3. The attitude of the ‘Left’ towards the party finances¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter exposes the parasitic relationship of the Left Faction to the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) through the concrete question of party finances. From the moment of fusion, the Left Faction systematically paid only the minimum party dues while simultaneously maintaining three full-time paid faction officials through separate faction levies. The Political Bureau tolerated this arrangement as part of its policy of maximum concession to the Left. The conflict escalated when the Central Committee introduced an income-based levy to address the party’s general financial crisis.
The chapter’s polemical force rests on a single piece of documentary evidence: a letter from JLR to TM, discovered in August 1944 when a Glasgow worker found it abandoned in a public library and passed it to an RCP member. JLR’s letter is reproduced in full. It denounces the new levy as a “racket” aimed at the Left and declares that no “cent more” will be paid. JLR boasts that any surplus above £3 5 shillings per week among Left members should be captured not at 10 per cent but at 100 per cent for the faction. The letter explicitly instructs that faction members must be kept “up to scratch” on RCP books to avoid expulsion, while simultaneously building factional “financial reserves” for the period after the “Stalinist hangover” is purged. Most damningly, JLR reveals that one of the Left’s paid professionals is occupied full-time studying Byzantium—a thousand-year-old civilisation—while the maintenance of the British Section of the Fourth International is dismissed as “pouring money down the drain.”
When confronted by Comrade Haston, JLR refused comment and referred the matter to TM as faction secretary. TM’s written reply does not deny the letter’s authenticity but argues it was not “meant to be taken literally.” He asserts that the Left is “politically hostile” to the RCP and considers its activities “a waste of time,” so money spent by the party is money wasted. The chapter concludes with a terse refusal to dignify TM’s “explanation” with further comment, leaving the reader to judge the faction’s conduct against its own words. The argument is not abstract: it demonstrates that the Left Faction treated the RCP as a shell to be hollowed out, its dues skimmed, and its resources diverted to factional ends, all while one of its functionaries studied ancient history on the faction’s payroll.