Our origins and history: the unbroken thread of revolutionary communism

On 23 November 2024, the Italian section of the Revolutionary Communist International launched the Revolutionary Communist Party. We appeal to all communist militants who are critical of Stalinism to join us in the task of building the party. The following article was written by Alessandro Giardiello in the run up to the launch of the RCP, in order to offer a summary of our origins and history.

What do we propose? Nothing less than the overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of communism; a classless society without gender, national or religious oppression, capable of harnessing the resources needed to cure an increasingly sick planet. 

In other words, we fight for a society based on the needs of the masses and not on the profits of a tiny minority. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to abolish private ownership of the means of production and the existence of nation states, which have become an absolute obstacle to the development of a peaceful and harmonious society.

In this, we draw on the political and theoretical contributions of Marx and Engels – the ideas that inspired the October Revolution – and the school of revolutionary strategy represented by the first four congresses of the Communist International, held when Lenin was still alive.

We also take inspiration from the struggle waged by Trotsky against Stalinism, first by forming the Left Opposition and then by founding the Fourth International.

For reasons we will explain in this text, after Trosky had been assassinated by a Stalinist hitman in 1940, the new International proved inadequate. We only recognise its founding congress of 1938, and in particular its political manifesto, The Transitional Programme, which was drafted by Trotsky himself.

After the death of Trotsky, along with many of the leaders of the Russian Opposition in the gulags of Siberia, or at the hands of Stalinist goons, the Fourth International did not have the cadres with the experience to cope with the new political situation.

Comrade Ted Grant was the only one who led a battle against the deviations of leaders like Pablo, Cannon, Mandel, Maitan, Pierre Frank, etc. We will thus make reference to many of Ted Grant's works, collected in Il lungo filo rosso, published by our printing house in 2007. Those documents, articles and political contributions represent a wealth of ideas that we are absolutely determined to bring to life in the new party and the new International.

Some in the movement call us ‘Grantists’, others, more generically, Trotskyists, Marxists or revolutionary Marxists. We do not oppose any of these labels. We make them all our own. But we prefer to call ourselves communists. This was the same decision Ted Grant made 80 years ago, in 1944, when he called his party the Revolutionary Communist Party.

Stalinism usurped the term ‘communist’ and discredited it in the eyes of millions of proletarians. Today too, the Chinese regime continues to call itself ‘communist’ and adorns itself with a red flag and a hammer and sickle. But it has restored capitalism, and bases its power on the unbridled exploitation of the Chinese proletariat, which is not so different from the exploitation Engels described 180 years ago in The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Ted Grant, the WIL and the RCP

The founder of our movement, Isaac Blank, known as Ted Grant, was a young South African who moved to London at the age of 21 with the clear intention of joining the Trotskyist movement. He had read the US Trotskyist newspapers that were sold in a left-wing bookshop in South Africa and came to support their ideas, which he continued to do throughout his life. As Ted Grant liked to say: “When certain ideas get into your blood they never leave you”.

When he arrived in London in 1934, he and his group of 30 comrades immediately began to build the forces of revolutionary Marxism with the tireless enthusiasm that was characteristic of him. In 1938, however, they refused to accept the diktat imposed by James Cannon, who was then secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the American section of the Fourth International. Cannon came to Britain with the aim of imposing a merger of the three different Trotskyist groups that existed in England at that time (plus one in Scotland) without a principled political basis.

When he arrived in London in 1934, he and his group of 30 comrades immediately began to build the forces of revolutionary Marxism with the tireless enthusiasm that was characteristic of him / Image: Congress of the WIL

The bureaucratic manoeuvres of Cannon and other leaders of the Fourth International against Ted Grant and his group are amply explained in The History of British Trotskyism, which readers can find in Il lungo filo rosso, and which has also been published by our English-language publishing house, Wellred Books.

In summary, the organisation founded by Ted Grant, Jock Haston, and Ralph Lee – the Workers International League (WIL) – by not accepting Cannon's bureaucratic manoeuvres, found itself excluded from the founding congress of the Fourth International in 1938.

At that congress, the mishmash set up by Cannon, which took the name Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), was recognised as the official section of the Fourth International in Britain. Precisely because it was plagued by numerous political differences, it found itself making every possible political mistake during the Second World War, applying Lenin's position of revolutionary defeatism in a formalist and sectarian manner. During the Second World War, these gentlemen found themselves campaigning around the slogan: “Hitler's victory is the lesser evil” in the factories and workplaces. This was an absurd position which was in conflict with that which Trotsky, in his exile in Coyoacán, Mexico, had elaborated in the ‘proletarian military policy’.

Trotsky’s policy consisted of joining the allied armies (made up of conscripts), fighting the military hierarchy by demanding the election of officers and workers' and trade unions' control over soldiers' conditions, and openly propagandising for the ideas of communism, nationalisation of the means of production, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, a workers' government, and the conduct of a revolutionary war against Hitler's army.

While the RSL, the official section of the Fourth International in Britain, rejected Trotsky's line, the WIL (which was not even granted the status of a sympathising section) did extraordinary work in the British Army. As Ted Grant put it, our comrades, though “illegitimate children of the Fourth International”, were the only ones who carried forward the military policy drawn up by Trotsky.

The result was that while the RSL disintegrated, the WIL grew stronger organisationally and politically to the point that in March 1944 it was able to annex what little remained of the RSL and found the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The RCP was recognised as the British section of the Fourth International… but the manoeuvres of the Fourth's leaders, driven by resentment and prestige politics, had only just begun.

The causes of the degeneration of the Fourth International

After the war ended, the new leaders of the Fourth International continued to repeat, parrot-like, the perspective developed in 1938 by Trotsky in The Transitional Programme:

"The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.

“The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism. Mankind’s productive forces stagnate. […]

“The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the bureaucracies of the Second, Third, Amsterdam and Anarcho-syndicalist Internationals, as on their centrist satellites; on reformism without reforms; democracy in alliance with the GPU; pacifism without peace; anarchism in the service of the bourgeoisie; on ‘revolutionists’ who live in deathly fear of revolution. All of these organisations are not pledges for the future, but decayed survivals of the past. The epoch of wars and revolutions will raze them to the ground.”

These words, absolutely correct in 1938, ceased to be true in the wake of the war. The leaders of the Fourth International, instead of making a concrete analysis of the concrete situation, clung to Trotsky's words. The reality was that the war had produced new and unforeseen developments that not even a revolutionary of Trotsky's genius could have foreseen.

Thus it was that Pablo, Cannon and their comrades – despite the fact that reality was going in a completely different direction – continued to defend a 'catastrophist' line. In essence, they predicted a future of precipitous and permanent crisis for the capitalist system, the consequence of which would be imminent clashes between the forces of revolution and reaction, embodied in the formation of new Bonapartist dictatorships. The possibility of a stabilisation of capitalism, and the emergence of bourgeois parliamentary democracies, did not enter their minds.

It was left to Ted Grant and the comrades of the RCP to lead the battle against the degeneration of the Fourth International after the end of the war / March of the RCP on May Day 1947

Ted Grant was the only Trotskyist leader in Europe to put forward the latter hypothesis, a detail that is omitted by many biased so-called 'historians' of the Fourth International, who feign ignorance of this small detail.

Pierre Frank, in his 1979 book on the history of the Fourth International (The Fourth International: the Long March of the Trotskyists), doesn’t even mention the existence of the WIL or the RCP, despite the fact that the RCP was the most important section of the Trotskyist movement in Europe during the war.

The same dishonest approach is shown by Livio Maitan, one of the main leaders of the Fourth International, who in one of his books states the following:

"Among the political leaders and economists of Marxist inspiration, no one, at least to our knowledge, foresaw at the end of the 1940s or at the beginning of the 1950s the prolonged boom that would involve the capitalist countries for about a quarter of a century surpassing all historical precedents." (L. Maitan, Storms in the World Economy, DataNews 1998, p. 11).

Not only does he pretend not to remember Ted Grant's positions but, true to his style, he is rather forgiving of the mistakes he and his cronies made:

"According to the hypothesis that we continue to regard as far from groundless, a different course and a different perspective would have been possible. […] There was no misunderstanding on our part of the involutional turn marked by the events of 1948. [...] We tended, however, to relativise these assessments, hypothesising a chronicisation of economic stagnation and fragility, over and above the evolving balance of power in the political arena. In this sense there was one-sidedness, a substantial inadequacy of our analysis". (L. Maitan, The Road Taken, p. 167-168).

Maitan was a master at construing glaring errors with devastating consequences as minor blunders.

To be fair, positions similar to those of the British RCP were also defended by a minority of the American SWP, led by Felix Morrow and Albert Goldman, albeit on less consistent grounds (this was partly for objective reasons linked to the persecution that the American Trotskyists suffered at the hands of the state apparatus).

It was left to Ted Grant and the comrades of the RCP to lead the battle against the degeneration of the Fourth International after the end of the war.

Here are some key passages. In March 1945, in a text called The Changing Balance of Power in Europe and the Role of the Fourth International, Ted Grant modified Trotsky's 1938 perspective and the one he had elaborated in June 1942 in Preparing for Power:

“[T]he counter-revolution of capital in its early stages, will, within a short period of time following the establishment of military government, assume a 'democratic' form. The bourgeoisie will combine the granting of illusory concessions with reprisals and repressions against the revolutionary forces.

“The approaching revolution in Europe can be no other than the proletarian revolution. However, in its early stages it is inevitable that the old organisations of the proletariat should succeed in placing themselves at the head of the masses. […] 

“It is possible, on the basis of the support rendered to world imperialism by Stalinism and classical reformism (and this is one of the objective factors to be reckoned with) that world imperialism can succeed, for a period, in 'stabilising' bourgeois democratic regimes in certain countries.”

The following year in Economic Perspectives 1946, he wrote:

"The Fourth International will only discredit itself if it refuses to recognise the inevitable recovery, and it will disorientate its own cadres as well as the broad masses by predicting a permanent slump and slow rhythm of recovery in Western Europe, when events are taking a different shape."

The polemic would continue in August 1946 with the text Democracy or Bonapartism in Europe – A Reply to Pierre Frank:

“Frank attempts to equate all regimes in Western Europe to 'Bonapartism'. His generalisations go even further: he argues that there have been Bonapartist regimes in France since 1934; that it is impossible to have any but Bonapartist or fascist regimes until the coming to power of the proletariat in Europe. This, if you please, in the name of 'the continuity of our political analysis for more than ten years of French history'! Such complacency reduces theory to formless abstractions and conceals inevitable and episodic errors, thus making them into a system. It has no place in the Fourth International.

“Comrade Frank indiscriminately mixes the terms bourgeois democracy with Bonapartism, not explaining the specific traits of either. He interchangeably speaks of 'Bonapartism', 'elements of Bonapartism' and he contrasts democratic liberties with 'a regime which one can correctly define as democratic.' Yet the reader has to seek in vain for a definition of his ideal 'democratic regime' as distinguished from the very real bourgeois democracy. He denies the existence of democratic regimes in Europe today because 'there is literally no place for them.' […]

“The British RCP has characterised the regimes in Western Europe (France, Belgium, Holland, Italy) as regimes of counter-revolution in a democratic form. […]

“Events in Italy have demonstrated the remarkable foresight of Trotsky. The bourgeoisie has been compelled to allow the jettisoning of the king and the Stalinist-socialist traitors have headed off the developing proletarian revolution into the channels of a 'parliamentary and democratic state'.”

The conditions for a new upward cycle of capitalism and an economic boom were laid by the defeat of the revolutionary processes of 1943-45 in Greece, Italy, France and Belgium (responsibility for the diversion of these into dead ends lay with the Stalinists); the destruction of productive forces and annihilation of surplus labour during the war; plus a gigantic flow of US investment into Europe through the Marshall Plan.

This had the political effect, there having existed more room for reformists to carry out part of their programmes, of allowing the social democrats and Stalinists to gain ground. In addition, the Stalinists benefited from the enormous prestige enjoyed by the Red Army after its victory against the Nazis at Stalingrad. It was no coincidence that the communist and social democratic parties became mass parties. This process had the same basis more or less everywhere, with obvious differences depending on the country.

For a whole period, all this barred the way for the development of the Fourth International. It found itself with a mass base in only two countries in the world, both of which were semi-colonies: Bolivia and Sri Lanka.

In an interview with marxist.com in 2004, Comrade Ted Grant, referring to the leaders of the Fourth International, said:

“They were completely ultra-left. They thought that revolution was just around the corner. They tried to deny that there was any economic recovery – when there clearly was. They talked about an economic collapse. We said that, on the contrary, for a number of reasons (which I later explained in my document Will there be a slump?) there would be an economic recovery – although none of us thought it would last as long as it did.

“Therefore, for a period, only modest gains could be made. It was mainly a question of educating the cadres, preserving our forces and winning the ones and twos or perhaps small groups here and there, and preparing for a change in the situation.

“But Mandel, Pablo and co. would not accept the facts. They denied the possibility of democracy in Europe, and predicted Bonapartist (dictatorial) regimes. We opposed this madness, pointing out that there was a Labour Government in Britain and the Communist Parties were in the government in France and Italy – carrying out a counterrevolutionary policy, of course. But it was, as we explained, counter-revolution with a democratic guise. They understood nothing of all this.”

The leaders of the Fourth International such as Mandel, Pablo and Cannon denied reality for at least 15 years. There were those who were even worse: Pierre Lambert, one of the leaders of the majority of the French section which was expelled from the Fourth International in 1952, continued to deny that there had been any development of the productive forces throughout the 20th century until the day he died in 2008.

In the meantime, the Red Army was forming states modelled on the USSR (which we call proletarian Bonapartist or deformed workers' states) throughout Eastern Europe. In 1949, the Chinese Stalinists, led by Mao, seized power.

Pablo came to the conclusion that the Stalinist bureaucracy was playing a revolutionary and not a counter-revolutionary role, as Trotsky had claimed. The thesis Pablo developed in the early 1950s was that the Stalinist bureaucracy, from being a “parasitic excrescence”, as Trotsky had called it in The Revolution Betrayed, had become a legitimate stage along the road to socialism, a transition that would last for centuries (Where Are We Going?, January 1951).

This analysis had the inevitable effect of provoking an abrupt reorientation towards the Stalinist bureaucracy. Tactically, they turned to ‘deep entrism’ in the communist parties.

In addition, they developed illusions about Tito's regime in Yugoslavia, which they considered a relatively healthy workers' state. In answer to this, we refer the reader to the letter written by Jock Haston to the leaders of the Fourth International.

Pablo and Mandel argued, after Stalin's death in 1953, that a period of 'self-reform' of Stalinism was opening.

Pablo declared that Stalinism and petty-bourgeois nationalism could play a progressive role in the transition from capitalism to socialism. This led the POR (the Bolivian section of the Fourth International) to support the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) in the 1952 Bolivian revolution, thus leading the proletariat to defeat. The theses of the Third World Congress of the Fourth International, held in 1951, openly spoke of giving 'critical support' to the MNR in its chapter on Bolivia.

In this context, Ted Grant opposed the Fourth’s entrist tactics during the 1940s. This, along with all the other divergences mentioned above, led to Ted’s second expulsion from the Fourth International in 1950 at the hands of Gerry Healy, who had become Pablo's puppet within the RCP in Britain and bureaucratically taken control of the party.

From the 1953 split to the 1965 expulsion

At the end of 1953, Cannon led a split from the Fourth International to form the International Committee of the Fourth International. This was joined by Healy in Britain, Lambert in France, and later Moreno in Argentina.

Cannon attributed the split to Pablo's adaptation to Stalinism. This adaptation certainly cannot be denied. But Cannon had totally supported it up to that point. In fact, the whole leadership of the Fourth, including Healy and Lambert, had supported the line of the 1951 Third Congress.

The real reason for Cannon's 1953 split had much more to do with his organisational method, which we would call commandism. According to Cannon, the international leadership should not meddle in the internal affairs of the American section and should always support the positions of the party majority.

Cannon suspected that Pablo shared and actively supported the positions of the minority in the American SWP, led by George Clarke, who was later expelled in November 1953. This was the real reason for the split.

Cannon had always been animated by the idea of the US section being the 'leading section', i.e. that the SWP should lead the Fourth International. In this, however, he was limited by the repressive Voorhis Act, which prevented US political parties from belonging to international organisations.

As a matter of fact, Cannon's plan failed and the International Committee did not hold a single congress in ten years. In 1963 it reunified with the Fourth International, returning to the mothership, but not before his antagonist Pablo had been marginalised by the international leadership.

In 1956, Ted Grant and his comrades formed the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL). They knew Cannon and Healy far too well to give the slightest credence to their break. However, Healy's exit from the Fourth left the International without a section in Britain. An appeal was made for the RSL to become the official section. But by this point, Ted Grant had not only failed to resolve his differences with the leadership: they had widened. He now had no confidence in Mandel, Maitan and co.

In discussion with the comrades, however, it was decided that the RSL, being internationally isolated, had little to lose. It could not be ruled out that, by fighting an opposition battle in the Fourth, they could meet worthy militants in other countries.

At the Sixth Congress of the Fourth International in 1961, comrade Ted Grant led a counter-attack during the economic debate and tabled weighty amendments to almost every item on the agenda.

This battle culminated at the Eighth Congress in 1965, where Ted presented an alternative document called The Colonial Revolution and the Sino-Soviet Dispute.

This document aimed to combat the Maoist, Castroist and guerillaist illusions that were beginning to make their way into the leadership of the Fourth International.

As a result of that debate, Ted Grant was expelled from the Fourth International for the third and final time. 

In his latest book, Livio Maitan once again distorts the facts. Let us read this masterpiece of hypocrisy:

"As far as Britain was concerned, the congress decided not to recognise either organisation as a section, which resulted in the splitting of the RSL, of which Ted Grant was the best-known leader, also represented at the congress by Peter [Taaffe]. The RSL would later give rise to 'The Militant' tendency, destined to take a prominent role on the Labour left. Personally, I must admit that I underestimated Grant's ability to build a substantial organisation. I had good personal relations with him, but I was impatient with his habit of punctiliously quoting Trotsky in almost every speech and it put me in a good mood to see him arrive at meetings with a valise full of books and documents." (L. Maitan, Towards a History of the Fourth International, p. 171-172).

Maitan speaks of a split, but it is quite clear that by not recognising either of the British organisations, the Eighth Congress was in fact expelling what had been the official British section since 1957: the RSL, Ted Grant's organisation.

In The Colonial Revolution and the Sino-Soviet Dispute, one can see an anticipation of the disagreements that later arose on the subject of rural guerrilla warfare during the Ninth Congress of 1969.

Ted Grant wrote as early as August 1964:

“Those comrades who have newly discovered the peasantry and the semi-proletariat and even the village proletariat as the main revolutionary force in these colonial revolutions, have not understood the real significance of the role which these classes have played. Where the proletariat is led by a conscious revolutionary party, the petit-bourgeois in town and countryside, under the firm leadership of the proletariat, can support the victory of the working class and the installation of its revolutionary dictatorship, i.e. in the sense of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in Trotsky’s expression, according to the norm.

“Thus these classes can play the key role of the reserve troops of the revolution, of the battering ram, but the sharp point of the revolution can only be a revolutionary consciousness of the industrial working class.” (The Colonial Revolution and the Sino-Soviet Dispute)

Responsibility for the disastrous guerrilla tactics, which cost the lives of many young Trotskyists in Argentina and beyond, must be attributed first to Maitan, who headed the Fourth International in Latin America, and secondly to Mandel, the main leader of the Fourth International after Pablo's exit in 1965.

Throughout the Fourth there was a real Castro fever. There were great expectations for the Organizacion Latinoamericana de Solidaridad (OLAS), formed in Cuba in 1967, with the aim of promoting armed struggle and the establishment of new socialist states.

Third Worldist and Focoist conceptions were incorporated by the leaders of the Fourth, who forgot all of Trotsky's teachings on the subject.

The same Moreno who, in 1973, wrote a fiercely critical document against rural guerrillaism (A Scandalous Document), had, in previous years, given uncritical and total support to focoist conceptions, as discussed in this critical article by comrade Francesco Giliani.

Compare the clear-cut words of Ted Grant in The Colonial Revolution with what Moreno wrote that same year:

"Our admiration, respect, and recognition towards them as leaders of the Latin American revolutionary process has no limits. In the case of Fidel Castro, we have no doubt in considering him, along with Lenin and Trotsky, one of the greatest revolutionary geniuses of this century." (N. Moreno, ‘Two methods for the Latin American revolution’, Estrategia, new series, 1964).

Pure adulation! Castro did not reciprocate such generosity of judgement: not only did he persecute Trotskyist activists in Cuba, but in his speech at the Tricontinental in January 1966 he stated – before representatives of revolutionary and national liberation movements from 82 different countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America – that the Fourth International was “repugnant and nauseating” and had become “a vulgar instrument of imperialism and reaction”.

Contrary to the high expectations that the Fourth's leaders had placed in it, OLAS was never an instrument for the extension of the armed struggle. Che Guevara's death in Bolivia, in an action that we do not hesitate to describe as desperate, put an end to any focoist ambitions of the Cuban regime, which now began to look towards Khrushchev's USSR.

In 1956, Ted Grant and his comrades formed the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) / Image: Ted Grant with Jimmy Deane

The truth is that the leaders of the Fourth International had totally lost faith in the revolutionary potential of the workers' movement in Europe. This process culminated just as the working class in Europe was showing its revolutionary character, with May '68 in France, the Hot Autumn in Italy, and the other great movements of the industrial proletariat across Europe.

The Fourth International had once again demonstrated its total inadequacy. Returning it to a Trotskyist programme was impossible. Ted Grant and the other comrades decided to turn their backs on it once and for all, and never retraced their steps. The balance sheet of that experience was collected in Ted’s 1970 text, The Programme of the International, which states:

"The analysis of this document shows that for 25 years, the USFI [United Secretariat of the Fourth International] has staggered from one mistake to another. From one wrong policy to its opposite, and then a higher level of mistakes back again. This is the mark of a thoroughly petit bourgeois tendency. As far as this grouping is concerned, at least its top leadership, this has now become organic. The whole outlook has been moulded by the mistakes of a quarter century, and become part and parcel of their methods of thinking, of their habits of work, and their whole outlook. Even to dignify this tendency by calling it centrist would be a compliment."

Ted’s goal became to build a new International based on the authentic ideas of Lenin and Trotsky.

In 1964, Ted Grant founded the newspaper Militant, and began to build an organisation that, through a skilful combination of independent work and Labour Party entryism, managed to grow significantly.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the conditions for entrism were maturing all over Europe. In Britain in 1970, the comrades first took control of the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS). Later they grew to influence numerous Labour Party branches and constituencies. The tactic was so successful that, by the 1980s, our organisation led Liverpool city council and had three MPs at a national level (Terry Fields, Dave Nellist and Pat Wall).

Control of the LPYS allowed us to make contact with a number of young socialist activists who were being radicalised internationally, through meetings of the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY). The Italian Communist Youth Federation (FGCI), the youth wing of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), also joined IUSY in the 1980s.

In Spain, in the fight against Franco's dictatorship, a left-wing tendency developed in the Socialist Youth of Spain (JSE). Thanks to the tireless work of Alan Woods, who moved to Madrid in 1976 and stayed there for seven years, its leaders, Luis Osorio and Alberto Arregui, joined our organisation. We also recruited comrades from the socialist youth in Germany and Sweden, creating the Committee for the Workers' International (CWI) in 1974. In 1974 the Militant had 600 comrades. This had grown to 8,000 just ten years later.

In the late 1980s in Britain, we led a mass movement of over 10 million who refused to pay the infamous Poll Tax. That movement brought down Thatcher who had ruled the country for 11 years. In those years, books were written about the Militant. Italian newspapers such as L'Unità, La Repubblica and the Corriere della Sera regularly wrote articles about the Trotskyists in the Labour Party.

The collapse of Stalinism and the ‘red 90s’

The Militant found itself playing a role that went far beyond its numerical strength. It had large influence in trade unions, and controlled trades councils, shop stewards' committees and other workers' organisations, etc.

The organisation formally had 8,000 militants. It was probably the largest Trotskyist organisation in the world. Despite this, there was a huge disproportion between its organised size and its strategic goal of the socialist transformation of society, for which it was necessary to win over the majority of the proletariat.

Moreover, in the 1980s, the objective conditions began to become more unfavourable. Unfortunately, several of Militant’s leaders either did not realise this or unconsciously concealed the problem.

Peter Taaffe and others lulled themselves into revolutionary illusions. On the other hand, comrades like Ted Grant and Alan Woods were beginning to realise that the situation was not as positive as it seemed on the surface, and that many problems were building up in the organisation.

This provoked a debate in the organisation's leadership group, with a majority led by Peter Taaffe and a minority led by Ted Grant and Alan Woods.

Taaffe, as general secretary, thought he could voluntaristically overcome the difficulties and contradictions the organisation was facing, making extremely optimistic assumptions about the objective situation, even going as far as to speak of the “red ‘90s”!

Ted Grant and Alan Woods, for their part, warned the organisation of the consequences that were being produced by this exposure to the pressure of the movement – a lowering of the theoretical and political level, a decline in participation in the branches, economistic and ‘movementist’ tendencies. In a word, the focus was becoming ‘building the movement’ at the expense of actually building the organisation. Organisational shortcuts were being sought to solve political problems.

Zinovievist tendencies thus developed. This term refers to the role played by Zinoviev, the president of the Communist International who, after Lenin's death, used administrative methods to resolve political disputes. His method was characterised by a harsh, commandist style of leadership whereby, instead of convincing comrades as was the norm in Lenin and Trotsky's time, the leadership gave orders and imposed decisions from above.

The consequences of the defeat of the miners in 1985, one of the most serious defeats that the British workers' movement had suffered, were not fully recognised by the Militant, which spoke of a 'draw'. Neither did Taaffe take note of the other defeats that had taken place in the rest of the world, from FIAT in Italy in 1980, to the civil servants in France, or the air traffic controllers in the USA, among others.

In 1964, Ted Grant founded the newspaper Militant, and began to build an organisation that, through a skilful combination of independent work and Labour Party entryism, managed to grow significantly / Image: 1988 rally of the Militant Tendency

The crash of the stock exchange on Black Monday in October 1987 was seen as proof that capitalism was heading towards a deep crisis of overproduction like the one Marx predicted, which it was claimed would soon open the way to new pre-revolutionary situations.

“After all, the Bolsheviks were not 8,000 like us in February 1917,” was the statement made at a meeting by Bob Labi, a leader of the majority faction in Militant. He forgot one small detail, namely that the Bolsheviks had been the traditional, mass organisation of the Russian proletariat even before the war.

At the same time the Spanish section, the second most important section of the International with around 1,000 members, was leading a movement of millions of students in 1987. And a year later, on 14 December 1988, Spain saw one of the most important general strikes in its history, with the participation of 10 million workers. These events only served to inflame enthusiasm.

But these were counter-tendencies to an objective situation that was generally moving in totally the opposite direction. With an ebb in the class struggle and with the capitalist system stabilising, Taaffe's idea of our forces launching new workers' parties by abandoning entrism was totally misplaced. It generated harmful illusions. It was for this reason that Ted Grant and Alan Woods opposed it, and certainly not because they believed that entrism could yield significant results at that time.

The coup in the USSR and the collapse of Stalinism

But the central debate was about Stalinism. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR, which took place between August and December 1991, definitively shifted the balance in favour of capitalism, which saw new potential markets of over two and a half billion consumers open up before it. This inevitably had an incredibly politically demoralising effect on most communist activists.

The prospect of the emergence of a crisis of overproduction was pushed back at least twenty years, to 2008 when it finally erupted. In the meantime, the period represented a breath of fresh air for the capitalist system. What attitude did the two fractions of the CWI have towards this issue?

Alan Woods and Ted Grant wrote a text entitled, The Truth about the Coup. It explained that, during the 1991 coup in Russia, there was, on one side, a Stalinist faction led by Ianaiev, and on the other pro-capitalist protests led by Yeltsin.

On the other hand, an article published in Militant on 22 August 1991 dealing with the same events, repeated the word 'people' 13 times. It spoke of “people power”, the “Soviet people”, the “Russian people”. What was striking about these articles was the absolute lack of class content. In fact, the point was that the working class was almost completely absent from these demonstrations: there were strikes recorded only in two factories in Leningrad and among a of section of the miners in Kuzbass and Vorkuta.

The Taaffist majority sided with Yeltsin, which was tantamount to siding with the counter-revolution. The minority appealed for independent action by the proletariat. This did not mean supporting the Stalinists' coup, but promoting workers' mobilisation independent of the two sides in the struggle. We quote from The Truth About the Coup:

“In the next paragraph, however, the authors… drag in yet another profound contradiction, that ‘these developments [the fall of the Stalinist regimes] remove a major obstacle to the politicisation of US workers and greater readiness to accept socialist ideas.’

“One rubs one's eyes in disbelief. The overthrow of Stalinism, in and of itself, does not in any way predispose US workers to accept the ideas of socialism. That depends on who does the overthrowing and for what purpose. This assertion about US workers, more than anything else, reveals the complete lack of understanding of the IS majority faction.

“Had the bureaucracy been really overthrown by a revolutionary movement of the working class, that would have had an extremely revolutionary effect on the psychology, not only of the workers of the USA, but everywhere.

“But the fact that this task was accomplished by the forces of the bourgeois counter-revolution has precisely the opposite effect. And all the ‘contradictory’ twisting and turning in the world will not alter this fact. How does the victory of Yeltsin and the pro-capitalist gangsters ‘predispose the US workers to accept socialist ideas?’ It will merely reinforce the propaganda of the bourgeois that ‘socialism is finished’, ‘nationalisation does not work’ and the ‘market economy is the only possible economic system’.”

A glaring mistake, but the Taaffites were not the only Trotskyist organisation to make it. The Morenistas in Argentina and the Lambertists in France, groups that were considerable in size (around 6,000 members), confused capitalist counter-revolution with political revolution or an unspecified 'democratic revolution'.

Lambert had developed the 'line of democracy' in 1984. So had Moreno. In a series of seminars of the mid-1980s, he questioned Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution in favour of the concept of 'democratic revolution'. Meanwhile, the less said the better about the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International and the French Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) which saw in Gorbachev's Perestroika a process of self-reform of Stalinism.

All these organisations, which had some clout in the 1980s, paid dearly for these mistakes.

Eventually, Ted Grant and Alan Woods were expelled from the CWI in 1992. Once again, they had to rebuild the organisation from scratch.

Thus, in 1992 the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) was born in Tarragona. In addition to  the British minority were almost all of the Spanish, Italian, Pakistani and Mexican sections and minority fractions from Sweden, Germany, Greece, France and Denmark. It was a new beginning.

After a long process lasting thirty years, which we will discuss in future articles, we have accumulated crucial theoretical and political capital and experience on the basis of which we have now launched the new Revolutionary Communist International, which sets as its goal the task of becoming a decisive factor in the construction of a new revolutionary International and a mass force, without which it would be impossible to pave the way for the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a communist society.