Production¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter "Production" from Ted Grant's History of British Trotskyism centres on the internal crisis that erupted within the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in the late 1940s over the question of entry into the Labour Party. Grant argues that the RCP’s leadership, having abandoned the tactic of the Transitional Programme, succumbed to a sectarian and sterile approach that isolated the party from the mass working-class movement. The core narrative thrust is the struggle between the party’s official line—which advocated for an independent, open party building a revolutionary base outside the Labour Party—and the minority position, led by Grant and his co-thinkers, which insisted on a turn towards the Labour Party to reach the radicalised workers who were its natural constituency.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical experience of the Bolsheviks and the early Comintern, particularly Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, to argue that the RCP’s refusal to work within the Labour Party was a fundamental error. Grant contends that the Labour Party, despite its reformist leadership, remained the mass party of the British working class, and that revolutionary socialists had a duty to operate within it to win a layer of its activists. The evidence marshalled includes the RCP’s dwindling membership, its inability to influence major strikes or industrial struggles, and the growing isolation of its cadre from the shop-floor militants who were the party’s natural base. Grant points to the success of the Socialist Review group (the forerunner of the Militant tendency) in building a base inside the Labour Party as a vindication of the entryist tactic.
The polemic is directed squarely against the RCP’s leadership, particularly figures like Jock Haston and Gerry Healy, who Grant accuses of adopting a leftist, ultra-sectarian position that mimicked the worst habits of the Socialist Workers Party (then the Workers Revolutionary Party) and the International Socialists. Grant argues that their rejection of entryism was not a principled defence of revolutionary independence but a retreat into a ghetto, driven by a fear of being absorbed into reformism and a failure to understand the dialectical relationship between the revolutionary party and the mass movement. The chapter also contains a sharp critique of the Trotskyist orthodoxy of the time, which Grant claims had ossified into a dogma that mistook propaganda for action. The central claim is that the RCP’s refusal to turn towards the Labour Party condemned it to irrelevance, and that only a return to the Leninist tactic of working within the mass organisations of the working class could revive the revolutionary project in Britain.