The new MIR is now out and contains unpublished material on the history of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The MIR also contains articles on the Marxist view of history, Marxists and Religion and Ted Grant’s article The character of the European Revolution.
The new MIR is now out. Amongst many other things, it contains unpublished material on the history of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
This material, written by comrade Ian Hunter in 1981, contains a defence of the marvellous contribution of the Revolutionary Communist Party during and following the Second World War. The article was written in reply to Jim Higgins’ diatribe against the RCP in his “Ten Years for the Locust”, published in International Socialism, No.14, in the autumn of 1963.
Up until that time, little had been written about the British Trotskyist movement during these years. Higgins, who had been a member of the Communist Party and then the Socialist Labour League, was by this time a leading member of the International Socialists, the sectarian group founded by Tony Cliff, which later became the Socialist Workers Party. As with Cliff himself later on, the wise-acre Higgins attempted to write off the heroic work of British Trotskyism in a series of blatant distortions, aimed at discrediting the role in particular of Ted Grant and Jock Haston, the main leaders of the RCP.
By the early 1960s, the Cliff group had long since broken with Trotskyism or Leninism and was attempting to reinvent itself as the true followers of poor old Rosa Luxemburg, who never deserved such dishonour. Part of this reinvention was an attempt to ridicule genuine Trotskyism by falsifying its significance and history. This was Higgin’s chosen role: dishonest from start to finish. His whole appraisal to Trotskyism at this time, indicated by the title of his article, “Ten Years for the Locust”, is to write off the whole episode as wasted years.
This is far from the truth. As Ian Hunter shows, the RCP and its forerunner, the Workers International League (WIL), conducted the most successful work of any Trotskyist organisation anywhere in the world during the Second World War. The reason for its demise in 1949, despite the difficult objective conditions, was not the party’s programme or perspectives, but the criminal role of Gerry Healy and the leadership of the so-called Fourth International, Pablo, Frank, Mandel and Cannon, who, for reasons of prestige, had manoeuvred since 1943 to undermine and destroy the Grant/Haston leadership. “Rule or ruin”, they deliberately set out to wreck the RCP in the process.
We are publishing Ian Hunter’s article as a welcome contribution to the history of British Trotskyism and the education of the new generation of workers and youth who have recently been attracted to Trotskyism. It serves to clearly demonstrate the continuity of our movement right back to the days of the Left Opposition and the Third International led by Lenin and Trotsky.
The MIR also contains articles on the Marxist view of history, Marxists and Religion and Ted Grant’s article The character of the European Revolution (1946).
You can subsribe to the MIR on the Wellred Bookshop homepage.
