The Tide Begins to Turn¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter chronicles a pivotal period in the history of the Trotskyist tendency led by Ted Grant, spanning the early 1960s through to its international isolation following the 1965 World Congress. The narrative opens with Grant's personal circumstances: sacked from Kleen-e-ze Brush in January 1961 for neglecting his duties in favour of political work, his unemployment benefit rejected, he eventually secured permanent night shifts as an international telephone operator by autumn 1962, enabling him to function as a full-time political worker during daylight hours.
The tendency was organisationally weak—no money, office, newspaper, or full-timers—while confronting the Healyite Socialist Labour League, which possessed a weekly paper and substantial apparatus. In a misguided attempt to counter this, comrades collaborated with the Cliff group (International Socialists) to launch Young Guard. This shortcut failed disastrously: the Cliffites took over by manoeuvre, disputes erupted over Cuba and the USSR, and the paper collapsed, leaving the tendency worse off. The SLL employed hooligan tactics, recruiting declassed youth to attack Young Socialist branches and break up meetings, and acted as strike-breakers during the 1964 apprentices' strike.
Under pressure from the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the tendency entered a doomed unification with the tiny International Group in 1964, launching Militant. The fusion quickly broke down due to lack of political basis. At a stormy National Committee meeting attended by Pierre Frank and Joe Hansen, Jimmy Deane confronted them about clandestine factional intrigue organised by Alan Harris, slamming the table and accusing Frank of forming a faction against Trotsky. The IG walked out, later publishing the reformist The Week and eventually veering ultra-left as the International Marxist Group, with Tariq Ali as its most prominent figure.
Up to 1965, the group was formally the British section of the USFI. Grant had been sceptical of the 1963 reunification, predicting it would unite two groups into ten. The International leadership capitulated to Maoism, distributing Maoist literature in Italy and pushing the Irish group into disastrous unification with a Maoist outfit. At the 1965 World Congress, Grant wrote The Sino-Soviet Dispute and the Colonial Revolution, arguing the International must emphasise basic Trotskyist ideas and not tail behind Stalinists or left reformists. The British section was reduced to sympathiser status; Grant told the Congress they would not return for a very long time.
The chapter develops Grant's theory of proletarian Bonapartism, extending Trotsky's analysis to explain the distorted form of permanent revolution in colonial revolutions after 1945, given the delay of socialist revolution in the West. The Cuban Revolution did not follow the classical form—the working class never held power through soviets—and suffered bureaucratic deformation from the start due to the absence of genuine Leninist parties. In Syria, the 1963 coup by radical young officers nationalised banks, oil companies and major industries, redistributed land, and created a new state machine. Grant supported these nationalisations as progressive but argued the lack of workers' democracy meant a totalitarian bureaucratic system, not socialism, requiring a second political revolution. The Afghan Saur Revolution of 1978–79 followed a similar pattern, carrying out progressive measures that met ferocious opposition. Grant argued that supporting the Soviet invasion in isolation would be correct, but its international effects on consciousness were entirely reactionary, providing the excuse for US imperialism to intervene.