The second example is of a very different type in respect of its style, rapid evolution and eventually explosive denouement. This organisation, known towards the end of its life as the Workers Revolutionary Party, exhibited a charismatic leadership, strong adventist tendencies and a frenetic activist style, and seemed to attract to itself a very particular type of personality. Understandably, it was much shorter-lived than the SPGB. Its genesis was out of a straight political group that showed few or no religious tendencies - the Revolutionary Communist Party of the Second World War period, a body in which nearly all the Trotskyists of Britain were united. (It was the only time that nearly all the Trotskyists were united.) At the end of the war, the Trotskyist movement quite rationally believed that the immediate postwar period would be characterised by economic crises and consequent revolutionary upheavals. They were not alone in this view, which was not confined to the left either. For whatever reason, such a crisis did not occur, and after a number of confusing faction fights and internal quarrels a group around Gerry Healy won the majority of what was left of the organisation. After an underground existence in the Labour Party, they formed the Socialist Labour League in 1958, all the while continuing to maintain that either the revolutionary crisis was happening, or was just about to happen. With such a dreadful crisis in the making, a revolutionary situation was therefore around the corner. At such a time, a hard, devoted, clear-sighted leadership was needed, and these attributes were assumed to exist in the central committee of the SLL. Not simply did this belief play an ideological role with most instructive effects on the organisation and its membership, but it also justified a secular version of the Doctrine of the Elect. Just as the leaders of the Restorationist House Churches see themselves as a delegated leadership from God, and if this leadership is questioned then the challengers are guilty of rebellion against God, so SLLers and WRPers were accused of being enemies of the working class if they attempted to question any manifestations of Gerry Healy's leadership. Such a state of affairs implied an iron discipline, the concentration of power in the hands of a few people at the top, and the need for frantic activity and financial sacrifice on the part of the rank and file. The leadership, in particular Healy, took on strongly-marked charismatic characteristics, while activity and fervour arose out of faith and belief in the forthcoming revolution, rather than from rational evidence and political sensitivity to the world, which, indeed, pointed the other way. The belief that the crisis was a matter of months away remained a constant factor in SLL/WRP politics for 30 years, despite many tactical twists and turns.
Spurred on by the belief that on their actions today depended the future of mankind, activity for the vast majority of members consisted of paper sales, fund raising and rallies. The raising of money was always to develop a more regular paper, which eventually resulted in a daily, though, of course, with minuscule sales. The paper was seen as an essential weapon in the class struggle, but, to continue the metaphor, the weapon of a daily paper was far too massive for a tiny organisation to wield. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a frantic round of selling in the evening in public houses in a style reminiscent of the Salvation Army's War Cry. In fact, most members were given a quota of papers which they had to pay for and then did not sell. This was increasingly the case as time went on, but members did not admit this failure to one another until after they had left or were expelled from the group. In any case, public house sales activity fell off. Rallies were worked for by running discos, and by promising young people that there would be a free disco after the meeting. Thus each member might get up to a dozen others on average to come along, but these were often very unpolitical working-class youth. So 500 activists could collect a sizeable rally of 4000 people. In a similar way to a mass religious service of the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Assemblies of God, in itself the large meeting legitimises the belief that something of significance is going on, and gives relevance and reassurance to the members, who feel that they are taking part in a great enterprise. Each rally had to be presented as a great triumph and a step on the road of party building. What made this process unstable and full of tension, however, was that each successive rally had to be larger than the previous one to maintain the illusion of dynamism and triumphalism. Eventually, there was bound to be a falling off, which would necessarily be blamed on the lack of faith and commitment of the members. At one such assembly in Wembley in the early 1970s, there were enormous portraits of Trotsky, Marx and Healy that were placed behind the speakers' platform. The whole affair had something of what I imagine to have been the ambience of a religious-political event like a Nuremberg rally, and was in great contrast to a meeting of the SLL in 1958 in Westminster of 600 or 700 people, where many shop stewards and manual workers were present. That earlier meeting was of a recognisable political, rather than quasi-religious, type and, of its type, very impressive. In the 1970s, the WRP's trade union activity was largely concentrated at one factory in Oxford, and, though real to the members who were shop stewards there, it played, in addition, an important symbolic role in the organisation. Only a few members on the central committee dealt with 'the workers' and their representatives, so that this monopoly of communication emphasised the power and charisma of those same leaders before the ordinary lower-middle-class membership. A further important part of the organisation's claim to legitimacy was the assertion that it was a true International Party, in the manner of the Comintern, with allies in many other countries. It would take too long here to detail the relations of the SLL/WRP with other groups abroad, since there were many confusing changes.
With such a strong belief in the imminence of the crisis, the adventist attributes of the organisation became steadily more marked as time went on, but were less and less related to what was happening in the world outside, and more and more to the internal needs of the sect. Even so, there was a constant tension which arose out of the millennialist expectations of the ideology and the need of the organisation for cohesion as these expectations were not fulfilled. This was always explained, in the most violent language, as the political treachery of the Labour leadership, the Communist Party or other Trotskyist groups. The image of the world that was presented was of a thin pink line of misleaders and conscious traitors holding back the proletarian masses from revolutionary action. The crisis was a crisis of 'leadership'. With a proper leadership, that of Gerry Healy, there would be a revolution, for there either was, or was about to be, a sufficiently deep crisis to merit the overthrow of the state. Once The Party was seen as the only embodiment of 'correct' doctrine, the problem arose as to who was to assess the authenticity of doctrine in any individual case. In a similar way to Christian sects, the definition of who is a true Christian (or Trotskyist revolutionary) inevitably turned out to be the job of the charismatic leader. With a strict definition of orthodoxy, there was likewise a broad definition of heresy and so a rapid turnover of members and witch-hunts of those who queried the infallibility of the leadership, including, occasionally, violent assaults on members and ex-members. This violence was solely reserved for the heretics or misleaders, and there was little or none towards the police or agents of what was perceived as the ruling class. Like both the SPGB and the Exclusives, there was a constant separating out of the membership from other people who were considered heretical, and, on one occasion in 1968, I observed the members of the central committee of the SLL link arms to keep away some people from another organisation who wished to join their demonstration. This seemed both very symbolic of the sectarian characteristics which were steadily becoming more and more strongly marked, and of the contradiction between the claims of universality for the organisation and of its pretended purity of doctrine. In 1973, for instance, the few hundred people in the SLL declared themselves to be the Workers Revolutionary Party because they stated that at this time there was the need for a working-class leadership.
Significantly, while the SLL had been, until about 1967, easily the largest Trotskyist grouping, by 1973 it was probably in third, or even fourth, place among British Trotskyists, and had played no part in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign or the big strikes over coal or the docks, though its rivals had had a small role in some of these industrial disputes, and had initiated and organised the VSC.
With this pattern of belief, it would seem that it was a necessary condition for the group's existence that there should be no real economic crisis or mass strike, but that these events should merely be imminent. If there was such a state of affairs, then the question would be posed among the membership as to why their party was not leading the masses. The answer, too, would have to be in religious-sectarian terms, and the solution would have to be found within the WRP and the shortcomings of individuals, rather than any inherent difficulty in the actual circumstances of the world outside. The heresy-hunting behaviour encouraged by the leaders would be bound to become internecine as a split developed amongst themselves. It may, therefore, be no coincidence that in the autumn of 1985, after the defeat of the miners' strike by a Conservative government and with unemployment at an all-time postwar high, the party exploded in a vicious faction fight. This would appear to be dramatic evidence of my hypothesis above as to why political sects fail to have a long life-span, since real events, outside their ranks, pose great and insoluble difficulties of interpretation for them. In this case, the internal struggle included accusations of sexual wrong-doing by the charismatic leader, Gerry Healy, a man of 73, all of which was far more analogous to factional behaviour among sectarian evangelicals than in any left-wing group, where it was very unusual indeed, no matter how strong a political group's religious-sectarian characteristics. It is one of the two such cases known to me among such groups in the postwar period. This was the more remarkable as the party had been characterised by its rivals as 'puritanical' in its attitude to sexual matters. More than half-a-dozen fragments of the party still exist, two of which, confusingly, call themselves the WRP, and the smaller of which stood 10 candidates at the 1987 general election. Healy died in December 1989, but a few individuals who were around him, largely from the theatrical milieu, maintain that they are continuing his work.
Another interesting development in the WRP which was, and is, practically unknown in other left-wing groups, was the creation of a secular equivalent of the doctrine of 'Double Honour' so strongly held and manifested among Evangelical sects and denominations in the United States. Just as the leaders of the evangelical groups are blessed both by prophetic gifts and by the material rewards donated to them by their followers consequent on these gifts, so it was argued, though not in print, that the 'leadership' of the World Revolution and World Working Class deserved an expensive car, comfortable quarters, good meals at restaurants, and, more discreetly, the sexual comforts provided by female comrades. To be fair, this was not true of any of the other leaders of the SLL/WRP apart from Healy. Such a situation is almost unknown in most other left-wing groups, which are often characterised by considerable asceticism of most of their leaders. A further striking religious-sectarian characteristic of the WRP throughout the late 1970s and 1980s was the increasing tendency of its paper and activity to centre around what were called 'philosophical' questions. Members, heretics and opponents outside were denounced for their political mistakes, but these errors were always assumed to arise from false 'philosophical' positions, and Gerry Healy was stated to be a great philosopher. Again, this attempted development of abstract, almost theological, characteristics to justify their behaviour and positions can be seen as an increasingly religious attribute. So the original ideological, quasi-political position encouraged a sectarian approach to the world, which, in turn, encouraged the development of a quasi-religious ideology which, had the tensions been controlled, could have resulted in the very long term, probably after the demise of the charismatic leader, in a very much more passive and separatist sectarian formation, akin to the SPGB, and, like that body, far removed from anything envisaged by Marx or Trotsky.
Sects and Sectarians
Neither of the two groups that have just been described exhibit all the phenomena appertaining to religious sects listed by Wilson, but neither do religious sects. This cluster of attributes that he suggests is, as was stated before, an ideal type, and no sect has all of them in a pronounced form. Nevertheless, the SPGB has about half-a-dozen of these characteristics, and the SLL/WRP about nine or nearly all. The SPGB is voluntary, membership is by knowledge of doctrine which is emphasised much more than in the SLL/WRP, deviants are expelled, there is no formal hierarchy and all members are constitutionally equal, it is hostile to the state and present social order, and the commitment of its members is much greater than in normal political parties even if far less intense than that in most Trotskyist groups. Likewise the SLL/WRP before its break-up in 1985 was voluntary, some knowledge of doctrine was required and this was increasingly of a 'philosophical' kind, there was present a self-conception of the 'elect' with all other Trotskyists and Marxists considered beyond the pale, great emphasis was put on the self-sacrifice needed amongst Bolsheviks - a level of personal perfection if you like. There was, however, hardly a priesthood of all believers, for the organisation was heavily structured with an authoritarian leadership but an intensely high level of rank and file participation, and activity in party matters did occur. Great hostility to present day society was expressed, commitment that was demanded was total, and the party had a totalitarian hold over its members far more intense than among other Marxist or Trotskyist movements. In addition, the SLL/WRP had the charismatic leadership and adventist tendencies which occur in some, though by no means all, Protestant sects. Finally, the genesis of these sectarian characteristics was rather different in the two cases, for the SPGB's arose out of an abstract, almost theological, passive programme, while the SLL/WRP's came from an activist programme which derived from a totally unrealistic assessment of the world. Thus far, these brief remarks on the political groups which display sectarian characteristics may define the phenomena much too narrowly. It is the case that sectarianism, whether religious or politico-religious, is far too often thought to be determined by organisational typologies, not by ideological ones. Sectarian behaviour, which is always determined by belief, may therefore express itself in strictly organisational terms, but may also appear in a far more unsystematic and inchoate form, and simply manifest itself as a shared belief system and lifestyle, both of which, however, tend to exclusivity and inerrancy. In this context, Andrew Walker has pointed out that in mainstream churches, neo-Pentecostalism is a 'sectarian implant', to use his apposite expression. I believe that the same phenomenon can be observed across the left-wing political spectrum in what I would call the 'vegan left', which, like the British neo-Pentecostalists, is a largely middle-class stratum. It is noticeable to an observer that their language is often somewhat laboured consciously to avoid any indication of prejudice against any non-heterosexual orientation, or there is a new and invented use of language to express their sympathy for feminism. Thus the individual's personal purity is proclaimed, in the same way as in a shipyard a member of a religious sectarian group is distinguished by his failure to use expletives and his dislike of alcohol. What is difficult is to determine the degree of intensity of observable behaviour amongst the 'implant' which justifies this label of 'sectarian'.
I would define sectarian characteristics, in Wilson's words, as the degree to which the sect sought 'to enforce behaviour on those who accept belief', and sought 'every occasion to draw the faithful apart from the rest of society and into the company of each other'. Truly political organisations would, of course, seek to involve themselves in the world, even if in order to change it, rather than drawing apart. However, there are problems of gaining evidence of this process for the sectarian implant. Because the implant is not an independent organisational form, one will not find the evidence in a journal or history, but one is forced back on individual observation of an event. This could be disregarded as subjective and personal. Yet descriptions and what might appear at first sight as anecdotal evidence have their value, and, indeed, in default of other evidence, they may be all that we have to go on. In conclusion, I would suggest that there is a rich field for further investigation here among those whose political activity seems to be defined rather more by a shared lifestyle and intolerance of those outside the charmed circle, than by some coherent ideological belief system.
(This article appeared originally in the excellent British journal "New Interventions." For subscription information, please contact the editor Paul Flewers at paul.flewers at virgin.net. Paul and the author Ted Crawford are also with the journal "Revolutionary History" which has a fine web page at http://www.compulink.co.uk/~jplant/revhist)
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)