Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From Socialist Worker, No. 120, 1 May 1969, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
IN Socialist Worker of April 26, your columnist Ray Challinor wrote a small item concerning myself with which I wish to take issue.
Challinor states that ‘Campbell’s complaint about Tearse (in 1944) was that he was inflaming relationships between workers and employers, advising trade unionists to disregard the negotiating machinery for remedying grievances, and being abusive to official leadership’.
This is quite correct as an interpretation of the propaganda of the Communist Party against the Trotskyists during the war (indeed, they went much further, describing us as, among other things, ‘Hitler’s agents’).
What Challinor fails to do is to explain the slanderous character of such complaints.
Inflamed relations between workers and employers are a natural consequence of capitalism itself, of the crude attempts of the employers to place the responsibility for difficulties at the door of the workers while they extract their pound of flesh. The function of Trotskyists is to explain the real nature of the situation and to point the way to a solution of the problems. This we tried to do, and now, as then, we reject the ‘inflamer’ label.
Only a sectarian idiot would advise workers to disregard the negotiating machinery for remedying grievances.
This is quite a different matter from advising workers to go to the employers cap in hand; any trade unionist worth his salt knows that to attempt to negotiate from a position of weakness is quite worthless.
In general, concessions are made by the employer when he knows the worker means business. But to argue that trade unionists must therefore disregard negotiating procedure and (presumably), advise striking, regardless of the issues and the relationship of forces, is not only to slander the Trotskyists as serious working class fighters but it credits the working class with zero perspicacity.
As for being abusive to the official leadership, this is not the method of revolutionaries. To expose their criminal betrayal of the working class, their hobnobbing with the employers in the interests of the employers, is quite a different kettle of fish. This simply implies a statement of the facts together with the need to draw the lessons clearly before the working class.
If anyone is guilty of abuse it is precisely those officials who castigate militants as wreckers because they demand that the officials should represent the interests of the members who pay them.
Now, it is not an accident that J.R. Campbell and the Communist Party adopted this slanderous language against the Trotskyists. No one could have been closer to the employers’ interests than they. Churchill’s and Stalin’s portraits were paraded at CP demonstrations as the saviours of mankind. It was a natural consequence , that they should adopt the worst and most hysterical language of the capitalist class against the Trotskyists who stood their ground in a hostile situation, maintaining a position of revolutionary internationalism.
What I find appalling is Challinor’s final statement that ‘a quarter of a century later, Roy Tearse is still doing the same’, i.e. that about which Campbell complained. My answer to Challinor is precisely the same as my answer to Campbell, given above. I accept, of course, that Challinor is simply confused and is not playing Campbell’s game.
Now it is true that although I am not a member of IS or of any political grouping at this stage, I have been invited to speak at a number of IS branches and I welcome the opportunity, not only to put forward my ideas but also to criticise those aspects of IS policy with which I disagree.
And, it needs to be said, chat of all the tendencies I have encountered IS has the healthiest attitude to criticism and discussion and they, least of all, have the illusion that they form the vanguard of the working class, a self-appointed leadership waiting for the troops to form up in their ranks behind them. Despite whatever confusion may exist, this attitude gives them a head start in building something worthwhile.
I hope that Ray Challinor’s rather ill thought out article will not discourage the members from listening to what I have to say.
|
|
Roy Tearse, |
Main Socialist Worker Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 16 January 2021