination by IS and other trendy lefties. So, while talking endlessly about the unity of the student movement with the labour movement, it was actually working overtime to ensure that ne'er the twain should meet, beyond the attendance of carefully selected student activists at trade councils and visits by carefully selected shop stewards to student unions.

In doing this, it sought to preserve its own monopoly over the outlook and reflexes of militant trade unionists, and largely succeeded, and so ensured that trade union militancy remained locked in a dead end, able neither to exploit its victories nor avert its subsequent defeats. At the same time, by fobbing off initially idealistic student politicians with a mere imitation of working class political purposefulness, it comprehensively corrupted their political outlook, and made them good for nothing. By reducing them to mere fans of the trade unions when the unions were powerful and fashionable, it ensured that they would forget all about the trade unions when Thatcher had smashed their power and destroyed their image.

What the CP created in the minds of student unionists was not a real sentiment of solidarity, but a cult, an affair of ritual gestures and incantations. The cult could last only for as long as its object, trade union power, lasted. But the CP had no programme for developing trade union power in the 1970s, and used its influence to block every other programme on offer, and ensured that trade union power was eventually destroyed for a generation by Thatcher.  And so the former student adepts of the trade union cult who are now running the Labour Party are the present adepts of other cults, the cult of the market, the cult of ethnic politics, and the cult of electoral reform, and to hell with the trade unions. What can be more embarrassing than the memory of an outmoded enthusiasm?

The CP conjured up the student movement by developing student unionism. It developed student unionism by creating and guiding the Left Caucus in the NUS. And when the Left Caucus secured its control over the NUS between 1969 and 1971, the CP realised that it was time to develop the Left Caucus itself. The arrangements needed to combat right-wing control up to 1969 were not suitable for exercising control thereafter. And so the CP arranged for the Left Caucus to be succeeded by the 'Broad Left'. It is the politics of the Broad Left which, since Neil Kinnock became leader, have taken over the Labour Party. Several major characteristics of these politics remain to be described.

Next article - The Broad Left and the End of Labour Politics