Ted Grant archive updates

Pamflet produced by the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1948. Full text available in the Ted Grant archive.

This is an introduction to Trotsky's pamphlet, "The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning" (1937), written by Ted Grant in collaboration with Ralph Lee while they were in the Workers' International League: a predecessor to the International Marxist Tendency. Ted and Ralph's introduction was praised by Trotsky himself in a letter to the WIL in 1938, which was suppressed and hidden for 80 years before finally being reunited with its rightful owners.

At the end of June 1976 a conference of Western European Communist parties marked the disenfranchisement from Moscow of the Italian and French CPs, followed by other European CPs. The birth of what was later to be called “Euro-communism”, argued Ted Grant, was the logical consequence of the trajectory of these parties. True revolutionary internationalism had been long abandoned by the Communist parties in order to become agencies of the Kremlin bureaucracy's foreign policy. The decision of severing links with the USSR came after a long period of nationalist and reformist degeneration and adaptation to bourgeois “public opinion”.

At the end of June 1976 a conference of Western European Communist parties marked the disenfranchisement from Moscow of the Italian and French CPs, followed by other European CPs. The birth of what was later to be called “Euro-communism”, argued Ted Grant, was the logical consequence of the trajectory of these parties. True revolutionary internationalism had been long abandoned by the Communist parties in order to become agencies of the Kremlin bureaucracy's foreign policy. The decision of severing links with the USSR came after a long period of nationalist and reformist degeneration and adaptation to bourgeois “public opinion”.

In 1976 Spain was ripe for revolution, but the leadership of the workers’ movement had learnt nothing from the past experience. “The CP and SP leadership have strengthened illusions in the panacea of bourgeois democracy – that same ‘democracy’ which prepared the way for the rise of the fascist forces, the rebellion of the generals and the nightmare of civil war, and bestiality of fascist repression”, commented Ted Grant. Once again the problem of the coming Spanish revolution would have been one of the revolutionary leadership.

In 1989 new negotiations between the USSR and US imperialism (culminating in a Reagan-Gorbachev summit) were heralded as opening a phase of world peace. Ted Grant analysed the extremely fragile nature of these deals and warned that “the underlying reality is of two fundamentally opposed social systems which cannot tolerate indefinitely the existence of the other.”

“What has changed in the situation to cause Wilson and the other Labour leaders to adopt capitalist policies which have proved to be disastrous to the working class in the last twenty years, and have not even solved the problem from a capitalist point of view?” Asked Ted Grant in 1966 while analysing the about-face in policies by the Labour government, “Wilson and the other leaders of the Labour Party, have forgotten the elementary principles of socialism. They had the illusion that they could run the capitalist economy better than the representatives of capitalism.” A warning that could well fit for today's Labour leaders.

The summer of 1943 marked a dramatic turn in the Second World War. In this article Ted Grant analysed the implications of the Allied invasion of Sicily and the opening of the Second Front, the attempts by Churchill to reach a deal with the Italian monarchy and prop up a regime of the accomplices of fascism which would preserve the interests of Anglo-US imperialism against the rising revolutionary tide. As in the case of North Africa with Giraud, Allied imperialism was dropping the "democratic" mask showing their real aims and interests in the war.

We publish for the first time in electronic form, this important document written by Ted Grant in the autumn of 1944. It analyses the consequences of the inevitable victory of Anglo-American imperialism and the growing grip of Stalinism over the European masses due to the immense prestige gained by the Red Army. It also explains why the imperialists would find themselves in a relatively weak position and would need to grant concessions to the masses in Europe. Imperialism would be forced to do this in order to carry out a counterrevolution, albeit in a democratic form, with the help of the leaders of the mass reformist and Stalinist parties.

In analysing Churchill's speech of September 21, 1943 on the surrender of Italy, Ted Grant denounced the hypocritical attitude of the British ruling class. All propaganda about the "war for democracy and against fascism" was ruthlessly put aside by Churchill and a deal with the former supporters of fascism (the monarchy and the Badoglio dictatorship) was struck by the Allies. As Ted Grant correctly predicted, the same horse-deal was to be repeated in one country after another, including Germany, and explained that in order to stave off revolution, Allied imperialism was perfectly willing to reach a deal with the very same forces that had backed fascism, in order to defend their common class interests.

The overthrow of Italian fascism in July 1943 sent shockwaves throughout Europe and the world, demonstrating that war was preparing combustible material for revolution. In this article from August 1943 Ted Grant greeted enthusiastically the heroic struggle of the Italian workers against fascism, dealing with the perspectives for the Italian revolution which was threatened on one side by the intervention of the Allied imperialists and on the other side by the treacherous policies of the Stalinist and social-democratic leaders. The article is published online in full for the first time.

We are resuming updates of the Ted Grant's archive this week with an important document which has never been published in electronic form: Syria - A reply to Kumar, written in the summer of 1978. In this internal discussion document Ted Grant analysed the process of the Syrian revolution in the 1960s and outlined the causes of its peculiar development, which gave rise to a regime of proletarian Bonapartism, where capitalism was abolished and the vast bulk of the economy was nationalised. The Syrian working class, however, needed to go through a political revolution in order to establish a genuine workers' democracy.