Political characterisation based on gossip¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter is a forensic polemic against Stuart’s accusation, published by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States, that a leading British Trotskyist, Ted Grant, displayed a “deviation of national colouring” by referring to the British Eighth Army as “our Eighth Army”. The author treats this charge not merely as an error but as a scandalous falsification, a “monstrous falsification” and a “malicious lie”, which ought to have been checked at source before being circulated in the international movement. The core argument is that Stuart has torn a phrase from its context to manufacture evidence of chauvinism, when in fact Grant’s remark was a revolutionary class analysis of the radicalisation occurring within the British armed forces.
The chapter supplies the original passage from Grant’s speech, delivered at the Workers’ International League (WIL) conference in 1943, not at the fusion conference as Stuart claimed. Grant’s point was that the Eighth Army was “our army” because it was being “hammered and tested” by class struggle, not because of patriotic identification. The author provides concrete evidence of this radicalisation: in elections to a mock Forces’ Parliament in Cairo, the Tories won only 14 of 600 seats, while Labour won an overwhelming majority; a Trotskyist was elected Prime Minister of the Benghazi Forces’ Parliament, which was then disbanded; and the Eighth Army News published a full-page article defending the right to strike. Grant’s speech had originally included illustrations of mutinies and struggles, omitted from publication due to government censorship.
The chapter draws on the theoretical context of Trotskyist internationalism, arguing that a revolutionary must distinguish between the bourgeois army as an institution and the revolutionary potential of the soldiers within it. The polemic is directed squarely at Stuart and, by extension, at the SWP’s Political Committee for circulating the accusation without verification. The author also draws a parallel with Max Shachtman’s earlier distortions of James P. Cannon’s military policy speeches, suggesting a pattern of dishonest polemics. To demonstrate the method’s absurdity, the author turns Stuart’s technique back on Cannon, quoting his 1940 conference remarks—“We are sending unlimited supplies of military materials to Europe”—to show that similar phrases could be twisted to imply chauvinism. The chapter concludes by refuting a second accusation: that Grant had claimed the liberation of Europe would be accomplished “by a socialist Britain in arms”. The author reproduces the original draft with pencilled alterations to prove this charge is a “downright lie”.