The Times That Try Men’s Souls¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter chronicles the most arduous period of Ted Grant's political life, following the destruction of the Revolutionary Communist Party by Gerry Healy's wrecking operations at the end of 1950. Homeless and financially destitute, Grant lived first in a caravan on a Hackney bomb-site before being rehoused by the council in Islington, surviving by working as a door-to-door brush salesman. His attitude to adversity resembled the ancient Cynics — total indifference to material privation, his eyes fixed on broad historical principles. Trotsky's words sustained him: a great idea raises one above personal misery and baseness.
By 1951, the group numbered only twenty members in London and eleven in Liverpool, working inside the Labour Party. They launched the theoretical magazine International Socialist in February 1952, appearing sporadically for lack of funds. The 1950s were a barren decade of small meetings and fruitless journeys. Yet Grant's strategic principle remained unwavering: "Outside the Labour Movement there is nothing." In Problems of Entrism (1959), he argued the revolutionary party must be built through patient, flexible work within the mass organisations to which workers first turn, not by simply proclaiming a sect.
Grant's 1960 essay Will There Be a Slump? rebutted Keynesian claims that the boom-slump cycle was abolished, predicting a catastrophic downswing confirmed by the 1974-75 recession. On Stalin's death in 1953, Grant believed the dictator was murdered by the bureaucracy, pointing to the Doctor's Plot as proof of an impending purge. The chapter details the group's fraught collaboration with Pablo in forming the Revolutionary Socialist League in 1956, a pragmatic move Grant justified despite harbouring no illusions. He rejected Pablo's war prognosis, arguing nuclear mutual assured destruction and the strength of the European working class prevented world war — a position vindicated during the Cuban missile crisis when Grant reassured a tearful French comrade there would be no war.
The narrative concludes with the internal crisis provoked by the undeclared Pabloite faction of Pat Jordan and Ken Coates, whose sniping and sabotage Grant considered indistinguishable from wrecking. Jimmy Deane, initially a conciliator, eventually concluded that a proletarian tendency cannot unite with unprincipled petty-bourgeois elements. The crisis was resolved only when Jordan and Coates broke from the group, with Deane becoming general secretary — though by this period he was demoralised, struggling with family and financial problems, drinking heavily.