Political influences no.3: The Spartacist League – Defeat clerical fascism! Down with little England demagoguery! Complete the American revolution!

 A blogger once wrote that there was “a whiff of Spartishness” about me.  He wasn’t completely wrong.

At some point as a precocious and no doubt very irritating kid, I went on some national demo, probably with my parents, probably anti-nuclear. I collected leaflets and other freebies right, left and centre. I was fascinated and mystified by the array of political positions. In an act that I now recognise as almost certainly clinically insane, I wrote to a number of them asking them to explain their unique selling points, and for their views on particular topics.

One of the groups I wrote to was the New Communist Party, a tankie breakaway from the Communist Party which left because the CPGB no longer saw Stalin as a wholly good thing. I was cursed then for years with a weekly visit from a deeply lonely and dysfunctional NCP member who had a geographically very widely dispersed paper round of about three addresses. I never had the heart to tell him that his paper was unimaginably dull and had no resonance with my politics.

I was much luckier with the Sparts.
Maybe they had no cadre anywhere near me to keep an eye on me; maybe my letter revealed I was poor recruiting material even for them. I’ve read somewhere that they only accepted recruits already tempered by having gone through another Trotskyist party. Instead they contented themselves with mailing me an enormous parcel of newspaper back issues and mimeographed pamphlets.

I don't think they had any great impact on me at the time, and even with no examples for comparison it was surely clear that I had stumbled upon one of the most insane of fringe political groups. But I kept the literature, and over the years I would return to it again and again, poring through partly out of a kind of morbid, trainspottery fascination, but partly out of genuine interest. This was long before the internet, when my only access to radical politics was the loner from the NCP and two or three strange books in the local lending library; these inky pamphlets were a window on to a mysterious world that appealed to me on some deep level.

It was probably there that I learned the word “Stalinist”, which much later became (and remains) a key entry in my political lexicon. There were three other things that have also stayed with me from these arcane texts.

The first, most trivially, was a picture of Tony Benn, pipe in mouth, with the caption “little England demagogue”. I found this description initially bizarre. I remember asking my dad what the words meant. How can this most radical of politicians, I thought, be not radical enough for these guys? But over the years, the phrase has stuck in my head, and now seems so apt. Every time I see him or his name, I think “little England demagogue”. And over the years, his smug face, his clenched pipe and his toxic combination of anti-Americanism, Euroscepticism, Israel-hatred and Slavophilia has increasingly come to define for me a certain trend on the indecent left, the inheritors of Henry Hyndman’s National Socialist Party, the Morning Star/Harold Pinter/NO2EU/Neil Clark/Andy Newman/George Galloway/Spokesman Books left – the left, in short, of little England demagoguery.

Secondly, I learnt the term “clerical fascism” from the Sparticists. They used the term for an idiosyncratic axis of evil that included Irish Republicanism, the Polish Solidarity movement, and the Mujahideen. Once I was able to form a view, I completely disagreed with them on Solidarity (although it has transpired to carry the seeds of some of Poland’s reactionary, authoritarian political currents). On Ireland, after escaping my adolescent support for the Republican movement, I had a certain amount of sympathy for its critique (although "clerical fascism" is rather over the top). But on the Mujahideen, you have to admit they were proved all too right. Not that the rest of the left could have made much difference in western Asia by more strenuously opposing the Islamo-fascists of the 1980s, but it is odd to see that the Sparts were on the right side on that battle, while many neoconservatives were on the wrong side.

Third, and more complex, the Sparts had a very strong position on the fact that the 1776 bourgeois revolution in America remained unfulfilled, even after the Civil War and then Civil Rights movements took up its tasks. Following Marx and Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution, they argued that proletariat must take up and defend the heritage of the American revolution and fulfil its historic mission. This meant, among other things, defending Constitutional rights like the right to bear arms. This position, I think, carries a great deal of food for thought, and I continue to hold some version of it, although not with the conviction I once did.

Footnote: John Sullivan on the Sparts (1988):

The Sparts’ complete parasitism on other groups makes them very unpopular on the rest of the Left, so, regrettably, little attempt is made to understand the theory which explains their behaviour. The Sparts’ core belief is that, in the forseeable future, it is impossible for revolutionaries to address themselves to significant sectors of the working class, as anyone open to revolutionary politics is already a supporter of one of the groups which, falsely, claim to be revolutionary. The key task of revolutionaries is, therefore, to win over supporters of these Ostensibly Revolutionary Groups (ORGs), by heckling their meetings and hoping to be thrown out. The Sparts will, in this way, achieve the primitive accumulation of cadres which is a necessary stage to be gone through before proceeding to a direct involvement in class struggle. The belief in the long slow haul is combined with the view that there is not much time left to build the vanguard party before the final struggle between socialism and barbarism. Such a theory may be contradictory but it is necessary if the group is to maintain revolutionary fervour while confining its activity to a propaganda onslaught on the ORGs...

Because many of the Sparts’ formal positions are more acceptable to labour movement activists than the lunacies peddled by their competitors, there is the danger that people outside the radical middle class milieu will want to join them. To prevent the inevitable tensions which would result from recruiting working class militants, reasonable positions are expressed in an intolerably harsh manner that works quite well. American ex-Sparts describe a very Healyite organisation where Robertson sits behind a steadily growing pile of empty beer cans carrying on a rambling drunken harangue interspersed with senile laughter, yet we have found Robertson charming on his visits to London. It is true that many of the leading Sparts go in for a macho-man image of guns and swords. The perfectly reasonable call for the abolition of the licensing hours is elevated to a central demand, and there are signs of a flirtation with Scots nationalism. As befits its American origin, the Sparts are individually competitive. New ideas are floated, and if successful their originators get promoted, while if the idea is found to be revisionist they are demoted. If you believe that she who lives by the sword will die by the sword, you have probably guessed the Sparts’ destiny. In the early eighties a group of veteran Sparts in the Bay Area of California, where they had their only toe-hold in the labour movement, defected. The renegades, who originally called themselves the External Tendency, had absorbed their Spart training well. They reclassified their parent group as an ORG and turned up to intervene at its meetings, carefully restraining themselves against attempts to goad them into violence. Innocents in Bootle or Lyon can hardly be expected to understand that the main purpose of all Spart literature is to discredit that tiny group in California.

For the rest of the series, click here.