Peter Taafe
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Long standing leader of Militant, Peter Taafe has died.
In its own way, his passing marks the end of a left-wing era in Britain.
Once upon a time, I knew the names of all the leaders of the various Trotskyist groups in Britain. I couldn’t tell you who is the current ‘leading member’ of the SWP. (Callinicos, maybe?)
“Theoretician”, “Workers’ Leader”. He was neither, just a common or garden manipulative Trotskyist political operator. And not a very clever one. He oversaw Militant’s brazen attempt in 1997 to steal one of the names we’d been using for over 90 years. But didn’t realise that “Socialist Party of England and Wales” gave, appropriately enough, SPEW as the acronym.
Even Trotsky was not a workers leader, or a Marxist theoretician, and his main thesis is only applicable to economic backward countries which also conducts toward state capitalism as the Soviets did, and the Bolsheviks adopted his thesis of the permanent revolution, and it is an anti marxist theory
One of his best biographers known as Isaac Deutscher wrote that the ascent of Joseph Stalin to power was because Trotsky lost popularity within the Russian working class, and curiously Stalin knew the real definition of socialism/communism and Trotsky never defined it properly.
All followers of Trotskyism have been apologist of state capitalism and the dictatorship of the vanguard party to lead and Lenin himself did recognize that it was only applicable to Russia, and at the end of his life Lenin also recognized that there was not any difference between the bureaucracy of the soviet state and the old czarist state
This person, who also died recently, seems a much more interesting Trotskyoid:
She was a member of the old POUM Party in Spain.
Unfortunately this is behind a paywall But there’s this in Spanish:
https://vientosur.info/maria-teresa-carbonell-1926-2025/
and this in Catalan:
https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Teresa_Carbonell_i_Cornejo
Where Taaffe’s passing (and legacy) has been discussed on various left social media forums, it’s telling that more than one person has praised the fact that he wasn’t especially aloof when relating to ‘ordinary’ – sorry, Danny, if you’re reading this – folk. One commenting:
“. . . he could talk to working class normal people who were not leftists or academics”
Do vanguardists not hear themselves sometimes?
Always thought the video below was a fascinating window into the old Labour Party and its in-fighting in the late 70s/early 80s. All the more intriguing ‘cos this programme would have been on prime time UK TV during the week of that year’s Labour Party conference.
Peter Taaffe and Tony Mulhearn debating Austin Mitchell and John Spellar. Taaffe was in his element in this:
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