Left Communism and Trotskyism

Loren Goldner has published a four way debate between left communists on Left Communism and Trotskyism that is a very interesting read. And for those of you who read Le Revue Gauche, he begins his email looking at CLR James whom I blogged about in February for Black History Month.

Left Communism and Trotskyism: A Roundtable (2007)

The following is a round-table which took place in March 2007. The common thread is the question of whether the terms of the debate emerging from the years 1917-1923, codified today in different variants of "left communism" and "Trotskyism" have any practical meaning today. Three of the participants (Loren, Amiri and Will, live in the U.S.; the fourth, Yves, lives in France. We decided to make the proceedings public in hope that they are of use to others interested in these questions.

You are familiar with James's rather unusual take on the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, expounded here but actually stated better in his masterpiece Notes on Dialectics (which I highly recommend). For James, Lenin was almost a spontaneist, a party-builder yes, but after he bit the Hegelian apple in 1914, was in another universe from What Is To Be Done?, which he repudiated ca. 1909 (following the events of 1905). James sees TROTSKY as the problem, for having continued Lenin's pre-1917 conceptions into the new period in which they were superseded (all this is laid out in the two texts on James on my web site http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner). For James, bureaucratic capitalism after the defeat of the Russian Revolution teaches "everyone" the truth of capitalism, so the party is no longer necessary, as witnessed by Hungary '56, France '68 and Poland 80-81. It's so simple it's charming, I guess. But the Marxist organization, for reasons never explained well, is still necessary, not to organize the workers, mind you, but to organize the Marxists. This is (as I say in those two texts on my web site Break Their Haughty Power) where they lose me, namely saying on one hand that the "whole class has become (and therefore superceded) the party" but at the same it is necessary to organize the Marxists because the working class needs them. For what?

But again, I digress. What I really wanted to write you about is my inability, 90 years on, to shake free of the Russian Revolution. Symptoms: in Ulsan (South Korea) in December, the worker group there asked me to speak on the differences between Rosa and Lenin, which I did (not terribly well, and with a very mediocre interpreter). In no time we were deep into a two-hour discussion of what happened in Russia in the 20's (the agrarian question). And this was not some cadaverous nostalgia piece as might be served up at an Spartacist League meeting, but with intense back-and-forth and questions and furious note-taking. The point is that no matter where you start out, somehow the question of "what went wrong in Russia" comes front and center. (In January, the Kronstadt debate erupted in Korea. A leading member of the British SWP-affiliated All Together group published a large theoretical work with a defense of Trotsky. This resulted in more "hue and cry over Kronstadt" in the press.

Is this just me or is it still contemporary reality?

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Thousands pay their respects at funeral of veteran Sri Lankan Trotskyist Wije Dias

On Saturday, nearly one thousand family members, comrades and supporters gathered at the Borella Cemetery in Colombo from all parts of the country to pay their last respects to the late comrade Wije Dias, chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).

Pall bearers carry Comrade Wije Dias' coffin [Photo: WSWS]

The casket with Wije’s remains was taken to the cemetery in a solemn procession of 500, including SEP members and sympathisers, marching the two kilometres from the funeral parlor. The Internationale was played throughout the march.

Wije Dias died on the morning of July 27 from a massive heart attack, just one month before his 81st birthday. His remains were kept at the Jayaratne Respect Home in Borella, Colombo from Thursday morning for those who wished to pay their last respects.

He was a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the predecessor of the SEP. After the untimely demise of Keerthi Balasuriya, the founding General Secretary of the RCL, in December 1987, Wije took up the responsibility of general secretary until last May when he was elected to the new position of party chairman.

Over three days, nearly 2,000 people from all parts of the island came to pay their respects, including SEP members, supporters, family members, artists, intellectuals, workers and students. Groups from the North and South and the Central plantation districts traveled to the funeral despite serious transport disruptions caused by acute fuel shortages.

A section of the funeral procession [Photo: WSWS]

Comrade Wije’s death and his funeral was reported with photos on several private as well as state television channels in their prime-time news together with brief comments on Wije’s political role. The major newspapers in Sinhala, Tamil and English also published prominent reports which all referred to Dias as an intransigent fighter who dedicated his adult life to Trotskyism, and noted the SEP and its relationship to the ICFI.

The Daily Mirror, a widely circulated English-language newspaper, headlined its report “Legendary Trotskyist Wije Dias no more.” The Sri Lanka Mirror declared: “Sri Lankan Trotskyist icon passes away.”

The funeral procession led by party members dressed in red attracted the attention of many on the roadsides. A banner at the front of the procession featured his photo with the inscription “Our Revolutionary Salute to Comrade Wije Dias, Chairman of the SEP, the Sri Lankan Section of ICFI.” Members of the health, education and plantation action committees carried banners bearing messages of condolence.

The entire funeral was broadcast live on the SEP Facebook page which had an audience of nearly 1,000, including from the US, Europe, Australia, India, the Middle East and several other countries. So far, over 3,000 people have watched the video and nearly 450 people have shared it. Many people, including members of the SEP’s sister parties, commented, adding their messages of condolence and revolutionary salute.

K. Ratnayake, a long-time SEP member, Sri Lankan WSWS national editor and a very close comrade of Dias, chaired the meeting. In opening, he referred to the RCL’s founding in 1968 in the wake of the betrayal by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) of the principles of socialist internationalism when it entered the bourgeois coalition government of Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike in 1964.

“When we look back at the period around 1968, it was not a very easy time politically. The wave of bankrupt, reactionary coalition politics—of socialism via parliamentary road—was spreading. At that time, Maoism, Castroism, Guevarism and the armed struggle were the political fashion internationally. Marxism and the revolutionary role of the working class were rejected. These ideologies were echoed in Sri Lanka. Keerthi, Wije and other comrades who founded the RCL in 1968 rejected these anti-Marxist theories and based the party on Trotskyism, the continuation of Marxism, which was defended only by the International Committee.”

Ratnayake said that Wije’s death was a great loss for Sri Lankan section as well as the ICFI, adding: “But we pledge to honor him by fighting relentlessly for the Trotskyist perspective to which he devoted his entire life.” He explained that Wije saw the struggles of the workers, youth and oppressed in Sri Lanka over the last three months very optimistically and was committed to the last minute of his life to arm and lead the SEP politically amid those developments.

K. Ratnayake, Sri Lankan WSWS national editor [Photo: WSWS]

David North, chairman of the US SEP and the WSWS International Editorial Board, addressed the gathering via the internet. He began his remarks by expressing his regret at not being able to be in Colombo as comrade Wije was being laid to rest. All those who are gathered at Dias’s funeral, North said, “are aware that they are in the presence of history.” He continued: “It can be declared unequivocally that Wije Dias played a monumental role, spanning sixty years, in the struggle to build the Trotskyist movement.”

North said that Wije and a remarkable cadre of young Trotskyists, led by Keerthi Balasuriya, had to “swim against the stream” in founding the RCL. But Wije, Keerthi, and their comrades, North said, “did so with unwavering confidence in the power of historical truth, the correctness of the perspective and program of the Fourth International, and the revolutionary role of the working class in Sri Lanka and throughout the world.”

The full text of David North’s tribute is published here.

SEP Political Committee member, Vilani Peiris, described the crucial role played by Dias in the formation of the RCL. She explained that Dias alongside with Keerthi Balasuriya drew brilliantly on the political guidance and decisive intervention made by the ICFI, which explained that the root of the great betrayal by the LSSP lay not nationally, but internationally in Pabloite revisionism.

Saman Gunadasa, SEP Assistant Secretary, explained that Comrade Wije worked very enthusiastically to prepare the party for the current class struggle developing in Sri Lanka. He paid tribute to Wije’s untiring efforts in his last days—his active involvement in the Third National Congress of the SEP in Sri Lanka and his close collaboration with the ICFI in producing the SEP’s decisive latest statement entitled “For a Democratic & Socialist Congress Workers and Rural Masses.” Saman concluded his speech pledging that the party would take forward the struggle for the Fourth International, as Wije had done and would have wished.

Speaking in Tamil, SEP Political Committee member M. Thevarajah said: “I met Wije in Jaffna in 1976, just two months after I joined the party. He came there to take theoretical classes on Lenin’s book What Is to Be Done. He insisted that the working class was the only revolutionary class and the socialist consciousness could be provided only by a revolutionary party. He insisted on the role of the Marxist Party for the victory of socialist revolution. After 45 years we can see how much that was been vindicated…

M. Thevarajah

“Amid the numerous nationalist tendencies, comrade Wije, with the RCL’s determined young comrades led by Keerthi, firmly fought for the internationalist policies based on the understanding that the working class is the international revolutionary class. We should learn from the life of comrade Wije and dedicate ourselves to bringing the working class to power.”

Janarthi, Wije’s nine-year-old granddaughter, addressed the assembly on behalf of his family. She said that grandfather was an amazing person who constantly cared about her and that what everyone else had said about him inspired her to be as determined as he was. “Throughout his efforts to make a workers’ revolution, he still made time for his family and made time for me,” she said. On behalf of the family, she thanked all who participated in the occasion.

Kapila Fernando, an SEP Political Committee member and convener of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, said: “It should be mentioned in particular that all comrades in the youth movement received immense guidance from comrade Wije in organising public meetings and in writing articles for the WSWS about the attacks on public education, youth unemployment and other cultural issues.” In some cases, he wrote the necessary analysis himself to develop the youth movement, drawing on his vast knowledge and political sharpness.

Kapila recalled that Wije was arrested in 1986, when he was addressing a meeting in Chilaw defending free education. He was kept in jail for six weeks, along with two other party members, by the police as part of the repression unleashed by the then United National Party (UNP) regime.

“All of us in the youth movement considered it a great privilege to work with him,” he said.

SEP General Secretary Deepal Jayasekara [Photo: WSWS]

Deepal Jayasekara, SEP general secretary, delivered the concluding remarks. He said starting with the fight against the betrayal of the LSSP, comrade Wije’s commitment to the principles of Trotskyist socialist internationalism remained unbroken throughout his entire political life. “In the midst of all the difficulties that our party faced as the RCL from 1968 to 1996, and since then as the SEP in Sri Lanka and globally due to the malign nature of capitalist class rule, he fought for those principles without hesitation and with indomitable courage.”

Explaining the decisiveness of Wije’s leadership in advancing the SEP struggle to build the unity of the Sinhala-Tamil working class, Jayasekara said: “Comrade Wije committed himself very firmly to the struggle to unify the working class against the Sinhala chauvinism of the Colombo government, as well as the Tamil separatism of the LTTE…

“Comrade Wije will be given the respect he deserves by building the SEP as the mass revolutionary party in Sri Lanka and the ICFI internationally and advancing the socialist internationalism to which he devoted his entire adult life.”

The funeral gathering ended with singing of the Internationale.

Comrades sing the Internationale at the end of the funeral gathering. [Photo: WSWS]

The Curious Case of Leon Trotsky's Heirs in Sri Lanka

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How the British state came to see Militant as a ‘subversive threat’

STEVE JONES 06 JAN 2022

A new study has revealed how the British secret services took covert action against Trotskyist groups, in particular the Militant, which they regarded as a threat. This should serve as a warning to activists today not to be complacent.

In the post-war period, MI5 (the British state’s internal security agency) paid little attention to the activities of Trotskyists in Britain, regarding the threat that they posed to be minimal. But the rise of the Militant in the 1970s and 1980s – a tightly organised, professional and theoretically trained organisation founded by Ted Grant – completely transformed the Secret Services’ perception of Trotskyism.

For the first time, it came to regard it as a serious subversive threat. Today, the best traditions of Trotskyism and the Militant are alive and growing in the International Marxist Tendency.

There can be little doubt that the British state has had a long and disreputable history of spying on – and attempting to undermine – the labour and trade union movement.

In particular, radical campaigning organisations have been targeted by bodies such as the police and MI5 over the years, often to the point of illegality.

The ‘spy cops’ revelations showed how undercover police officers have infiltrated various campaigns, often remaining hidden for years. These spies often acted as agent provocateurs, pushing activists to carry out acts for which arrests could be made.

Now a new academic study by George Kassimeris and Oliver Price, published by the journal Contemporary British History, takes a closer look at how the state sought to take covert action against Trotskyist groups in Britain, and in particular the Militant.

The first part of the study outlines the basic history of British Trotskyism from 1937 onwards – mainly drawn, it must be said, from old and not always totally reliable source books.

Readers wanting a more accurate history should go to History of British Trotskyism by Ted Grant and The Permanent Revolutionary by Alan Woods, both published by Wellred Books.
Informers and infiltrators



During the Second World War, the state did carry out an investigation in 1944 of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) to see if it posed a threat to the war effort. Attempts were made to recruit informers and infiltrate RCP meetings, with little success it should be noted.

The state was particularly concerned on account of the fact that in the midst of World War Two, all the main parties were in a wartime coalition.

On the left, the Communist Party was under orders from Moscow to support the Churchill cabinet. It played a despicable role in breaking strikes of workers, who it argued must subordinate their interests to the bosses in order to win the war. The RCP was left as the only opposition party in the whole of Britain.

MI5 noted that in the course of the war, the Trotskyists evolved from “an unimportant handful of talkers” in 1940 to become “a disciplined body of some size, having programme, finance and organisation and the determination to use them” by 1945.

The agency was particularly interested in the WIL, led by Ted Grant and Jock Haston and which would become the core of the RCP. They were particularly interested in its ‘armed forces work’.

MI5 was particularly concerned when the RCP was formed, noting that this was the first time a Trotskyist organisation’s name “began to be heard outside its own slummy basement rooms”.

No action was taken, however, despite the complaints from His Majesty’s Loyal Communist Party. And, indeed, after the fragmentation of the RCP following the war, the various left groups linked to Trotskyism were pretty much ignored from then on until the emergence of the Militant tendency.

It was understandable that the secret services should regard Trotskyism now as a diminished threat. With the post-war boom and the strengthening of reformism and consensus politics, the RCP soon fell apart into various factions – most, with the exception of Ted Grant’s group, having little connection to reality.

The difficult conditions of the period meant that it was difficult to get a foothold. Social peace seemed to be the order of the day.

This changed with the rise of the anti-Vietnam war campaign in 1968. The Labour government was sufficiently concerned about this wave of youth radicalism to set up a special section of the police – the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS, later becoming Special Branch) – to keep track of what was going on.

Spies targeted the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign; although they later concluded that the government's fears had been overstated: “Despite the impact the Trotskyists were able to have on the protest movement [against the Vietnam War], MI5 believed that its influence was always going to be limited because the Trotskyist movement was so divided.”

But the state would soon find that it had severely underestimated the Trotskyists.
Militant tendency



By the mid-1970s, the attention of the state had turned to the Labour Party and the trade unions.

The old consensus politics of the post-war boom had long gone; and a growing left presence in the movement had alerted the state to the potential dangers of a radical shift inside the mass organisations of the working class. A right-wing Labour Party was fine, but a left-moving one was cause for concern.

An MI5 investigation in 1975 conducted a “wide-ranging investigation” into “the extent of subversive infiltration and influence in the Labour Party”; and at this point, the secret services picked up on the growing strength of the Militant tendency.

The secret services were alarmed at the growing influence of Militant inside the Labour Party:


“Trotskyist ‘entrism’ … in CLPs [Constituency Labour Parties] presents a direct threat to some MPs and thus to the Parliamentary Labour Party’s ability to resist subversive pressures upon and within the Party as a whole.”

It estimated that there was Trotskyist influence in 9 CLPs in which the sitting Labour MP was at risk, and in another 67 CLPs there was some degree of Trotskyist influence. Kassimeris and Price conclude, significantly:


“For the first time, … MI5 believed that Trotskyism posed a significant danger, not only to an established political party but, since Labour was in government at the time, potentially to the British state.”

In 1976, the Home Secretary under right-wing Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, personally requested information from the Director General of MI5 concerning Trotskyist penetration into the party.

MI5 assessed the base that Militant had, and noted that the Labour bureaucracy did not seem capable of dealing with it. They noted that Militant was quite unlike any of the other far-left groups – it was a disciplined Bolshevik organisation, with a serious approach to the mass movement and to Marxist theory:


“Militant was able to develop and gain significant influence not only due to the lax disciplinary procedures in the Labour Party, but also because of the dedication of its members and its strong internal discipline—a characteristic which most other Trotskyist groups had lacked.”

The Labour government continued to push for more information, and spies were sent in to monitor Militant conferences. Famously, at one event, two agents ended up having to hide behind a partition from early morning to late evening to record the day’s discussions. According to one of those Special Branch officers:


“We crept in, into the little cubby hole at 8 o’clock in the morning with a bucket to cater for our needs, and we stayed there until all the delegates had left, after nearly 7 o’clock at night, and we recorded the proceedings on a small, Swiss high tech tape recorder provided by MI5 for us … We were that near to people standing at the back of the hall and just the width of a small, thin wooden partition, looking through a peep hole.”

Both the security services and Special Branch sent in infiltrators, sometimes unaware of each other’s presence. Around 30 informers were recruited.

This surveillance extended to the use of agents to spy on Militant supporters Dave Nellist and Terry Fields, who were elected as Labour MPs for Coventry South East and Liverpool Broadgreen respectively in 1983. Indeed, an agent was sent into Coventry Labour Party to monitor Nellist and was “instructed to ‘cultivate’ Nellist, and developed a close relationship with him, ‘helping him with a lot of things’ and ‘going around with him to a lot of meetings’.”
Proscription and the Poll Tax

The study claims that although the state continued to monitor the actions of Militant, and in particular those Militant supporters who had become Labour MPs, interest waned after the mid-1980s as Militant declined.

For some reason, the study’s authors seem to think that this was all down to Labour taking action against Militant. The tendency was officially proscribed from the party, with Kinnock making his infamous speech at the Labour conference against the Militant-led Liverpool City Council.

In fact, the Labour right wing’s attacks did not have anything like the detrimental impact on the Militant’s influence that is claimed. Militant moved on to play a leading role in the anti-poll tax campaign, which would ultimately help to bring down Thatcher.
Civil service



The state was not just interested in Militant and the Labour Party, however. By the 1980s, concerns were being raised about what was happening in the civil service and its main trade union at the time, the CPSA (part of what today forms the PCS union).

The public sector had changed dramatically over the previous few decades. The bowler-hat brigade had been replaced by a new layer of employees, who were mostly much younger and from more working-class backgrounds.

As such, inevitably, people with more left-wing views now found themselves working inside the civil service.

A vetting system had always existed inside the state, mainly to stop Communist Party members and the like getting anywhere near sensitive information. But left-wing shifts inside the CPSA flagged up that the Militant could now pose a threat inside the state machine. In the words of Kassimeris and Price, this was a cause of “significant unease” for the Security Service.

Cabinet secretary Sir Robert Armstrong warned a meeting of top civil servants that Militant was a threat to “the effective operation of government”.

When a strike broke out at the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) in Newcastle in 1984, MI5 demanded the department give it a report on Militant activities in the branch. It found that one-third of the union representatives who had facility time were probably Militant activists.

Another top civil servant, Sir Kenneth Stowe, warned in November 1984 that Thatcher’s policies were creating a radical mood inside the CPSA, which was undermining the old right-wing leadership.

So it was that Sir Robert Armstrong commissioned in early 1985 a full report into leftist groups inside the civil service. 284 people were identified as Militant supporters – although the real figure was believed to be higher. Again the report picked Militant for particular mention:


“Militant members were considered a greater threat than other Trotskyists in the Civil Service due to their organisational capabilities and their stronghold in some Civil Service unions. In 1986, a Militant member, John Macreadie, was elected general secretary of the CPSA.”

Armstrong reported to Thatcher that the Militant threat was serious, and that new covert procedures should be put into effect. Thatcher personally signed off on the report’s recommendations, advising senior civil servants to “be very ready to sack subversive troublemakers if they showed any cause under the Civil Service rules”.

As a result, many left-wing civil servants found themselves being moved to less sensitive positions, or were simply blocked from taking up jobs without being told why.
Power and privileges

The study concludes by emphasising that the state considered Militant to be a real threat to the status quo. They understood that Militant’s base and orientation towards the labour and trade movement made them a danger unlike any other group. In the words of Kassimeris and Price:


“Militant Tendency fundamentally changed the way in which British intelligence agencies perceived Trotskyism. For the first time in nearly half a century of investigating the Trotskyist movement, the Secret Services came to believe that a Trotskyist group had the potential to pose a significant subversive threat to Britain.

“Militant was different from other Trotskyist groups partly because it had been able to gain a significant power-base thanks to the lenient Labour Party discipline procedures which had previously prevented the far left from entering the party. Militant, unlike previous Trotskyist movements, maintained discipline and unity – a key to its success.

“… For the first time, Trotskyists were specifically targeted, under an informal ‘purge’ procedure that had long prevented Communists from working in certain Civil Service jobs.

“… MI5’s definition of subversion, adopted in 1972 was: ‘activities threatening the safety or well-being of the State and intended to undermine or overthrow Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means’. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Militant was the first and, so far, only Trotskyist organisation that both fitted this definition and was perceived to pose a genuine threat to security.”

The long-held belief that genuine Marxist ideas could never actually pose a threat was changed forever by the progress of Militant.

Four decades on, it is tempting to treat this as just a story belonging to the history books. Militant shot itself in the foot with its ultra-left turn in 1991, and declined thereafter. Instead, the genuine ideas and methods of Marxism are today represented by Socialist Appeal, which in 1992 broke with Militant.

Yet, as the ‘spy cops’ scandal shows, the police have continued to infiltrate left groups. Both MI5 and Special Branch have not gone away. Under conditions of economic and political crisis, they will again concentrate their energies on Marxists and militant activists in the movement.

This is a warning not to be complacent. The state, in the final analysis, will always act in the interests of the ruling class. As this account shows, they will go to any length – legal or otherwise – to defend the capitalist system, and the power, privileges, and profits of those at its top

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