Trotskyism, Corbyn and the Labour Party - public meeting

Tuesday 4th October, 7.30pm, 

YHA Bristol (Grain House), 14 Narrow Quay, BS1 4QA

The Jeremy Corbyn leadership campaign is once again inspiring thousands of people to get active in politics and stand up for the future they want. It has driven the right wing of the Labour party to distraction as they try every dirty trick to oust him and take control of the party back. 

Trotskyism has been thrown around as a dirty word in an attempt to smear some of their opponents. The name of Militant, (now the Socialist Party) a Trotskyist group expelled from Labour for being too left wing has been brought up and many slanders spread.

In this meeting we will discuss how Corbyn and his supporters can consolidate a political voice for the 99%, not the 1%. We also look at the real history of the Militant Tendency and what the Russian revolutionary socialist Leon Trotsky actually stood for.

Organised by Bristol Socialist Party and Bristol University and UWE Socialist Students groups. All welcome.

A Trend in the Wrong Direction..in history..

 

 

 

 

A Trend in the Wrong Direction

(The case for defending an independently elected Party Control Commission was made by US revolutionary James P Cannon at a time when the Trotskyist party in the US, The Socialist Workers Party, was experiencing a growth of members as a result of the student radicalisation of the 1960's.
Posted for those interested in past discussions relating to organisation and cadre development in a Leninist Party.-Martyn Ahmet)



November 12, 1966
Copies to:

Ed Shaw, New York

Jean Simon, Cleveland

Reba Hansen

New York, N.Y
Dear Reba:
This answers your letter of November 2 with which you enclosed a copy of Jean Simon’s letter of October 12. I was surprised and concerned by Jean’s proposals to change the constitutional provisions providing for an independent Control Commission elected by the convention, and making it a mere subcommittee of the NC, which would mean in effect a subcommittee of the PC. This would be the de facto liquidation of the Control Commission as it was originally conceived.
As far as I can see all the new moves and proposals to monkey with the Constitution which has served the party so well in the past, with the aim of “tightening” centralization, represent a trend in the wrong direction at the present time. The party (and the YSA) is too “tight” already, and if we go much further along this line we can run the risk of strangling the party to death.
As I recall it, the proposal to establish a Control Commission, separately elected by the convention, originated at the Plenum and Active Workers’ Conference in the fall of 1940, following the assassination of the Old Man. The assassin, as you will recall, gained access to the household in Coyoacan through his relations with a party member.[6] The Political Committee was then, as it always will be if it functions properly, too busy with political and organizational problems to take time for investigations and security checks on individuals.
It was agreed that we need a special body to take care of this work, to investigate rumors and charges and present its findings and recommendations to the National Committee.
If party security was one side of the functions of the Control Commission, the other side - no less important - was to provide the maximum assurance that any individual party member, accused or rumored to be unworthy of party membership, could be assured of the fullest investigation and a fair hearing or trial. It was thought that this double purpose could best be served by a body separately elected by the convention, and composed of members of long standing, especially respected by the party for their fairness as well as their devotion.
I can recall instances where the Control Commission served the party well in both aspects of this dual function. In one case a member of the seamen’s fraction was expelled by the Los Angeles Branch after charges were brought against him by two members of the National Committee of that time. The expelled member appealed to the National Committee and the case was turned over to the Control Commission for investigation. The Control Commission, on which as I recall Dobbs was then the PC representative, investigated the whole case, found that the charges lacked substantial proof and recommended the reinstatement of the expelled member. This was done.
In another case, a rumor circulated by the Shachtmanites and others outside the party against the integrity of a National Office secretarial worker was thoroughly investigated by the Control Commission which, after taking stenographic testimony from all available sources, declared the rumors unfounded and cleared the accused party member to continue her work. There were other cases in which charges were found after investigation to be substantiated and appropriate action recommended.
All these experiences speak convincingly of the need for a separate Control Commission of highly respected comrades to make thorough investigations of every case, without being influenced by personal or partisan prejudice, or pressure from any source, and whose sole function is to examine each case from all sides fairly and justly and report its findings and recommendations. This is the best way, not only to protect the security of the party, but also to respect the rights of the accused in every case.
As far as I know, the only criticism that can properly be made of the Control Commission in recent times is that it has not always functioned in this way with all its members participating, either by presence or correspondence, in all proceedings - and convincing the party that its investigation was thorough and that its findings and recommendations were fair and just.

* * *

It should be pointed out also that the idea of a Control Commission separately constituted by the convention didn’t really originate with us. Like almost everything else we know about the party organizational principles and functions, it came from the Russian Bolsheviks. The Russian party had a separate Control Commission. It might also be pointed out that after the revolution the new government established courts. It provided also for independent trade unions which, as Lenin pointed out in one of the controversies, had the duty even to defend the rights of its members against the government. Of course, all that was changed later when all power was concentrated in the party secretariat, and all the presumably independent institutions were converted into rubber stamps. But we don’t want to move in that direction. The forms and methods of the Lenin-Trotsky time are a better guide for us.

* * *

I am particularly concerned about any possible proposal to weaken the constitutional provision about the absolute right of suspended or expelled members to appeal to the convention. That is clearly and plainly a provision to protect every party member against possible abuse of authority by the National Committee. It should not be abrogated or diluted just to show that we are so damn revolutionary that we make no concessions to “bourgeois concepts of checks and balances.” The well-known Bill of Rights is a check and balance which I hope will be incorporated, in large part at least, in the Constitution of the Workers Republic in this country. Our constitutional provision for the right of appeal is also a “check and balance.” It can help to recommend our party to revolutionary workers as a genuinely democratic organization which guarantees rights as well as imposing responsibilities, and thus make it more appealing to them.
I believe that these considerations have more weight now than ever before in the thirty-eight-year history of our party. In the present political climate and with the present changing composition of the party, democratic centralism must be applied flexibly. At least ninety percent of the emphasis should be placed on the democratic side and not on any crackpot schemes to “streamline” the party to the point where questions are unwelcomed and criticism and discussion stifled. That is a prescription to kill the party before it gets a chance to show how it can handle and assimilate an expanding membership of new young people, who don’t know it all to start with, but have to learn and grow in the course of explication and discussion in a free, democratic atmosphere.
Trotsky once remarked in a polemic against Stalinism that even in the period of the Civil War discussion in the party was “boiling like a spring.” Those words and others like it written by Trotsky, in his first attack against Stalinism in The New Course, ought to be explained now once again to the new young recruits in our party. And the best way to explain such decisive things is to practice what we preach.
Yours fraternally,
James P. Cannon

Leon Trotsky on the real traditions of Britain

Rather than the Monarchy, which is a relic of feudalism used today to drape a Union Jack over the class chasm in society, workers and socialists can look back to very different British 'traditions'. Leon Trotsky in his important work 'Where is Britain Going?' from 1925 looks at two of those traditions, republicanism and working-class democracy. This is just the start of the chapter so please read on...

'WHERE IS BRITAIN GOING?' BY LEON TROTSKY CHAPTER 5

Two Traditions: The Seventeenth-Century Revolution and Chartism

The editor of the Daily Herald recently expressed his doubts as to whether Oliver Cromwell could be called a “pioneer of the labour movement”. One of the newspaper’s collaborators supported the editor’s doubts and referred to the severe repressions that Cromwell conducted against the Levellers, the sect of equalitarians of that time (communists). These reflections and questions are extremely typical of the historical thinking of the leaders of the Labour Party. That Oliver Cromwell was a pioneer of bourgeoisand not socialist society there would appear to be no need to waste more than two words in proving. The great revolutionary bourgeois was against universal suffrage for he saw in it a danger to private property. It is relevant to note that the Webbs draw from this the conclusion of the “incompatibility” of democracy and capitalism while closing their eyes to the fact that capitalism has learnt to live on the best possible terms with democracy and to have taken control of the instrument of universal suffrage as an instrument of the stock exchange. Nevertheless British workers can learn incomparably more from Cromwell than from MacDonald, Snowden, Webb and other such compromising brethren. Cromwell was a great revolutionary of his time, who knew how to uphold the interests of the new, bourgeois social system against the old aristocratic one without holding back at anything. This must be learnt from him, and the dead lion of the seventeenth century is in this sense immeasurably greater than many living dogs.

Following at the tails of those living non-lions who write leading articles in theManchester Guardian and other Liberal organs, the Labour Party leaders generally counterpose democracy to any sort of despotic government whether “the dictatorship of Lenin” or “the dictatorship of Mussolini”. The historical mumbo-jumbo of these gentlemen is nowhere expressed more clearly than in this juxtaposition. Not because we are in hindsight inclined to deny the “dictatorship of Lenin” – his power was, through its effective influence on the whole course of events in an enormous state, exceptional.

But how can one speak of dictatorship while passing over its social and historical content? History has known the dictatorship of Cromwell, the dictatorship of Robespierre, the dictatorship of Arakcheev, the dictatorship of Napoleon I, and the dictatorship of Mussolini. It is impossible to discuss anything with a crackpot who puts Robespierre and Arakcheev on a par. Different classes in different conditions and for different tasks find themselves compelled in particular and indeed, the most acute and critical, periods in their history, to vest an extraordinary power and authority in such of their leaders as can carry forward their fundamental interests most sharply and fully. When we speak of dictatorship we must in the first place be clear as to what interest of what particular classes find their historical expression through the dictatorship. For one era Oliver Cromwell, and for another, Robespierre expressed the historically progressive tendencies of development of bourgeois society. William Pitt, likewise extremely close to a personal dictatorship, defended the interests of the monarchy, the privileged classes and the top bourgeois against a revolution of the petty bourgeoisie that found its highest expression in the dictatorship of Robespierre.

The liberal vulgarians customarily say that they are against a dictatorship from the left just as much as from the right, although in practice they do not let slip any opportunity of supporting a dictatorship of the right. But for us the question is determined by the fact that one dictatorship moves society forward while another drags it back. Mussolini’s dictatorship is a dictatorship of the prematurely decayed, impotent, thoroughly contaminated Italian bourgeoisie: it is a dictatorship with a broken nose. The “dictatorship of Lenin” expresses the mighty pressure of the new historical class and its superhuman struggle against all the forces of the old society. If Lenin can be juxtaposed to anyone then it is not to Napoleon nor even less to Mussolini but to Cromwell and Robespierre. It can be with some justice said that Lenin is the proletarian twentieth-century Cromwell. Such a definition would at the same time be the highest compliment to the petty-bourgeois seventeenth-century Cromwell.

The French bourgeoisie, having falsified the revolution, adopted it and, changing it into small coinage, put it into daily circulation. The British bourgeoisie has erased the very memory of the seventeenth century revolution by dissolving its past in “gradualness”. The advanced British workers will have to re-discover the English revolution and find within its ecclesiastical shell the mighty struggle of social forces. Cromwell was in no case a “pioneer of labour”. But in the seventeenth-century drama, the British proletariat can find great precedents for revolutionary action. This is equally a national tradition, and a thoroughly legitimate one that is wholly in place in the arsenal of the working class.

The proletarian movement has another great national tradition in Chartism. A familiarity with both these periods is vital to every conscious British worker. The clarification of the historical significance of the seventeenth-century revolution and the revolutionary content of Chartism is one of the most important obligations for British Marxists.....

Read the rest here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/britain/wibg/ch06.htm

Excellent coverage of Jarrow March 2011 in Mirror

Jarrow March 2011: Kevin Maguire on the road for historic repeat

by Kevin Maguire, Daily Mirror 3/10/2011
Read more: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/columnists/maguire/2011/10/03/jarrow-march-2011-kevin-maguire-on-the-road-for-historic-repeat-115875-23462922/#ixzz1ZhtA9yQa

THE 330-mile walk for work from Tyneside to London is history repeating itself for James Allison. The retired labourer was a young boy when he skipped alongside his dad, also called James, one of the marchers on the 1936 Jarrow Crusade. He was also there, 75 years on, to watch a group of young people leave town in the footsteps of the most famous protest trek of them all.

“I was going along, holding my dad’s hand,” he recalled. “And one of the others grumbled that I was putting them out of step.”

Now 84, Mr Allison went on: “It was terrible in the 1930s during the Depression. Everybody was out of work up here, you had no money and you were always hungry.

“I went to school in my bare feet and drank out of a jam jar – you couldn’t pour in hot water or it’d crack. If you had a chair, you had to sell it before you got help from the unemployment board.”

Nobody claims the jobless are as badly off today as the means-tested destitute of 1930s Depression Britain. Half of a poverty-stricken Jarrow was out of work and struggling to stave off malnutrition. Yet there are signs the great British public is stirring. As the procession makes its way round town, with a brass band near the front, shoppers applaud, bus drivers toot their horns and lunchtime drinkers spill out of the pub to watch. Ordinary people are increasingly resentful of the unjust austerity of Tory Cameronomics.

One in every 10 workers in North East England is dumped on the dole. Youth unemployment at just over one in five is at a record national high. The dreams of young people are destroyed by education cuts and £9,000 university fees. Insecurity is terrorising workers; plummeting living standards the curse of a growing number of families. Those in work, such as the cleaners on the minimum wage at Tyneside’s Metro, risk losing their paid meal breaks.

Yet at this week’s Tory conference in Manchester, our Government of millionaires will blame the jobless for their plight. A big stick will be waved at the jobless while big tax cuts are dangled before the wealthy. Lizi Gray, the great granddaughter of another of the original marchers, will walk parts of the route between studying at college. The 17-year-old, from nearby Gateshead, explained: “If you go to university you’ll be saddled with a huge debt that you might never be able to pay it off.

“Is that what we want? Britain’s getting unfairer, more unequal. It doesn’t have to be like that. This march is about an alternative.”

About 30 marchers will cover all or most of the miles, compared with the 200 three-quarters of a century ago. Unemployed chef Rhys Harris, from Pontypridd, South Wales, intends to take a few days off to watch Cardiff play Burnley in the fourth round of the Carling Cup.

I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen in 1936.

Trainers and blue T-shirts have replaced hobnail boots and oilskins. The elderly may also be amused to learn they will take five weeks compared with the four weeks of the originals. Indeed, I heard the first jokey, “Are we nearly there yet?” in the very first mile.

The route, however, is broadly similar to that followed in the year of Edward VIII’s abdication. Last night the marchers were due to reach Durham and then on to London by way of Harrogate, Sheffield, Leicester, Coventry, Northampton and Luton before a rally in Trafalgar Square on Saturday, November 5.

Youth Fight for Jobs, the group behind the trek, is an offshoot of the Socialist Party, formerly part of the Militant Tendency, which Neil Kinnock devoted much energy in the 1980s to expelling from the Labour Party. Half a dozen unions including the biggest, Unite, PCS civil servants and RMT rail workers back the march.

On Saturday, I addressed a rally alongside trade unionists to send the walkers on their way on Saturday. Dave Nellist, the ex-Labour MP kicked out over his Militant links, has lost none of his combative rhetoric. Now a Socialist Party councillor in Coventry, he warned that smashing windows and rioting will achieve nothing. Even Mr Cameron may agree with that sentiment – if not Mr Nellist’s call for revolutionary action to overthrow the Tories.

Having grown up on South Tyneside, I can attest to the hold the Jarrow Crusade has on the town. It’s as much a part of the North East’s identity as the soaring Angel of the North or the magnificent Tyne Bridge. Local lad Stephen Hepburn, Jarrow’s Labour MP, was inspired as a kid by tales of the marchers. In 2001, on the 65th anniversary of the Crusade, he unveiled “The Spirit of Jarrow” statue to honour the marchers.

It’s outside Morrisons – not a spot art snobs would pick. But it guarantees a daily audience for Hepburn’s predecessor “Red Ellen” Wilkinson, two banner-carrying marchers and a couple of kids running alongside.

“We’ve massive local pride in the Jarrow Crusade,” Hepburn told me. “But it’s more than a piece of history. It’s a warning about what the Tories will do, turning their backs on the unemployed. And a rallying cry to good people everywhere to stand up and be counted.”

History has repeated itself too for pensioner Emma Madsen. Back in 1936, when she was a jobless teenager, she stood near Jarrow Town Hall to cheer the leaving marchers.

Fast forward to 2011 and the former barmaid was in Jarrow Park, curious to see this group. “Everybody was much poorer than today,” she remembered. “But good luck to them. At least they’re having a go.”

Then, with a twinkle in her eyes, she showed Jarrow’s true grit. “I might have gone with them if I had the legs,” she said. “As it is, I’d have just slowed them up.”

I’m not so sure, although she is 94.

1911: Strike For Liberty

100 years since the 1911 railway strike

By Alex Gordon, RMT. Reprinted with author's permission from RMT News August 2011

August this year sees the centenary of Britain’s first national railway strike.  August 1911 was a turning point in trade union organisation, which created the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), Britain’s first industrial union in February 1913 and hastened the Labour Movement's awakening everywhere. 

The causes of the 1911 strike are familiar today.  Wage levels fell 10 per cent between 1900-1910, while prices rose and bosses used anti-union laws to stop workers taking strike action. 

The August 1911 rail strike was one element in a huge upsurge of worker militancy between 1910-14 known as ‘The Great Unrest’.  Overall union membership doubled to 4.1 million.  Numbers of strike days rocketed from 2 million in 1907, 10 million in 1911 and 41 million by 1912.  The ‘Triple Alliance’ of miners, dockers and railworkers forged through industrial solidarity in 1913 became for a while the most powerful organisation ever created by British workers to fight for their interests. 

The frustration and anger of railway workers built up from 1907 when the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants’ (ASRS) ‘All Grades Movement’ to cut working hours, raise wages and secure union recognition was diverted into a ‘Conciliation Scheme’ that left pay and conditions unchanged. 

Tom Lowth, of the General Railway Workers’ Union (GRWU) said: “It does not look to me like a very satisfactory settlement” and he was right.  By August 1910 Lord Claud Hamilton, Chairman of the Railway Companies Association boasted: “The union of course is not recognised in any way.  Not a loophole as far as I can see has been left open for them.” 

The following month in September 1910 a full-scale, workers’ revolt broke out led by the South Wales Miners’ Federation against the Cambrian Coal Combine. 

On 9 January, 1911 Liverpool ship-repairers struck for better pay and the National Sailors’ and Firemens’ Union held mass meetings in London, Cardiff, Bristol, Southampton, Hull, Glasgow, Grimsby, Dublin and Manchester under the slogan “War Is Now Declared: Seamen Strike Hard and Strike For Liberty on 14 June 1911”. 

A 72-day national seamen’s strike began in Southampton on 9 June 1911 and spread like wildfire around British ports.  In Liverpool, Tom Mann the charismatic leader of the National Transport Workers’ Federation (NTWF) was invited to chair the strike committee.  Mann arrived at Liverpool docks on 14 June 1911, while the government sent 3,000 troops to occupy the city and anchored a Royal Navy gunboat in the Mersey. 

The ASRS leadership tried to negotiate a return to work by rail workers.  However, the rail companies were intransigent against demands for a 2-shillings per week wage increase and a reduction from 60 to 54 hours per week.  Unofficial railway strikes continued to spread from Hull, Bristol, Swansea and Manchester through June and July. 

On “Bloody Sunday” 13 August 1911 a mass strike meeting at St George’s Plateau outside Liverpool’s Lime Street station was attacked by police from Birmingham.  The Liverpool strike committee declared a general strike from midnight 14 August. 

Tom Mann announced: “A strike of all transport men of all classes; of railway workers, passenger as well as goods men, drivers, stokers.  It will mean all connected with the ferry boats, tug boats, river tender men, Dock Board men, Overhead and underground railways, flatmen, bargemen, dockers, coal heavers, crane men, elevator men, warehouse workers, carters, and in fact every conceivable section and branch of the great transport industry in Liverpool will down tools until this business is settled.” The strike initiated by seamen drew in 66,000 transport workers of all sectors who brought the Port of Liverpool to a standstill. 

The following day 15 August a joint meeting of the Executive Committees of four rail unions (ASRS, GRWU, UPSS and ASLEF) made a joint call for a national rail strike unless the railway companies agreed to immediate negotiations. 

The government offered rail bosses “every available soldier in the country” and on 17 August unions declared a national rail strike in the famous ‘liberty telegram’, which proclaimed: “Your liberty is at stake.  All railwaymen must strike at once.  The loyalty of each means liberty for all.” 

(1911 railway strike - the first in British history - commemorative medal)

Around 200,000 rail workers took strike action.  Organised attacks on parts of the rail system included 1,000 workers besieging a working signal box at Portishead, Bristol.  Tracks were ripped up and telegraph systems damaged.  In Derby troops ordered to defend the railway station fixed bayonets and charged unarmed rail workers leading to pitched battles.  In Long Eaton strikers impounded trains and it took 100 troops to release them.  Chesterfield station burnt to the ground. 

(Leicester Junction - the rail strike was strongest on the Central Railway)

The most violent scenes took place in Llanelli, South Wales.  Strikers blocked the South Wales mainline stopping the Irish Mail.  Magistrates read the Riot Act as strikers and their supporters sang “Sospan Fach” ("Little Saucepan") the song of Llanelli Rugby Club.  Troops then opened fire on the crowd killing two workers who supported the striking railwaymen. 

On 18 August the government offered a Royal Commission to discuss industrial relations and union leaders immediately called the strike off, although it took days for workers to return to work in Manchester, Newcastle and other centres. 

The Royal Commission reported in November and failed to meet any of the strikers’ demands.  However, the significance of the strike lay in its demonstration of the industrial power of transport workers acting together across shipping, docks, railways and road transport sectors.  The events of 1911 also demonstrated the willingness of railway workers of all grades to act together in solidarity to achieve their aims and undermined the grip of craft sectarianism, which the railway companies relied on to divide and rule their workforce. 

Most importantly the 1911 strike pushed leaders of three railway unions (the ASRS, GRWU and UPSS) to put aside their differences and to have the courage to start merger talks, which led in just over 12 months to the National Union of Railwaymen, one of the largest and most important trade unions in 20th century British labour history. 

Alex Gordon,

President RMT

11 July 2011

Further reading:

‘Pulling Together: A Popular History of RMT’ (available free to RMT members from b.denny@rmt.org.uk );

Philip Bagwell, ‘The Railwaymen: The History of the National Union of Railwaymen’ (London: Allen & Unwin, 1963);

Bob Holton, ‘British Syndicalism 1900-1914: Myths and Realities’ (London: Pluto Press, 1976)