MIA > Archive > Cliff > A World to Win
Chapter 4
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Although the youth movement was at the centre of the arena during this period, the International Socialists (IS) never dropped their concern with the industrial struggle. More workers were being recruited to IS, though they were being recruited as individuals on the basis of general politics rather than on the basis of an industrial strategy. In any case, most of them were too young to have any decisive influence at their place of work. But they provided the basis of a new industrial cadre for the future.
The industrial orientation was also encouraged by the launching in 1961 of a new paper, Industrial Worker, soon to be renamed Labour Worker. It was intended to be more agitational, more geared to ongoing industrial struggles, than Socialist Review had been.
It was clear to us that with the coming to office of Labour under the leadership of Harold Wilson in 1964 an offensive against the workers and trade unions would occur. Britain lagged more and more behind its rivals. While British industrial production rose by 40 percent between 1951 and 1962, France’s doubled, that of West Germany and Italy went up two and a half times, and that of Japan quadrupled. Britain’s exports rose 29 percent, France’s 86 percent, Germany’s 247 percent, Italy’s 259 percent and Japan’s 378 percent. British national income fell below that of Germany and France. [1]
In 1963 Harold Wilson offered a vision of resurgent modern capitalism under dynamic management. He promised economic planning not based, as traditionally accepted in the Labour movement, on the nationalisation of industry, but on a national incomes policy, i.e. the imposition of wages control. Straight after his victory Wilson introduced a six month standstill on wages, to be followed by a further six months of ‘severe restraint’.
Harold Lever, the Parliamentary Labour Party’s leading economics expert, pleaded for business confidence: ‘Clause Four or no Clause Four, Labour’s leadership ... knows as well as any businessman that an engine which runs on profit cannot be made to run faster without extra fuel ... [Profits, then] must and will, over a longer period, increase significantly ... For their part, businessmen should show less sensitivity and more sense. It is time they realised that a ringing political slogan is often used as a sop to party diehards or as an anaesthetic while doctrinal surgery is being carried out’. [2]
Labour’s incomes policy was dressed up as fairer to the poor, but this was totally false. The proof was that the conservative weekly paper the Economist supported ‘a profit conscious and profit seeking’ Labour in the 1964 election. [3] The Tory economist Sam Brittan also recommended a Labour vote because ‘paradoxically, one of the strongest arguments for a Labour government is that, beneath layers of velvet, it might be more prepared to face a showdown in dealing with the unions’. [4]
For incomes policy to be effective, Wilson had to weaken the unions. As early as 1963 a Fabian Tract explained, ‘Acceptance of an incomes policy will also have implications for the right to strike. Clearly, to be operable, such a policy cannot have hanging over it the threat of a strike by a dissatisfied union’. [5] Two years later the Economist said the same: ‘The price of securing an incomes policy in Britain will be a willingness to stand up to strikes’, [6] adding later, ‘quite bluntly, blacklegging must become respectable again’. [7]
Above all, Wilson wanted to weaken the power of the shop stewards. They were the main motors of wage rises and they reflected the strength and confidence of a working class which had been working in conditions of boom and near full employment for two decades. A few examples from our own comrades illustrate this point.
One day the guillotine at our printshop broke. We needed a new piece for it. Roger Cox agreed to make it up. At that time he worked in CAV, a car accessory factory. He was not a fast worker and it took him days to produce the piece needed, but one day it arrived. I asked him how it was possible. Wasn’t the foreman looking on and noticing what was going on? Roger’s reply was that the foreman might know he was doing a ‘homer’, but he wouldn’t dare comment on it.
Geoff Carlsson, as has been mentioned, was the chair of the shop stewards of ENV, the north London engineering works. A new manager was installed. He called a meeting of the shop stewards in his room and told them that now, ‘We are one happy family.’ After a time he went to the toilet. When he returned he found Geoff sitting in his chair with his feet up on the table. He was furious. Geoff replied, ‘But you said we were one happy family. At home I always put my feet up.’ And he added, as a warning, ‘I have got rid of more managers than I’ve had hot dinners.’ That was the sort of power that the ordinary workers felt in the boom conditions of the 1950s and early 1960s.
For years national agreements between the trade unions and the employers merely established a minimum wage level. This was supplemented by wage drift – the topping up of incomes by plant bargaining around piece rates, bonuses, etc. Settlements by strong shop stewards committees would set a benchmark for other workers inside and outside the industry. [8] Incomes policy, it was clear, would have to weaken the unions in national bargaining and the shop stewards in plant bargaining. And that is exactly what Barbara Castle, the employment secretary in the Wilson government, tried to do with her white paper, In Place of Strife, issued on 17 January 1969.
Such a general offensive by government and employers, we argued, would meet with a generalised defence by workers. Up to now the pattern of strikes was that of atomised struggles covering one plant or even one shop in the plant, led by a few shop stewards, or even just one. From now on things would change. It would take some time and would be slower under Wilson than under Heath (1970-74). Nevertheless, the trend was already visible. As Colin Barker and I wrote:
The first essential task for any worker is that of ensuring that his own immediate organisation is in fighting shape; that every factory and place of work has a joint stewards committee (including all stewards regardless of their union membership, and covering white collar workers like draughtsmen too); that every company with different factories is covered by combined stewards committees to coordinate activities and prevent ‘splitting’ activities by the employers. More broadly, the rank and file must find forms of organisation – area rank and file committees, etc – that can do the job the trades councils used to do. Only the new organisations must be based on the factories rather than on geographical place of residence.
Most of these tendencies are in their infancy, but the threat to the shop stewards is now so acute that the implementation of these basic tasks must be accelerated and largely achieved in a relatively short time, creating the conditions for the formation of a national shop stewards movement – an idea which, since the First World War, has existed almost solely in the minds of some of those whom Harold Wilson calls ‘wreckers’ and whom we see as the potential builders of the mightiest socialist movement yet in the history of Britain. [9]
From words we moved to deeds. One path open to me to approach trade unionists was that of the NCLC – National Council of Labour Colleges. This was an educational organisation that served the trade unions. I was a voluntary tutor, and was invited to different branches of the union to speak on a variety of subjects in which the members were interested. Among the most useful were lectures on incomes policy, trade union legislation, the role of the trade union bureaucracy, etc.
However, far more important was our link with ENV. I was invited to speak to the shop stewards in this very well organised workplace, which not only enjoyed wages above the district level but had a reputation for giving traditional solidarity to other workers in struggle. The shop stewards took time off from their work, some two hours, to listen to me. As already mentioned, we had one member in the factory, Geoff Carlsson.
The shop stewards committee was dominated by members of the Communist Party. As the political differences between Geoff and the rest were well established, there was hardly any political argument between the two sides: ‘We know the arguments, so why reiterate them?’ And so Geoff was politically isolated among the shop stewards. Now an opportunity arose. The shop stewards wanted me to explain to them how to read a company balance sheet. Having worked in Palestine in an economic research institute, I knew quite a lot on the subject. Instead of speaking in generalities I decided to take the balance sheet of ENV and analyse it. The result was that I argued that the profit of the company was far greater than the company claimed. The shop stewards committee issued a leaflet to this effect. The management reacted by issuing a reply, which they stuck on the factory noticeboard. I then wrote a long article on the same subject, which was printed as a broadsheet. It ended with a challenge by the shop stewards to the management to come to the canteen and have a debate on the subject in the presence of all the workers and managers. Each side had the right to bring its own expert. Of course, the management declined.
After this incident I started coming to the factory every week to meet a number of the shop stewards to discuss different subjects. Eventually we built up a group of twelve in ENV. It was on the basis of this that the IS branch in ENV was able to take an important initiative. The convenor, Geoff Mitchell, was involved in a legal dispute, and following action to support him the ENV shop stewards committee decided to launch the London Industrial Shop Stewards Defence Committee. The meeting was held on 16 January 1966 and attracted some 200 people, about three quarters of them industrial workers, from 23 different unions.
The platform speakers included two IS members from ENV, Geoff Mitchell and Geoff Carlsson, and another IS member, Jim Higgins of the POEU. There were also two Communist Party members. One was Reg Birch, an AEU divisional organiser, former longstanding Communist Party militant and, at that time, a Maoist. The other was Jim Hiles, chairman of the building workers’ Joint Sites Committee.
The resolution unanimously adopted by the meeting was remarkable in bringing together what were to be the main issues facing British workers over the coming decade:
• This conference of rank and file trade unionists is deeply perturbed at the proposed, and actual, intervention by the government into established wage negotiations.
• We equally deprecate the threats of legislation against the trade unionists and rank and file militants who have been mainly responsible over the past years in improving the wages and conditions in industry.
• We are opposed to the government incomes policy, which has nothing in common with socialist planning; as likewise we are opposed to those trade union officials who support the government on these issues.
• It is our belief that the so called incomes policy, the threats of legislation and the interference in wage negotiations can only strengthen the employers in their efforts to smash the shop stewards and the rank and file movements. [10]
The secretary of the London Industrial Shop Stewards Defence Committee was Geoff Carlsson. A couple of months after the conference launching this committee, it published the book Incomes Policy, Legislation and Shop Stewards, written by myself and Colin Barker, with an introduction by Reg Birch.
The book set out in a clear and non-sectarian manner the main lines of the analysis IS had been developing over the previous couple of years. It began with a general consideration of the economic situation that had led the ruling class to start imposing incomes policy. It then looked at the existing situation on the wages front, and in particular showed the importance of the phenomenon of wage drift in the preceding period. It contrasted the role of shop stewards with the full time union officials, who were shown to be becoming increasingly conservative and impotent. Finally, it looked at the pattern of strikes over the preceding period, in which working class strength had been reflected by the predominance of short, unofficial and generally successful strikes, and predicted that with the introduction of legislation against trade union rights the situation would have to change. The book closed with a call to action, stressing the need for ‘a political as well as industrial response’.
The book sold like hot cakes. Some 15,000 copies were sold, the great majority to factory workers. The dozen IS members in ENV spent a week going around factories in north London pushing the book. (The shop stewards organisation in the factory was tough enough to prevent management disciplining them, or even deducting pay for the time they spent going round factories.) Many other members of IS did the same. Chanie spent three months when unemployed doing the same. By and large we did not sell single copies, only in bulk. Approaching the shop stewards from outside, both at the factory gate and the trade union branch meeting or the trades council, was very successful.
The IS membership increased significantly. Ian Birchall writes:
By the end of 1967 the membership had increased slowly but significantly – over 400 as against 200-odd when Labour came to power. More important, it was a membership geared not simply to arguing the line, but to making interventions, albeit usually very low level ones, and to servicing the ongoing struggle. Without the base and, even more importantly, the orientation established in this period, the breakthrough of 1968 could not have taken place. [11]
To launch the book, a meeting was held in Hanson Hall, Willesden, with two speakers, Reg Birch and me. There were nearly 300 people in the audience, the large majority engineers from the huge industrial Park Royal area.
This period also saw the development of mass college sit-ins, strikes and demonstrations throughout the world, in Berkeley in 1964, Berlin in 1966-67 and Paris in 1968. Tokyo students were involved in large-scale militancy. British students were first involved in March 1967 when London School of Economics (LSE) students had a sit-in.
1968 was a year of momentous events. In January the National Liberation Front in Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, winning great victories against the far superior military forces of the US. In May the largest general strike in history took place in France, with the occupation of factories, triggered by a rebellious mass movement of students. In August the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia led to a deep internal upheaval in the Stalinist parties across the world. A number of them dissociated themselves from Moscow for the first time in their history.
The role of students in society has changed radically over the last two generations. Hitherto the most enduring image of students among working class militants in Britain remained that of Oxbridge undergraduates scabbing on the General Strike in 1926. Trotsky had long ago dismissed the revolutionary potential of students. In 1910 he wrote:
The intensification of the struggle between labour and capital hinders the intelligentsia from crossing over into the party of labour. The bridges between the classes are broken down and to cross over one would have to leap across an abyss which gets deeper every passing day ... this finally means that it is harder to win the intelligentsia today than it was yesterday, and that it will be harder tomorrow than it is today. [12]
In 1968 students played a completely different role to that envisaged by Trotsky.
The explanation for the change in the mood of students since Trotsky wrote his article and since the 1926 General Strike is above all rooted in the change in the social composition of students. As a result of changes in capitalism and in the employment of intellectuals, the majority of students are not being trained any more as future members of the ruling class, or even as agents of the bosses with supervisory functions, but as white collar employees of state and industry, and thus are destined to be part and parcel of the proletariat.
A central aspect of the ‘third industrial revolution’ is the integration of manual with mental labour, of intellectual with productive work: the intellectual element becomes crucial to the development of the economy and society. But this productive force comes into increasing conflict with the irrational nature of capitalism. The conflict expresses itself in university life as a contradiction between the demand for the streaming of education dictated by the immediate needs of industry and the need to allow a certain amount of intellectual freedom. This applies especially to the social scientists, who have to ‘solve’ capitalism’s social problems – according to the theory of the ruling class – and at the same time have to understand, at least to a certain extent, what generates the revolt against capitalism.
Under capitalism a commodity has both a use value and an exchange value, as Marx said. The first is natural and intrinsic to the commodity; the second is specific to the capitalist order of society. In tile university this is reflected as a contradiction between the ideal of unlimited intellectual development, free from social, political and ideological restraint on the one hand, and the tight intellectual reins imposed by capitalism on the other. The real purpose of education clashes with its capitalist content.
Because students – or, even more, graduates who have left the university – are more and more pivotal to the development and salvation of all advanced industrial countries, it is more and more essential for these countries to ensure that students and technologists fulfil their assigned role. And this means that any attempt by these groups to put forward demands on their own behalf which conflict with the needs of capitalism will inevitably be resisted by the ruling class. Increasing international competition and the narrowing of profit margins combines with the need to produce more graduates. As a result the pressure is fierce to cut expenses per student, which involves greater streamlining of courses, regimentation of standards, and increasing resistance to students’ claims.
Another factor fanning the revolt among students is the feeling of insecurity as to what the morrow of graduation will bring in their personal lives. The student of a previous generation knew in advance the slot into which they would fit – in the higher brackets of society. Not so the student of today. At the university they do not find the kind of education that was awaited, and after graduating it is more and more difficult to get the kind of job they were led to expect. The feeling of instability, of uncertainty, creates unease, which easily combines with other factors to create a revolutionary combustion.
The feeling of insecurity among students was clear in 1967-68 when I spent weeks talking to LSE students. Again and again a raw nerve was touched when I said, ‘I see before me a number of BA unemployed, or BA failed.’ I knew very well about the last category as I myself was a BA failed. (I never got a degree as I was arrested in 1939 on the eve of my finals in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Who knows, if I had got a degree perhaps Alex Callinicos would not have been the only professor on the Central Committee of the SWP.)
Another important element encouraging student rebellion is that students are more and more concentrated in the same areas. This was particularly the case in Nanterre, where 12,000 students were gathered in the same buildings, many living on the university campus all the year round.
‘The special medium in which the student is trained – theorising and generalising – facilitates the synthesis of the different elements of unease and rebellion’. [13]
Another significant characteristic of students is their youth. Nowhere else in capitalist society are young people separated off and pooled together in the same way. There are no factories containing only young workers. But late capitalism concentrates growing numbers of students into special institutions. This has many disadvantages for the long term development of a student movement – isolated from the mass of the population, it can easily be taken on by the authorities without receiving outside help, and it is incapable by itself of really damaging the ruling class through attacking their profits. It also lacks the tradition of sustaining struggle that some sections of workers have. But this lack of tradition also means lack of inhibition by outdated modes of struggle or past defeats. Youth alone can confront late capitalism with the resources of unlimited imagination. It is not weighed down by the past. When young workers occasionally do struggle for their own ends (as in apprentices’ strikes), they too display some of this initiative and ability to learn quickly. Yet it is only in the colleges that these qualities are really concentrated. That is why students have been the first to respond without inhibition to the much wider disenchantment with past political forms. [14]
In 1966 the Socialist Society of LSE, which included among its members Chris Harman, John Rose and Laurie Flynn, published an intermittent magazine, Agitator, and held meetings on Rhodesia, incomes policy and the seamen’s strike. [15] In October 1966 Agitator organised a campaign against the appointment of Walter Adams, previously director of University College in Rhodesia, as director of the LSE. This caused outrage, as the LSE was a multiracial college. In March 1967 a sit-in took place in protest against Walter Adams.
The IS members of the Socialist Society in LSE were active in founding the GLC Tenants’ Action Committee, formed to fight the rent rises which led to a rent strike; they were also involved in actively supporting building workers in the Barbican dispute. [16]
Activities were intermixed with very serious discussion of ideas. I spent something like five hours every day in the canteen over a period of weeks. The number of cups of tea I drank probably kept a Ceylon tea plantation going.
The IS members in the LSE and other colleges had been ‘known ... for the line of taking students off to the picket line and factory gate’. [17] IS, and later the SWP, were more than once accused of ‘workerism’, or a contempt for ideas, because of our insistence on the centrality of the working class. But the accusation was misplaced, and the orientation misunderstood. It would be the most stupid thing for a student to pretend that she or he was a worker. It was a question of social circumstances that led to the direction we followed. Because of their life experience, workers tend to go from the specific – wages and conditions – to the more generalised issues. Intellectuals begin from ideas. The most important thing for the development of the students (as well as our implantation in the working class) was for the students to learn from direct contact with the workers’ movement.
In 18% Russian social circumstances were comparable, to a certain extent. Lenin had to move from operating in Marxist circles to economic propaganda. Krupskaya describes how one worker said that Lenin was worse than two employers, because he always asked so many questions. He produced four handwritten copies of a factory leaflet. Two reached the hands of workers, the other two were seized by the employers. But Lenin did not want the party to limit itself to immediate economic concerns, and two years later he had to attack the narrowness of ‘economism’, which had taken the organisation too far in one direction. That would be a danger for us too – that orientation on the working class would lead to a worship of the limitations imposed by the prevailing ideology on many workers. To give one example, there was a time when the Socialist Review Group was tiny, with between 25 to 30 members only. A worker wanted to join. He liked our programme, but he thought that our opposition to immigration controls would prevent other workers from joining. I said, ‘You join the group over my dead body.’
Student occupations took place in more and more colleges, from Manchester to Bristol, from Hornsey Art College to Hull and Essex. [18 ]However, by far the most important focus for student activity was opposition to the Vietnam War. IS branches in the localities helped to prepare the demonstration in October 1967. The result was some 30,000 people in Grosvenor Square (outside the US embassy), a confrontation with the police, and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign’s name firmly on the political map (two more massive demonstrations followed, in March and October 1968). [19] On the day before the mass demonstration on 27 October, an occupation took place in the LSE to provide sleeping accommodation and first aid facilities for thousands.
The demonstration was a very important test. Three Trotskyist groups were present, but each took a different position. The Socialist Labour League (SLL), followers of Gerry Healy, came to the demonstration for one purpose only – to distribute a leaflet entitled ‘Why The Socialist Labour League Is Not Marching’. The argument was that it was not led by Marxists and not composed of workers: ‘The Socialist Labour League refuses ... to participate in the demonstration. Our task is to direct all young workers and students towards serious consideration for the theory and role of Trotskyism and the Fourth International towards the building of the revolutionary party’. [20]
Then there was the International Marxist Group (IMG), whose characteristic was to overlook the revolutionary potential of the working class and look for the agents of socialism elsewhere: the national movement in the colonies, the peasantry, and now the ‘student vanguard’. The talk was about turning the universities into ‘red bases’.
The orthodox but ossified ‘Marxism’ of the SLL assumed that the question of how students would behave in 1968 was made clear by their behaviour during the 1926 General Strike, or by Trotsky’s article of 1910. If that is so one does not need theory, only memory.
For the impressionistic ‘Marxism’ of the IMG, on the other hand, everything changes completely. There is only change, no continuity. Hence one cannot have a theory, as one cannot generalise. The ideas of Marx shaped in the 1840s about the centrality of the working class in liberating itself, and liberating society, have no relevance for 1968.
IS members were deeply rooted in Marxist theory, but we did not live in an ivory tower. So we were quite conscious of the changes that took place. For us it was clear that students could not be a substitute for the working class but could only aid the working class in its liberation. We always looked to the student movement as a detonator. On the 27 October 1968 demonstration IS distributed a leaflet that aimed to link the anti-war struggle with the class struggle at home:
... the battle against the wage freeze; against social service cuts; against bad housing and rent increases; against bad hospitals and schools; against unemployment; against the government’s racialist policies is the same as the battle against the Vietnam War ... In the factories workers are fighting against the wage freeze and unemployment. On the housing estates tenants are resisting rent increases. If we are to help the Vietnamese we must go on from Grosvenor Square to fight these struggles. ‘A blow against the boss is a blow against the Vietnam War.’
Today on Sunday we are demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. What will we do on Monday? We will have to go to the factories, the docks, the bus depots, to connect with the workers’ fight.
Out of the three Trotskyist groups – the SLL, the IMG and the IS – only IS built significantly out of the demonstration.
The SLL declaration of disdain for the demonstration would not have encouraged anyone among the demonstrators to join it. The IMG did not say anything the demonstrators disagreed with, but it did not raise any argument to convince the demonstrators to go beyond the point they were at at the beginning of the day. To say, ‘Victory to the National Liberation Front’ was obvious to anyone who came to the demonstration.
This has parallels with intervention in a strike situation. For example, you can stand on a picket line and next to you is a worker who makes racist comments. You can do one of three things. You can say, ‘I’m not standing on this picket line. I’m going home because no one makes racist remarks there.’ That is sectarianism, because if ‘the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class’, you have to stand with workers on a picket line against the boss.
The other possibility is simply avoiding the question. Someone makes a racist comment and you pretend you haven’t heard it, and you say, ‘The weather is quite nice today.’ That is opportunism.
The third position is that you argue with this person against racism, against the prevailing ideas of the ruling class. You argue and argue. If you convince them, excellent. But if you don’t, still when the scab lorry comes you link arms to stop the scabs, because ‘the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class’. You cannot choose between activity and argument. Activity alone is blind. Argument alone is futile. Both must be combined in a dialectical unity, one with the other. To give a lead one has to go with the stream three quarters of the way, and against it a quarter of the way.
Our leaflets did not convince the 100,000 demonstrators, but they must have impressed a few thousand, made them think. IS was with the demonstrators but at the same time arguing with them.
Tariq Ali was better known and more popular than any IS member on the demonstration. But he did not bring forward any convincing argument why anyone should join the IMG. Leadership is a dialogue, and dialogue contains both agreement and disagreement. We recruited hundreds to IS at the demonstration and straight afterwards. The students we recruited in the Vietnam campaign were recruited on the basis of orientation on the working class.
At the end of 1974 there were about 90 IS student societies. The founding conference of the National Organisation of IS Societies (NOISS, subsequently changing its name to Socialist Worker Student Society – SWSS) at Leeds in November 1974 was attended by delegates from 28 universities, 11 polytechnics, six colleges of education, and six colleges of further education and technical colleges. Its journal, Agitator, had a circulation of about 3,000. [21]
Ian Birchall writes:
IS had grown dramatically in the course of 1968. It had begun the year with 447 members, and ended with something in excess of a 1,000 (the pace of recruitment and turnover were so hectic that precise figures are hard to get). The monthly Labour Worker had given way to the weekly Socialist Worker, with a vastly increased circulation. A number of full time workers had been employed both for the paper and as regional organisers. The pace of growth had taken the members by surprise. [22]
It was largely students recruited during 1968 and the following couple of years who built a sale of Socialist Worker in the factories, who recruited workers into the organisation, and who played a crucial role in establishing IS factory branches and rank and file groups.
When, in April 1968, Enoch Powell made his infamous racist speech about ‘rivers of blood’, thousands of London dockers came out on a one day strike and demonstration in his support. The Communist Party, which had considerable influence in the docks, declined to use it to fight Powell. Danny Lyons, one of the leading Communist Party militants, had so little confidence that he brought along two clergymen, one Catholic and one Protestant, to try and dissuade the dockers.
IS had only one docker in the organisation, Terry Barrett. He took a very strong anti-racist position. However, I remember having a very long discussion through the night about the tactics he wanted to adopt. He was convinced he should cross the dockers’ Powellite picket line and go to work. I was convinced that although his feelings were admirable, the tactic he suggested was wrong. If he violated the democratic decision, however wrong, of his mates, and was paid for the day, what would we say when in other strikes – and they were far more numerous – another docker decided to scab. Finally we came to an agreement. So Terry issued an IS leaflet that he and a number of IS members, including students, distributed among dockers who supported Powell. They got insults as a result, but I am still very proud of this leaflet, which argued a clear class line against Powell:
Who is Enoch Powell? He is a right wing Tory opportunist who will stop at nothing to help his party and his class. He is a director of the vast National Discount Company (assets £224m) which pays him a salary higher than the £3,500 a year he gets as an MP.
He lives in fashionable Belgravia and writes Greek verse.
What does he believe in?
• Higher unemployment. He has consistently advocated a national average of 3 percent unemployed.
• Cuts in social services. He wants higher health charges, less council houses, charges for state education and lower unemployment pay.
• Mass sackings in the docks. Again and again he has argued that the docks are ‘grossly overmanned’. [23]
Sadly, Powell had quite an impact in the country. Racist microbes spread widely. Coming back to Terry Barrett, he got a lot of support from LSE students at the time he needed it to fight Powellism. Terry reciprocated the help he got from them. Again and again he came to LSE to argue revolutionary politics with them.
I had connections with a number of people who played a key role in the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in 1968-69. One was Gerry Lawless and his old Irish Workers’ Group which, despite some of its flaws, included as members both Michael Farrell, who was the key person in leading People’s Democracy (PD) in Belfast, and Eamonn McCann in Derry, who played a central role there from October 1968 to August 1969. Through McCann we got quite close connections with Bernadette Devlin. She became famous when, as an MP newly elected to the Commons on a civil rights ticket (17 April 1969), she crossed the benches and punched Reginald Maudling, the Tory minister. The British state happily deals out repression. It does not expect to be confronted in its own home. Bernadette Devlin did several meeting tours with us, and her meetings were always very well attended.
Michael Farrell’s relationship with us was close in the period 1969-70. He spoke at one of our conferences. We took collections for PD. I remember a discussion I had with him and some other people at my house in early 1969. It was just after the Burntollet march, where the civil rights marchers were ambushed and beaten up by several hundred Loyalist bigots, including a number of part time police of the B-Specials. At that time Farrell and Devlin, as well as McCann, were strongly committed to the idea of building a non-sectarian revolutionary movement in Northern Ireland, but they were enormously confused as to what to do. This is shown by an interview they did for New Left Review. They did not, for instance, seem to want to say anything about the border. I failed to convince Farrell that they had to say something about it, to find ways of putting across an argument against partition which linked national and working class issues in a way that could build support among workers in the South and so find a bridge to Protestant workers in the North.
For a successful revolutionary strategy these issues could not be ducked. On the surface it is true that the problems the workers in the South face – bad working conditions, poor housing, poor social services – have no direct relation to the presence of British troops in the North. Equally it appears, superficially, that the fight for civil rights for Catholics in the North also does not relate to the day to day struggle of workers in the South. Yet the issues of the border and of class politics are inextricably linked because the hold of reaction in the South is reinforced through Green nationalism. In the North the sectarian division of Protestant and Catholic workers because of partition damages the interests of both groups.
Thus Green nationalism has no attraction for Protestant workers in the North, who do not see why they should aspire to a united Ireland. With the Green Tories ruling Dublin, why should the Protestant workers of Belfast wish to join them? Home rule looks like Rome rule. This leads Protestant workers to identify their interests with the British state and its symbols, such as the monarchy. In the South workers are also held back. When I lived in Dublin (1947-52) I remember visiting a number of trade union offices, and I was really shocked to see at their entrance a statue of the Madonna and the infant Jesus. How could a Protestant worker, or an atheist or agnostic worker, find himself at home in such a place?
The civil rights movement could not avoid these questions and succeed. To demand civil rights for Catholics, in other words equality between Catholics and Protestants in job opportunities, housing, etc, also would not convince Protestant workers to aspire to join the Catholics if it looked as though it would be merely the sharing of misery. Catholic workers’ advance under such conditions looks as if it is at the cost of Protestant workers.
To break down the walls of the Catholic ghetto in the North one has to mobilise the workers in the South on class issues that challenge the power of the Green Tories and the Catholic church. The route connecting the Shankill Road and the Falls Road goes through Dublin (the Shankill Road is the centre of the Belfast Protestant working class, while the Falls Road is the centre of Belfast’s Catholic workers).
Michael Farrell paid lip service to Marxism, to the working class, to the need to unite Protestant and Catholic workers. Alas, in reality, he did not go beyond the civil rights movement in the North. This movement in itself was only a reformist movement that, in the end, could not break through the walls of the ghetto to unite Catholic and Protestant workers, to unite the workers of the South and the North.
A revolutionary party, of course, is not a sect, and therefore has to participate in progressive movements. But it has to be a distinct, separate entity. Two examples have already been mentioned: while Socialist Review Group members participated in the CND march to Aldermaston in 1958, making up a contingent of some 50 in a crowd of 50,000, we carried a banner that the majority of CND supporters would not have agreed with. It said, ‘Industrial action against the bomb. Black the bomb. Black the bases.’ Ten years later, in October 1968, in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) demonstration, we issued a leaflet stating, ‘A blow against the boss is a blow against the Vietnam War.’ We had a clear class position in the latter campaign.
The independence of the revolutionary party is also a question of survival. It cannot afford to dissolve itself into such movements. A movement rises and falls: CND rose, and then declined, as did the VSC. If the boundary between the revolutionary party and the movement is fudged, the decline of the movement must lead to a deep crisis and even disintegration of the revolutionary organisation. It was a great error for Farrell’s PD to merge completely with the civil rights movement.
My failure to convince Farrell was possibly connected with the relative size of our organisations. IS had about 1,000, while the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland consisted of tens of thousands and was very much in the news. Farrell did not understand that under such conditions PD was bound to rise like a rocket but fall like a stick two years later. Nevertheless, the strategy I argued for was not without a basis. Eamonn McCann, in his brilliant book War and an Irish Town, lists many occasions in the history of the North when Catholic and Protestant workers joined forces. This was at times ‘when they have had something to fight together for’. [24]
In 1973 McCann wrote the following about the civil rights movement of 1969:
There never was the slightest possibility of a movement demanding ‘fair play’ [for Catholics] in Northern Ireland engaging the support, or even securing the neutrality, of Protestant workers. In terms of strict economics the only programme with any potential to undercut sectarianism would have been one which linked the demand for fair distribution of the relevant commodities to demands designed to increase absolutely the number of jobs and houses available for distribution ... In a phrase, it would have involved the elaboration of a comprehensive anti-capitalist, not just anti-Unionist, programme.
If any group had fought consistently ... for such a programme, the all-class Catholic alliance, which is what the civil rights movement became, could not have held together. And such a programme.. .would not have attracted immediate mass support; but it might have enabled those of us in Deny at least to go on talking to Protestants ... in 1969. [25]
Alas, PD did not build a real organisation. It was a very loose grouping. Farrell, Devlin and McCann led a mass movement, but they had no organisation to speak of. McCann, writing about the Housing Action Committee in Derry, said:
We called a meeting of ‘the local organisers’ for Tuesday night in the City Hotel. The index of our political and organisational chaos was that, having called the meeting, we were not at all certain who would have the right to attend. At the time that did not seem very important. We would as always muddle through ... In the nature of things there was no mechanism whereby our loose group could convene itself and arrive at a joint attitude. [26]
PD had very incoherent views. McCann writes:
It was a loose organisation, without formal membership and with an incoherent ideology comprising middle-class liberalism, Aldermaston pacifism and a Sorbonne-inspired belief in spontaneity. [27]
... while maintaining a separate existence the PD ... was for a long time effectively submerged in the mainstream of civil rights agitation, establishing itself not as an organisation with a programme qualitatively different from that of the ‘moderates’, but as a lively and aggressive ginger group within the same broad movement. To the mass of the people it was clear that the PD in Belfast and White, Finbar Doherty, myself, and others in Derry were more militant than the NICRA [Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association] or the Derry Citizens Action Committee. But it was not clear what we were being militant about. [28]
After the demise of the civil rights movement, McCann drew the right conclusion:
We have learned that mass ‘influence’ or prominent involvement in mass agitation is, despite sometime appearances to the contrary, meaningless and fruitless unless one is in the process of forging the political instrument necessary to lead such agitation to victory over the opposing force. We have learned that it is impossible to do that if one is not forearmed with a coherent class analysis of the situation and a clear programme based on it. [29]
In a phrase, we need to build a mass, revolutionary Marxist party. [30]
McCann ends his book with the following words:
The future in Ireland lies with the small, but at last steadily growing, forces of Marxism. To make the revolution we need a revolutionary party. [31]
Sadly, 20 years later, in 1993, in a preface to a new edition of his book, McCann admitted that he had done very little to achieve this target:
I ended the book in 1973 by suggesting that the future lay with the small but steadily growing forces of Marxism. This was something of a cheek, since at the time I was doing little to encourage this growth. It wasn’t until 1983 that I joined a Marxist organisation. [32]
McCann joined the Socialist Workers Movement, the sister organisation of the British SWP.
The civil rights movement disintegrated and was absorbed into two separate organisations: the Republicans on the one hand and the SDLP on the other.
The Republicans cannot unite Catholic and Protestant workers, as for them the struggle for a united Ireland has nothing to do with bread and butter issues. The Irish equivalent of the Labour Party and trade union leadership also see the issues compartmentally. They have nothing to do with the national question, being mediators with the bosses and the state. They take a Green colour in the South and an Orange hue in the North. So the struggle for a united Ireland remains confined largely to the Catholic ghetto in the North. This fits the Republicans perfectly.
People’s Democracy, composed as it was of students who were influenced by movementism, did not go further than paying lip service to the working class. A revolutionary organisation must be orientated on the working class. Although a tribune of the oppressed, it must relate also to other sections of society. Alas, the discussions with the leadership of PD did not bring lasting results.
When all hell broke loose in Northern Ireland, with the armed attacks on Catholics, including the Belfast pogroms of August 1969, we did our best to help PD by printing literature for them and so on. There were, however, serious problems, as McCann later explained in War and an Irish Town. The PD leaders were able, at a particular point, to head a massive movement. They spoke to huge meetings. Bernadette Devlin was elected to the House of Commons. But that is not the same as leadership. They never succeeded in building anything like a stable organisation capable of evaluating what it was doing and putting forward a coherent socialist policy as an alternative to the pull of mere nationalism. So there was not even an organisational link between the socialists in Derry and those in Belfast, let alone with any socialist organisation in the South.
After August 1969 they were fairly rapidly marginalised by the SDLP on the one hand and, more importantly, by Republican forces that had seemed moribund in 1968. They had started an avalanche but then did not know what to do, or how even to organise themselves. So it was that over time they all drifted off to Republicanism or inactivity, apart from Eamonn McCann, who still puts across a revolutionary socialist line.
When the British troops were brought into Northern Ireland in 1969, we in IS were faced with a dilemma. We insisted British imperialism was the root of Northern Ireland’s problems. But the Paisleyites were the loudest voices shouting ‘Troops Out’, meaning ‘leave the RUC, the B-Specials and the Orangemen to kill Catholics’. And there was even some shooting between troops and Orangemen in the Shankill Road. Meanwhile, the Nationalist population were initially friendly to the troops. We had to find a way of putting forward anti-imperialist demands without sounding the same as the Orangemen. We did this in Socialist Worker with the headline, ‘Keep The Barricades’, and by arguing very strongly that people should not rely on the troops to defend them. An editorial in Socialist Worker of 21 August 1969 had the following headings:
The Barricades Must Stay Until
B-Specials Disbanded
RUC Disarmed
Special Powers Act Abolished
Political Prisoners Released
The editorial in Socialist Worker of 11 September 1969 said:
Defend The Barricades
No Peace Until Stormont Goes
The breathing space provided by the presence of British troops is short but vital. Those who call for the immediate withdrawal of the troops before the men behind the barricades can defend themselves are inviting a pogrom.
The moment the honeymoon between the troops and the Catholic population came to an end, early in 1970, we then raised the slogan ‘Troops Out’ as a central demand.
Activity around the Irish issue was quite central to us in the years 1968-72 – the Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign, the Anti-Internment League and so on, and the big and bitter demonstrations over Bloody Sunday. But after 1972 it became difficult to get more people than our own members on demonstrations and protests. This was because Republican bombs in Britain had the effect of making the Irish population in Britain keep their heads down, especially after the Prevention of Terrorism Act (late 1974). The bombs removed an important way of getting the argument about the oppression of the Catholics in the North and the problems caused by partition across to other workers.
One has always to fight against conservative inertia which plagues even the most revolutionary organisations.
As I have said, between April and October 1968 the membership of our organisation grew from 400 to 1,000. This quick growth brought about a serious crisis in the organisation. We were forced to have three national conferences in 1968. The first, in the spring (before the May events), was held in the Africa Centre, and had an attendance of about 200 people. The second was held in the Beaver Hall in October with some 300 comrades present.
There were deep splits all over the place. We had recruited hundreds of students in the previous months and they had all sorts of ideas. What is more, the effect of the May events was to create enormous spontaneism and illusions in the immediate revolutionary possibilities. (I remember Akiva Orr, who had only just joined us and left soon after, saying, in true C.L.R.-James-type fashion, ‘Socialism already exists in the factories.’ He was not the only one to be attracted to such ideas – Ian MacDonald and three people who had been working with us around tenant and anti-racist work were very much influenced by similar ideas.)
Had the comrades waited a few weeks they would have found out that the revolution did not win in France, that capitalism survived the spontaneous action of the masses.
It is true that on 20 May the largest general strike in history began. One million people demonstrated in Paris. But the French Stalinists controlling the union bureaucracy did not disappear. Frightened of the thought that the revolutionary students would mingle with the workers, they insisted on separating the two groups by creating a cordon of 20,000 stewards holding arms to separate them. Ten million workers did go on strike, but the strike committees were not elected. They were appointed by the trade union bureaucracy. It is true that millions of workers occupied the factories, but right from the beginning of the occupations, the union bureaucracy insisted that only a small minority of the workers should stay in the factories while the majority were sent home. If the workers had remained in the occupation the strike would have been active. Now it was passive.
Tragically, there was not in existence a large revolutionary organisation that could overcome the bureaucracy. In Russia in March 1917 the Bolshevik Party had 23,600 members, and this number increased by August to 250,000. The French industrial working class was significantly large than the Russian working class in 1917. Had there existed a revolutionary organisation of some tens of thousands, it could have argued that the workers’ contingents on the demonstration should not be separated from the students. It could have called for democratic elections of strike committees and convinced the millions occupying the factories to remain inside the factories, creating a collective force many times stronger than when these same workers were simply an aggregation of individuals. Alas, the total number of revolutionaries in France could be counted in hundreds.
Therefore it was not long before the government got the unions to agree to a compromise with the employers on a wage rise. The occupation of the factories ended, the strike was called off, and the ground was prepared for the return of the president, General de Gaulle. When the factories were occupied de Gaulle was so demoralised that he flew out of the country to find refuge with the French troops in West Germany. But now he came back to rule once more. On 30 May a right-wing demonstration of half a million took place in Paris. The police seized back the TV and radio stations, threw out occupying workers, attacked any continuing demonstrations, and even killed two workers and a school student. Again and again during 1968 the revolutionary potential, which could have gone far, stopped well short of victory. And this has been the pattern in other revolutions.
The debates at IS conferences in 1968 were heated. Symptomatic of the extremes of the libertarians was a resolution put forward by one branch of the organisation that headlines of Socialist Worker should be determined by delegates from all the London branches. At present Chris Harman and the rest of the Socialist Worker editorial board decides these. Each branch has a different composition and works in different situations. If the headline was put to a debate of 30 or 40 branches every week the paper would never appear.
Symmetrical to the libertarian tendency was ‘toy Bolshevism’. A number of old timers – and I use this word loosely, to describe people who had been in the organisation four or five years – started complaining loudly about the ‘dilution’ of the membership. At the Beaver Hall conference a motion was proposed to introduce probationary membership. The chairperson called one speaker in support of the motion, one against, and so on. The last speaker was myself. When the chairperson asked for a comrade to support the motion over probationary membership I put my hand up. Comrades were stunned. I said, ‘I am for introducing probationary membership for everyone in the organisation who has been a member for four or five years. It is dangerous if they exhibit conservative inertia. They should be put on probation and then excluded if they fail.’ I was the last floor speaker and we won the vote overwhelmingly against the introduction of probationary membership. A revolutionary does not live on his past or his promises for the future. What is decisive is what he or she is doing this week, next week, and what was done last week. Toy Bolshevism is a danger threatening small revolutionary organisations which become impatient and too hard.
The October 1968 conference lasted a number of days. I did not speak at all on the factional issues because the moment I spoke it would only serve to unite all the factions in their anger and disappointment at the leadership not delivering the goods as quickly as the comrades, in their inexperience, had expected. The need was to consolidate the group. Therefore the question of democratic centralism (rather than everyone for themselves doing their own thing) was very important. Democracy that does not lead to common action results in bureaucratic anarchy, where the person with the loudest voice predominates or there is action which pulls in many directions and cancels itself out.
The most impressive intervention at the conference was by Duncan Hallas. The comrades there did not know who he was, as he had left the organisation in 1954 and had now reappeared. The comrades who argued against Leninist democratic centralism on the grounds that Leninism leads to Stalinism were all very young and inexperienced. Therefore when Duncan, who was in his forties, spoke with real authority, it was extremely impressive. What he said was short and sharp and included the question, ‘If Leninism led to Stalinism, why did Stalin kill all the Leninists?’ His speech was absolutely riveting. Still he was heckled by some delegates.
The atmosphere of the conference led me to propose an adjournment of the conference for a couple of months. So it was that the issue of leadership and democratic centralism was not finally settled until what was in effect the third conference of the year (again in Beaver Hall), where we carried the argument without any splits. To help the process I wrote a short document on democratic centralism.
It was not perhaps very well argued, but I myself was panicked by the situation. What is so important about democratic centralism? First of all, it is important to understand why we need democracy. If you want to go from London to Birmingham you need a bus and a driver. You don’t need democratic discussion, because the route has been followed before and all that is needed is one good driver and one good bus. The problem is that the transition from capitalism to socialism is something we have never experienced before. We do not know the issues that will arise on the way and what the party will have to do to carry the struggle forward.
If you do not know, there is only one way to learn – by being rooted in the working class and learning from the class. It is not that democracy from below solves every problem. Marxism, in so far as it is a science, does not need to revisit every discovery of Marx and debate every concept in his books. If you want to know if there is a decline in the rate of profit, if Marx is right, you do not need to go to the vote. The same applies to other questions of principle such as anti-racism. However, there is another category of things that must be put to the vote. Everything that is connected to our struggle must be put to the test, because we simply do not know the right answers. If the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class, the working class through its own experiences will teach us, and this must be expressed within party debates and shape the strategy that is followed.
There is a beautiful description of how Lenin had to learn from the class in 1917. He describes what happened when he was in hiding after the July Days in 1917. The Bolshevik Party was illegal and its press smashed. The Bolsheviks were accused of being German agents. Lenin did not know how far the power of reaction had been consolidated. He describes eating with a worker he was in hiding with. The worker gave him bread and said, ‘The bread is good. They, the capitalist class, are frightened of us and don’t dare give bad bread.’ Lenin wrote, ‘The moment I heard him I understood about the class relation of forces. I understood what workers really think – the capitalists are still frightened of us. The victory of the counter-revolution is not complete’.
If you want to know if the workers are confident you cannot decide from the top down. How do you know? You cannot have a ballot in the press – they do not provide the opportunity. You cannot survey every individual. For a working class revolution you need a deep democracy. And what the revolution is about is raising the working class to become the ruling class, about creating the most democratic system in history. Unlike under capitalism, where every five years you elect someone to misrepresent you (because they are completely in the power of capital), here it is a completely different story. Under capitalism you elect the MPs but not the employers. Under capitalism we do not vote on whether to close a factory. We do not elect the army officers or the judges. In a workers’ state everything is under workers’ control. Everything is in workers’ power. It is the most extreme form of democracy. Therefore, within the revolutionary party there must be democratic debate which reflects the experience of the comrades, who themselves are part of or linked to the working class.
If this is all true, why do we need centralism? First, the experience is uneven. Workers have different experiences. You have to collect that experience together. Even in the revolutionary party the members are influenced by different pressures. They are influenced by the general picture and by the section of the workers to which they belong. As I wrote in 1968, ‘Marx argued that as the prevailing ideology under capitalism is the ideology of the ruling class, revolutionary politics does not reflect the current ideas of the class’. [33] There must be a clear picture of the current state of class consciousness, but the role of the party is to overcome the sectionalism, the narrow experience. You need to centralise all the experience.
Again you need centralism because the ruling class is highly centralised. If you are not symmetrical to your enemy in power of organisation then you cannot win. I was never a pacifist. If someone uses a stick on me I have to have a bigger stick. I don’t believe a quotation from Marx’s Capital will stop a mad dog who attacks. The power of our organisation has to be symmetrical to our enemies’. That is why I cannot understand the anarchists when they come and say that after a revolution we will immediately abolish the state. The capitalists elsewhere will still have a state. How do you maintain workers’ power in the face of organised capitalist opposition without a state for the workers? Anarchists always deny the issue of the state. Yet during the Spanish Civil War, when confronted by Franco’s state, they immediately joined the bourgeois state opposing him. They should have tried to oppose Franco with a workers’ state.
Democratic centralism therefore involves the freest debate and discussion about how to take the struggle forward based on an estimate of the possibilities of the moment, combined with a centralised carrying out of the decisions reached. Between conferences the Central Committee is responsible for leadership. In bourgeois parties the leadership is rarely accountable for its actions. MPs cannot be removed between elections. Governments hide behind blaming ‘the world economy’ or ‘economic forces beyond our control’ for their failures. They depend on the passivity of their party memberships, who are there only to canvass at election times or give standing ovations. The Central Committee of the SWP is accountable for its political line every week through the pages of Socialist Worker. Because we are an organisation of activists, if the Central Committee took a wrong position on an issue the comrades would soon let us know about it. Every week the comrades know where we stand on the key issues of the moment.
I wrote elsewhere:
There is a dialectical relationship between democracy within the party and the party’s roots in the class. Without a correct class policy and a party composed of proletarians, there is no possibility of healthy party democracy. Without a firm working class base all talk of democracy and discipline in the party is meaningless verbiage. At the same time, without party democracy, without constant self criticism, development of a correct class policy is impossible. Lenin said, ‘We have more than once already enunciated our theoretical views on the importance of discipline and on how this concept is to be understood in the party of the working class. We defined it as: unity in action, freedom of discussion and criticism. Only such discipline is worthy of the democratic party of the advanced class’ (Lenin, Collected Works, vol.9, p.230). Again: ‘The proletariat does not recognize unity of action without freedom to discuss and criticise’, (ibid., p.321)
If democracy is essential in order to assimilate the experience of the struggle, centralism and discipline are necessary to lead the struggle. Firm organisational cohesion makes it possible for the party to act, to take initiatives, to direct the action of the masses. A party that is not confident in itself cannot win the confidence of the masses. Without a strong party leadership, having the power to act promptly and direct the activities of the members, a revolutionary party cannot exist. The party is a centralist organisation which leads a determined struggle for power. As such it needs iron discipline in action. [34]
The arguments in 1968 were not just about democratic centralism as an issue standing on its own; diey were about reorienting the student recruits towards industry with factory sales, bulletins, etc. The book I wrote on productivity deals at the time (The Employers’ Offensive: Productivity Deals and How to Fight Them) was part of the same process. The turn to the working class in the late 1960s and early 1970s led to serious distortions in our activities. It encouraged the wholesale abandonment of student work, justified by ‘workerism’, which was especially rampant among ex-students. Chris Harman, Alex Callinicos and Simon Turner had to fight to get student work taken seriously again in the mid-1970s. This tendency for ex-students to turn their backs on student work is still with us in a number of groups outside Britain belonging to the IS Tendency.
1. T. Cliff and D. Gluckstein, The Labour Party: A Marxist History (London, 1988), p.279.
2. The Observer, 7 March 1966.
3. The Economist, 3 October 1964.
4. S. Brittan, The Treasury under the Tories 1951-1964 (London 1965), p.276.
5. M. Stewart and R. Winsbury, An Incomes Policy for Labour, Fabian Tract 350 (October 1963), p.18.
6. The Economist, 5 June 1965.
7. The Economist, 4 September 1965.
8. See T. Cliff and C. Barker, Incomes Policy, Legislation and Shop Stewards (London, 1966), pp.59-62.
9. Ibid., p.136.
10. I. Birchall, op. cit., p.10. Since long before Labour came to power, IS had taken a firm position of unconditional opposition to all incomes policy under capitalism. This position left it almost completely isolated from the rest of the left. For example, at a conference organised by the Institute for Workers’ Control in April 1964, the two IS members present were the only people to take a position of all out opposition to incomes policy. Ibid., p.9.
11. Ibid., pi 2.
12. L. Trotsky, The Intelligentsia and Socialism (London 1966), p.12.
13. T. Cliff and I. Birchall, France: The Struggle Goes On (London 1968), pp.11-13.
14. C. Harman, D. Clark, A. Sayers, R. Kuper, M. Shaw, Education, Capitalism and the Student Revolt (London 1968), pp.48-49.
15. D. Widgery, The Left in Britain, 1956-1968 (London 1976), p.310.
16. Ibid., p.311.
17. Ibid., p.313.
18. Ibid., p.315.
19. I. Birchall, op. cit., p.15.
20. D. Widgery, op. cit., p.349. This leaflet was consistent with the publication by the SLL a couple of years earlier of the pamphlet by Trotsky we have referred to, The Intelligentsia and Socialism, op. cit.
21. A. Callinicos and S. Turner, The Student Movement Today, International Socialism 1:75, p.15.
22. I. Birchall, op. cit., p.16.
23. Ibid., p.15.
24. E. McCann, War and an Irish Town (London 1993), p.32.
25. Ibid., p.46.
26. Ibid., pp.99-100.
27. Ibid., p.106.
28. Ibid., p.297
29. Ibid., p.311.
30. Ibid., p.312.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., preface.
33. T. Cliff, Neither Washington Nor Moscow, op. cit., p.215.
34. T. Cliff, Lenin, vol.1, op. cit., p.269.
Last updated on 19.12.2004