What this is
For anyone trying to understand the British section of the Fourth International between 1970 and 1985, Macnair’s typescript is hard to ignore. It is nearly the only extended account built from the inside: from pre-conference discussion bulletins, National Committee minutes and the papers each tendency put out. Macnair is right in his 2011 preface that the alternatives are thin: Phil Hearse’s 1985 bulletin article, and outsiders’ surveys such as John Callaghan’s British Trotskyism. He sat on the Central Committee from 1978 to 1981. He was in the room.
It is also openly partisan, and he says so. His last page calls it “not only partisan”. He began it in 1976–77 to find “the common thread” in John Ross’s positions. He returned to it in 1984 because he thought the new debate was replaying the 1970s, and finished it soon after the split of autumn 1985. By then he had left the Socialist League to join the International Group. The book’s targets are therefore not ours. Its main target is Ross (”Jones”); its second is the pro-Barnes faction around Brian Grogan (”Clynes”). Even so, its verdict on our own current is harsh. Faction One, it says, broke organisationally from Ross before it broke politically. Its balance sheet was “schematic”. Its strategic case for entry rested on a mistaken theory of politics. And it walked out of a fight it could have won with patience and propaganda.
This review takes the book seriously, which means granting what it gets right before saying where, from our side, it goes wrong. The short version: Macnair diagnoses the symptoms of the IMG’s long crisis very well. His explanation of them, though, is too tidy, and it is tidiest exactly where the evidence on 1984–85 is most awkward for it.
What it gets right
Several of Macnair’s judgements have held up, and our tradition should own them.
The Turn to industry. Chapter 6 is the best short account anywhere of what the US SWP’s “wrenching turn” did to the IMG in 1979–83. Macnair shows that it rested on an impressionist forecast of an American CIO-style upsurge. He shows that it redefined the proletariat by place of work, which wrote off white-collar and public-sector workers, the unemployed and women in the home. And he shows that it broke up the student, public-sector and women’s fractions, the bases that might have carried the organisation through. His account of Cowley in 1983 is damning and, as far as we know, accurate. Eighteen comrades took jobs at once with no serious discussion of the plant’s history. Then came the sackings. Then the leadership retreated in disorder, with a member on television denying she was anything more than an ordinary Labour Party member. That tells you something about the regime. The Morning Star and Socialist Organiser defended the victims’ right to work more openly than the Socialist League did.
Anti-Pabloism. The first half of Chapter 7 is an effective demolition of the “International Committee” case against the Fourth International. Macnair argues it is timeless and abstract; that its idea of “cadre” turns any faction fight into an attack on the party; and that the federal concessions made to the SWP in 1963 lie behind several of the IMG’s later troubles. All of this fits what the ISG later argued against Healyite and Lambertist critics.
The movements of the oppressed. Macnair defends the IMG’s support for the autonomy of the women’s, black and lesbian and gay movements. He grounds that defence in Marx and Engels on the family, and in the Communist International’s own experience of “red” unions. That is a more serious case than most of the far left made in 1986.
The Benn–Scargill–Livingstone current. Macnair calls the majority’s 1984–85 discovery of a single “Benn–Scargill–Livingstone current” a “ridiculous amalgam”. He is right. Faction One’s own perspectives document of June 1985 said much the same, in its words that “a homogenous ‘Scargillite’ leadership is a myth”.
Our share of the blame. He is also right that the leaders of Tendency 1 had helped write the line of 1982–84 that they later attacked. The 1982 documents on the relative strength of the imperialist bourgeoisies, the 1984 conference papers, and the defence of Faction and Party against the pro-Barnes faction all carried their names. A current that held a majority in 1983–84 cannot present itself as having been outside the leadership’s errors. Macnair says that Tendency 1 first appeared as an internal fight over the Central Committee slate and the paper’s finances. That made it look like a power struggle before it looked like a political one. That criticism also stands.
Where it goes wrong
1. One cause for everything
The book’s framework is set out in its introduction and three philosophical chapters: a theory of consciousness, an attack on Althusser, a defence of “scientific method”. Everything that follows hangs on it. Ross’s errors are errors of method. They come from collapsing consciousness into cognition, from “agitationism” (the idea that a group is built by leading actions rather than by propaganda), and from a failure to see that British trade unionism is “syndicalist” and so separate from Labour Party politics. Each opposition is then measured by whether it broke with that method. The IMT Opposition of 1975 did not, so it lost. Faction One did not, so it lost too.
The pattern shows in how he treats the losers. Of the IMT Opposition he grants that the class struggle “was later to confirm the correctness of their original positions” (p. 99). He says much the same of Tendency 1 after the miners’ strike (p. 188). In both cases they lost anyway, and in both he puts it down to theory. A history in which being proved right by events counts for less than having the right philosophy of consciousness has decided its verdict in advance.
The trouble with a key that opens every lock is that it explains too much. In this book splits happen because the losing side had the wrong epistemology. The concrete programmatic disputes of 1984–85 shrink into symptoms. Macnair does write that the bloc between Ross and the pro-Barnes faction meant the leadership had “passed beyond opportunist errors to a definite and systematised centrism”. He even calls the pro-Barnes current a “new layer of Capitulators”. But that judgement has no consequences in his account of the split. If the leadership had become centrist by holding office in bloc with a faction he calls capitulators, why was leaving it a tactical error caused by weak propaganda, and not a defensible decision about where revolutionary Marxists could work?
2. The split the participants describe is not the split in the book
Read what the International Group actually said when it left, and the difference is plain. Its open letter, “The break with Socialist Action“, puts programme first. The paper’s editorial majority, it says, now held that permanent revolution was wrong. That had led it to refuse serious criticism of the Khomeini regime while the regime was killing thousands of revolutionaries, women and members of oppressed nationalities. It had also led to uncritical support for the ANC’s programme, which the letter called a two-stage strategy. Only after that does the letter turn to left unity. There it attacks the paper for denouncing Labour Briefing and the Labour Left Co-ordination as “ultra-left”, and sets out the strategic aim: a class-struggle current across the unions and the Labour Party, on the model of the 1920s Minority Movement and National Left-Wing Movement.
Macnair never mentions the Khomeini regime. South Africa gets a single sentence, about the paper’s agnosticism. He does not name Party or Sect, the leadership’s resolution adopted at the July 1985 conference. Yet Party or Sect had already accused the minority of “proposing a completely unjustified political split” before any split took place. Faction One’s own presentation to the United Secretariat tells the story the other way round, as a split drive from the leadership and the pro-Barnes faction. It has sections on the leadership’s “split drive at the May CC”, the “destruction of the Youth Organisation” and “factional abuse of the apparatus”. You need not accept either side’s dossier to see what is missing. Macnair’s version, in which “the base of the Faction 1 became demoralised” and “decided on a split”, leaves out the leadership’s own conduct, and it leaves out the reasons Faction One itself gave for leaving.
Macnair also writes that the Potter–Heron group, which left the Socialist League in December 1985, went “on a much clearer political basis” than Faction One. But the basis they went on was the one Faction One had already stated: permanent revolution, and the bloc with the pro-Barnes faction.
3. The balance sheet, misread
Macnair reduces Hearse’s balance sheet, “Some Observations on our History” (Andre, 1985 pre-conference bulletin no. 6), to one thesis: that “everything is ascribed to systematic ultraleftism”. That is not a fair summary. The document does criticise ultra-leftism: the empirical break with entry around 1968, the “Jones–Howard” document of 1972, the European Perspectives Document, and the candidates the IMG stood against Labour in February 1974. But it criticises the opposite fault too. It faults the 1960s group’s “objectivist” conception of entry, in which The Week could not defend a full programme and Ken Coates set himself up as an adviser to left bureaucrats. It faults the factional regime of 1972–76, in which differences were fought out “in the Conference Nominations Commission” rather than by political argument, and it calls for a collective leadership drawn from every tendency. It asks why the Turn was wrong and why the unity campaigns with the SWP were dropped. And it ends with a sentence Macnair could have written himself: “A tendency which does not have a grasp of its own history is destined to repeat the errors which it has made.”
Macnair also complains that the balance sheet “writes out of existence the various past oppositional tendencies in the IMG” (p. 12). That is an odd charge, because his own book shows Andre leading several of them. Andre was a leader of Faction A in 1976, the group Macnair credits with wanting to take up the questions of method (p. 51). He was a leader of the Birmingham branch in 1978, whose analysis, Macnair concedes, “had at least the merit of concreteness” (p. 134). And he was in Tendency 1 in 1980. Macnair’s criticism amounts to saying that Hearse left his own opposition record out of the story.
On the central practical question Macnair comes closer to Hearse than he admits. Hearse called the quick abandonment of the 1975 Labour Party fraction work “one of the major errors” of the decade. Macnair condemns the 1975 turn as rightist and sterile. But he also writes that an entry in 1976 on the line of the United Secretariat’s theses, with Socialist Challenge as an entry paper, “would probably have had a great success”, and would have taken the space later held by Briefing, Labour Herald and Socialist Organiser (pp. 119–20). That is the balance sheet’s own argument, made in his words.
The real disagreement between them is narrower and more interesting than “ultra-leftism or not”. Hearse argued for entry as a long-term strategy. The British crisis would take the form of a crisis of social democracy. The mass revolutionary party would come out of splits and fusions in the mass party. Militant’s growth after 1979 showed what a current gains by being inside when the differentiation starts. Macnair wanted a permanent Labour Party fraction without full entry. His reason was a theory he states most clearly at the end of the book: the activists in the constituency Labour parties and those in the unions are “largely separate both in terms of personnel and of politics”. They will be joined, he says, by a revolutionary nucleus fusing a constituency left with a union left, “and the CPGB has to be confronted and smashed”.
That is a coherent position, and it deserves an answer rather than a caricature. But Macnair’s account of Faction One’s view is itself a caricature. He says Faction One assumed that “the political discussions in the LP and its political forms can be simply carried over into the TUs”. Faction One’s June 1985 perspectives say the opposite. The key political questions often find their most advanced expression in the Labour left, but “it is in the TUs that these issues will ultimately be answered”. The task is “the integration of our TU and LP work, and the mass campaigns, towards the building of a class struggle left wing”. The same document warns that “any spontaneism or objectivism in this regard would be fatal”. It analyses the Communist Party’s conservative role in the miners’ strike area by area, including McGahey and Bolton in Scotland and Emlyn Williams in South Wales. That is exactly the “pivotal role of the CPGB” Macnair accuses everyone else of missing.
4. “Agitationism” as a cure that becomes a disease
Macnair’s remedy for the IMG is consistent from start to finish. Put “a much higher premium than even the ‘classical’ IMG did on theoretical work, education and propaganda”. Prepare for “a prolonged ideological struggle within the section”. Accept that this means addressing “a relatively few people (the members of the section)” rather than agitational projects. In 1985 he thought Faction One should have stayed inside a Socialist League led by a Ross–Grogan bloc, and spent its energy educating the membership.
From where we stand this misses something important. The IMG’s propaganda was indeed weak. Faction One’s own documents complained of the collapse of political education. Socialist Action’s adaptation to the ANC, to Khomeini and to the Labour left leaders was real, and it was what we fought. But the claim that the problem was too much activity, and the solution a propaganda group talking mainly to itself, is the claim Party or Sect hung on us, inverted. Our view in 1985 was that revolutionaries are tested in the class struggle and in their relations with the forces moving in it. A small organisation that withdraws to win the argument internally, inside an apparatus controlled by its opponents, spends its forces on the wrong audience. Macnair’s own introduction gives the game away. The one current he says had begun to overcome the IMG’s problems, because it “holds cadre, it conducts education and propaganda”, was the pro-Barnes faction (pp. 8–9). On his own showing it was “openly revisionist”, and it ended in the Communist League’s break with Trotskyism. Internal education is no protection when the programme being taught is wrong.
The record bears this out. The internal-education strategy Macnair recommended was not tried, because nobody in the 1985 fight wanted it. The current that left did keep its forces, and it went on to build something.
5. What the book leaves out: where we were going
The largest omission is forward-looking. Faction One’s June 1985 perspectives, “A Fresh Start for the League”, had a section headed “For fusion with the Socialist Group”. It called Alan Thornett’s current, the former WSL, “by far the most serious” force on the far left outside our own. It noted that the Socialist Group was rethinking its relationship with the Fourth International, which it now called “the only serious internationally organised Trotskyist force”. And it called for fusion “on the basis of adherence to the FI”, while noting frankly that the Socialist Group was a “sectarian Trotskyist current” in its view of the Cuban leadership.
Macnair finished his book after the split, but the Socialist Group appears in it only as the “later WSL-SG”, in a parenthesis about anti-Pabloism. In that respect his picture of Faction One’s strategy as nothing but regrouping “the far left inside the LP” is incomplete. Faction One already had a concrete regroupment perspective, with a named partner and a programmatic condition. It was carried out. The International Group, the Socialist Group and Socialist Viewpoint fused in 1987 to form the International Socialist Group, with Socialist Outlook as its paper. The ISG became a sympathising section of the Fourth International in 1991 and a full section in 1995.
Macnair’s closing forecast was that the Socialist League’s remaining 250 had little prospect of staying united, while the 150 who left “cannot yet be said to have succeeded in establishing itself as an independent organisation”. The first half came true within a year: the Barnesite Communist League split in 1986–87. The second half did not. For a book whose method is the testing of theories against prediction, that result deserves to be weighed.
6. Majorities, oppositions and the International
Macnair complains of “a tendency to group think among broad majorities with only marginal oppositions”. The Fourth International’s own practice already answers him in part. Open pre-world congress discussions, regular reports back from its leading bodies, and a public press open to contributions from its members and sections are all built to bring different ideas together, not to drive them into separate camps. The stronger answer is that the International has already tried what he wants, and it failed. From 1969 to 1977 the International Majority Tendency and the Leninist Trotskyist Faction fought as permanent world factions. Every section was sorted into one camp or the other, and every national dispute became a proxy for the world fight. Positions hardened, each side read the other’s documents as moves in a war, and in 1977 both factions agreed to dissolve because the fight had stopped producing anything. The ruptures that followed came out of that habit of mind, not out of too much consensus.
The test of group think is whether majorities change their minds, and here the International is a counter-example. By 1977 the majority had made a self-criticism of the Latin American guerrilla orientation it adopted in 1969, through argument rather than because a rival faction won. Group think also needs a centre that imposes a line, and the International has given up that role: its sections decide their own national tactics. A broad majority on world questions, combined with real autonomy at national level, is what an International of self-governing sections looks like. It is not a monolith with a few dissenters at the edges. Macnair’s own book is the best evidence against him. It is mostly the history of a section run as a regime of permanent factions, and by his own account that regime ended in a split, not in clarity.
7. Method in the other sense
Some weaknesses are matters of craft, and they make the book harder to use than it needs to be.
It is written in code. Almost everyone appears under a party pseudonym, some people under two, and one pseudonym (”Marshall”) covers two different people. The 2011 cast list helps, but the reader still has to know that “T1”, “F1”, “TT”, “TY”, the “IP faction” and “the Faction” are different bodies at different dates.
Its references are unfinished. Cross-references remain as “pp___” throughout. Documents are cited by nickname (”the Smith organisation report”, “SRP”) without date or bulletin number. A reader cannot check most of its quotations without the bulletins themselves.
Its sources are internal, and that shapes what it can see. A history built from bulletins and committee minutes sees the arguments members had with each other. It sees much less of what the organisation actually did in the movement: the paper, the campaigns, the union fractions. Those are where a line is tested. Macnair’s judgements on the 1983–85 entry work rest almost entirely on what the documents claimed for it.
It has a hole where its author was. Macnair admits that his files, “passed on from the Oxford branch, do not include 1976-8 NC materials or internal majority materials after December 1973” (p. 115). What follows that admission is introduced as “In outline, it appears”. The gap covers the years of the Socialist Unity project and of his own time on the Central Committee.
It is the work of a participant who changed sides more than once. He was in Current X in 1976, the ELS tendency in 1978 and the LTT in 1979, and sat on the CC from 1978 to 1981 as a minority member. He calls 1976–79 the “brief exception” to the factional rule (p. 8), yet later calls the same years “a blind alley” (p. 169). He left in 1983, rejoined in 1984, and in 1985 joined the IG. He says in the preface that his position “evolved between” the early and late chapters. A reader should keep that in mind. So the book’s unifying theory, that everything goes back to Ross’s method, was partly a way for its author to make sense of his own route through those years.
Conclusion
Macnair’s typescript is indispensable, and it should be read. Its chapters on the Turn and on anti-Pabloism are among the best things written about British Trotskyism in the 1980s. Its insistence that the IMG never drew honest balance sheets is a reproach our own current also earned. Our tradition should accept two of its criticisms: that we shared responsibility for the line of 1982–84, and that we went into the 1984 fight looking more like a slate than a political platform.
But as an account of the 1985 split, which is the event the whole book was finished to explain, it falls short. It replaces the programmatic issues the participants named with a theory of method. It misreads the balance sheet it criticises. It credits Faction One with views that Faction One’s own documents reject. And it leaves out the strategic perspective, fusion with the Socialist Group on the basis of the Fourth International, that turned the International Group into the ISG and Socialist Outlook. The IMG of the 1970s was dead by 1986, as Macnair said. But it did not die only because its leaders lacked a theory of consciousness. Part of it went on to fight, on a programme it had stated in 1985, and it fared better than his diagnosis predicted.
Sources checked for this review
All internal Socialist League and International Group material is cited here, not published, in line with iur archive’s rule on internal bulletins.
Andre (Phil Hearse), “Some Observations on our History”, 1985 PCDB 6.
Andre, “Entrism and the construction of the British Section”, 1985 PCDB 9.
Inglefield (Valerie Coultas), “Our Entry project, Labour Briefing and the lessons of the Mineworkers Defence Committee”, 1985 PCDB 10. Her description there of the “Biggs/Andre/Lynch” position on entry is a useful independent reading of the balance sheet.
Faction One, “A Fresh Start for the League”, perspectives document of 6 June 1985, 1985 PCDB 26. See especially the sections on entryism, the miners’ strike, trade union perspectives and “For fusion with the SG”.
Faction One, “The Crisis in the British Section — a presentation by Faction One (to the USec)”, Faction One Internal Discussion Bulletin no. 3, 1985.
Socialist League Central Committee, Party or Sect — Tasks for our organisation at its 1985 conference, adopted July 1985.
Supporters of International, “The break with Socialist Action“, open letter, 1985.
Macnair, typescript and especially pp. viii–ix (introduction), 171–188 (Chapter 6), 189–231 (Chapter 7) and the 2011 preface and cast list.