The Entry Tactic — the post-war experience in Britain (part one)

This article on the tactic of "entryism" or “entrism”, looks at the role that the misapplication of this tactic played in the collapse of British Trotskyism in the 1940s and early 1950s.

This period of British Trotskyism is an underexplored one. Leaders of left groups today like Ted Grant of the Militant, Tony Cliff of the SWP and Gerry Healy of the WRP, have more interest in obscuring the history of this period, in which they participated, than in shedding any instructive light upon it.

Their mistakes of this period are crucial to understanding how and why British Trotskyism shattered into fragments. To admit these mistakes would mean admitting a departure from revolutionary communism - hence the silence of Grant, Cliff and Healy.

The mistaken method developed in 1945-51, a period of labour government over the question of "entryism", is being repeated by centrist organisations today. Socialist Organiser and Socialist Challenge are in the forefront of this process. Whether or not they admit it their attitude to the labour left, their abandonment of fundamental revolutionary positions and their fantasies about the "evolution" of a "hard" reformist "left", have precedents in the 1945-51 period of British, and eventually, international Trotskyism.

In our view this period saw a qualitative degeneration of Trotskyism into centrism. On the question of strategy and tactics with regard to the labour Party, those co-responsible for this centrist revision of Trotskyism were Thomas Gerard Healy (generally known as Gerry Healy) and Michel Raptis (generally known as Pablo). The former was leader of the Minority Faction of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP- British Section of the Fourth International); the latter was the Secretary of the FI itself.

Though Healy, James P Cannon and Pierre Lambert were to cast Pablo in the role of the great Satan and Healy paint himself as the patron saint of "Anti-Pabloism", in the key period when the centrist liquidation of Trotsky's programme was actually prepared and executed, they were close allies. Both had the 100% support of Cannon and the American Socialist Workers Party the other main figure and the predominant party in world Trotskyism post –1945.
We will follow this article with a further one on the practice of Healy's group during the "Socialist Outlook" venture, from 1948 to 1954. This period, following the collapse of British Trotskyism, provides irrefutable evidence of the centrist practice of the Healy group.

The enormous social weight of reformism in Britain has repeatedly proved a tremendously disorienting factor for revolutionaries. Amongst British Trotskyists, as with their predecessors in the Social-Democratic Federation (SDF) and the British Communist Party, the great strength of Labourism produced huge pressures toward either sectarian isolation or opportunist liquidation. The question of the Labour Party exercised a central influence in the early days of British Trotskyism.

Between 1934 and 1936 splits over work in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) or the Labour Party (LP) completely derailed the movement. From 1936 - 39 there were at one moment or another at least ten different "Trotskyist" groupings in Britain. Where more than personal intrigue or rivalry was involved, the Labour Party question was usually at the heart of differences.

The "Peace and Unity" Conference of 1938, where the leadership of Fourth International tried to fuse the groups, centred on Labour Party and ILP perspectives. The immediate collapse of the resultant Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) - official section of the Fourth International (FI) - partly stemmed from unresolved differences on this score.

As the war was drawing to a close another, this time successful attempt to unify the Trotskyists took place. The fusion which produced the RCP was a move of great promise, bringing together delegates representing some 490 members. Whilst this figure was an overestimate, as was later recognised (the figure being nearer 350), the RCP had a solidly proletarian class composition, and was well-rooted in the trade unions. Unlike the European sections the RCP had not been the victim of massive repression; its cadre was intact.

However the 1944 Fusion Conference, which produced the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), remained deeply divided over the question and the resultant party was to remain so. The majority reporter to the 1946 National Conference complained of: "the tremendous energy which has been consumed by the Party, and which partly consumes the Party, in the factional struggle especially insofar as it related to the question of entry or non-entry into the Labour Party." (Special International Bulletin Sept. 46).

Yet the good class composition and he high quality of its cadres was unable to save the RCP from political disintegration over the following five years. In part this was due to having been built on insecure foundations. Despite, or even because of, the historical differences over the entry question, a veil was drawn over the experience and therefore over the political lessons of the preceding ten years. The fusion conference agreed not "to open up old wounds and go over sterile discussions of the past which can have value only for the archive rat or the historian of the future, but which would only introduce the antagonisms of the past into the fused party, and therefore be a godsend to the professional faction fighter."

Such 'agreements to disagree' have been a hall-mark of unifications throughout the last 30 years of British "Trotskyism". They amount to a decision not to decide on crucial tactical questions - usually on the pretext that it is after all "only tactics” which are involved. Yet political life has yet to produce a way of carrying out a strategy except by means of tactics. Since fighting reformism - in Britain at least - is a central question, the tactical questions about how to do so cannot be left aside with impunity.

Tactics can be applied in either a principled or an unprincipled fashion. If the latter is the case then they corrupt and disintegrate the revolutionary strategy of which they are a part. Thus strategy and tactics do not inhabit totally separate realms - indeed consigning them to mutual isolation is one of the first signs of centrism. How this disease destroyed British Trotskyism is integrally linked to a parallel process within the Fourth International as a whole. Indeed in some respects the British experience pre-figured the issues and events of the great schism of 1951 to 1953 when the Fourth International split in two.

THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL
An important preparatory stage in the centrist degeneration of the FI took place in its process of reconstruction after the war. Between 1944 and 1948 it raised a correct, indeed courageous, revolutionary programme for Europe in the aftermath of the imperialist war. However, the work of its conferences and congresses (a European Conference in 1944, a pre-conference in 1946, and the Fourth International’s Second Congress 1948) fell decisively below its programmatic and tactical positions on the question of perspectives. The Fourth International's programmatic strength lay in its firm adherence to Trotsky's positions. Yet, paradoxically, a similar fidelity to Trotsky's 1938-40 perspectives and prognoses led it into to very serious problems.

Trotsky's perspective in 1938/40 was one of war and revolution as immediate prospects. He correctly foresaw the catastrophic effects of the war on both the capitalist states and on the USSR. He considered that the Kremlin bureaucracy and its totalitarian apparatus would break up under the blows of the war; that rotten to the core, bourgeois democracy would collapse, bringing down with it the reformist parties and trade unions. These, threatened or realised catastrophes would open up the necessity and possibility of the FI assuming revolutionary leadership of the masses during and after the war.

Of course this was not a "prediction" like a horoscope. Above all it was not a description of a process which would happen regardless of the exist-ence or actions of the revolutionary party, In 1940 Trotsky wrote that: "The capitalist world has no way out unless a prolonged death agony is so considered. It is necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades, of war, uprisings, brief interludes of truce, new wars, and new uprisings. The question of tempos and time intervals is of enormous importance; but it alters neither the general historical perspective nor the direction of our policy".

He concluded that "the great historical problem will not be solved in any case until a revolutionary party stands at the head of the proletariat" and that the FI's task to this end was to educate and organise the proletarian vanguard.

Taken in epochal terms Trotsky's perspective and strategic conclusions were correct. Stated thus at the beginning of a world war, they were a justifiable perspective full of revolutionary optimism and will. However, as Trotsky pointed out in the same document: "What characterises a genuine revolutionary organisation is above all the seriousness with which it works out and tests its political line at each new test of events".

In part Trotsky’s prognoses were correct. Democratic French imperialism collapsed like a pack of cards. Britain trembled on the very edge of defeat both in Europe and the Far East. Russia nearly crumbled before the Nazi onslaught in 1941. But thanks to the entry of the USA into the war and the resilience of the Russian planned economy and the Russian workers defence of their homeland, the US-UK-USSR alliance emerged victorious. So too did the currents in the workers movement tied to the imperialist democracies (Labourism and Social Democracies and to the USSR (the Stalinist Communist Parties). Together these forces smothered the European revolution, the first sign of which were clearly visible in Italy in 1943.

The Fourth International however clung to the validity of Trotsky's perspective of revolution well beyond the end of the war. The failure of a revolutionary situation to really materialise in an exhausted, occupied and divided Germany, where the remaining prestige of Social Democracy and Stalinism were thrown into the scales to support the huge armies of the occupying powers, seriously undermined the projected revolution.

The prestige of Italian and French Stalinism gained both in the partisans' fight against the Nazis and the victory of the Red Army, enabled the communist parties to head off revolutionary situations in both of these countries. In Britain and the USA, no pre-revolutionary crises comparable to the post-1918 situation emerged. In 1918-25 in Britain, 192,250,000 days were lost through strike action. In 1945-51 the figure was 14,250,000. In the USA there was indeed a massive strike wave but it was under firm bureaucratic control, and whilst it achieved economic concessions, soon proved a Pyrrhic victory. The frightened Truman administration passed harsh anti-union laws, especially the Taft-Hartley Act. Clearly by 1947, no revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation existed in the principle imperialist countries.

The leaders of the FI, and especially its Secretariat members Michel Raptis (Pablo) and the young Belgian Ernest Mandel. (Germain), clung remorselessly to Trotsky's 1930s perspective of crisis and profound economic stagnation despite these developments. They considered it essential to any perspective of revolution. The 1946 document "The New Imperialist Peace and the Building of Parties of the F I" stated these erroneous views unequivocally:

"The war has aggravated the disorganisation of capitalist economy and has destroyed the last possibilities of a relatively stable equilibrium in social and international relations. lf the war did not immediately create in Europe a revolutionary upsurge of the scope and tempo we anticipated, it is nevertheless undeniable that it destroyed capitalist equilibrium on a world scale, thus opening up a long revolutionary period".

These formulations were in stark contrast to Trotsky's warnings to differentiate between different situations and periods, and to orient the programme accordingly. The longer the crisis and the revolutionary period extended without producing any real crises or revolutions, the more Pablo and Mandel emptied these terms of specific concrete content. "Crisis" they turned into an epochal ever-present phenomenon. "Revolution" became a process whose protagonists became "forces", "currents" and "tendencies", rather than parties grouped around programmes.

The precision of definite revolutionary or pre revolutionary situations, of parties, leaderships, pro-grammes, were dissolved in the name of fidelity to Trotsky's perspectives.

By 1950 Pablo extended this method into a new perspective of war-revolution; of. centrist tendencies roughly adequate to revolutionary tasks. If the implementation of these positions only began in 1952 on an international scale, the forging of the underlying method took place in the earlier period. With Healy as his loyal local representative, Pablo discovered in Britain a "pre-revolutionary crisis"; a centrist' current (Bevanism): a new tactic, total entry for a long period; a new programme - "transitional demands to mobilise thousands"; a new vehicle for revolution - the Labour Party, suitably transformed.


PABLO'S "NEW TYPE" ENTRYISM
Thus in February 1952 Michel Pablo, Secretary of the Fourth International, in introducing his "special type" of entrism pointed to the pilot-run entrism of the British and Austrian sections. He notes that in the period 1944-47 the work of the International was one of "essentially independent work". This work was, in Pablo's view, based on a perspective of "the masses deserting the old reformist parties" and "disillusioned" with Stalinism. Here he remarks that England and Austria were "special cases" and "did not fail to attract the attention of the International." For Pablo this work prefigured his later tactics (entrism sui generis - entrism of a special type):

" in the entry into the labour Party the International embarked on the course of long-term work within these movements and organisations through which flow - and most probably will flow for another period - the fundamental political current of the class." (Entryism of a Special Type: International Secretariat Documents VoI,1 p 32)

Pablo's conception of such long term entry, for a whole period, was based on a definite perspective that he advanced at the time. This was one centred on the idea that a Third World War was imminent. In 1951-2 given the tensions and explosion on the Korean peninsular , this did not appear as unlikely as it does in retrospect.

"The essential forces of the revolutionary party would appear through differentiation or explosion in these mass organisations. This tactical conception was and is based of course on the perspectives of the evolution of the international situation as they began to be clarified for us at the beginning of the 'cold war'; the relatively short period before the (next world –ed.) war breaks out; the new and decisive character of this war; the accelerated crisis of the capitalist regime which will in any case acquire a generally explosive character in the war itself."

However Pablo's perspective was false on every count. The "cold war" was a retrenchment of the spheres of influence agreed at Yalta and Potsdam with conflict only in the areas where no agreement existed. Given the resolution of the inter-imperialist contradictions, the massive destruction of productive forces in Europe and the uncontested economic hegemony of the USA (dissolution of the French and British colonial empires and their transference to the status of US semi-colonies) the likelihood, let alone the probability of a new world war was a thoroughly false basis for a perspective.

Certainly Marxists could not so easily "predict" the long boom that lay ahead but to stake all, and to revise fundamental principles in the operation of crucial tactics (entrism) on such undialectical schema-mongering led straight to disaster. From this false perspective, and using the same method with which he had elaborated it, Pablo predicted a "process of differentiation" within the social-democratic and Stalinist parties. Since these parties "cannot be smashed and replaced by others in the relatively short time between now and the decisive conflict" they must be transformed by differentiation. This itself would take place by stages; first "Bevanism", and then at a later stage a "genuine revolutionary tendency". But the latter stage lies at a distance whose arrival cannot be foreseen. Therefore "it will first be necessary to go through the experience (of Bevanism – ed); by penetrating it and helping it from the inside to develop its last resources and consequences. "

Pablo was quite frank that this was a break with Trotsky’s practice before the war. It was he said, entryism of a "different kind from the entrism practised before the war", one based on a desire "from the inside of these tendencies to amplify and accelerate their left centrist ripening".

In this process the Trotskyists were to compete for leadership of these centrist tendencies. Gone was the fight for a revolutionary tendency, able and willing to criticise and expose all shades of centrism and reformism. Gone was Trotsky's specific, concrete perspectives and the principled entry tactics appropriate to them.

The Road to Ruin for the R.C.P.
Pablo's entrism sui generis produced an "explosion and a differentiation" all right. Unfortunately it was within the ranks of the Fourth International not those of the social democrats and Stalinists. Alas this differentiation did not go to the roots of the matter because the leaders of the "anti Pabloite" forces, particularly Cannon and Heady were thoroughly embroiled in and compromised by the pioneering case of British Labour Party entry. It was only when the "special entry" was applied to Stalinism at the height of the Cold War, that, belatedly, Pablo's tactics were discovered to be liquidationist.

Yet Healy - with Cannon's blessing - had waged a four year struggle to destroy the RCP and develop precisely the fundamentals of "Pablo's method". Can-non in 1953, looked back on this period: 'The whole Haston (leader of the RCP - WP) system had to be blown up before a genuine Trotskyist organisation could get started in England. lf one were to undertake to write the real history of British Trot.skyism, he would have to set the starting point as the day and date on which your group finally tore itself loose from the Haston regime and started its own independent work". (Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Vo1.1. p.262)

What was this splendid struggle in which Cannon acted as midwife at the birth of British Trotskyism? The fact that this lusty infant turned out to be Healyism should give us pause.

The first majority Labour Government was elected, in a landslide victory in July 1945. 48% of the popular vote had given it 393 seats, 146 more than the combined opposition parties. The British working class expressed its yearning for fundamental change, its desire not to return to the dole queues of the thirties in a massive electoral show of strength. But it was one that had little or no counterpart in direct action in the factories and streets. In the first 15 months after the war ended there were 12 times fewer strikes than in 1918-1919.

Labour's 1945 programme declared that the "Labour Party is a Socialist Party and proud of it" but its programme in general reflected the social and political consensus of the leaders of the wartime co-alition. There was a Liberal-Tory-Labour agreement on such things as the need to maintain full employment and provide social security and a national health service. These were the first priorities of the Labour administration. Its nationalisation programme for the coal, electricity and gas industries reflected the ruling class' willingness to extend the advantages of state capitalism (learned during the war) to the loss making industries and public utilities. After all it was a matter of socialising their losses via state compensation, not expropriating their profitable enterprises.

It was in this context that the RCP leadership around Jock Haston and Ted Grant tried to orient the group. Fraction work had been carried out in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) by the Trotskyists since 1940 when there was a marked turn to the left in repulsion from the wartime Labour-Tory-Liberal coalition. This meant that not only was there no general election but by-elections were uncontested by the coalition parties.

Thus the local Labour parties almost ceased to exist, dedicated as they were to electioneering. For a short while the ILP tried to intervene in industrial disputes. However, the Trotskyists (the RCP and its components the WIL and RSL before 1944) intervened as a serious independent force in industrial disputes. In contrast after 1941, the much stronger Communist Party scabbed on them all. The Tyneside Apprentices’ strike was, perhaps, the Trotskyists’ greatest success.

In 1945 and 1946 Haston and Grant turned more of their resource. away from the ILP towards the Labour Party whose grass root organs were beginning to come alive again in the wake of the election, There was a steady increase in individual membership and trade union affiliations but their activity remained within the bounds of those union electoral machine. At the time the Labour League of Youth was much smaller than the CP's youth organisation, At the pea k of the fraction work the RCP, in 1946, had 20% of its mem-bers (66) operating in 46 wards. In this work they were guided by Trotsky's advice in 1934 when he said: "Alongside independent propaganda work, all means must be employed - always in keeping with the concrete situation - to link up with the masses, push them forward, and consolidate new revolutionary cadres from their ranks, Above all this includes
i) Systematic fraction work in the trade unions under the slogan of trade unity, The opportunity to reach and influence worker masses is better here than in any party

ii) Systematic fraction work in all workers parties and organisations, not just by forming fractions out of sympathisers already present there but also by sending in really solid elements." (Tasks of the ICL, Writings, 1934-35)

There was clearly not a situation in any way comparable to the mid-30s in France (see Workers Power no. 37) in which total entry of the Trotskyist forces was both necessary and justified,

Major strikes did occur in 1945-6 particularly in the Docks and Transport but the RCP was able to relate to these independently on its own programme, There was no evidence that these struggles had any major effect within the Labour Party, A balance sheet of the RCP's LP fraction work during these strikes was revealing:

“Despite the fact that the majority of the transport strikers lived in the North and North East district of London, and through their trade unions, are affiliated members of the Labour Party, it his not been reported that one single deputation approached the dozens of Labour Parties in the area... The strikers did not attend the LP meetings to seek solidarity and bring pressure to bear on the Government."

With this tactical perspective the RCP leadership sought to pursue its independent activity, It had campaigned in the 1945 general election under the slogan "Break the Coalition: Labour to Power" and advanced a series of demands focused towards workers' control. Given the nationalisation programme of the Labour Party and the belief of workers in the socialist character of these measures, it was a correct emphasis.
In the Municipal Elections later in 1945 the RCP stood its own candidate in Newcastle, In their manifesto there was a sharp differentiation between Labourism and Trotskyism that was to be totally absent in Healy’s policy four years later:

"The Labour Party is not a socialist party ..but a party of capitalism, It is nevertheless a workers' party and is based in the unions…and we will unite with the Labour party to defeat the representatives of capital, But we .do not think, nor have we ever said, that the Labour Party is capable, or even wants to, carry out this policy of ending capitalism and introducing socialism".

Labour's colonial policy was vigorously s attacked and the following demands outlined: "No compensation to pit owners, operate the pits under the control of workers and technicians committees,"

"No compensation to bankers,"
"operate a sliding-scale of working hours without reduction of wages,"
"Open the closed plants",
“Committees of housewives, co-ops small shopkeepers and workers in the distributive trades to oversee rationing.

Although the manifesto is weak in not clearly stating its position on the question of the government resting on parliament alone, its transitional demands are backed by the, call for independent struggle to achieve them.
Gerry Healy did not take up an oppositional position on these questions prior to the Labour Governent's election. He voted for the majority resolution on Labour Party work at the 1944 fusion conference, which outlined the need for fraction work not total entry. However Healy, unlike the Haston-Grant majority, wholeheartedly agreed with the International Secretariat of the Fourth International's (lSFI's) 1944 International Conference Theses on International Perspectives which stated that:

"The revival of economic activity in capitalist countries weakened by the war...will be characterised by an especially slow tempo which will keep their economy at levels bordering on stagnation and slump."

This perspective was to be refuted by the developments which took place after 1945 in Europe. The war itself had created new conditions for an upturn. The enormous productive capacity of US imperialism, damaged by the effects of war, together with a chronic shortage of goods in devastated Europe, completed to ensure relative stability. Already by 1946 Industrial output had exceeded pre-war levels and was rising rapidly. Capital investment far exceeded the pre-war high by 1946.

Pablo and Healy held rigidly this perspective basing a schematic, dogmatic political strategy on it, There would be an inevitable clash between workers compelled to defend their living standards in slump conditions, and the Labour leaders which would a "crystallisation of a left wing", Based on the Labour Party's "unique" relationship to the unions, this radicalisation would "inevitably" make itself felt in the Party, this therefore, was the rationale for total entry. Healy argued in 1945: "The turn to independent work could only be a temporary phase until the Labour Party sprang to life once again."

Attacked by the majority of the RCP and unable to adduce any concrete evidence of a centrist development in the Labour Party, Healy soon gave up this whole approach, instead his justification became thoroughly opportunist. For Healy the "dangers" of fraction work were hammered home by the expulsion of leading RCP members from the Newcastle ILP in 1945 on the charge of "Trotskyism", McNair, the ILP leader responsible was, as it so happened, a very close friend of none other than Marceau Pivert, the key leader of French centrism in the 1930s.

Healy's reaction to these expulsions paralleled that of the leaders of the opportunist wing of the French Trotskyists in the 1930s, Raymond Molinier and Pierre Frank. Their tactics when faced with the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the SF10 in 1935. (See WP newspaper 38) were to seek to avoid expulsion by unprincipled manoeuvres, making their politics indistinguishable from Pivert’s. Trotsky fiercely criticised them and split from them.

Healy now wanted at all costs to avoid what he called a "provocation", He concluded that the real problem with fraction work was that it presupposed an independent party, This, he argued, would leave them open to the charge that they were not "sincere". It also allowed ammunition for the bureaucracy, Therefore, he concluded, only total entry would avoid the problem, Healy scoffed at the RCP leaders for believing that: "whilst maintaining that 'independent' Party it will be possible to work in these organisations with the object of winning comrades over to the outside party, thereby laying the basis for the mass party at some future date, The conception is entirely erroneous,"

One of the failures of both sides in the faction fight was that the programmatic significance of the entry tactic received virtually no consideration, The debate revolved primarily around organisational questions, namely, what proportion of RCP members to devote to Labour Party work, But on what programme was that work to be conducted? The leadership never spelled out any separate programme for entry because they doubtless assumed that existing RCP politics would be the basis of LP work under all conditions, But no such implication could be assumed from the International Secretariat(IS) under Pablo or his man in Britain, Healy. In a debate over entry work in the ILP, Sam Gordon, the official representative IS in Britain (and also James P. Cannon's close confidante) argued: "The programme is not at issue, with minor concessions the basic position of the FI is already acceptable to the native left-wing."

Pablo and the IS intensified their support for Healy. The June 1946 Plenum of the ISFI passed a resolution on tactics in Britain, It was rejected by the RCP leaders, In January 1947 Pablo again insisted on total entry, The opportunism behind Healy and Pab-lo's motivation deepened, They re-iterated the slump-crisis perspective as an immediate threat: "the death agony of capitalism is an ever-present factor in the world now, in the very midst of the conjunctural revival," The 1946 upturn was a "revival without any perspective of real stability".

Driven by the logic of his polemic Pablo began to revise the entry tactic of Trotsky;

"'Under these circumstances the question of entry takes on an entirely new aspect from previous times, it seems to us. Whereas previously the entry of revolutionists into the LP of necessity had more circumscribed and limited objectives - the winning over of relatively restricted layers of advanced workers to the programme of Trotskyism…the present situation sets new objectives for entry: the setting into motion of the entire awakened British working class along the path of revolutionary action, this time within the framework of the Labour Party itself."

By 1947 there was no longer any pretence of relating to any existing centrist current as in the 1930s. Rather the task was to "anticipate" it by capturing key leadership positions in the local labour Parties so as to be there when the centrist current emerged. Pablo himself wrote testily to the RCP leaders explaining this in June 1947: ("It is High Time to Find a Solution") "The whole problem for the British Trotskyists consists in entering now into the labour Party armed with this perspective without waiting for the left-Wing to crystallise around centrist leaders or a centrist platform."

Six months earlier the International Secretariat had made the implications of this clear: "Entry into the Labour Party today therefore signifies for the Trotskyists a campaign of relatively long duration." Thus Pablo and Healy completely revised the whole political method that Trotsky had applied to entry tactics before the war. For Trotsky fraction work in the social-democratic and Stalinist parties was a norm as long as they contained serious working class forces. Total entry, of necessity, could not be predicated on a long term perspective.

The party exists to defend and fight for the programme. Its formal independence could only be abandoned therefore if it could be replaced by a revolutionary fraction or tendency etc, within the mass reformist parties. This would only be possible in periods when the reformist masses were sufficiently radicalised to defend the revolutionaries and the reformist leaders were driven to adopt centrist camouflage. However for Trotsky the revolutionaries should not tailor their programme, the tactics they advanced for the class or their criticism of the reformist leaders of the left and right.

For him there could be no question of making the object of the entry tactic staying in the reformist party for any particular length of time. To do so implicitly builds into the perspective the surrender of revolutionary positions for a centrist or even left-reformist disguise. Although at first Pablo and Healy talked of mobilising thousands around transitional demands, in fact that they counterposed to this "the winning over of individuals here and there to the full programme of Trotskyism."

This was the shape of things to come. In fact Pablo and Healy confused the tactic of the united front on certain immediate and transitional demands with the building of a revolutionary party or tendency.

The RCP majority resolutely refused to accept the entry tactic so at the end of 1947 Pablo and the ISFI split the RCP, allowing Healy to enter and pursue his tactic as he saw fit. This was to open a process which effectively destroyed the RCP, the only sizeable unified Trotskyist organisation there has been in Britain.

Less than two years after the split the majority of the RCP themselves decided to enter the Labour Party and join Healy. What led to this abrupt collapse?

Was it in fact the impossibility of doing independent work with a grouping a few hundred? One factor in the demoralisation of the Haston-Grant leadership was that from 1948 onwards there was a narrowing of the differences over economic perspectives. The RCP majority had never denied the slump perspective, but refused to accept it as an immediate pros-pect between 1944 and 1947. At the end of 1946 the RCP majority replied to the International Secretariat:

"How long can this upward swing last? .... Certainly not for longer than a few years at the most(…)Far from the Revolutionary Communists of Britain pushing this overriding factor of decline into the background (...) our whole activity and orientation is based precisely on this factor. In the resolution of the RCP.( ..)we emphasise that: 'the orientation and strategy of the RCP is firmly based on the long term perspective of crisis and decline.'" (Original emphasis.)

On this basis Haston and Grant did not of Course exclude the possibility of total entry. This was always written into the resolutions.
From the end of 1947 the economic situation of the working class took a serious turn for the worse. During the 1947/8 winter an austerity programme was introduced by the labour government, designed to squeeze domestic consumption and boost exports. The Miners' working week was extended by 2 1/2 hrs. Food imports were reduced; rationing extended to petrol and meat and there were increases in direct and indirect taxes. In 1949 there was £250 million of spending cuts.

The prosecution of this austerity programme was to lead to the eventual resignation of Aneurin Bevan from the cabinet in 1951.Meanwhile the RCP itself stagnated. The Haston-Grant majority had expected growth from open work and an orientation to industry. Between 1945 and 1947 they could point to a steady escalation of strikes, to a peak of 2 1/2, million days lost. But after 1947 there was a steady dissipation of industrial action. In 1950 there were only 1 1/2, million days lost in strikes.

On the other side, the steady escalation of individual membership of the labour Party (rising from 0.6 million in 1947 to 1 million in 1952) and jump in trade union affiliation to the labour Party (after the 1947 trade union reform abolished 'contracting-in') seemed to add weight to Healy's old positions. The RCP could not reconcile itself to return to the limitations of a propaganda group.

Since 1944 it had shared, with the whole Fourth International, a perspective of a coming revolutionary crisis and consequent growth into a mass force. Whilst the RCP majority had resisted Pablo and Healy's schematism, they were not willing or perhaps able to thoroughly re-assess the perspectives or programme for the post war Fourth International.

In 1948 a major programmatic revision occurred. Pablo retrospectively gave the Yugoslav revolution and resultant creation of a degenerated workers state a clean bill of health on the basis of the split between Tito and Stalin which occurred in that year. The Haston-Grant leadership correctly and strenuously protested against this capitulation to Yugoslav Stalinism (Titoism) but found no support in the rest of the International.

In March 1949 the block between Haston and Grant broke up. Grant argued that the RCP must face a period of "becoming more and more a propaganda group but with the possibility of intervening, and in certain circumstances playing a leading and active role in relation to certain disputes". Haston and Co could not face this retreat. However, their rejection of propaganda group existence was not in favour of revolutionary mass work. They argued for the closing down of "Socialist Appeal" (the RCP's paper) because it could not compete with the CP's Daily Worker. The left turn of the CP, occasioned by the outbreak of the cold war, in the Haston group's view meant that "the prospect of creating in the immediate period ahead, a third independent alternative party of the working class has been undermined" .

Only a politically bankrupt tendency could show such defeatism. The central question of programme, of defending Trotskyist politics against Stalinism and Social Democracy was thus reduced to mere organisational fetishism - a danger that always lurked in their organisational conception of the RCP’s 'building the party' approach. The need to propagandise for revolutionary politics as the minimum necessary activity was thus abandoned.

By the time of the RCP's admission of political bankruptcy, Healy's grouping in the Labour Party had produced four issues of a totally centrist paper "Socialist Outlook". It had a growing circulation. The IS in Paris eagerly urged a "re-fusion" of the groups in 1949, and as a reward for services rendered, Healy's faction, though still the smaller, was given the majority within the leadership.

Before a formal conference of the fused organisation could take place in late 1950, Healy had used his position and the pretext of differences over the Korean War, to expel his erstwhile opponents. Grant was expelled. Haston left in complete moral and political collapse. The conference never took place, and Healy reduced the now defunct RCP to a tiny conspiratorial cabal of a few dozen - "the Club", whose "Trotskyist" politics were shrouded in secrecy and available only to the privileged few, lest they prove a "provocation" to the left-reformist allies in "Socialist Outlook".

The lessons of this period need to be carefully digested and understood by authentic Trotskyists today. Underpinning many of the arguments of both sides in the RCP debate was the question "to be in or not to be in?" Today's epigones of Trotsky in the Socialist League (ex IMG) and WSL still insist that is the question.

It isn't, and to pose it this way is to confess confusion at best and gross opportunism at worst. The whole experience points to the need to return to Trotsky's own advice on entryism. Work by revolutionaries inside a reformist party is a means to winning adherents to communism. As such its programmatic basis (not its organisational execution) must come first. This was not the case in the period of the break up of the RCP, and it certainly is nowhere in evidence in the strategies advocated by the Socialist Challenge and the Socialist Organiser today.


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