The Tide Turns¶
Core Argument¶
In the early 1960s, the organisation counted fewer than 50 members nationwide, with no funds, no full-time workers, no centre, and virtually no paper. The turning point came with the launch of Militant in October 1964. The first issue named Roger Protz as editor, sparking a major row. Protz, a petty-bourgeois element demanding editorial control, soon left to join the SWP. On Ted Grant’s insistence, the masthead was changed from “For Youth and Labour” to “For Labour and Youth”. The first Militant meeting in Brighton drew about thirty people, and the group rented three rooms in an ILP office at 197 King’s Cross Road. A breakthrough occurred at Sussex University, where systematic student work began; the Sussex comrades’ financial contributions paid Peter Taaffe’s wages and bought the centre’s first colour duplicator.
Ted Grant predicted the post-war economic upswing would end in a crisis of overproduction, a position ridiculed as “primitive slumpism”. The Cliffites—now the SWP—capitulated to Keynesianism, arguing a “permanent arms economy” had eliminated slumps. Almost all sects abandoned the working class for students, peasants, or the lumpenproletariat, following Marcuse. The USFI leaders wrote off the French working class as “bourgeoisified”. May 1968 vindicated Grant’s position: ten million workers occupied factories, but the PCF refused power. The other tendencies had not expected it; they had written off the working class. Unions grew rapidly, with factories like Citroën—previously a site of terror with banned unions and constant harassment—becoming organised overnight. The Communist Party expanded, setting up over 80 new branches in Paris alone and running out of membership cards. However, without a sizeable Trotskyist current to combat the reformist leadership, many new communists became demoralised and left politics after the movement was sold out.
The tendency operated a clean, democratic internal regime. Grant stood for democratic centralism as a dynamic principle, not a static formula. The Coxhead affair in 1973 demonstrated this: a secret faction produced a 100-page document attacking the tendency’s positions. The leadership printed and distributed it without reply, gave the opposition equal speaking time, and defeated them politically without personal attacks. Grant insisted Coxhead remain on the Central Committee to defend his ideas.
After 1970, objective conditions changed. The Heath government’s anti-union laws provoked mass mobilisation, culminating in the 1974 miners’ strike that brought down the government. The Labour government then imposed an incomes policy, leading to disappointment and the “winter of discontent”. The shift to the left saw right-wing union bosses replaced by left-wing figures, vindicating the tendency’s tactic of remaining in the Labour Party. The ultra-left sects repeatedly called for workers to leave the right-wing unions and form new ones, with disastrous results. The sects ruled out the possibility that the unions would change through events, just as they ruled out change in the Labour Party. Events proved them wrong. Radicalisation spread to the Labour Party, which swung left in opposition. Under left leaders Tony Benn and Eric Heffer, the Party was open to socialist ideas. The right wing split to form the SDP, weakening the bureaucracy. The Militant tendency gained widespread support for Marxism in the Labour Party and unions, growing from fewer than 80 comrades in 1966 to over 600 by 1975, with a weekly newspaper from January 1972. This success was possible only because the tendency remained inside the Labour Party while others left.