From a Propaganda Group to a League for Revolutionary Action

'It is for us to avoid organisational sectarianism and build our organisation, not in competition with, but for the movement.'

In 1970 the British section of the Fourth International, smaller then than the Revolutionary Communist Party is today, argued its way out of propaganda-group purity and into the movements. Its national secretary wrote the case. The IMG's nephews, the RCP, have spent 2026 arguing the opposite.

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Two secretaries, the same tradition, fifty-six years apart, and the same question put to each: what is a small revolutionary group actually for? Rob Sewell, political secretary of the Revolutionary Communist Party, gave his answer at the party’s Central Committee this June, and we took it apart in ‘The Clean Banner’: the broad movements are class collaboration, the united front is a snare, and the task is to keep the flag clean and recruit the vanguard of the vanguard. Pat Jordan, national secretary of the International Marxist Group, gave the opposite answer in the document extracted below, and he gave it from the weaker position. The IMG in 1970 was a few hundred strong and a few months into being the British Section of the Fourth International, following the departure of ‘MIlitant’ from the FI at the 1969 world congress. The RCP, Militant’s descendant, claims thirteen hundred. The smaller group is the one that argued for going out into the movements; the larger is the one arguing for staying home.

The document is the IMG’s hinge. Both wings of the British section had been built out of the long years of ‘deep entry’, its people working inside the Labour Party as a propaganda ginger-group (in the case of Militant) and as the infrastructure for The Week, the Labour-left magazine, vibrant campaigns for Vietnam and workers’ control (in the case of the International Marxist Group), and this resolution is the new section, the IMG, talking itself out of that and into independent public work. Jordan even borrows his title. ‘From a Propaganda Group to a Party of Mass Action’ was James P. Cannon’s phrase for the American SWP’s own refounding turn in 1946, which is partly why the Americans reprinted the British text in their internal bulletin: two fraternal sections making the same argument, that the era of the small group defending a body of ideas was over, and the job now was to intervene.

Jordan names the trap first, and it is the RCP’s trap exactly.

However, we must be objective and assess our present stage as that of being essentially a propaganda group. Obviously from the situation described previously this is quite inadequate: what can a propaganda group do in the case of big industrial struggles (in particular a general strike)? If we are to play our role in the historic task of helping to bring into existence a revolutionary leadership we have to transcend being a propaganda group.

We are, in a sense, in a vicious circle just now: our ability to intervene in the many struggles and even explosions which are inevitable in the coming years is strictly limited by our small size; and yet unless we can intervene in this kind of struggle we will find it difficult to grow in size and influence. The example of the Northern Ireland struggle last summer, where we could not send someone over until two or three months after the main action and where we were incapable of taking the political initiative, is a warning. We will not automatically grow in size and influence in even the most militant struggles. Put another way we can say that unless in the coming years we can go from being a propaganda group to a league for revolutionary action the opportunity may be lost for a whole period.

His way out is not to accept the circle as a discipline, which is what Sewell has done. It is to break it, and he begins by saying what the organisation should become.

By a league for revolutionary action I mean an organisation capable of initiating campaigns in an increasing number of fields, able to intervene in most of the important political processes and able to take the initiative in the decisive struggles. It is not yet a revolutionary party: it is not substantial enough and has not yet got the support of a decisive section of the working class. However, because it is seen as a serious force by the whole left it can act as an important pole of attraction which militant workers will respect.

Note the modesty the RCP lacks: ‘not yet a revolutionary party’. The turn had a governing rule, and the rule is the whole quarrel with Sewell in a single clause.

It is for us to avoid the organisational sectarianism of IS (International Socialists) and the SLL (Socialist Labour League) and build our organisation not in competition with but for the labour movement.

And then the thesis, stated flat.

The era of the small group is now over; the main function of the Trotskyist movement is not any more that of preserving and defending a body of ideas against Stalinism and reformism. Today, the task is to rapidly set about the job of laying the basis for mass revolutionary parties.

Honesty about the document cuts the other way too. Jordan’s sense of tempo was fantasy. He has capitalism in its ‘final death agony’ and thinks a French May in Britain is possible inside a year, which is the same overheated clock the RCP runs at its World School, and if we hold Sewell to it we hold Jordan to it. The perspective was wrong. What was right was the orientation underneath it, and the two come apart.

Then, in an appendix on the dangers of the turn, Jordan does the thing no one at the RCP’s World School has done. He describes the party the RCP is becoming, and names it a disease.

a) Organisational sectarianism: This disease is one which has stricken many revolutionary movements, the SLL being an almost laboratory pure specimen of the phenomenon. It has its sources in the impact of bourgeois ideology on the movement and the consequences of competition between various groups in a period when they are not put to the real test of leading mass struggles. In the latter circumstances there is a built-in tendency for those groups to flourish which concentrate on building their own resources, putting great emphasis on organisational efficiency, regardless of how this relates to the class struggles. In this situation the yardstick for the ‘correctness’ of a tendency’s policies can become its success in selling papers rather than how well it can apply Marxism to a concrete situation. If a tendency can accumulate enough resources to have a print shop or a publishing house the process can be structuralised. For it the recruitment of some business efficiency experts will reap bigger dividends than leading a strike.

These trends are all the more intensified because in a situation where there is a low political level of activity and general lack of Marxist education recruitment will be easiest for those tendencies which have a very simple unsophisticated policy. All of this tends to become self-perpetuating: the more resources a group has the more propaganda it can make, the more propaganda it makes the more members it gains, the more members it has the more resources it has, and so on and so on. This circle will only be broken when the organisation is put to the test in a decisive struggle or if its internal structure fragments.

Jordan wrote that in 1970, about the SLL. Read it again with the RCP in mind, and the only thing that has changed is the letterhead.

There is a harder truth still, and it is the reason this is an unlock and not a fable. The IMG made the turn Jordan urged, and it did not become a mass party. It reached a thousand, then declined, and in 1982 it folded into Labour as the Socialist League. So the document is no recipe for victory; the right orientation guaranteed nothing, because the objective conditions Jordan misread were not there. What it proves is narrower and sharper. The question Sewell treats as long closed, whether a small group grows by entering the movements or by holding aloof with a clean banner, was posed and answered the other way by the RCP’s own tradition, at the RCP’s own size, by a man in the RCP secretary’s own job. The RCP has not merely chosen abstention. It has chosen the option its tradition tried, renounced in writing, and warned against, and it has done so as though the argument were never had.

Read it as the tradition arguing with itself. Jordan lost the perspective and won the orientation. The RCP has kept neither.

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The document was proposed by the IMG Political Committee and was almost certainly drafted by Pat Jordan, the IMG’s national secretary, who defends it under the pen-name ‘Peter Peterson’ elsewhere in the same bulletin and whose Ireland writing in International the text cross-refers to in the first person. It appeared as ‘From a Propaganda Group to a League for Revolutionary Action’, prepared for the IMG’s March 1970 conference and reprinted in the US SWP Internal Information Bulletin*, no. 6, October 1970. Red Mole publishes it as part of the inheritor tradition of the section that wrote it. Some of the language, particularly in the appendices on Black and Irish work, is of its moment; we reproduce it as a historical document rather than edit it into the present.*

The full document, pages 31 to 45, main resolution and all appendices, is available to download here.