The Marxist sleepers waging war on woke

BACK IN THE EARLY 1980s, when I was studying politics at Leeds University, I had a lengthy reading list of dense, important books. But my favourite work, at best tangentially related to my course, was a tattered pamphlet called “Go Fourth and Multiply”. The pun was a reference to the Fourth International, the international revolutionary socialist movement formed by supporters of Leon Trotsky in 1938 in opposition to the Third International, aka the Comintern, the official pro-Moscow communist organisation. After Trotsky’s murder in 1940, the organisation eventually split — spawning a myriad of factions, groupings and positions, one strand of which eventually morphed into Britain’s Revolutionary Communist Party.

Written by John Sullivan, a veteran left-wing activist, “Go Fourth” is a deeply knowledgeable and often hilarious satire on Britain’s would-be revolutionaries. I was not a Trotskyist, but I was firmly on the left. My years at Jewish schools, studying religious texts and the nuances of Talmudic interpretation, gave me an unexpected affinity for doctrinal disputes over how many cadre members could protest on the head of a pin.

My favourite grouping was the Revolutionary Workers Party, a tiny bunch of Labour Party entryists (not to be confused with the Workers Revolutionary Party). One of the RWP’s demands, that the Soviet Union should not be distracted by pacifist deviations but must launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the capitalist West, was, noted Sullivan, “generally played down when canvassing”.

Amid the Life of Brian knockabout, “Go Fourth” was also astonishingly prescient about the rise of lifestyle and gender politics now tearing the left apart. For all its factionalism, there was a time when the Trotskyist movement and its thinkers represented a serious alternative to Stalinism and domination by Moscow — which is why the Soviet secret police killed so many Trotskyists during the Spanish civil war, and ultimately Trotsky himself. But by the 1970s British Trotskyism was a long way from the battlegrounds of Spain. Writing about the International Socialists (IS), the precursor of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), O’Sullivan observed:

The IS group had always been sceptical about middle-class lifestyle fads, but it was clear that if the middle-class members were not to lead the revolution, they would have to be allowed to indulge their personal fetishes; so Gay Lib, Ecology and Life-Stylism were authorised as politically relevant.

After this lurch wards, a Marxist hard core split off from the IS to form the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG). The RCG was staunchly anti-imperialist and gave unconditional support to national liberation movements. Its newspaper was (still is) called . RCG members, noted Sullivan, made “a great point of declaring