The Party

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A Review of Trevor Griffiths plays 'The Party' little or no socialist consciousness even of a rudimentary kind... When the Pakistan army capitulated and Bangladesh was proclaimed, the ] Part 13] It is scandalous that such words appear in a paper calling itself Trotskyist. Blaming the working class and Bengali peasantry for not correctly rallying round the IC banher is the lowest level of opportunism, worthy of any right winger.

The harsh fact is that the IC offered Bengali workers no prog ramme, nothing to draw them towards socialsim. It did not call in a concrete way for land antionalisation, workers and peasants councils, workers militia or workers control.

It did not put forward any way in which Trotskyism could become a living force in the working and peasant masses of Bengal, and abandoned these millions to the tender mercies of reformism, Stalinism and Sheikh Mujib.

LENIN

We must take up briefly one more major attack on Marxism in the Banda series. He talks as if Healy were Lenin, and the WRE were itself the Bolshevik Party.

This comes ironically from a party which has done much to besmirch the name of Trotskyism and Bolshevism in the British ans international Labour movement by its bureaucratic expulsion of its first opposition tendency since 1961.

Banda states for instance: "The following extract from Trotsky's appreciation of Lenin's struggle for Bolshevik principles against Menshevik vacillation and opportunist equivocation confirms !!I, unquestionably|!], that Cde Healy's [!) life-long struggle for a democratic-centralist revolutionary Marxist party is based entirely on the precedent created by Lenin:" Lemphasis added, part 11] We need scarcely add here that Trotsky did not refer to Comrade Healy once in the cited. extract. Nor indeed is it possible to see any relationship between Lenin's "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back" and S.Torrance's bureaucratic att empts to stifle inner-party discussion in the WRP prior to its 1st Annual Conference. Yet Banda boldly asserts: "Let Thornett remember this: slander the WRP and you slander Lenin!"

Many other points form Banda's series stand in need of reply. Yet the prevailing methods - distortion of what is said, attributing to us things not said, fraudulent swaggering in the use of quotes supposedly "proving' the WSL wrong, attacks on Marxist philosophy and the founding programme of the Fourth Interantional, preparatory to blaming the masses for not joining the WRP, these methods run through the whole series.

What is confirmed again and again by Banda is the degeneration the WRP, its inability now to reckon with its own past and practice, and the necessity of constructing the WSL to fight this wholesale revision of Marxism, and for the continuity of the Trotskyist pro gramme and tradition. Footnotes:

*The article was prepared by the Socialist Press editorial board. Bandi - and Slaughter - chose to attribure it to Cde A. Westoby, a university educated member of the WSL.

**Notes Towards a Study of Thornett's Philosopny; G.Healy WRP Internal Document.

and 'All Good Men' Trevor Griffiths has made a name for himself writing "didactic", , "political" plays. One might well describe him as a political peeping-Tom. His play The Party, commissioned by the National Theatre and performed there in 197374, deals with the idea of the Revolutionary Party and has as its central figure (acted by Sir Laurence Olivier) a barely-disguiser Gerry Healy!

Griffith's acquaintance with revolutionary theory and left groups and personalities in Britain in 1968 would seem to date from his attendance then at one or two of the SLL/WRP's Friday evening classes designed to woo to the party those bourgeois intellectuals showing an interest in left politics. (Some of the 'big names' of the WRP were recruited through these classes).

Griffiths has made a lot out of his observations on these classes -one successful play and a reputation for an intimate knowledge of the left and left politics - all without spending tedious long years fighting in the revolutionary movement. He sums up the position himself: "Imagine a life without success.

The intellectual's problem is not vision, it's commitment. You enjoy biting the hand that feeds you but you'll never bite it off" • (J. TaggG. Healy, end of Act 1).

The Party comes on strong with huge posters of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky as stage backdrops, film clips of the 1968 student-police battles in Paris, long passages quoted from Marx and Lenin, an exposition of revisionism countered by Tagg-Healy's good solid WRP orthodoxy. This ends, interestingly enough - in the light of the recent developments in the WRP, with this: "There is only one slogan wortt mouthing at this particular historical conjunction. It is Build the Revolutionary Party. There is no other slogan that can possibly take precedence"

All this appears alongside a parade of degenerate intellectuals: the impotent TV producer, guilt-ridden by his easy success and growing distance from his working class roots; the drunken playwright who "can't bear the thought of himselt as successful in a society he longs to destroy" , but who knows all the reasons why revolutionary politics isn't necessary or possible. And the melodrama of the Revolutionary leader who wants "to be right just once" , fighting to build his party because he is dying of stomach cancer. Plus nudity, sex, masturbation, infidelity, drugs, drun ken violence, a Czech au-pair girl who wears a track suit and sings folk songs, and a guinea pig named Novotny. You name it, The Party's got it to titillate the bourgeois audience the National Theatre exists for.

After the 1973 premiere of The Party, the Guardian's drama critic praised Griffiths for "telling the truth" (alla Gramsci: "It is a revolutionary duty to tell the truth"), while at the same time "showing us the intimate relationship between the private and public man" This linking up of political "truth; and private lives would seem to have become Griffiths' speciality.

by Ann Baye.

Another of his plays, All Good Men (could the title be a tip-off?)

is ending a lunchtime run at the Young Vic in a good production with excellent performances by the four actors involved. This play was written for the 'Play for Today' BBC-TV series and shown on 31st January 1974. Griffiths having progressed from revolutionary politics to the Labour Party, this play deals with a LP leader, William Waite (Waite - wait, get it?) about to be given a peerage. (Some suspect a parallel is intended here with Lord Robens).

The play's four characters are all stereotypes: the loveable, grand fatherly labour leader who "always gave more than he took" ', championing the working class through reformism, who believes that "reality is priorities" and who agrees with Beatrice Webb that the 1926 strike was a "proletarian distemper that had to run its course"; the son Edward, wild-eyed, uncomprom ising revolutionary who is a lecturer in politics at Manchester University; the daughter Maria, embittered by her lifelong contact with politics, and her broken family and marriage, who defends her working class background and hates privilege; and the trendy TV producer, public school educated, smart, slippery, principle-less and cunning, bound to expose to the TV-viewing world the class betrayal of a working class politician tempted by power and prestige.

Once again 'truth' is liberally smeared about the stage - "truth" in the speeches of Waite on the importance of Labour reforms since 1924, and on the compromise nec essary in the democratic process; commitment to "truth" by the son Edward who, having in the course of his research uncovered voting records which show that his father voted (by secret ballot) six times against the 1926 strike and ended ul sitting on the committee of owners to deal out discipline to the strikers. He accuses the old Waite of being a class traitor and of suppressing his record on the strike, and then goes on to turn over photocopies of the relevant documents to the TV producer (who is planning a hatchet job on the old Waite in his "special'). There is "truth" also in the family and class loyalty of the daughter Maria.

For Griffiths all is the "truth" just as all are "good men" • He will not follow Edward Waite's advice to the unscrupulous TV producer and "declare an interest" , but rather follows the producer's phoney line of "I present, others judge"

Griffiths will not take a single clear position and work to win the audience over to his point of view. How can you be didactic if you will not declare an interest? Has there ever been a good teacher who did not exude his own special subject! Who says a trendy parade of a variety of "truths" is political?

A Marxist playwright would attempt to comprehend human practice by examining what people do and asking why they do it. He/she would then in this way try to teach us to know what we do - to help us to a measure of self-cognition.

Griffiths has no method of analysis which could enable him to do this, and so he leaves us every time knowing no more about the objective world or about ourselves than we did when we got to the theatre..

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historical lessons working of society, a concept of reason that they cannot simply "unity" of society conceived in unleash a military Bonapartist dicTrotsky, writing about the Nazis as they would like to and are forced brilliantly portrays the historical to rely upon Wilson to carry out "The petty bourgeois is hostile that he clearly assert his control against him; progress has unleash fascism to smash the brought him nothing except strength of the organised working irredeemable debts. National class when the working class move Socialism rejects not only ment thoargh strong falters through Marxism but Darwinism. The the failure of the reformist leaderNazis curse materialism because ship either to lead or to effectively the victories of technology over discipline the workers while at the nature, have signified the same time it lacks a revolutionary triumph of large capital over • alternative leadership having the small..: The petty bourgeoisie allegiance of decisive sections of Police drag off anti-fascist demonstrator in Glasgow The recent attempts by the National Front to intervene through meetings and parades openly on the question of the EEC together with the increasing frequency • of violent attacks by Nº thugs raises the necessity for a clear understanding of the question of fascism and exactly what type of threat it constitutes to the working class today.

Fascism first arose in the 1920's and 30's in and Italy This, with the political weakness of the capitalist class meant that massive unemployment, wage cuts and speed up could only be effectively imposed on the working class with the complete destruction of all independent working class organisations.

"Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force and of police terror. Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society."

(Trotsky - What Next)

The essence of fascism is that the ruling class is unable, despite the acquiescence of the terormist leadership of the working class movement, to impose slump of the working class. In Germany the fragile political framework of the Weimar Republic was a totally inadequate vehicle for dealing with ‚thé working class by a bourgeoisie already racked by massive inflation, war reparation payments and industrial collapse.

A fascist corporate state was ¡required, in which the trade unions were destroyed. Since the very existence of the reformist leadership of the unions and the Social Democratic Party was tied to the existence of independent working class organisations to destroy these meant also to destroy social democracy itself.

Trios Took pook of imperia Decay":

"Monopoly capitalism is less and less willing to reconcile itself to the independence of trade unions It demands of the reformist bureaucracy and the labour aristocracy who pick the crumbs from its banquet table, that they become transformed into its political police before the eyes of the working class. If that is not achieved, the labour bureaucracy is deiven away and replaced by the fascists.

(emph added) (Marxism and TUs Class Collaboration Thus despite the abject class collaboration of the reformists they cannot serve the same function as that of fascism with its state-run corporate unions set up and controlled by fascists. Trotsky stresses this point:

"Incidentally, all the efforts of the labour aristocracy in the service of imperialism cannot in the long run save them from destruction." (Ibid, emph. added)

The possibility of the crushing of working class organisation rested on the possibility of fascism developing as a mass movement as a force which the ruling class could employ to carry through this task.;

The mass movement of the fascists, , such as the Nazi Party in Germany, though it drew in certain sections o demoralised workers, found its mair strength in the petty bourgeoisie :of small farmers and businessmen and a diverse rabble of declassed ex-soldiers, unemployed middle , class youth and professionals and petty officials, who swelled the ranks of the armed uniformed brownshirt thugs which constituted Hitler's power on the streets.

Trotsky thus characterised fascism as specific means of mobilising and organising the petty bourgeoisie in the interests of finance capital." (Bonapartism and In Germany in the 1920's this Class (more numerous than in Britain) found itself caught in a vice. On the one hand lay its antagonism for the banks who refused credit to shaky small business and the big monopolies who out-competed with it for the diminishino canitalist world market. On the to caper other hand lay its even stronger hatred for the working class shose attempts to defend living standards ate into the fragile profits of a petty bourgeoisie on the verge of bankruptcy.

Despite the strong anti-big business sentiments of some sections of the Nazi party the petty bourgeoisie remained committed to the defence of private property and capitalism since it was a capitalist class itself. Thus the ruling class could take the calculated risk of letting Hitler come to power in order to unleash a regime of terror on the working class.

The ruling class knew that the Nazis, in order to defend private property and capitalism, would be forced to defend big business and in order to secure the survival of capitalism would have to concede the eventual liquidation of small firms in the interests of rationalisation and capital concentration.

The inability of the Nazis to carry through the interests of the class that constituted their mass base is reflected in their methods of organisation and their ideology.

Terror, violence and gangs of armed thugs are the necessary forms of organisation of fascism. This arises from the political and economic powerlessness of the petty sourgeoisie.

The workers have the power o!

the factory occupation and the strike, the ruling class have the state. The petty bourgeoisie has neither. It can for this reason jonly demonstrate its power and seek to exercise political power through the control of the streets by violence and terror.

As Trotsky says in Whither : Fascism unites. and arms the scattered masses. Out of human ‚dust it organises combat detachthus gives petty bourgeoisie the illusion of being an independent force. It begins to imagine that it will really command the state." (p. 19)

This is why to the National Front the ability to march openly and to hold public meetings openly is vital to its growth and that is why mobilisation to prevent these is a necessary part of the struggle against the NF Furthermore for fascism to form a political party in the usual sense it would need a programme.

But any programme that takes its starting point as the preservation ‚of opitalism, must, in a period of general economic crisis dictate the liquidation of the petty bourgeoisie, For this reason it is a mistake to expect a coherent political pro gramme from the NF' The extreme economic nationa~ lism of the Front has absolutely 10 viability in modern capitalism. The repatriation of immigrants would in no sense solve the economic crisis even for the petty bourgeoisie. The racism and nationalism of the NF comes rather from the same need as it came for the Nazis: the need to find a place for the petty bourgeoisie in the face of all the economic pressures of the capitalist crisis by substituting for an analysis of the actual terms of race or nation.

bankruptcy _of fascism:

to the idea of development for over Benn.

development goes immutably needs a higher authority which. stands above matter and above history and which is safeguarded from competition, inflation, crisis, and the auction block... Hitler's nation is the mythological shadow of the petty bourgeoisie itself, a pathetic delirium of a thousand year Reich." (Trotsky - What is National Socialism)

Blackshirts' In Britain during the nineteen thirties Mosley's Blackshirts did not become the basis for a mass fascist movement. His attempts to gain a base were defeated by the working class. Furthermore, the British ruling class had no need to abandon parliament and the independent trade unions to deal with the working class. The defeat of 1926 brought about by the betrayals of the reformists and the lack of alternative leadership from the CP, meant that the British working class entered the slump politically weakened.

This paved the way for the MacDonald betrayal of 1931 and the National Government. This government proved sufficient for the ruling clies as a vehicle for inflicting measures to deal with the crisis in the working class.

Writing about the 1931 government.

Trotsky commented:

"The present government... has received unheard of support from 'the nation'. Only the growth of the revolutionary movement in Britain can force the government to tread the path of naked ultraparliamentary violence. This will without doubt take place but at the present time this is not so. To place today the question of fascism on the first plane is not here motivated. Even from the standpoint of doubt in what measure it is one in place to speak of 'fascism' for Britain." (Trotsky, Writings on Britain Vol. 3 p. 49)

The key point that Trotsky raises here is the question of the revolutionary movement. The conditions under which the bourgeoisie will support fascism are not simply where it is weak and the working class is strong.

The working class in Britain at this moment is strong in relation to the canitalists. It is for this CALM -- -tatorship on the working class much their requirements demanding only The ruling class prepares to workers.

Trotsky saw clearly how in Germany the betrayal of the Comintern with its disastrous adventurism of attacking the reformist leadership as "social fascist" failed 'to build à bridge to the majority of workers to unite the class struggle and thus allowed the ruling class to seize the time and use the fascists to smash the divided and confused working class movement.

At present the ruling class is certainly not prepared to allow Tyndal and Webster to march on Westminster and Congress House.

Wilson and Murray are still the main weapons that the capitalists rely on. However, the NF can still fulfill a vital role in assisting the bourgeoisie through intimidation and attacks on workers. This has to be fought now.

Clearly no faith can be placed for this defence in the police to whom the fascists have an appeal and » many cases a direct link. The Italin fascist movement, the MSI, enjoys considerable police collaboration, and so clearly does the National Front.

The strong movement of the working class against the Wilson government poses the need to te ruling class for various mechanisms to discipline the working clas.. A large part of this consists of course in the strengthening of the police and the vital role (from the viewpoint of the ruling class) of the training of the army in Ulster, at Heathrow, and in exercises of urban "counter-insurgency"

Workers must defend their organisations therefore independently of the State, as a part of the mobilisation of the class to defend living standards and basic rights. This means that workers defence squads must be selected in each area physically to defend the trade union movement and antifascist forces from NF thugs.

Trotsky wrote in Whither France "To struggle. it is necessary to conserve and strengthen the instrument and the means of strug gle - organisations, the press, meetings, etc. Fascism threatens all of that directly and immede:

¡ately....

[pp 24-25]

Trotsky is of course talking about a situation where large, armed bands of fascists were in action on the streets against French working class organisations in 1935-6. As yet the National Front is only beginning to assemble these kinds of forces, and has not grown to the level of Moseley's movement in the 1930's. But the struggle by workers in defence of jobs and wages will grow more intense and as Trotsky showed:

"Should the resistance of the workers to the offensive of capital increase on the morrow, Fascism, despite what Thorez [CP leader) says, will not evap orate but instead grow with redoubled force. The growth of the strike movement will impel the mobilisation of the strikebreakers. All the "patriotic"

thugs will participate in the movement. Daily attacks against the workers will be put on the order of the day. To close our eyes to this is to walk toward certain defeat"

[Whither France, p76)

In these conditions the importce of the Transitional Program's call for workers' defence is ought home sharply:

"The struggle agianst fascism does not start in the liberal editorial office but in the factory - and ends in the street. Scabs and private gunmen in factory plants are nuclei of the fascist army. Strike pickets are the basic nuclei of the proletarian army.

This is our point of departure....

It is necessary to give organised expression to the valid hatred of the workers towards scabs and bands of gangsters and fascists. It is necessary to advance the slogan of a workers militia as the one serious guarantee of the inviolability of workers' organisations, meetings, and press"

[Transitional Programme, It is vital to understand therefore that the struggle to defeat the NF is completely inseparable from the fight to build a revolutionary leadership in the working class through the struggle for a transitional Programme. It is only the fight for a programme, carried out by a revolutionary party, which can give a perspective to the middle class and bring them under the It iS bourgeoisie who stand to lose through the harsh pressure of European capitalist rationalisation facilitated by the EEC and who therefore the NF attempts to recruit with its extreme nationalist anti-EEC position.

Trotsky clearly understood the connection between the failure of the Communist Party in Germany to find a road to unite the working class and the turn of the petty bourgeoisie towards fascism. Speaking of the elections of September 1930 in Germany • in which the fascists made big gains he wrote:

"When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass it inevitably pulis behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie. [Trotsky - The Turn in the Communist International pp5960] In other words the NF must be fought politically in the working class as part of, the strugge tor programme and leadership. It must be made absolutely clear from this that only this struggle in the working class movement can combat

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SOCIALIST PRESS, Thursday 12th,

----- pull-quotes -----

Bengali workers - almost to a man: lost interest in the socialist struggle"